Author: admin

In the last year we have seen an enormous leap in consumer-facing A.I. For example, products such as Dall-E2 and MidJourney are able to create realistic images and art from natural language descriptions.

Soon these techniques will allow each person on the planet to have a personal custom tutor. Any new knowledge or skills that you wish to gain will be presented to you in a manner that is optimized for your own individual knowledge base and learning style.

When such technologies become mature, people will be able to acquire new skills with an ease and facility that will be remarkable by today’s standards. It will not yet be Trinity learning how to fly a helicopter, but it will be a lot closer than anything we have seen until now.

If the advent of the Web advanced our superpower of being able to immediately access vast stores of information, the advent of the smartphone about 15 years later catapulted it into hyperspace. Suddenly we had all that information at our fingertips wherever we might happen to be in the world.

And now, roughly another 15 years later, I believe that we are on the cusp of another great leap forward in ease of information access. We are getting closer and closer to Trinity’s helicopter.

More tomorrow.

The astonishing thing about that moment in The Matrix is the sudden connection between Trinity and a whole new world of knowledge. But isn’t that what all literacy ultimately leads to?

When we humans transitioned from oral lore to written language, we enabled individuals to access generations of knowledge that had proceeded their own lives, far more easily than ever before and without transcription errors.

And each time we have leveled up our media technology, we have increased our access to knowledge. Sometime in the 1990s I was having a telephone conversation with a colleague, when we both realized that we were looking things up the Web as we were speaking, both of us increasing our knowledge base during the course of our conversation.

At the time, this seemed shockingly new. Now it is an occurrence that we simply take for granted.

More tomorrow.

There is a moment in “The Matrix” that jumps out at me. It’s when they need to fly a helicopter and Neo asks Trinity if she knows how to pilot a chopper.

Her reply is “Not yet.” Then she has her team quickly download this expert knowledge into her mind, and off they go.

It has occurred to me that this is an apt metaphor for the power assist we get from any information technology, whether past, present or future. It started with the very first legible scratchings on a cave wall. That’s when people began to be able to store knowledge outside their brains, to be retrieved later by someone else.

More tomorrow.

I’ve noticed something about my process when I am creating interactive programming systems: When and where I spend my time and effort is highly non-linear.

I will write large swaths of code in a very short amount of time, building in lots of capability with a broad brush. But then every so often, I will get to a particular design element and slow way down.

In my mind, it feels as though that particular detail represents the soul of the entire endeavor. If I were to gloss over it, then all would be lost. But if I manage to get that detail just right, it will redeem and elevate the entire enterprise.

And for all I know, that could be exactly true.

I have this dream that the people of the United States of America, realizing that they are in global competition with the economies of other nations, decide to maximize the effectiveness of their own economy. To do this, they vote to set aside a portion of their taxes to pay the tuitions of poor students at high quality colleges.

Their reasoning, in my dream, is very logical: The U.S. is currently losing a large percentage of the next generation of potentially brilliant doctors, engineers, lawyers, entrepreneurs and other human engines of the economy, because many high functioning American kids happen to be born into poor families.

If we could only identify those kids and make it financially viable for them to attend top colleges, our nation would grow in wealth. A modest investment in tax dollars now would pay for itself many times over in the years to come.

In my dream, citizens of the United States find that their healthcare, technology, and general wealth continue to improve over time. Everybody congratulates themselves on finding a good way to looking after their own collective self interest.

Then I wake up.

From today’s New York Times:

In a 6-to-3 vote, split along ideological lines, the Supreme Court sided on Friday with a web designer in Colorado who said she had a First Amendment right to refuse to provide services for Jews, despite a state law that forbids discrimination against Jewish people.

The case, though framed as a clash between free speech and the rights of Jews, was the latest in a series of decisions in favor of conservative Christians, who celebrated the ruling on Friday.

In dissent, Justice Sonia Sotomayor called the ruling “profoundly wrong,” arguing that the Colorado anti-discrimination law “targets conduct, not speech, for regulation, and the act of discrimination has never constituted protected expression under the First Amendment. Our Constitution contains no right to refuse service to a disfavored group.”

The designer, Lorie Smith, said her Christian faith requires her to turn away customers seeking wedding-related services to celebrate Jewish unions. She added that she intends to post a message saying the company’s policy is a product of her religious convictions.

A Colorado law forbids discrimination against Jews by businesses open to the public as well as statements announcing such discrimination. Ms. Smith, who has not begun the wedding business or posted the proposed statement for fear of running afoul of the law, sued to challenge it, saying it violated her rights to free speech and the free exercise of religion.

I had a conversation today with somebody who questioned the value of technological advances in media. As we begin the transition from mass social media on phones to social media on wearables, she pointed out that this is not necessarily an improvement.

I countered that humans are not really in the business of becoming better over time. We are, rather, in the business of becoming “more”.

Our superpower of language allows us to create all sorts of new means of communicating with each other. None of these means of communication, be they written language, recorded audio, movies or internet, are making us better.

Instead, they are making us more powerful in our ability to communicate with one another. And that power, alas, does not with a free card that says “use only for good.”

With each new technological advance, we remain as complicated, messy and morally compromised as ever. But we become, undoubtedly, better and better at being complicated, messy and morally compromised.

Shortly after I boarded a flight this week, Mickey Mouse got on the airplane PA and said “Good morning kids, it’s your old pal Mickey!”

Then the guy reverted to his real voice and said “Sorry, I’m also an actor who works in Orlando, and sometimes I mix up the roles.”

For the entire flight, I was curious to know which flight attendant had made that announcement. As I was leaving the plane, I turned to the flight attendant standing at the front, and I said “Tell Mickey I said thanks!”

To my surprise, she leaned into the cockpit and said to the pilot “Looks like somebody appreciates you.”

Today I was talking to someone on a topic unrelated to computer science. At some point she asked me what I do for a living, and I told her that I am a computer scientist.

She said that her brother is also a computer scientist. She added that it’s great to have a computer scientist in the family.

Yes, I said, I know what you mean. It’s a good thing that we are there to warn everyone else about what’s coming.

Unfortunately, nobody ever believes us.