Author: admin

All in a circle
We talk about the future
And so — create it

Today I went to a large event at the MIT Media Lab in honor of Marvin Minsky. This was very different from the much smaller event I went to shortly after he passed away, which was just for family and a few friends.

Many wonderful things were said, and I took notes. Looking at those notes now, one if my favorites is from Pat Winston, who summed up Marvin’s contribution to A.I. like this: “Alan Turing told us we could make computers intelligent, and Marvin Minsky told us how to do it.”

Another is from Brian Silverman. He was explaining how when Marvin was working with Seymour Papert on developing programming languages for kids in the early 1970s, and there was no computer that could do what Seymour needed, Marvin just designed a new kind of computer and built it himself.

I particularly like the way Brian said it: “Research required a particular thing. If that thing didn’t exist, Marvin just invented it.”

They also passed out fortune cookies at the event, each with a quote from Marvin. At the end of the evening I saw somebody carrying out a large bag of left-over fortune cookies. “Careful,” I told her, “if you eat too many of those at once, everything will start to make sense.”

Humans are very good at picking up on subtle non-verbal cues. We can generally tell when somebody is nervous, or excited, or joyful or confused, without needing to hear a single word.

There is, reasonably enough, much worry about whether these sorts of important interpersonal cues will be preserved when people are having extended conversations in a shared virtual world. But I am not worried. In fact, quite the opposite.

When you and I speak on the phone, we don’t feel that our inability to see each other visually destroys our ability to communicate. Instead, we both understand quite well that the only channel we have is voice, so we pay more attention to vocal cues. When communicating with each other, people are very good at sussing out where the good quality information is, and focusing their attention accordingly.

I think something similar will happen for face to face communication in virtual worlds. At first, the body cues will be a strict subset of those in real life. We will be able to see each others’ head movements, and then perhaps hand movements, but it will take a little while longer to transmit all of the subtleties of full body motion.

At every step of this evolution, we will instinctively know where the quality information is coming from, because that’s what people are good at. Once we are used to any particular mode of future face to face commmunication, we won’t think of it as odd, or off-putting, any more than we currently think that way about talking to each other on the phone.

But what if it’s even better than that? What if it turns out that our brains are more evolved and capable at supporting face to face communication than our bodies are?

If that is so, then there might come a point when computationally enhanced body language actually lets us convey and apprehend subtle cues of body language that are not possible in physical reality. When that happens, we might find that body language and facial expression, suitably enhanced by computer intermediation, will allow us to communicate with each other more effectively than was ever before possible in the history of humanity.

After a generation or two of living with such advanced support for non-verbal communication, people might wonder how the human race ever got along without it.

Today at our lab we held part of our weekly production meeting in VR. We were all in the same physical room, and we could have seen each other in person, but we opted to put on wireless headsets, using our Holojam technology, and hold our conversation “in world”.

Because we could move around the room freely, it felt as though we had all been transported together to that alternate world. We could continue to talk with each other, but while inhabiting alien bodies on another planet.

This was just an early experiment. We still haven’t added enough things to do on that planet to make it a place we would prefer to spend a lot of time hanging out together. But we are going to keep adding. Every week, our alternate meeting room on a friendly alien world is going to become an ever more interesting place to hang out.

Still, to quote the last line of a great movie, there’s no place like home.

Happy Ides of March! 🙂

Today I was interviewed about a virtual reality dance performance we recently did. The interview questions were really good, and I was enjoying the process. And then something unexpected happened.

I was trying to explain the idea of giving a dance performance in virtual reality. So I said “It’s like a non-fictional version of the Holodeck.”

At this last statement, the interviewer looked confused. “What,” he asked, “is the Holodeck?”

I realized, with a mix of astonishment and sneaking delight, that he really didn’t know. So I explained about Star Trek the Next Generation, and that first episode in 1987 when the world was introduced to this wondrous fictional plot device.

Yes, the Holodeck is a fabulous (in every sense of that word) literary invention. But there is also something fabulous, and oddly refreshing, about meeting somebody who has never heard of it.

Happy PI day, everybody! 🙂

I had an on-camera conversation recently with a filmmaker who is putting together a documentary about how evolving technologies might, in the long term, change the human condition. He was particularly interested in the sorts of conjectural views that center around everybody uploading their minds into a computer.

