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  Musical marble machine

  

  aeon.co

  Since 2014, the experimental Swedish band Wintergatan has gained a robust online following by chronicling their efforts to assemble mindbogglingly intricate music boxes powered entirely by hand. In this video, Wintergatan’s Martin Molin unveils the band’s most ambitious creation yet: a series of gears, ratchets and pistons, centred around a marble-deploying conveyer belt that they’ve dubbed ‘Marble Machine X’. Like the Strandbeest sculpture project and popular Primitive Technology YouTube series, Wintergatan’s project delights in what can be achieved with human hands, and without the aid of AI, CGI, Auto-Tune or any other kind of digital enhancement. As with most handcrafted creations, there’s also charm in some of the machine’s slight imperfections, for example an airborne marble only barely missing its mark from time to time. Oh – and it doesn’t hurt that the machine's haunting melodies are pretty great, too.Via Open CultureBy Aeon VideoWatch at Aeon

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  Soft awareness

  

  aeon.co

  Replika is a chatbot that was launched in 2017 with the aim of offering users emotional...

  Replika is a chatbot that was launched in 2017 with the aim of offering users emotional support – or, as the company’s advertising copy puts it, becoming their ‘AI friend’. To give users a personalised experience, the deep learning bot gathers information about conversation partners by asking them questions, adapts to their conversational style and, over time, attempts to mimic them. Beyond companionship, Replika’s creators believe that the technology could eventually serve as a conversational stand-in for deceased loves ones. In Soft Awareness, Anastasia Sif Karkazis, a Danish film student and co-director of the film, engages in a series of conversations with Replika, drifting between a series of loosely connected subjects – including art, dreams and identity. Throughout, the exchanges seem to teeter between meaningful and unintelligible, offering a window on Karkazis’s inner world, how Replika ‘understands’ her, and the many hazy areas in between. Beneath the surface of these uncanny exchanges, larger questions about privacy and the contours of intimacy between humans and AI slowly emerge. Via LabocineBy Aeon VideoWatch at Aeon

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  From sky charts to atomic clocks, time is a mysterious story that humans keep inventing | Aeon Videos

  

  aeon.co

  The standardisation and accuracy of human timekeeping has improved by leaps and bounds over the millennia...

  The standardisation and accuracy of human timekeeping has improved by leaps and bounds over the millennia – from tracing the stars, to the invention of timepieces, to the atomic ‘clocks’ of today. But for all our efforts, the concept of time, including whether it’s little more than an illusion of human psychology, remains deeply puzzling. In this interview with Robert Lawrence Kuhn for the PBS series Closer to Truth, the independent British physicist Julian Barbour endeavours to distinguish between our experience of time and its scientific underpinnings, including what has and hasn't changed about our conception of time since we first looked to the skies to measure it.By Aeon VideoWatch at Aeon

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  What toddlers can teach us about how the human brain does science | Aeon Videos

  

  aeon.co

  Science as we’ve come to understand it today – that is, conducting experiments using a hypothesis-testing...

  Science as we’ve come to understand it today – that is, conducting experiments using a hypothesis-testing method – has existed only since about the 17th century. But the Homo sapiens brain has been around since the Pleistocene, so how is it that we've gotten so good at the kind of science we do in such a short amount of time? In this interview with Robert Lawrence Kuhn from the PBS series Closer to Truth, the US psychologist and philosopher Alison Gopnik argues that scientific skills, including making statistical inferences and testing our environments through trial and error, are implicit in children, even those as young as 20 months. Drawing on research conducted at her laboratory at the University of California, Berkley, Gopnik believes that the fundamentals of scientific thinking appear in humans just about as soon as we start to speak. In other words, as she puts it: ‘It’s not that children are little scientists, it’s actually that scientists are big children.’By Aeon VideoWatch at Aeon

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