“I was aware that I was probably the first person to ever hear these sounds, and that what I was hearing was something musical that had probably never been heard by anyone before — at least, not by anyone on this planet.”
“An AI, and others, would benefit from improved communication skill and infrastructure. Will the AI understand the wave of a police officer, indicating that the officer wants the AI to go through an intersection? Can it express to other vehicles that the reason it is idling in a narrow parking lot is to wait for a car up ahead to pull out? Can it accurately, precisely, and urgently express a sudden observation of dangerous road debris to (AI) drivers behind it? Can it communicate sufficiently with another brand of driver AI to achieve the subtle coordination required to safely convoy in close proximity?”
“The most important challenges of cooperation might be the most difficult to benchmark; they involve creatively stepping out of our habitual roles to change the ‘game’ itself. Indeed, if we are to take the social nature of intelligence seriously, we need to move from individual objectives to the shared, poorly defined ways humans solve social problems: creating language, norms and institutions.”
“What’s the future of interaction design?” — Chris Downs
4 years ago
“We designed tools and frameworks to help us see the world in new ways, but they also changed how we think. We shaped frameworks, and in turn they shaped us. 20th century approaches like design thinking, human-centered design, and jobs to be done too often look at people solely as individuals. Or, worse yet, only as consumers. They don’t consider people in relation to their communities or to wider society. And society itself is ignored by design.”
“What if new technologies could help us embrace nature’s diversity and complexity, instead of simplifying it? If breeders could unlock the genetic diversity of the 30,000 edible plant species that exist worldwide, they might be able to identify plant species and varieties that would be resilient and productive under the pressure of climate change. If growers could understand how each and every plant on their farm is growing and interacting with its environment, they could reduce the use of fertilizer, chemicals, and precious resources like water, and explore sophisticated growing techniques like intercropping and cover cropping that restore soil fertility and increase productivity.”
Project Mineral is using breakthroughs in artificial intelligence, sensors, and robotics to find ways to grow more food, more sustainably
4 years ago
“Ideas by definition are always fragile. If they were resolved, they wouldn’t be ideas. They’d be products ready to ship. I’ve come to learn you have to make an extraordinary effort not to focus on the problems which are implicated with the new idea. These problems are known, they are quantifiable, understood. But you have to focus on the actual idea, which is partial, tentative and unproven. If you don’t actively suspend your disbelief, if you don’t believe there is a solution to the problems, of course you will lose faith in your ideas. That is why criticism and focusing on the problems can be so damaging, particularly in the absence of a constructive idea. Remember, opinions are not ideas, opinions are not as important as ideas, opinions are just…. opinions.”
4 years ago
Chobani’s society centred vision of the future is really something I can get behind. More heartfelt and humane than any inadvertently dystopian vision film created by the big tech companies. Lovely.
4 years ago
The TR-808 art is a piece of art. It’s engineering art, it’s so beautifully made. If you have an idea of what is going on in the inside, if you look at the circuit diagram, and you see how the unknown Roland engineer was making the best out of super limited technology, it’s unbelievable. You look at the circuit diagram like you look at an orchestral score, you think, how on earth did they come up with this idea. It’s brilliant, it’s a masterpiece.
I think it’s disingenuous for services like Alexa to give the impression of having a coherent, intelligent personality when the thing that talks to you is a patchwork of many complex systems, all running in server farms far away. The device sat in your room is not Alexa - it’s the business end of a very large, very complex networked iceberg. I also think that it’s a problem that the personality it pretends to have is bland, subservient, coded ‘female’ - a 1950s secretary in a box. This is why I like to make things that speak with many voices for these devices - a truer reflection of the herd of algorithms running things behind the scenes, and less bound to a particular false personality.
