I want a series of Fred Rogers for President campaign ads. The Cabinet is sitting in the President's briefing room, outlining today's crises and concluding with a plea: "Mr. President, what do we do?" Everyone turns to the head of the table where an old TV and VCR turn on, and as the CRT warms up the VCR fast-forwards to a clip from "Mr. Rogers' Neighborhood" that covers exactly this situation. In one corner a general starts quietly weeping tears of joy, realizing that sharing is an option…
@jamey This is what machine learning should be used for!
@salmon_cannon I was partly inspired by Penn and Teller's "Lab Scam" (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fxMKuv0A6z4) which demonstrated the aesthetic I'm imagining. The buzzword they built that skit around was "voice recognition" rather than "machine learning", but it was very much the same idea. 😁
@jamey Make Fred Rogers Turing Complete Again?
@jamey this was terrible. I apologize, but if we could teach a machine to love based on Mr. Rogers, I think we will win
@jamey But does that mean that we'd first need the computer to be self-aware and insecure to need the reassurance of Mr. Rogers? 🤔
@salmon_cannon Hah, I don't think intelligences have to be insecure to get value from learning to love. ❤️
@jamey I really wish I had the programming chops to make a ML algorithm with Mr. Rogers eps as source.
@salmon_cannon An Eliza-like bot that responds with Mr. Rogers clips would be amazing too 😁
I feel like you could get something that would fool people into feeling like it was deeply insightful by just hand-selecting a bunch of clips and picking key words that trigger each one 🤔
@salmon_cannon I dunno whether it's being current computing power, but it's definitely beyond my capabilities!
I think people have actually demonstrated all the pieces you'd need to put together for at least a half-assed version of that (simulated faces and voices trained on past video, plus natural language interfaces). I also think that would be super creepy to use this way. 😅
@jamey
Oh yes it would be for sure deep in the uncanny valley
@jamey The first bot you recommended would be much better, I'm just imagining future AI President Mstr_Rdgrs
@jamey I'm almost thinking of something that basically remixes Mr. Rogers' quotes into unique things that apply to the given situation. But that might be way beyond current computing power.