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Georg Ohm, who was born on this day,
Had something very important to say.
    His ideas met resistance
    But he showed much persistence,
And invented Olm’s Law anyway.

Many years ago I went scuba diving with a friend in the Florida Keys. The way it works there is that a guy takes you out on a little boat to where the reefs are, and then you go from the boat down into the water.

The boat was just big enough to take four passengers. My friend and I noticed that the other two passengers were deaf, and were speaking to each other in sign language, but we were too wrapped up in our own adventure to pay much attention.

Until, that is, we all started diving. My friend and I, who had been having a pleasant conversation on the boat, suddenly found ourselves mute. All we could do was point at the pretty fish and nod at one another.

The other two people, on the other hand, never stopped their conversation. While swimming among the fish and underwater coral reefs, they just kept chatting away.

I suddenly realized that in the water, they had a super power.

Pie: A food. A round, delicious, so creamy treat. Its lovely aromatic seductive filling entrances all of our joyfully woke senses.

I could continue this forever, but that would be irrational.

Suppose the time eventually came (and I acknowledge that this is still a long time away) when an AI is able to faithfully mimic your every response. In other words, your personal AI passes the Turing test with flying colors.

And then, in this far off future, you opt to designate that AI as your proxy. Whenever you are unavailable, you can trust your AI to step in and give the response that you would have given.

In time, people just take this arrangement for granted. As Abraham Lincoln once said “A difference that makes no difference is no difference.”

But then one day you die, and in your will you have designated your AI as your legal proxy in perpetuum. What happens then?

Do you legally live on forever? Do the courts step in and declare that you have overstepped?

By then I suspect that the courts may be filled with the AI proxies of jurists long deceased — or perhaps AIs that consist of well crafted amalgams of the finest legal minds from various historical eras. So those future courts might very well be biased in your favor.

Something to think about.

I was devastated to read that Eric Carmen has passed away. The man was a true musical genius.

Today I walked around NYC listening to Go All the Way on repeat, a song he penned as frontman for The Raspberries. It may very well possess the single best hook of any song in the modern pop music era.

And I say this as a devoted fan of the Beatles, ELO and other brilliant groups from that era. As Jeff Lynne might say, I can’t get it out of my head.

Today a friend sent me an email suggesting that we get together and use AI to write and stage a play — maybe a musical, with computer generated songs.

I said “Yes, and then we can substitute an AI for the audience. We could train it to love whatever we create, and to always give us rave reviews.”

What could possibly go wrong?

This year I agreed with the decisions in all the major categories. That pretty much never happens.

Maybe I’m getting soft.

I m becoming fascinated by Wizard of Oz type experiments. They are, in a way, a method of seeing into the future.

It’s nice to be able to visit the future now and then. Even if we can’t quite live there yet.

Today at our research lab we were discussing the relative advantages of meeting remotely and meeting in person. Good arguments were raised in favor of both positions.

But at some point one of the students came up with the killer argument. We all immediately agreed that she had presented a decisive advantage for in person research meetings.

Her point was simple, yet effective: When you meet in person, you can share snacks.

Suppose you could design your house just by walking around on an empty lot wearing your XR glasses. You would gesture to show where the walls should go, and point out the locations of windows and doors.

The kitchen would go here, the master bedroom there. If one room was too big and another too small, you could just push on the virtual wall between them.

Everything would be adjustable, from window width to ceiling height to the location of the stairs. And the best part is that you would already know, even as you were designing your house, what it would feel like to be in that house.

I wonder whether the future of house design will look anything like this.