Three Eyes in the Window
The front window of our house watches the street this Halloween. Three eyes, one to a pane, rear-projected onto the glass by a laser projector on the living room floor. They sleep when the walkway is empty. When a trick-or-treater starts up the path, all three snap open, and each one follows its visitor to the door. Once the porch empties, they close one at a time and go back to sleep. The division of labor was clean. I contributed the imagination, the picture of a person standing on that walkway while something huge watches them. My AI assistant contributed the engineering: the pipeline, the tracking, the tests, the discipline of finishing a real-time system in three weeks. There is an earlier essay about teaching this assistant to reach and to remember. This is what that investment looks like when the deliverable is a show. ...