#64: Can computers have common sense?
Plus how tokens change communities, a live captioning HUD, and more.
💩 Cool shit
CaptionIt - This project feels like the near future. It’s a wearable HUD that gives you live, real-time captions.
Noisy Cities - A fun and fascinating map to see how much noise you’re exposed to in different parts of London, New York, and Paris.
Filmot - Search for phrases within YouTube subtitles. This is something that should be built into YouTube natively.
Play with GPT-3 - Try out GPT-3 for free! You’ve probably seen some of these pop up on your social feeds. Regardless what you think about AI, this is scarily good.
Space Debris - A 3D visualization of all the space debris circling the globe. It’s shocking seeing how much stuff is up there.
Infinite Mac - A browsable collection of classic Mac software. I love simulated UIs in your browser, and this one fits that category perfectly.
Analytics USA - This is a surprisingly cool idea. Explore the site analytics data for many .gov sites, and see how people use government websites.
💎 Word gems
The core point from this still prescient thread is that introducing economic incentives (tokens) to a community fundamentally changes our motivations and group dynamic. The whole tweet thread is worth reading, and the suggestion of creating tokens that look less like money is one worth exploring.
Communities are many-person relationships. Tokenizing communities could lead to more fair and effective coordination. But will it eventually erode the trust, shared values, and culture that let the community form - and would help it get through any hard times?
— Danny | Ceramic (@dazuck) 1:57 PM ∙ Apr 8, 2021
Can Computers Learn Common Sense? (New Yorker / Matthew Hutson)
I’ve largely ignored the news story about Google’s LaMDA AI potentially being sentient because I think it’s ridiculous. But the scary part of that story is an “AI” can be good enough at pretending to be sentient it can fool us. That’s where this article comes in. The goal of introducing common sense is fascinating, but scary.
By definition, common sense is something everyone has; it doesn’t sound like a big deal. But imagine living without it and it comes into clearer focus. Suppose you’re a robot visiting a carnival, and you confront a fun-house mirror; bereft of common sense, you might wonder if your body has suddenly changed. On the way home, you see that a fire hydrant has erupted, showering the road; you can’t determine if it’s safe to drive through the spray. You park outside a drugstore, and a man on the sidewalk screams for help, bleeding profusely. Are you allowed to grab bandages from the store without waiting in line to pay? At home, there’s a news report—something about a cheeseburger stabbing. As a human being, you can draw on a vast reservoir of implicit knowledge to interpret these situations. You do so all the time, because life is cornery. A.I.s are likely to get stuck.
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