Happy Valentine's Day from Your Computer

i-17036bc7c1c62b5e2ab1863751a6c873-resetlovw.jpg

In 2007, my friends at m ss ng peces and I started work on a new Internet-television show called RESET, for the Sundance Channel. The idea was to make a show designed for computers to watch, that could teach them what it was like to be human -- a show that, while ostensibly made for human beings, would also nourish our computers' circuit boards with generous descriptions of the richness of human experience. Obviously this is just an artistic conceit, and not, as far as I know, a practicable reality, but it does raise a lot of interesting questions. You probably spend your entire day within arm's reach of warm and buzzing little laptop; if you could teach it anything about yourself, what would it be? Does it matter? If we're diving headlong into a post-Singularity future, wouldn't it be reassuring to know the computers knew what it felt like to dance, to smell, or -- most appropriate today -- to fall in love?

To celebrate the project, we made some valentines for you and your computer to share. After all, you do spend all day staring at each other.

You can watch episodes on the Sundance Channel site or on the RESET Tumblr, where I'll be posting endlessly interesting ephemera about the increasingly intimate and complex relationship we have with our technology. Please come visit, follow along, and join the conversation -- I'm talking to you, microchips!

i-c096a6385c3ba5eab011aa3d9f509137-tumblr_lgl3q7Iju81qgemebo1_500.pngStill from RESET: Sound

Meanwhile, an IBM computer trounces human contestants on Jeopardy! and a robot quietly orders a scone from a Mountain View coffee shop. This, apparently, is the world we live in.

P.S. Oh, and you can also Like RESET on Facebook here.

More like this

For the last few years, Claire L. Evans and friends have been producing a television show designed to teach computers about the human experience. On Valentine's Day, the term technophile got a new meaning on Universe. Claire explains, "we made some valentines for you and your computer to share.…
Clive Thompson has a wonderful article in the NY Times Magazine on Watson, the supercomputer programmed to excel at Jeopardy. Thompson delves into the clever heuristics used to generate singular answers to ambiguous questions. (Watson relies on massive amounts of parallel processing, so that "he"…
What Watson Can Learn From the Human Brain | Wired Science | Wired.com "Watson won. That set of microchips will soon join the pantheon of machines that have defeated humans, from the steam-powered hammer that killed John Henry to the Deep Blue supercomputer that battled Kasparov. Predictably…
Last week, a team of computer scientists led by Dharmendra S. Modha announced what sounded like an impressive breakthrough for neuroscience-inspired computing: Using Dawn Blue Gene / P supercomputer at Lawrence Livermore National Lab with 147,456 processors and 144 TB of main memory, we achieved a…