Author: admin

At some point in the future, when we are all wearing the mature version of those mixed reality glasses, the interior of your house or apartment will start to become partly virtual. There will be various features, both visual and functional, that will only exist while you are wearing your glasses.

We won’t even think about this as a thing, just as today, we don’t think about it as a thing that we have to get in the car to drive on the road. It will just be reality.

When that happens, I wonder how people will think about permanence in interior decorating. Will people generally settle upon a single motif for their home environment? Or will they think of these things as seasonal, or even vary there surroundings based on time of day or current activity?

The same room, after all, will be able to function at different times as a living room, playroom, bedroom, craft room, etc. We tend to have conventions for lighting, decoration, etc. for these different functional spaces. When we are able to change all of those things at will, will it be like switching to different phone apps? On your smartphone, you are always looking at the same screen, but you are not surprised when you are able to switch from one app to another on that screen.

Will our physical reality become virtually subdivided into reality apps?

There are places that are distant in space and there are places that are distant in time. Often the latter can seem more heartbreaking.

When I was a teenager I was a counselor at a performing arts camp. One of the people working there was a professional clown named Toby. He was there to teach the children circus arts.

Toby was a very sweet man, but he also seemed a little sad and a little lost. After camp was over I never thought I would see him again.

Then some years later, after I was all grown up, he showed up as a barista in a coffee shop on 8th Street. I happen to be walking by, and I saw him working there behind the counter, so I came in to say hello. We were both very happy to see each other.

I never saw Toby again. I often wondered what happened to him after that, but there was no good way to find out.

Just this morning I walked past that same coffee shop. Needless to say, it has changed hands many times since then, but it is on exactly the same street corner as the coffee shop where I last saw Toby all those years ago.

It’s such a strange feeling. A place can be right in front of you, just a few short steps away, yet so infinitely distant.

I always feel a little tug inside on the last day of the month. I suspect it has something to do with the way I organize my life.

Without really thinking about it, I chunk things in terms of months. On my computer I copy over all of my working files to a new folder the first day of a new month, and I start afresh.

Then at the beginning of the new month I take inventory. What did I get done the previous month? What can I reasonably expect to accomplish in the next four weeks or so?

Sometimes I end up exceeding my expectations. But other times I fall woefully short in one area or another.

Which isn’t necessarily a bad thing. Because suddenly I have a whole new month to get it right. 🙂

Has this ever happened to you? You think of some sort-of-famous person, maybe a celebrity, maybe somebody that you saw in a movie or a TV show years ago. You are curious as to what happened to them. So you look them up online to find out. And it turns out that today is their birthday.

This has happened to me a surprising number of times.

It could be that because it is their birthday, somehow you saw a mention of them online, but you didn’t consciously notice it. It could be that it is all just some kind of crazy coincidence. After all, coincidences happen.

Or it could be that somehow, in some way that you don’t yet fully understand, the Universe is speaking to you. I like the third explanation.

I know that a lot of people like to play computer games in VR. But as a practical matter, I don’t know many people who use it for other purposes.

Sure, there are specialized applications that really call for it. For example, brain surgeons use it as part of pre-surgical planning to work out and practice operative paths, and I am very glad that they do.

But in the workplace you don’t tend to see offices full of people wearing VR headsets. As an item for use by millions of people, there doesn’t seem to be at the moment an application and beyond game play.

I wonder whether this is inherent in the nature of VR, or whether it will change as either technology or culture or both shift in the coming years.

A lot of people are confused about the nature of today’s machine learning systems. There seems to be a widespread belief that these giant pattern matching and mimicry systems are actually intelligent, in the way that people or dogs or sea slugs are intelligent.

But the more you learn about how such systems work, the more you understand that they are not at all intelligent, in the sense that the word “intelligent” is used to describe a living being. They are very impressive, but then a lot of things are impressive.

For example, an automobile can outrun a human in a race, but we don’t put automobiles and humans in the same category. We understand that they are operating by completely different means, and so we know to keep them separate in our heads.

