The TV series 'Utopia' just started.

"The series follows a cast of 15 men and women who are placed in isolation and filmed twenty-four hours a day for one year. The cast must create their own society and figure out how to survive. The series will be shown twice a week, but there will be online streaming 24/7 with 129 hidden and unhidden cameras all over the Utopia compound. The live streams will begin on August 29, the day when the 15 pioneers will enter Utopia. Over 5,000 people auditioned for the series. Every month three pioneers will be nominated and could be sent back to their everyday lives. The live streamers will decide which new pioneers get their chance to become Utopian." (source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Utopia_(U.S._reality_TV_series))

Since every month new 'pioneers' will be introduced, you can still audition for the series; here's how: http://www.utopiatvcasting.com/how-to-audition. I would love to see a well-trained rationalist teaching "the world" some applied rationality principles, and I think this TV show would be an excellent medium to reach the "average person". It would also be nice to see someone explaining what Utopia means to a transhumanist. Let us know if you apply.

At the Australia online hangout; one of the topics we discussed (before I fell asleep on camera for a bunch of people) Was writing a rationality TV show as an outreach task.  Of course there being more ways for this to go wrong than right I figured its worth mentioning the ideas and getting some comments.

The strategy is to have a set of regular characters who's rationality behaviour seems nuts.  Effectively sometimes because it is; when taken out of context.  Then to have one "blank" person who tries to join - "rationality house". and work things out.  My aim was to have each episode straw man a rationality behaviour and then steelman it.  Where by the end of the episode it saves the day; makes someone happy; achieves a goal - or some other <generic win-state>.

Here is a list of notes of characters from the hangout or potential topics to talk about.

• No showers. Bacterial showers
• Stopwatches everywhere
• temperature controls everywhere, light controls.
• radical honesty person.
• Soylent only eating person
• born-again atheist
• bayesian person
• Polyphasic sleep cycles.

The following is a clipping of a documentary about transhumanism that I recorded when it aired on Arte, September 22 2011.

At the beginning and end of the video Luke Muehlhauser and Michael Anissimov give a short commentary.

Download here: German, French (ask for HD download link). Should play with VLC player.

Sadly, the people who produced the show seemed to be somewhat confused about the agenda of the Singularity Institute. At one point they seem to be saying that the SIAI believes into "the good in the machines", adding "how naive!", while the next sentence talks about how the SIAI tries to figure out how to make machines respect humans.

Here is the original part of the clip that I am talking about:

In San Francisco glaubt eine Vereinigung ehrenamtlicher junger Wissenschaftler dennoch an das Gute im Roboter. Wie naiv! Hier im Singularity Institute, dass Kontakte zu den großen Unis wie Oxford hat, zerbricht man sich den Kopf darüber, wie man zukünftigen Formen künstlicher Intelligenz beibringt, den Menschen zu respektieren.

Die Forscher kombinieren Daten aus Informatik und psychologischen Studien. Ihr Ziel: Eine Not-to-do-Liste, die jedes Unternehmen bekommt, das an künstlicher Intelligenz arbeitet.

My translation:

In San Francisco however, a society of young voluntary scientists believes in the good in robots. How naive! Here at the Singularity Institute, which has a connection to big universities like Oxford, they think about how to teach future artificial intelligences to respect humans.

I am a native German speaker by the way, maybe someone else who speaks German can make more sense of it (and is willing to translate the whole clip).

It was mentioned before on LessWrong, but I feel people might appreciate a reminder:

http://www-03.ibm.com/innovation/us/watson/what-is-watson/countdown-to-jeopardy.html

It's a bit of a cheesy PR thing - I'd be a lot more interested if they connected the program on the Internet and allowed anyone to try and ask them general questions, rather than mixing the program with voice recognition and (heh) buzzer-pushing. Trivia tests are also probably one of the easier challenges to deal with, since keyword filtering alone is very efficient in narrowing down the candidate space.

Still, I'm going to watch it if I can: if anybody knows of a streaming link that is accessible to non-US viewers, that would be appreciated.

(Silly aside: is anyone else annoyed by how "Jeopardy" pretends to invert the traditional question-answer format, while what it does is simply moving the "what is" from the former to the latter, even if the result makes no sense? I suppose to US people this is a rather old complaint, but I learnt about the show today and I'm rather bugged by this feature.)