Ken’s Blog

I was talking with some colleagues today about the possibilities of combining wearable blended reality with artificial intelligence. I mentioned how convenient it is, when I’m writing an email on my phone, that my AI email assistant realizes when I’m writing the same sequence of words several times and offers to complete the thought.

One of my colleagues pointed out that this feature is not foolproof. And if errors occur out in the real world, rather than on a screen, the consequences could be larger.

Suddenly a scene popped into my head: Two future military commanders are discussing their midday battle plan. Noticing the time, one commander says “time for lunch.” But his helpful AI assistant hears “time for launch.”

Unfortunately, out in the real world there is no “undo” key.

In these first months I have been trying to make sense of the actions of the incoming U.S. administration. Surely there must be some pattern.

Today I think I finally have it. The key insight came from this latest announcement that the U.S. State Department would be reorganized. The most important changes are (1) eliminate any operations that might help Africa, and (2) cease any operations that might promote democracy, support human rights or assist refugees.

Essentially, the administration has been asking the question “What actually makes America great?” And whenever they identify anything that might even be perceived as making America great, they then systematically work to get rid of it.

So what we are seeing here is apparently an elaborate form of absurdist performance art: The incoming president runs for office on the slogan “Make America Great Again”, then as soon as he comes into office, he does everything he can to destroy anything that might be great about America.

So there you have it. We are witnessing the future of America, and it isn’t great.

I know it sounds counterintuitive. But sometimes, after a flurry of activity, you just need to take a day to do as little as possible.

Sometimes what you really need is to rest and recharge your batteries. And then doing nothing at all can be the most productive thing.

I understand that a lot of people don’t like flying on airplanes. Flights are a hastle to get to and from, they often involve physical discomfort, and they can take a lot of time, depending on how far you are going.

But I love them. And the reason is I get a ton of work done on airplanes. Nobody interrupts me, and nobody can call me or email me.

Well, maybe they are emailing me, but as long as I am on that flight, I am blissfully unaware of it. I get some of my best work done during flights, because they are one of the rare occasions when I can be guaranteed to be alone with my own thoughts.

When nobody interrupts you and you have several hours just to write down whatever comes into your head, it’s amazing what you can discover. Looking at the ideas that have popped up in this way, I sometimes find myself asking, “Now where did that come from?”

I guess you could say it was just in the air.

Will our relationship with words become fundamentally different when we are all able to see them floating in the air between us? AI and XR glasses will help us visualize and organize even our casual conversations, if that is what we want.

At that point the relationship between words and objects might change, because we will be able to see and add visual labels to the things around us. That is something we will do without needing to give it even a moment’s thought.

Acts of visualization which now require preparation and staging, will take on some of the qualities of spoken language. Creating visual representations of your ideas can then be fluid, immediate, in the moment.

Children will grow up in a world thus transformed. Will their idea of language be different from ours in some fundamental way?

Today I tried to implement a sophisticated and elaborate method of sending data back and forth efficiently between my computer and my XR headset. I was very proud of it, and spent a few hours fine-tuning it.

To my disappointment, I couldn’t quite get it to work properly. There were always artifacts in the data. Try as I might, I wasn’t able to track them down.

So I just tossed the whole thing out, and spent just a few minutes implementing something much simpler and less sophisticated. The simple approach worked like a charm, and I’m going to keep using it.

There is a lesson here.

I was having a conversation with a friend today about the intricate relationship with two dimensional and three dimensional things in our daily life. We seem to spend much of our time transitioning between these two modes of reality.

We walk through three dimensional rooms to our TV or computer, where we then interact with a 2D view of whatever we are interested in. But often the content on those screens represents something three dimensional, a 3D world much like the one we just walked through.

Yet in that screen-bound 3D world we see people reading books, looking through papers, watching screens, and otherwise focusing their attention on 2D things. And so it goes, an infinite succession of nesting dolls.

I guess this all makes sense. We inhabit these three dimensional bodies, and yet all we see with our eyes at any moment is essentially a 2D view of the world. So of course we intertwine these two types of realities on such a fundamental level that we hardly even notice that we are doing it.

Today I am very proud of my alma mater, Harvard University. In the face of inappropriate threats and bullying by this rogue administration, Harvard has stood up for academic freedom, and has blocked the encroaching forces of authoritarianism.

Our American flag stands for many things. But at our best, one of those things is the right to engage in free intellectual and academic debate, without the long arm of the government dictating the limits of that debate.

That is the only way in which we can educate each new generation of young people to be capable of working through the difficult choices that we always face as a highly diverse democratic nation.

If academic discussion is hobbled by the dictates of a political order, then freedom is replaced by fear. And this administration has made it very clear what can happen to young scholars whose opinions it disagrees with.

Harvard is being brave in standing up for patriotism, for the U.S. Constitution, and for our collective right to engage in free debate in a democratic society. Let us hope that they prevail against those who are currently working to destroy our nation from within.

People say a lot of negative things about family. And at times I see their point.

But at the end of the day, as imperfect as it is, there is nothing else like family. And that is a wonderful and precious thing.

In a wide ranging interview, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth was asked why certain books were banned from the Nimitz Naval Academy library, but not others.

“What was the reasoning behind banning May Angelou’s award winning autobiography?”

Hegseth explained that the book was deeply racist. Angelou falsely claims that when she was a child, she was treated differently from other children because of an imaginary concept of “race”, a concept which the current administration has pointed out does not actually exist. “As you know, we treat all children equally in this great country, and we always have,” Hegseth said. “We need to make sure that our military officers in training are never exposed to fictional statements to the contrary.”

“Have you read the book in question?”

“Of course not. In order to do this job, I need to keep my mind pure.”

When asked why “Mein Kampf” by Adolph Hitler was still in the library after the purge, Hegseth grew more positive.

“I’m glad you asked me that. As you know, fighting antisemitism, by any means necessary, is a high priority for this administration. And the simplest way to eliminate antisemitism is to eliminate Jews. That’s how you cut through the red tape. No Jews, no antisemitism. In his own way, the former chancellor of Germany was quite the political genius. In fact, we find that book to be so inspirational that we keep two copies in the Nimitz library.”

Unfortunately, just at that moment the interview was cut short, as the interviewer rushed out of the room, claiming to be suffering from a sudden stomach ailment.