As the discussion evolved, it became pretty clear that from his perspective, I represent the relatively staid voice of old-fashioned humanism. In fact, I am not really interested in those sorts of questions, and I consider them a distraction.

Of course I understand why people are so fascinated by these possibilities. We all have a strong instinct to want to not die, and the idea of uploading yourself into the Cloud, and thereby becoming some sort of immortal being, can be very compelling.

When I told him that I wasn’t really interested in those sorts of conjectures, he was surprised. “Wouldn’t you want to live forever,” he asked, “if you had the chance?”

I told thim that I thought he may be missing the point. Sure, if you lived forever there would be many things to reconsider. But that’s not the important question, is it?

“What’s the important question?” he asked.

The most essential quality of the self, I suggested, is not our mortality, but rather our uniqueness.

“If you were to meet another you,” I asked him, “or ten thousand other versions of you, which one is you? For example, if for some reason only one of you could survive, which of you should get to live?”

He didn’t seem to have an answer for that.

Today, because I needed an interactive animated avatar for our latest social VR research, I decided to repurpose a character I had created years ago. That was back when I first started programming for the Web in Java.

As soon as I saw the newly reconstituted character (now translated into Javascript), I realized that I had created the original exactly twenty years ago. Strangely, it did not feel at all as though twenty years had passed. In fact, it felt like just a moment.

Looking at the character, and the code I had written to model and animate it, my mind slipped back to the exact moment of first creation, and into the exact thoughts I had had in that moment. The feeling was as though I had put down my tools for just a second, and then picked them right up again after a brief pause.

I wonder whether there is a separate category of time, which might be called “artistic time”. In the world around us, years might elapse, nations may rise and fall, and entire generation of children can be born and grow up to become young women and men.

But when we are in artistic time, all of those things can feel like a distant dream. For within that creative place inside us, we know that it was all just a moment.

Canadian pot
Is actually good for you
‘Cause it’s medical

Maria Lantin and I, with the help of some amazingly hardworking and talented students, gave an unusual performance this evening. It was, perhaps, an historical first: The first untethered virtual reality pas de deux dance performance for a live audience.

Our team had set out to do something a bit different, but high technology being what it is, we ended up revising our plans at the very last minute. In short, we improvised.

What astonished me was how good it felt to take the script off its rails, and thereby journey in real time into uncharted territory. Even as I was within the performance, enjoying the moment, somewhere in the back of my mind I was taking notes.

And now, as a result, I am feeling a whole new vocabulary. It is a vocabulary not based on creating a linear script and then enacting it, but rather on creating a sort of interactive “story creation” instrument, one that can be steered in real time, in the heat of performance, much as a jazz pianist steers the direction of a musical piece during the performance of the work itself.

Maybe we need to have these sorts of fortunate accidents more often. After all, the most important thing in art may very well be whatever manages to shake us out of our complacency, and thereby forces us to enter a new world of possibility.

When I was a little boy, perhaps six years old, I and all of my friends thought that the Beatles were for us. Yes, of course we understood, on some level, that older people liked them too.

I don’t believe we made any distinction at all between different sorts of older people. Whether they were sixteen or sixty, they were just those slightly unfathomable grownups, people who clearly weren’t us. But whatever those people thought, we were quite convinced that the Beatles made music for six year olds.

We would listen to those songs endlessly, dance to them, know all the lyrics, and in general groove to the mysteriously beautiful perfection of every Beatles tune. And we sincerely believed what we were told — that this was all because of four geniuses from Liverpool.

When I grew up, I learned that what we had believed was not quite correct. An essential component of that perfection was the man often referred to as the “fifth Beatle” — George Martin. Sure, Lennon and McCartney were one of the great songwriting teams of all time. That will never be in dispute.

But without Martin, those songs would never have possessed the aural sheen, the sonic perfection, the delightful use of surprising instrumentation, the sophisticated and daring arrangements, that we recognized and responded to even as little children. We didn’t know why we were mesmerized by this music, but we knew, without a doubt, that we were in the presence of somthing extraordinary.

George Martin passed away yesterday, at the age of ninety, peacefully at home, as I understand it. He was a man in harmony to the very end. How fitting, for here was a man who helped to give the world profound and beautiful harmonies that will continue, for centuries to come, to delight children of all ages.