I’m so proud of the Marco Tempest AI generated video on Ada Lovelace!
I visited him and watched him put it all together on January 20 and that experience stuck in my mind as a highlight of my life. I visited him in Switzerland and saw the whole setup – in person.
I was so moved that I did one of my signature moves – I invited a few people to our intimate dinner to help them respond to a piece of art/history/technology to facilitate the narration – I first thought of Stephen Wolfram, who is a big fan of Babbage and Lovelace, then Megan Smith (3rd US CTO), then Vlad Bulovic (Director of MIT Nano) and finally Daniela Rus (Director of MIT CSAIL).
I’ve known Marco for years and watched him wow audiences with his cyber illusions.
For those who don’t know, Ada Lovelace (or Byron, as she was actually the daughter of the poet Lord Byron) was interested in mathematics and conceptual science in the 1800s (she lived from 1815 to 1852, roughly around the same time as Charles Dawin). ). She became a fan of the much older Babbage after seeing his progress on an “analytical engine”, the first such computer, which, because of its atavistic origin, was not electronic, but entirely mechanical. (I’ll come back to this a little later). You can read the rest of the story on Wikipedia or elsewhere: some would call Babbage the “builder” – since he actually built the machine, and Lovelace the “dreamer” since she is considered the first to realize that the analytical engine had applications beyond calculation.
Anyway, I was excited to see what Marco was doing: I’ve known him for a long time (he actually visited my son and daughter’s primary school years ago) and I followed his unique and inspiring work on “magic”.
Marco is such a great guy that when I asked him to give a presentation at my children’s elementary school, he did and … [+]
Marco is a cyberillusionist – he loves delving into the mystery of technology, creating new ways to use technology for staging, and talking about the potential of magic in our world.
When you see him somewhere like at the World Economic Forum talking about this stuff, you really get a sense of the role imagination plays in technology. But he also talks about the practical aspects of it: how magic can help you stay ahead of reality and how it can help businesses plan for the future. He mentions the rules of magic, like collaborating, avoiding groupthink, and taking risks.
Marco is also deeply involved in using drones to tell stories. It’s part of his life, you can find the results in the web archives.
I use this photo during a visit to Marco’s lab/innovation space in Zurich, Switzerland
Last January, during our visit, I asked Marco what was exciting him these days.
“I’m very excited about AI robots,” he said.
Another type of breakthrough Marco expects is the creation of what he calls “virtual worlds” – digital environments generated in real time and capable of reacting to our emotional states.
As for the power of creativity to deal with AI, Marco is optimistic.
I visited Marco at his home where he was rehearsing this magnificent piece. He presented it a few … [+]
“I think we need magic more than ever,” he said, reflecting on how these brand-new tools will be used in the schools and laboratories of tomorrow.
Learn more about Marco’s Lovelace/Babbage presentation: in their voices, in their forms
Marco’s new project is a fascinating foray into the world of 17th-century computing, as Marco, in a sense, reanimates Ada Lovelace and Charles Babbage, the dreamers and builders (as I mentioned) of the original calculating machine.
Take a look and you’ll receive a reminder of how, as the slogan says, “Imagination is the key to discovery.”
Portrait of the English author and mathematician Ada Byron (later Lovelace, 1915 – 1852), circa 1835. … [+]
As Marco uses new features like voice cloning and gesture capture, you see him bring these characters to life on screen. You can still see Marco and see how everything fits together (I tried his setup).
When we see Charles Babbage speak with a distinctive voice, or Lovelace raise two fingers to the screen while the voice says “two,” we understand the kinds of clues that are embedded in this kind of cyber magic, and how today’s technology makes all of this possible; Marco uses ComfyUI, Stable Diffusion, as well as a control software called Aximmetry, and some local models to bring these ideas to life.
And the term “resuscitation” is entirely appropriate here: ultimately, as Marco points out, Lovelace, whom he calls “the enchantress of numbers, died in her thirties, but not before writing the axion that I consider it a sort of crude haiku:
” My brain
is more than just deadly
as time will show us…”
Be sure to watch the video and think about how it channels these eternal concepts that Ada Lovelace’s brain manifested almost two centuries ago. It’s an exciting and important story: Marco tells a story that we need to make more people aware of! What better way to do it than to use this brand new technology – something that can (and soon will) be used in so many different ways, some very well, some, well, not so well… Either way , there is incredible potential to tell all kinds of other stories too!
But the story of Babbage and Lovelace brings us another really interesting concept that I’ve been thinking about. Imagine: although Babbage’s original design a few centuries ago was entirely mechanical, today’s computers are electronic. What will they be in a few centuries?