But most people are not familiar with how machine learning systems actually work. So an ML system’s apparently magical powers of mimicry can easily be misconstrued as a sign of emerging sentience.

To be fair, what is going on under the hood is very technical, so it’s not easy to understand how these systems really work. It would be unreasonable to ask everyone to take an advanced course in computer science.

But once you realize that there is no actual intelligence at work here — just a very impressive feat of pattern matching and generative imitation — you start to count your blessings. It would be much worse for us humans if these things could actually think, wouldn’t it?

Many years ago, when Max Headroom first came out in the U.S., I and my fellow computer animation friends used to watch it religiously. We knew that Max wasn’t actually a computer animated character — he was really Matt Freuer with prosthetics and video effects — but that made it even more fun.

I still recall my favorite moment from the series, a moment which I now take as an eerie harbinger of the future. It’s in a scene in which intrepid reporter Edison Carter (also played by Matt Freuer) enters a room that a group of renegade anarchists had recently made their secret lair.

The anarchists had apparently fled just minutes before the authorities discovered their existence. The great moment comes as Carter is looking in puzzlement at a television set. He is clearly trying to figure out why it looks strange.

Then, all at once, he figures it out. “This TV set,” he proclaims in astonishment, “has an off switch!”

In 1987 that scene played well as absurdist science fiction humor. Today it hits a little too close to home.

Watching two very different TV series at the same time can be educational. At the moment I am in the middle of both She-Hulk and Rings of Power.

On the one hand, you could say it’s hard to imagine two shows more different in tone or purpose or overall outlook. On the other hand, I am seeing interesting parallels.

At their core, both shows are about a woman, a powerful warrior with uncommon abilities, who simply wants to fight evil. Her agenda is very straightforward and not hard to understand.

But in both cases, she is surrounded by people who just don’t get it. They don’t deny that she is more powerful and more capable than pretty much everyone else put together, but they have other concerns on their minds. Those concerns are far more trivial, and therefore more important to them, then the central question of how do we save the world and stop the advance of evil.

So in a sense, both shows are about a familiar feminist dilemma. Men get to be heroes and nobody has a problem with it. But put power for the forces of good in the hands of a woman, and everybody gets all up in her face.

Have you ever watched a movie? Thought to yourself, that movie would be perfect if it starred these people instead of those people? I have often had that thought.

Many times I find myself doing creative recasting in my head, and I imagine what the film would have been like with my ideal cast. To describe this, I coined the term retcasting, a shameless rip off of the word retconning.

I realize that the technology does not yet exist to go back and remake a movie with the cast of one’s choice. But artificial intelligence is getting better every year, and I would not be surprised if, within the next decade or so, we could choose any movie, from any era in history, and drop in our preferred favorite actors and actresses.

It would be especially interesting to mix together actors that actually lived at different times in film history. That could create a sort of tension as the acting styles meld together, as the AI does the best that it can to blend the results so has to fit the intention of the screenplay.

For now, perhaps, creative retcasting remains an idle daydream. But one day, it made very well become an art form in its own right.

I had a great conversation this week with a writer friend. We were discussing one difference between the experience of playing a game and the experience of being told a story.

There are many differences of course, but one in particular, we both agreed, is essential. It’s the question of “who am I here?”

When you play a game, you yourself are an inherent part of what happens. You are an active participant in the experience, and your choices explicitly affect the outcome.

One consequence of this is that your ego is on the line. You have a different experience if you win than if you lose.

When you read or watch or listen to a story, the opposite is true. Your goal is to effectively observe. It is not up to you to determine the outcome, and therefore you are free to use your powers of inference and observation, without being judged.

One consequence of this is that your ego is not on the line, because you are not present within the world of the narrative. You don’t “win” or “lose” a story — you receive it, hopefully you are entertained by it, and perhaps you learn from it.

There is an argument to be made from this that the hybrid genre of a “story game”, although certainly possible, is difficult to do well. In a sense, something that tries to be both a game and a story inherently clashes with a fundamental difference between the experience of “playing a game” and the experience of “being told a story”.