They're Made Out of Meat

niccollsdp1 HN recommenders · 2014–2023
1.2M views · other · evergreen · Uploaded 2013-03-20

A short film adaptation of Terry Bisson's story 'They're Made Out of Meat', in which alien explorers discuss with disbelief that humans are sentient beings made of meat. It won a grand prize at the 2006 SIFF short film festival.

HN commenters recommend it as a well-made version of the story and quote it jokingly whenever discussions touch on biology versus machine intelligence.

Watch on YouTube

9 comments from Hacker News

@pdkl952014 · in “They're Made out of Meat”

[VIDEO] The short-film adaptation of this was very well done. The David Lynch-influenced directing style worked well.

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@tjradcliffe2015 · in “On Disliking Poetry”

This analysis of poetry is like declaring that the purpose of physics is to build perpetual motion machines and then saying we all dislike physics because it fails in this transcendent purpose. The author trots out uncritically the entire corpus of Romantic twaddle, swathed in sufficient technical language that most poeple will feel too intimidated to challenge it. But twaddle it is. The failure of poetry in the modern world is a result of the rejection of concrete experience as the foundational matter of poems. This has been accompanied by the abandonment of the physical rhythmicities of speech (including rhyme) as the basis of poetic structure. There's nothing transcendent about good poetry. People are made out of meat, and we communicate by flapping peices of meat: [VIDEO] Poetry reflects our meat-based lives, the physicality of our meat. When we abandon that, when we abandon concrete, sensual experience for floating abstraction, as the Romantics did, or for purely internal emotional states as modern confessional free verse does, we abandon the very thing that makes poetry possible and necessary: meat. Poetry is speech, specifically speech where the rhythmical structure dominates the gramatical structure. The rhythmical structure can be strong and overt (rap, Kipling, etc) or subtle (even the best confessional free verse manages this at times, or the L A N G U A G E poets at their most surreal, although I don't have any use for their political programme.) The rhythmical st

@paulmd2018 · in “How Discord Handles Two and Half Million Concurrent Voice Users Using WebRTC”

> "They actually do talk, then. They use words, ideas, concepts?" > "Oh, yes. Except they do it with meat." > "I thought you just told me they used radio." > "They do, but what do you think is on the radio? Meat sounds. You know how when you slap or flap meat it makes a noise? They talk by flapping their meat at each other. They can even sing by squirting air through their meat." [VIDEO]

@Izkata2020 · in “If we weren’t the first industrial civilization on Earth, would we ever know?”

A universe of what we perceive as AI, reminds me of the short story They're Made out of Meat [0] (and a version on youtube [1]). [0] [LINK] [1] [VIDEO]

@triangleman2020 · in “AI slays top F-16 pilot in DARPA dogfight simulation”

They're made out of meat [VIDEO] By the way, I agree with you, it is unsettling to hear human beings reduced to such terms.

@c222020 · in “They're Made Out of Meat (1991)”

> I'll grant that it's not going to win any awards... For what it's worth it was one of six nominations for Best Short Story in the 1991 Nebula awards [0] and the Stephen O'Regan film adaptation [1] someone else already posted here won the 2006 Grand Prize at the SIFF Science Fiction Short Film Festival [2]. [0]: [LINK] [1]: [VIDEO] [2]: [LINK]

@bryanrasmussen2022 · in “Meat made from recycled carbon dioxide”

So, in a possible future overhearing of two aliens discussing us being made out of meat [VIDEO] we might be able to fib and convince them the meat is made out of carbon dioxide? Universe, here we come!

@belter2022 · in “A new way to predict when software jobs will become automated”

We need another "No Silver Bullet" [1] for these modern times of ridiculous hype. Contain your ego and all these Matrices Statistical manipulations you decide to call AI...Somebody please volunteer. "OpenAI estimates that OpenAI Codex (what powers Github’s Copilot) can already complete 37% of coding tasks." And who decides the task is done, complete and works? The Meat does [2]...The Meat and nobody else. [1] "No Silver Bullet": [LINK] [2] "They're Made Out of Meat": [VIDEO]

@qup2023 · in “Let's build GPT: from scratch, in code, spelled out by Andrej Karpathy”

Outside tools are not required. We'll selectively breed humans until one can just compute it in...meat[0]. [VIDEO]