What you’re watching above isn’t your ordinary film. No, this film — A Boy and His Atom– holds the Guinness World Record for being the World’s Smallest Stop-Motion Film. It’s literally a movie made with atoms, created by IBM nanophysicists who have “used a scanning tunneling microscope to move thousands of carbon monoxide molecules, all in the pursuit of making a movie so small it can be seen only when you magnify it 100 million times.” If you’re wondering what that means exactly, then I’d encourage you to watch the behind-the-scenes documentary below. It takes you right onto the set — or, rather into the laboratories — where IBM scientists reveal how they move 5,000 molecules around, creating a story frame by frame. As you watch the documentary, you’ll realize how far nanotechnology has come since Richard Feynman laid the conceptual foundations for the field in 1959.
Note: An earlier version of this post appeared on our site in 2013.
In the credits of Phil Collins’ No Jacket Required appears the disclaimer that “there is no Fairlight on this record.” Cryptic though it may have appeared to most of that album’s many buyers, technology-minded musicians would’ve got it. In the half-decades since its introduction, the Fairlight Computer Musical Instrument, or CMI, had reshaped the sound of pop music — or at least the pop music created by acts who could afford one. The device may have cost as much as a house, but for those who understood the potential of playing and manipulating the sounds of real-life instruments (or of anything else besides) digitally, money was no object.
The history of the Fairlight CMI is told in the video above from the Sydney Morning Herald and TheAge, incorporating interviews from its Australian inventors Peter Vogel and Kim Ryrie. According to Ryrie, No Jacket Required actually did use the Fairlight, in the sense that one of its musicians sampled a sound from the Fairlight’s library. To musicians, using the technology not yet widely known as digital sampling would have felt like magic; to listeners, it meant a whole range of sounds they’d never heard before, or at least never used in that way. Take the “orchestra hit” originally sampled from a record of Stravinsky’s The Firebird (and whose story is told in the Vox video just above), which soon became practically inescapable.
We might call the orchestra hit the Fairlight’s “killer app,” though its breathy, faintly vocal sample known as “ARR1” also saw a lot of action across genres. A desire for those particular effects brought a lot of musicians and producers onto the bandwagon throughout the eighties, but it was the early adopters who used the Fairlight most creatively. The earliest among them was Peter Gabriel, who appears in the clip from the French documentary above gathering sounds to sample, blowing wind through pipes and smashing up televisions in a junkyard. Kate Bush embraced the Fairlight with a special fervor, using not just its sampling capabilities but also its groundbreaking sequencing software (included from the Series II onward) to create her 1985 hit “Running Up That Hill,” which made a surprise return to popularity just a few years ago.
The Fairlight’s high-profile American users included Stevie Wonder, Todd Rundgren, and Herbie Hancock, who demonstrates his own model alongside the late Quincy Jones in the documentary clip above. With its green-on-black monitor, its gigantic floppy disks, and its futuristic-looking “light pen” (as natural a pointing device as any in an era when most of humanity had never laid eyes on a mouse), it resembles less a musical instrument than an early personal computer with a piano keyboard attached. It had its cumbersome qualities, and some leaned rather too heavily on its packed-in sounds, but as Hancock points out, a tool is a tool, and it’s all down to the human being in control to get pleasing results out of it: “It doesn’t plug itself in. It doesn’t program itself… yet.” To which the always-prescient Jones adds: “It’s on the way, though.”
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletterBooks on Cities and the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles. Follow him on the social network formerly known as Twitter at @colinmarshall.
And now for a good use of AI. The UK-based telecom company O2 has developed a chatbot (“named Daisy”) that performs a noble task. Impersonating an elderly grandmother, the chatbot engages with internet fraudsters and then systematically frustrates them and wastes their time. As part of a demo, notes The Guardian, Daisy wasted a series of fraudsters’ time for up to 40 minutes each–“when they could otherwise have been scamming real people.” The AI system was trained on real scam calls–according to Virgin Media O2’s marketing director, Simon Valcarcel–so it “knows exactly the tactics to look out for, exactly the type of information to give to keep the scammers online and waste time.” If you have three minutes to spare, you can listen to Daisy clown a scam artist above.
One would count neither Elon Musk nor Neil deGrasse Tyson among the most reserved public figures of the twenty-first century. Given the efforts Musk has been making to push into the business of outer space, which has long been Tyson’s intellectual domain, it’s only natural that the two would come into conflict. Not long ago, the media eagerly latched on to signs of a “feud” that seemed to erupt between them over Tyson’s remark that Musk — or rather, his company SpaceX — “hasn’t done anything that NASA hasn’t already done. The actual space frontier is still held by NASA.”
What this means is that SpaceX has yet to take humanity anywhere in outer space we haven’t been before. That’s not a condemnation, but in fact a description of business as usual. “The history of really expensive things ever happening in civilization has, in essentially every case, been led, geopolitically, by nations,” Tyson says in the StarTalk video above. “Nations lead expensive projects, and when the costs of these projects are understood, the risks are quantified, and the time frames are established, then private enterprise comes in later, to see if they can make a buck off of it.”
