※ 2017 Stocking Stuffers ※
For the past two years I've wrapped up the year with a little "work I'm most proud of putting out into the world" list. This year I'm doing something different: I'm picking three relatively minor things I produced that still felt like gifts I was grateful to receive (from the people I interviewed). And now I'm regifting them to you.
Stocking Stuffer #1: The AI researcher who accidentally programmed a "companion agent" that may occasionally maim you for no reason
Christopher Salge is an NYU researcher studying "empowerment," an intriguing concept in artificial intelligence that he believes could help us design AIs that will reliably put our interests over their own (as with Asimov's classic "Three Laws of Robotics"). He tested some of his ideas via an AI "companion" that was incentivized to watch out for you in a video game by protecting you from enemies. But the best part of our Q&A is the part where he cheerfully admits that it had some... bugs:
"The other thing we noticed in the game was that, if you had, say, 10 health points, the companion wasn’t really concerned with you losing the first eight or nine of these—and would even shoot you once in a while just for laughs."
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Stocking Stuffer #2: A type designer concedes that normal people like Comic Sans and that's OK
Jonathan Hoefler is "kind of a big deal" in font-world. But he's not a pretentious dillhole. When he was explaining the reasoning behind his own handwriting-inspired typeface called Inkwell—intended as a more "proficient" alternative to Comic Sans—he gave me this bighearted quote about that thoughtlessly maligned font:
"Designers don't like it, but humans do."
(By the way, the Inkwell font family itself is as warm and comforting as a mug of hot chocolate sipped under a hearth hung with stockings. (The "season's greetings" image at the top is set in its Blackletter version.)
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Stocking Stuffer #3: This biologist-artist-teacher who says too many scientists treat science as a "sausage maker"
My favorite video project all year was conducting a series of short, surprisingly frank interviews with the members of Science Sandbox's advisory board. Werner Herzog, Miranda July, and Alan Alda all gave great soundbites. But Harvard's Robert Lue really inspired me more than the boldface names did. Here's his clip. And here's the essence of it in one quote, which unfortunately had to be left on the cutting room floor:
"Every person deserves their own laboratory. Every person deserves their own studio."
I love the way he equates those two spaces where imaginative discovery happens. I love the way he talks about them like they should be treated as both sacred and commonplace at the same time. I love the sheer generosity of his conviction.
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