What Are These Vibrations For?
In today's edition: plane brain, FOIAing Slack, the ocean worlds approach to exploration, Minsky mind, and the impending end of humans winning any game.
Real Future TV, segment 4: How King Keraun and Simone Shepherd conquered Vine and Instagram. This power couple is young, black, and Internet famous. We chart their path as celebrities and entrepreneurs.
"'Jet' became in the sixties what 'cyber' or 'Web' was to a later decade: a prefix that could furnish anything with a cool gleam of futurism. George Jetson appeared in 1962. 'Jet lag,' an affliction of the well travelled, first showed up in print in 1965; 'jet-setting' grew synonymous with chic. John F. Kennedy was the first President to make a jet the symbol of Air Force One, and it’s debatable which of them, the man or the plane, got the greater image boost from the upgrade. Gordon describes the jet world’s glamour on his first visit to Eero Saarinen’s Idlewild (recently renamed Kennedy) complex, in 1964, when he was twelve. 'Pilots stepped through pools of milky light,' he writes. 'Beautiful stewardesses trailed behind them wearing trim red outfits and perfectly straight stocking seams. The ambient lighting, the flirtatious smiles, the lipstick-red carpet and uniforms, the cushioned benches and steel railings curving around the mezzanine—all conspired on the senses.'"
2. Can you FOIA Slack messages?
"Slack, for its part, is trying to make it easier for organizations to comply with strict document-retention requirements. Usually, the lead user of a group that uses Slack is allowed to export a transcript of all messages sent and received in public channels and groups. But a change the company made in 2014 allows organizations to apply for a special exemption that allows them to export everymessage sent and received by team members—including one-on-one messages and those sent in private groups. A spokesperson for Slack said the extra export capabilities were designed in part to allow federal agencies to comply with FOIA requests, in addition to helping financial-services companies that have to follow strict message-retention rules, and companies that are subject to discovery in litigation."
3. So into the idea of a NASA Ocean Worlds program.
"Earth isn't the only ocean world in our solar system. Oceans could exist in diverse forms on moons and dwarf planets, offering clues in the quest to discover life beyond our home planet. This illustration depicts the best-known candidates in our search for life in the solar system."
4. Recollections of Marvin Minsky. (Yes, he gets two links.)
"The thing that struck me more than anything else was his orthogonal take on just about everything. He would talk about music as if he was an alien visitor from another planet. 'What are these vibrations for?' He might view a problem as if he were a machine. 'What would a machine think about mental illness? It's just a bug.' I came to think he was alien himself, or at least he trained himself to think like an alien. Or maybe he was a warm loving robot. Every interaction I had with Marvin over the years would always startle me with his ability to think different, like he was an AI from another planet. This mind-spectacle gave him a reliable way to see original solutions. I don't know if Marvin really used that trick but what I learned from my brief encounters with him was to use that trick as often as I could when I was trying to thick about a problem or some unknown. Pretend you are not human; what would you see?"
5. AI will soon beat humans in every game.
"AlphaGo’s next challenge will be to play the top Go player in the world over the last decade, Lee Sedol. The match will take place this March in Seoul, South Korea. Lee Sedol is excited to take on the challenge saying, 'I am privileged to be the one to play, but I am confident that I can win.' It should prove to be a fascinating contest! We are thrilled to have mastered Go and thus achieved one of the grand challenges of AI. However, the most significant aspect of all this for us is that AlphaGo isn’t just an ‘expert’ system built with hand-crafted rules, but instead uses general machine learning techniques to allow it to improve itself, just by watching and playing games."
1. newyorker.com | @cwaddington504 2. theatlantic.com 3. jpl.nasa.gov | @elakdawalla 4. edge.org 5. googleresearch.blogspot.com
What Are These Vibrations For?