Author: admin

Recently I was at a faculty gathering at NYU in which we discussed how we might promote ties with the tech industry. In particular, we discussed how we can make sure potential Silicon Valley employers are able to see the work that our best grad students are doing at the cutting edge of research.

Of course this is a weird time for that, because Silicon Valley has been laying people off right and left. Still, these things are cyclical, and it is always good to keep the door open for the whenever the next wave of hires arrives.

At some point one professor, bemoaning the current state of things, said “So basically we are helping them to find the next group of employees for them to lay off.”

“Maybe,” I said, “that’s why they call it the cutting edge.”

If we extrapolate the capabilities of AI to another decade or so, the following scenario becomes quite plausible: A movie will simply be a way of visualizing a book.

Given the amount of talent and thought that goes into a well written novel, an AI trained on a sufficient richness of cultural knowledge should have everything it needs to work with to turn that novel into a compelling motion picture. Which will lead to a change not only of movies, but of books themselves.

Once authors begin to realize that their novel can convert directly into a movie, they will start to write with that goal in mind. We will see a new set of writing styles, optimized for feeding into AI visualizers.

After all, a lot more people are likely to see the film than to read the book. Which means that a novel which converts readily over into a compelling movie experience can be far more lucrative to an author than proceeds from the book itself.

This trend may very well be inevitable, and we already know why. Like Will Sutton said, because that’s where the money is.

A lot of people have been telling me that they are concerned that A.I. will eventually replace us. As ChatGPT and MidJourney advance by leaps and bounds, worried visions of SkyNet and Agent Smith are running through peoples’ heads.

The reality is that these large-data-model systems are merely reflectors of our own collective intelligence. The illusion of intelligence that they present is based entirely on mimicry.

These systems merely feed back to us iterated copies of the prodigious output of the collected fruits of our own human creativity. Without the actual data created by our human brains, they would be empty.

From a philosophical perspective, it could therefore be argued that these A.I. are parasites. They cannot exist independently of us. They exist only as a reflection of our own much weightier reality.

And that is why we should indeed be worried, but also why we don’t need to worry about the SkyNet and Agent Smith scenarios.

Parasites are perfectly capable of destroying their host. But they are not capable of becoming their host.

Today is the birthday of George Lucas, Robert Zemeckis, and Mark Zuckerberg, three men whose mutual fascination with high tech toys has changed our very culture, and in some ways even how we look at reality itself.

Largely because of Lucas, we all have a sort of comfortable familiarity with robots, anti-gravity, bizarre alien races, and the casual intermixing of sci-fi with magic, in ways that otherwise would have remained largely on the fringes of our culture.

Largely because of Zemeckis, we take for granted that the actors in our movies will become ever more digital. Others more recently have taken up the charge, but it really started with him.

And you’ve probably heard of the third guy. Some people would argue that his fascination with high-tech toys has had an impact, for better or worse.

After managing to implement save/load in my demo, the next thing of course was to implement the undo function. Under the hood, the mechanism is the same — I encapsulate the entire current state of the demo, and then I stash it somewhere for whenever I need to get it back.

But from the perspective of a user, the implications are profound. An undo button frees you up to experiment, to try new things. You can make as many goofball mistakes as you want, because you know that you can always roll back time.

I remember visiting Walt Disney Animation studios some years back. The animators were all using data tablets to create their drawings.

I asked them whether they preferred the tablets to old-fashioned pencil and paper. “Oh no,” they all said. They explained that pencil and paper is far better — more expressive, more accurate, more personally satisfying — in every way but one.

When you draw on a tablet, you can hit the undo button. And when you are in the heat of production, that one detail is more important than everything else.

The undo button is one of the best things about computers. Wouldn’t it be wonderful if we could have an undo button in real life? I still recall that sad moment, in my early twenties, when I backed my dad’s car into a telephone pole…

I’ve been spending the last few weeks working on a software demo. It has a lot of cool features, but the implementation of one feature in particular continued to elude me — saving and loading.

Which meant that I could show a cool demo by building everything right then and there, but I couldn’t prepare anything beforehand. Sort of like if Julia Child didn’t have that other meal already prepared in the oven.

Today I finally got the save and load feature to work, after many failed attempts. And now I can finally prepare some really cool demo content beforehand to keep warm in the oven.

Today being Salvador Dali’s birthday, I am suddenly reminded of a memory from the late 1980s, one that I had quite forgotten until now. At that time, a friend of mine was the proud possessor of a small original painting by Dali.

She had always told me that she had mixed feelings about the painting. On the one hand, it helped her to feel connected to the great artist. On the other hand, she knew that its monetary value would greatly increase when he died, which somehow seemed wrong.

And sure enough, in early 1989, the great man passed away. The painting was now officially worth much more than it had been worth the day before.

My friend took no comfort at all in this. I believe that given the choice between the painting and Dali, she would have much preferred that we all still had Dali.

It’s odd that this would all come back to me only today. Chalk it up to the persistence of memory.

Today was the day when I went to various places and saw the end of semester projects of students.

Some of the projects were wildly successful. At one I actually cried because it was so emotionally moving. Others, not so much.

But taken as a whole, the experience experience was very inspiring. To see young people trying their best to make a statement to the world is a beautiful thing.

I wish I had a magic slider that could move forward into the future to see what they Will do in another 10 or 20 years.

But I don’t have that magic slider. Guess I will just have to wait and see.

This afternoon a student asked me what might be a good way to simulate fluid viscosity. I didn’t know the answer, so I made one up.

Basically, I suggested that when any two particles in a viscous fluid are near each other, they should form a temporary bond, so it would be harder for them to slide past each other. As viscosity gets higher, this will make the fluid act more and more like a solid.

I was curious to see whether this would actually work, so I sat down and implemented it. I am happy to report that it works just fine.

You can play with my little viscous fluid simulator here.

I am trying to understand the strategy Ron DeSantis is using to try to get people to want to vote for him.

As far as I can tell, the man is pinning his presidential hopes on Americans deciding to choose him over the Walt Disney Corporation. So basically, he’s going up against Bambi, Pinocchio, and Cinderella.

Which means that he has already lost the hearts and minds of voters, whatever their political leanings. That much is obvious.

I wonder whether this is one of those weird nihilistic things. Like Elon Musk’s very obvious strategy of efficiently destroying Twitter, while pretending (not at all convincingly) that he is trying to help it.

It’s like watching the opening monolog of Shakespeare’s Richard III. The guy really seems to believe that he is the hero of the piece.

But the audience isn’t fooled for a moment.