Another exploration of this theme was in an episode of Doctor Who (Smile) which features a colony with nanobots that are optimized for happiness, with disastrous results: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smile_(Doctor_Who)
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"The Vardy were programmed to help construct and operate the colony and make the colonists happy, monitoring the emotional state of the colonists through the emotion badges and avatars. When one of the flight crew died of natural causes, it created grief among the crew, something the avatars were not programmed to register. The Vardy took this as a sign of disease and killed those who displayed unhappiness. This created a "grief tsunami" which rapidly wiped out the flight crew, and will likely wipe out the waking colonists when they discover what happened."
Huh, I was going to wonder if this inspired the AI safety concept about how you shouldn't program a superintelligent AI to optimize the number of things it can see that look like human smiles, since unfortunately there are many ways to maximize that other than making real people genuinely happy.
But it seems like the Doctor Who episode is from 2017 and so it could potentially have been inspired the other way around.
If you enjoyed reading this, you may also appreciate the novel Ella Minnow Pea by Mark Dunn. As letters are banned in the story, they also are omitted in subsequent chapters.
Yes! we think alike. I am planning to implement a database to store this info. I think it would be super interesting to see the result! From an extremely limited data set (Twitter), I see many people are reporting Inconsolata being their winner.
If you find yourself running out of battery power, an extra powerpack can come in handy. I ordered one earlier from newtrent.com this year and use it a lot more than I thought I would. Lots more other manufacturers too if you do a quick search.
