The future: AI intelligence & metaverses (Spam Mail #32)

💩 Cool shit

The life and death of an internet onion - A website that will stay alive for 5 weeks. Peel layers to read more about love online.

Lost & Found! - Recording of plants and animals once thought extinct that have been rediscovered.

The Upworthy Research Archive - A wonderful dataset of all the headlines Upworthy have A/B tested. You won’t believe what happens next.

Loud numbers - A podcast of ‘data sonification’ - turning data into sound.

The debt project - Portraits of people in debt - a raw and honest collection of people sharing their financial situations.

Run Internet Explorer 5 in your browser! - Do you miss IE5? You can relive that piece of internet ancient history.

The Pudding’s Visual History of Rickrolling - The Pudding continue their data visualization storytelling by commemorating everyone’s favorite Rick Astley video hitting 1 billion views.

💎 Word gems

The Myth of a Superhuman AI (Wired / Kevin Kelly)

This piece is set-up as a a mythbusting exercise of every dystopian AI trope you know. While it does a good job of that, it is more interesting as a dissection of what is intelligence. "Every species alive today is equally evolved” truly reframes our idea of intelligence.

The most common misconception about artificial intelligence begins with the common misconception about natural intelligence. This misconception is that intelligence is a single dimension. Most technical people tend to graph intelligence the way Nick Bostrom does in his book, Superintelligence — as a literal, single-dimension, linear graph of increasing amplitude. At one end is the low intelligence of, say, a small animal; at the other end is the high intelligence, of, say, a genius—almost as if intelligence were a sound level in decibels. Of course, it is then very easy to imagine the extension so that the loudness of intelligence continues to grow, eventually to exceed our own high intelligence and become a super-loud intelligence — a roar! — way beyond us, and maybe even off the chart.

I Know a Place (Pioneer Works / Everest Pipkin)

A personal story through The Roblox metaverse, and how years of effectively infinite digital spaces has shaped it to what it is today.

As you can probably tell by the fact that my teenage years overlapped with the subprime mortgage housing crisis, I am too old to have had a childhood in Roblox—although I did spend considerable time in other online social worlds like Neopets, Avidgamers, Gaia Online, and later, Second Life. Even as a kid, I was interested in the history of these places. I would spend hours reading through old forum posts, looking at discarded roleplaying threads, finding unlinked pages and trying to break into accounts with lost logins; excavating the strata of what had been, while more was happening all around me.

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