To go, boldly or otherwise, “where no one has gone before often involves risk that a company that has investors will not take, unless there’s a very clear return on investment. Governments don’t need a financial return on investment if they can get a geopolitical return on investment.” Though private enterprise may be doing more or less what NASA has been doing for 60 years, Tyson hastens to add, private enterprise does do it cheaper. In that sense, “SpaceX has been advancing the engineering frontier of space exploration,” not least by its development of reusable rockets. Still, that’s not exactly the Final Frontier.
Musk has made no secret of his aspirations to get to Mars, but Tyson doesn’t see that eventuality as being led by SpaceX per se. “The United States decides, ‘We need to send astronauts to Mars,’ ” he imagines. “Then NASA looks around and says, ‘We don’t have a rocket to do that.’ And then Elon says ‘I have a rocket!’ and rolls out his rocket to Mars. Then we ride in the SpaceX rocket to Mars.” That scenario will look even more possible if the unmanned Mars missions SpaceX has announced go according to plan. Whatever their differences, Tyson and Musk — and every true space enthusiast — surely agree that it doesn’t matter where the money comes from, just as long as we get out there one day soon.
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletterBooks on Cities and the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles. Follow him on the social network formerly known as Twitter at @colinmarshall.
The end of the nineteenth century is still widely referred to as the fin de siècle, a French term that evokes great, looming cultural, social, and technological changes. According to at least one French mind active at the time, among those changes would be a fin deslivres as humanity then knew them. “I do not believe (and the progress of electricity and modern mechanism forbids me to believe) that Gutenberg’s invention can do otherwise than sooner or later fall into desuetude,” says the character at the center of the 1894 story “The End of Books.” “Printing, which since 1436 has reigned despotically over the mind of man, is, in my opinion, threatened with death by the various devices for registering sound which have lately been invented, and which little by little will go on to perfection.”
First published in an issue of Scribner’s Magazine (viewable at the Internet Archive or this web page), “The End of Books” relates a conversation among a group of men belonging to various disciplines, all of them fired up to speculate on the future after hearing it proclaimed at London’s Royal Institute that the end of the world was “mathematically certain to occur in precisely ten million years.” The participant foretelling the end of books is, somewhat ironically, called the Bibliophile; but then, the story’s author Octave Uzanne was famous for just such enthusiasms himself. Believing that “the success of everything which will favor and encourage the indolence and selfishness of men,” the Bibliophile asserts that sound recording will put an end to print just as “the elevator has done away with the toilsome climbing of stairs.”
These 130 or so years later, anyone who’s been to Paris knows that the elevator has yet to finish that job, but much of what the Bibliophile predicts has indeed come true in the form of audiobooks. “Certain Narrators will be sought out for their fine address, their contagious sympathy, their thrilling warmth, and the perfect accuracy, the fine punctuation of their voice,” he says. “Authors who are not sensitive to vocal harmonies, or who lack the flexibility of voice necessary to a fine utterance, will avail themselves of the services of hired actors or singers to warehouse their work in the accommodating cylinder.” We may no longer use cylinders, but Uzanne’s description of a “pocket apparatus” that can be “kept in a simple opera-glass case” will surely remind us of the Walkman, the iPod, or any other portable audio device we’ve used.
All this should also bring to mind another twenty-first century phenomenon: podcasts. “At home, walking, sightseeing,” says the Bibliophile, “fortunate hearers will experience the ineffable delight of reconciling hygiene with instruction; of nourishing their minds while exercising their muscles.” This will also transform journalism, for “in all newspaper offices there will be Speaking Halls where the editors will record in a clear voice the news received by telephonic despatch.” But how to satisfy man’s addiction to the image, well in evidence even then? “Upon large white screens in our own homes,” a “kinetograph” (which we today would call a television) will project scenes fictional and factual involving “famous men, criminals, beautiful women. It will not be art, it is true, but at least it will be life.” Yet however striking his prescience in other respects, the Bibliophile didn’t know – though Uzanne may have — that books would persist through it all.
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletterBooks on Cities and the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles. Follow him on the social network formerly known as Twitter at @colinmarshall.
The video above from Sabins Civil Engineering promises to reveal “the MAGIC behind Da Vinci’s Self Supporting Bridge.” That sounds like a typical example of YouTube hyperbole, though on first glance, it isn’t at all obvious how the fragile-looking structure can stay up, much less support the weight of a crossing army. Not only does the design use no permanent joints, says the narrator, “the more weight on the bridge, the stronger it becomes.” The key is the distinctive manner in which the pieces interlock, and how it directs force to create a “friction lock” that ensures stability.
Remove just one piece of the bridge, however, and it all comes crashing down, which is more feature than bug: designed to facilitate troop movements, the structure could be dismantled to prevent use by the enemy even more easily than it was put up in the first place.
