AI Unbundled / Clink. Clank. Think. →

Greg Borenstein:

Papert and his graduate students were part of an Artificial Intelligence group within CSAIL lead by John McCarthy and Marvin Minsky. McCarthy defined the group’s mission as “getting a computer to do things which, when done by people, are said to involve intelligence”. In practice, they translated this goal into a set of computer science disciplines such as computer vision, natural language processing, machine learning, document search, text analysis, and robotic navigation and manipulation.

I like this angle on AI.

And this approach to understanding the fabled New Aesthetic:

Rather than trying to imagine how computers will eventually think, we’ve started to examine how they currently compute.

Lastly, I didn’t know about this TIME cover featuring IBM’s Thomas Watson. The tagline, “Clink. Clank. Think.”, is brilliant:

IBM's Thomas Watson on the front page of TIME magazine

In January, Greg also wrote a brilliant post about “Machine Pareidolia” (face detection gone wrong, so to speak).

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Kevin Slavin on why augmented reality is nothing but a thin veneer of the actual experience

In his talk called “Reality is plenty, thanks” given at MobileMonday in Amsterdam, Kevin Slavin rips through the idea that Augmented Reality (in the sense of meaning “computer-mediated reality“) is something we should aspire to as a way of “enhancing” reality.

My favorite quote is this:

Reality is augmented when it feels different. Not when it looks different. And when the senses of time and obligation rewards are altered, maybe the aspiration to 3D-optical augmented reality, maybe it starts to begin to feel a little bit like pornography, right? Like a thin veneer of the actual experience that is flattened for the eye, that is rendered for the eye, which is the one sense most easily fooled to begin with.

Ouch.

The whole talk is absolutely magnificent, and to think that an hour before he went on stage, it didn’t even exist makes it all the more impressive.

I am absolutely in love with his arguments for why Tamagochis outsold the first wave of 3D games (Duke Nukem etc.). That they mimicked the behaviors we know from humans—hunger, sickness, death—were what made the experience so immersive, not the fact that the technology was anything special. On the contrary, they were basically a piece of plastic with a shitty battery and an 8×8 pixel screen.

I’m currently writing the part of our thesis that involves artificial intelligence and this is a great addition to it, because it shows that the thing that sets a piece of designed technology apart is not the technical aspects of the artifact/program. It’s how it’s perceived by the interacting partner that makes it a fulfilling experience.

Just imagine: If I had told you in 1995 that a year later, some company would sell 70 million 8×8 pixel screens that were so disruptive to kids’ education, they had to be banned from school, because the kids formed deep relationships to them, would you have believed me? Of course not. But the Tamagochi had to take a shit, and it had to be cuddled…

I still like the idea of an augmented reality but it doesn’t work in the way that it’s promoted right now. It gives me nothing I couldn’t get in a dozen other ways.

What, then, is a valuable augmentation of reality? I don’t have a clear answer but it’s a question I think about a lot and Slavin gives some good examples in his talk:

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