No.61 Asides

How Doug Engelbart Pulled off the Mother of All Demos.
Dungeons and Dragons, not chess and Go: why AI needs roleplay.
“These experiences have none of the open-ended collaboration of D&D. Which got me thinking: do we need a new test for intelligence, where the goal is not simply about success, but storytelling? What would it mean for an AI to ‘pass’ as human in a game of D&D? Instead of the Turing test, perhaps we need an elf ranger test?”
Helena Sarin: Why Bigger Isn’t Always Better With GANs And AI Art.
I love this! “The second way artists can protect against homogeneity in AI art is to ignore the computational arms race and focus more on training models using your own hand-crafted data sets. By training GANs on your own artwork, you can be assured that nobody else will come up with the exact same outputs.”
Delphi. “[A] pioneering interdisciplinary review of emerging technologies as seen through the perspectives of experts from the fields of science and technology, ethics, economics, business and law.”
Climate Change Is Stealing Our Children’s Futures 📹. Fabulous short talk by 15-year-old Swedish climate activist Greta Thunberg at COP24. Come for the 🔥, stay for the polite (shamed?) clapping by the audience she just schooled.
Spain Wants to Ban Cars in Dozens of Cities, and the Public’s on Board. “In the Northwestern region of Galicia, a favorable attitude toward such bans went as high as 78 percent.”
😡😤 Climate change: COP24 fails to adopt key scientific report.
“But negotiators here ran into serious trouble when Saudi Arabia, the US, Russia and Kuwait objected to the conference “welcoming” the document.”
The Extremely Fast Peopling of the Americas. “In a matter of centuries, these people had gone down both sides of the Rockies, across the Great Basin, and into Mexico’s highlands. Within a couple more millennia, they had zipped down the Andes, through the Amazon, and as far south as the continent allowed.”
Scientists solved a decades-old swamp-monster mystery in Florida. “This strange giant salamander has a slimy spotted body that extends about two feet. It has two forelegs, no back legs, and a set of gills that fan out like leaves just behind its head. Basically, it looks like a long eel—hence the local moniker.”
Eviation Alice Is an All-Electric Airplane That May Replace Turboprops. Good looking plane. “An all-electric mini-airliner that can go 621 miles on one charge and replace many of the turboprops and light jets in use now.”