Just one of the various tools of war Leonardo came up with, this bridge was conceived under the patronage of the famous statesman Cesare Borgia (a chief inspiration for Niccolò Machiavelli’s The Prince), who employed him as an architect and military engineer in the early fifteen-hundreds.
Though Leonardo’s bridge designs have proven influential in the half-millennium since his death — think of him next time you cross the Galata Bridge in Istanbul — no evidence remains that he ever built one in his lifetime. But unlike most of his inventions, realized or theoretical, you can build it yourself today without much difficulty. The video presents an example large enough to walk across, which may make it feel rather less stable than it actually is. Luckily for students looking to understand the self-supporting bridge in a hands-on manner, the same engineering principles apply just as well on the more manageable scale of popsicle sticks — a modern building material at which Leonardo himself would surely have marveled.
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletterBooks on Cities and the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles. Follow him on the social network formerly known as Twitter at @colinmarshall.
Life evolves, but machines are invented: this dichotomy hardly conflicts with what most of us have learned about biology and technology. But certain specimens roaming around in the world can blur that line — and in the curious case of the Strandbeesten, they really are roaming around. First assembled in 1990 by the Dutch artist Theo Jansen, a Strandbeest (Dutch for “beach beast”) is a kind of wind-powered kinetic sculpture designed to “walk” around the seaside in an organic-looking fashion. Jansen has made them not just ever larger and more elaborate over the decades, but also more stable and more resilient, with an eye toward their eventually outliving him.
Improving the Strandbeest has been a long process of trial and error, as explained in the Veritasium video above. Jansen’s process especially resembles biological evolution in that the changes he makes to his creations tend to be retained or discarded in accordance with the degree to which they assist in adaptation to their sandy, watery environment.
Getting them to walk upright in the sand was hard enough, and ultimately required computer modeling to determine just the right angles at which to connect their joints. But the joints themselves have also demanded improvement, given that the rigors of a Strandbeest’s “life” necessitate both flexibility and durability.
We’ve featured Jansen and his Strandbeesten more than once here on Open Culture, but this new video reveals another dimension of his lifelong project: to keep them from walking into the sea. This challenge has led him to build “brains” that detect when a Strandbeest has drawn too close to the water. Constructed with simple mechanical valves, these systems are reminiscent of not just the neurons in our own heads, but also of the collections of binary switches that, assembled in much greater numbers, have technologically evolved into the basis of the digital devices that we use every day. While a computer can theoretically last forever, a living creature can’t — and nor, so far, can a Strandbeest. But now that Jansen has discovered their “genetic code,” inventors all over the world have already begun their own work propagating this diverse, captivating species worldwide.
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletterBooks on Cities and the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles. Follow him on the social network formerly known as Twitter at @colinmarshall.
We now live in the midst of an artificial-intelligence boom, but it’s hardly the first of its kind. In fact, the field has been subject to a boom-and-bust cycle since at least the early nineteen-fifties. Eventually, those busts — which occurred when realizable AI technology failed to live up to the hype of the boom — became so long and so thoroughgoing that each was declared an “AI winter” of scant research funding and public interest. Yet even deep into one such fallow season, AI could still inspire enough fascination to become the subject of the 1978 NOVA documentary “Mind Machines.”
The program includes interviews with figures now recognized as luminaries in the history of AI: John McCarthy, Marvin Minsky, Terry Winograd, ELIZA creator Joseph Weizenbaum. It also brings on no less a technological prophet than Arthur C. Clarke, who notes that the dubious attitudes toward the prospect of thinking machines expressed in the late seventies had much in common with those about the prospect of space travel during his youth in the thirties. In his view, we were already “creating our successors. We have seen the first, crude beginnings of artificial intelligence,” and we would “one day be able to design systems that can go on improving themselves.”
If computers were thereby to gain greater-than-human intelligence, it would, of course, “completely restructure society” — not that the society he already knew wouldn’t “collapse instantly” if its own relatively simple computers were taken away. Clarke not only asks the question now on many minds of what “the people who are only capable of low-grade computer-type work” will do when outstripped by AI, but more deeply underlying ones as well: “What is the purpose of life? What do we want to live for? That is a question which the intelligent computer will force us to pay attention to.”
Few viewers in 1978 would have spent much time pondering such matters before. But presented with footage of all this now-primitive proto-AI technology — the computer chess tournament, the simulated therapist, the medical-diagnosis assistant, the NASA Mars rover to be launched in the far-flung future of 1986 — they must at least have felt able to entertain the idea that they would live to see an age of machines that could not just think but, as the narrator puts it, possess “the most crucial aspect of common-sense intelligence: the ability to learn.” Perhaps another AI winter will forestall that age yet again — if it’s not already here.
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletterBooks on Cities and the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles. Follow him on the social network formerly known as Twitter at @colinmarshall.
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