Hacker Cinema
Gizmo!
1977 · Film · documentary · 77 min
Directed by Howard Smith
A documentary about some of the thousands of inventions that did things we never thought needed doing, or in ways we never considered doing them. A respectful, yet humorous tribute to the inventors whose vision, however far-reaching, was just a little off the mark.
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3 comments on Hacker News
Man has been trying to do this for decades. There's this AMAZING old movie called Gizmo! from the 60s (I think) with some guys running wine through a series of tubes and declaring it aged...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gaVwqraUKxA&feature=youtu.be&t=2267
I found the clip! Must watch.
I saw this in the '80s. A PBS station in Los Angeles showed it once, and someone I knew taped it.
He also had another amusing movie taped off of that same PBS station, that is even harder to find than Gizmo. That is "A Natural History of the Water Closet: A Documentary Cantata" (1974) [1], apparently created by WITF-TV [2]. That is exactly what the title says. It is a history of the water closet, done largely in song in the form of a cantata.
It's a shame that these old things are disappearing.
[1] http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0404271/?ref_=ttpl_pl_tt
[2] http://trove.nla.gov.au/work/21313634?selectedversion=NBD2654500
> Edit: this was meant somewhat ironically to get the point across that we can't be expected to succeed with AI unless we know how HI actually works
That's only true if the way HI works is the only reasonable way at achieve AI.
Biological solutions can be a good inspiration for some problems, but not always. See the film Gizmo, which is the subject of another story currently on the first couple of pages of HN, for some footage of what happened when people tried to base aviation too closely on what birds do.
I can't see any reason that it is not plausible that someday, after we do have AI, the sentence "we can't be expected to succeed with AI unless we know how HI actually works" will be regarded similarly to the way the sentence "we can't be expected to build vehicles that travel 60 mph [1] unless we know how cheetahs actually work" would be regarded now.
[1] 97 km/hr