Author: admin

Let’s say we all suddenly acquired the ability to modulate our physical appearance. In order to remove any inessential issues about technology, imagine we were all given the superpower that Mystique has in the X-Men universe.

What would end up happening? Would appearances converge or diverge? I can imagine a boring scenario in which large numbers of people simply choose to look like their favorite pop star.

But perhaps people will be more adventurous than that. Maybe appearances will start to diverge, in some interesting and exciting way.

Wouldn’t it be cool if people were to experiment with new forms of physical presentation. Clothing choices might end up being just one among many aspects of future fashion.

On-line virtual communities have already been playing around with some of these capabilities for quite a while. But I have a feeling the results would be different if those same capabilities were to suddenly show up out here in the physical world.

Yesterday I acted irrationally angry toward somebody whom I love very much. We both realized afterward that it was what is colloquially called my “inner child” who was throwing the tantrum.

That realization does not take away from the destructiveness of the moment. We all have a part of ourselves that is small and scared and still dealing with issues from a long-ago time. Yet we are also adults, with a responsibility to be kind to one another.

As we seek to protect our inner child, we need also to engage it, to speak with it honestly about what is causing us stress. If we try to simply protect it from all stress, eventually the child will react unfavorably to being removed from the conversation, and the result will not be pretty.

I am going to seek to do better to figure out how to talk honestly, yet of course gently, with my inner child, about the issues that cause me grief in my adult life. That is, in any case, far better than finding myself watching helplessly as my inner child, feeling unheard, lashes out at somebody else.

Oddly, I had already opened up my computer and was just about to start typing the post of the day when I heard the news. The first confirmed case of coronavirus in Manhattan was announced this afternoon.

The woman has been quarantined in her apartment, and testing of people who show symptoms is continuing. Nobody seems to exactly what this means.

Perhaps it would be best not to say too much more on this subject until there is good news to report. Let us all hope for better news in the days ahead.

Today I was behind another guy in line at the local CVS. As the teller was handing the man his plastic bag, he told the customer that today was the last day that CVS would be providing plastic bags.

“Starting tomorrow,” he explained, “we will provide paper bags, if you need one, for a charge of five cents per purchase.”

The man looked at the plastic bag in his hand thoughtfully, and then a big grin broke out on his face.

“So this isn’t just a bag,” he said happily. “It is now a valuable historical artifact.”

For any technology, there is a point of inflection. That is the moment at which it transitions from a curiosity to a fundamental part of our everyday reality.

You can go back through history and identify the inflection point for various technologies. Some examples that come to mind are mass publishing, universal air conditioning, radio, cinema, television, the Web, SmartPhones and more.

Clearly every inflection point has a “before” and an “after”. Yet it may not always be obvious what is the decisive moment when everything flips.

I wonder whether there is a formal way of defining the inflection point for mass adoption of a technology.

As I talk with people in recent days, I sense a sort of amorphous fear underlying every conversation. People try to be chipper, to stay on message, but everyone knows what is nagging at the edges.

Nobody knows what is going to happen with the coronavirus. People obsessively look at the news, pore over those world maps with the little colored dots on them, and hold hushed conversations.

The outbreak is already a terrible tragedy — every senseless death is a tragedy. But the potential is there for a much larger tragedy.

We need to not let this overwhelm us, and of course we should hope for the best. But we also need to be prepared. And when it counts, we will need to remember to help each other.

I was going through the list of phone numbers in my SmartPhone today, and noticed that one of them is not useful anymore. I would delete that number, except for the reason it is not useful.

It’s not that the person has moved to another place on this Earth. Rather, it’s that the person is no longer on this Earth at all.

I find myself hesitating to delete the number of a deceased friend. Somehow it seems disrespectful.

It feels as though the number within my phone is a sort of mini-shrine to our friendship. Were I to delete it, that would somehow feel as though I am severing an emotional connection to someone I still care about.

This is undoubtedly silly, from a practical point of view. After all, that phone number is useless. Were I to dial it, I am sure a complete stranger would pick up, and would no doubt be annoyed by the intrusion.

Still, I refrain from hitting “delete”. I shall keep this number on my phone, together with my other cherished memories of my friend.

Warning: spoilers ahead.

When considered formally, the denouement of the first season of The Mandalorian follows a classic pattern for children’s fantasy adventure stories. Let us consider.

The title character himself is clearly the Tin Man. Over the course of the season, he gradually finds his heart.

Greef Karga is clearly the Cowardly Lion. In the course of his character arc, he finds his courage.

The only character I can’t figure out is Cara Dune. If she were the Scarecrow, then her journey would be to find her brain. Maybe it counts that she gains in wisdom over time.

For example, she comes to truly appreciate the title character and his young charge (who is, of course, on a journey to return home), but I’m not entirely convinced.

Oh well, it’s only a theory.

Today on our Future Reality Blog I talked about one of the challenges of working collaboratively in mixed reality: How can you give people a reasonable experience of reaching out their hands and grasping, holding and manipulating a mixture of real and virtual objects?

It’s a deep and challenging question, since real and virtual objects behave quite differently. In fact, I don’t think there are any shortcuts to getting good answers.

Here were my thoughts about it today on our lab’s blog.

Because we are all human, we share a certain kind of subjectivity. All of you reading this are processing your thoughts through the use of a human brain, which is our shared heritage after millions of years of evolution.

We know that there are non-human sentient creatures out there. For example, an octopus is highly intelligent, but in a way that is vastly different from us.

In the first chapter of T.H. White’s novel The Once and Future King, Merlyn teaches valuable lessons to young Wart by magically turning him into various species of animal.The boy comes away from these experiences with a profoundly expanded view of reality, which will help him to rule wisely when he eventually grows up to become King Arthur.

As I think on this, I find myself wondering, what is the shared subjectivity between one octopus and another, or — a bit nearer to home — between two cats, or two hawks or badgers? Two intelligent beings that have the same biological brain structure will have an intuitive understanding of each others’ view of the universe around them.

We literally cannot comprehend the world as it is comprehended by a dog, or a cat, or a horse, or a badger, or an octopus. Yet we know, intellectually, that there is a shared understanding between all the members of any intelligent species.

I wonder whether we ever could get a non-trivial insight into the world-view of another species. And if we could ever do that, would we come away with new kinds of wisdom?