2001: A Space Odyssey
sama is a chancer, no doubt, but I take issue with this article's angle. Clearly they wanted something reminiscend of the film "Her". Since Scarlett Johansson didn't want to do they voice they hired someone else. The voice they used is that of their voice actor, not Scarlett Johansson. She owns her own voice, but I don't think she has any rights to voices that merely sound like hers, when they're not being used to fraudently imply that she's involved. So movies are really influential on culture, and I think there should be broad scope for "taking inspiration" as long as it stops short of…
You're amply correct on all points, and GP wrong. I'd point to Stanley Kubrick and Arthur C. Clarke's 2001: A Space Odyssey for numerous aspects of technology, including talking computer interfaces, tablet computers, and voice communications. Vannevar Bush, in the 1940s, and H.G. Wells, in the 1930s, were proposing systems markedly similar to contemporary Internet-based systems. Arthur Clarke's Imperial Earth (1975) featured an all-in-one, solid-state, "Minisec", indistinguishable from a contemporary smartphone: pocket computer, communicator, video and audio recording device (along with…
>>> The art of telling a story involves change which is far more compelling if it creates at least some conflict and confusion[1], and if AI or artificial mind enhancements are key, they're more interesting as a cause than a solution to the problem[2] >> When it comes to assessing how people might react when blessed with superaugmented intelligences, there are plenty of cautionary examples of people with natural but notable extremes of intelligence who've been tripped up by crippling vulnerabilities. <<< Except, if you examine this belief then it is a somewhat recent thing. If you go back a…
>So all in all colour me puzzled over why technological pessimism is on the rise. Because SF is always about the present, and most of the population has precious little optimism at the moment. The interesting thing for me about 50s and 60s SF was how much of it was about humans developing psychic and intellectual superpowers. Through 2001, Dune, and hundreds of short stories you had writers redefining what human minds were capable of. That changed in the 80s, with smart transcendent machines taking the place of smart transcendent humans. There were a few evil overlord AIs, but a lot of SF…
Ebert never mentions Arthur C. Clarke, who wrote the short story that the movie is derived from, who wrote the script with Kubrick, and who also wrote a first-class sci-fi novel with the same name and basic plot as the movie. The Clarke novel is far more literal in spirit than Ebert's interpretation of the film. The most important difference is probably the bedroom. In the novel, it's a place where the aliens try to make Bowman comfortable while they study him. The novel describes how Bowman spits out the water he finds there, because it doesn't taste right: turns out it's too pure. The…
Kubrick's version makes no sense at all unless you read the book, and it left me with a lasting dislike of all of his works and a bafflement that people consider him such a great director. It's a story first, and a work of art second. I suppose some (lots?) of people like art that makes no sense, but not me. And I think Ebert never mentions Arthur C. Clarke because Ebert didn't read the book either, and like everyone else has no clue what's happening in the film. There is an actual story here. A great one, and Kubrick was unable (or unwilling) to actually include it in the movie. For…
I read the book before the movie came out (I was 12 at the time; I vividly recall begging my mother to take me to the bookstore to buy it, at which time she presented it to me because she'd already bought it for me for Christmas or my birthday (not sure what month it was)). So, I have always understood the movie in light of the book. And yet, I love Kubrick's films -- he's my favorite director, and I think I would have loved 2001 even without having read the book. In that case, I think my interpretation would have been a lot like Ebert's, although I wouldn't have been able to express it as…
Kubrick's films before 2001 (Spartacus, Paths of Glory, etc) tended to tell the story with words and pictures. From 2001 on, with the notable exception of Barry Lyndon, he seemed to become obsessed with imagery, or as you say, creating visual poems (and even Barry Lyndon with its simple plot was a visual powerhouse), but I'm afraid his storytelling became secondary. For those of you who haven't read Clarke's book 2001, you should consider putting it on your list. As garyrob has implied, it's very different from the movie - very concrete - and yet, possibly as a result, almost more…
> Something I've never understood about the Turing test: are you allowed to ask things about family, about what they had for breakfast, about where they're located and what's the weather out, about whether they saw the movie than opened last weekend? Turing's original paper had the interrogator asking the subject to write a sonnet on the subject of the Forth bridge, and later on he describes a dialogue in which the writer of a sonnet is asked questions about it that bring in seasons, Mr. Pickwick, and Christmas. So it certainly seems like he did not intend for the questions to be limited to…
> Well, how does that compare to traditional search? Poorly. Traditional search is a dumb pipe, it gives you multiple links to review and evaluate on the basis of a well-understood PageRank algorithm. It's gotten a lot worse, but humans adapted to its limitations, and know what not to click on (affiliate marketing sites that rank #1 for instance). GPT3 is a dead end, it provides a single response and you can either accept what it tells you or not. It is not going to disclose what links it scraped to provide the information, and it's not going to change its mind about how it put that info…