My two big grins of the day

[taerowyn]

Was sent to two sites/videos today that I can't stop grinning about so I have to share.

The first is a smile through the tears video via my Twitter stream. As the poster says: This would be borderline unbelievable if you saw it in a movie but is probably one of the most PERFECT moments ever captured on television. From top to bottom. If this doesn’t make you say to others nearby, “Ah…there’s something in my eye,” before you run off to the bathroom, your heart is made of tar.

The second comes from liz_marcs. This little story of someone who wondered: could a human-like object traverse sidewalks and streets along with us, and in so doing, create a narrative about our relationship to space and our willingness to interact with what we find in it? More importantly, how could our actions be seen within a larger context of human connection that emerges from the complexity of the city itself? To answer these questions, I built robots.

Comments

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

The Tweenbot story is great. It reminds me of the way that people encountering the ELIZA chatbot in the 1960s and 1970s would sometimes anthropomorphize it to a great degree and pour out personal secrets, even though ELIZA's actual algorithm is extremely crude and not hard to perceive as a simple bag of tricks if you are inclined to. The effect frightened Joseph Weizenbaum a great deal and his reaction was to eventually regard artificial intelligence as inherently dangerous. But you could equally easily see it as a demonstration of the power of human empathy.