Month: January 2016

Some months back I mentioned here that I had had started to use the phrase The Holodeck is other people, to help keep things focused on the human and social aspects of shared virtual/augmented reality, rather than just the technical aspects.

I used that phrase again in a talk I gave yesterday. One of the attendees sent me an email today asking, quite reasonably, whether I was consciously doing a shout-out to Sartre, and if so, in what sense I meant it.

In fact I was indeed echoing Sartre. In his play No Exit, one of the character says that “L’Enfer, c’est les autres.” This line is usually translated into English as “Hell is other people.”

In the play, this character perceives the others as Hell because they are all, in fact, in Hell, and their punishment is simply to spend eternity with each other. Of course, they are in Hell only because they make it Hell for each other. If they had been different sorts of people, the same fate might have seemed like Heaven. Quelle ironie!

But it is important not to miss Sartre’s larger point. As he himself has said, when explaining this line of dialog:

When we think about ourselves, when we try to know ourselves … we use the knowledge of us which other people already have. We judge ourselves with the means other people have and have given us for judging ourselves. Into whatever I say about myself someone else’s judgment always enters. Into whatever I feel within myself someone else’s judgment enters.

As we start to enter virtual worlds together, this powerful interweaving between self and other must not be ignored. In my email reply I said the following:

We define ourselves through the mirror of the view others have of us. So VR/AR will only be truly meaningful when it becomes part of this ongoing exchange of reflected selves that allows us to have a shared humanity.

I spend this evening hanging out with an old friend. We had not seen each other in a while, so there was a bit of catching up to do.

At some point in the evening I noticed that we were using a kind of shorthand. Not of speech, but of feeling. She didn’t need to tell me everything in words, and vice versa. There was another channel of communication at work.

After enough years knowing a person, you develop a kind of language with them. It’s not quite mind reading, but it has a bit of that flavor. After your friendship has gont through enough ups and downs, conflicts and resolutions, you begin to get the lay of the land of each others’ psyches. You know each other, in some deep sense of that word.

New friends and acquaintances are wonderful — enigmas to be solved, undiscovered worlds to explore. But old friends are something else entirely. In some mysterious way they become you, and you become them.

We must never forget just how precious that is.

I had a conversation with a friend today about how people will feel about bots taking on human roles, once VR gets to the point where people are conducting transactions in a virtual world. The specific question was whether people, in general, would protest a bot impersonating a human.

In a more limited way, this is already becoming an issue. During our discussion we checked on-line to see whether anybody had used the phrase “bot or not”, and we got several hits: One to software that analyzes a poem to determine whether it was written by a human or a computer, and another to software that can determine whether a twitter account is being written by a human or a bot.

My sense is that yes, people definitely would object. I’m basing this opinion on that study in Zurich I wrote about back in 2008, which showed that our brains react differently, on a physiological level, depending solely on whether we believe we are interacting with a fellow human or a computer.

Which strongly suggests that the question “is this a real person or not” is one of those things hardwired into our brains. There are just some things about which we are not rational. After all, if somebody tells you that their child is more lovable than your child, your rational mind might understand and even process such an assertion. But deep down, you know that your child is the most lovable child in the world. 🙂

We are setting up demos today, in a place where all around us others are setting up demos as well. Lots and lots of cool demos by lots of cool people.

This evening there will be two hundred people in attendance, if everyone shows up who said they would. A classy capacious crowd coming to comprehend a collectively contributed cornucopia of cleverly creative contemporary communicative capability!

I was talking with a friend today about the experience I had many years ago seeing Neil Jordan’s The Crying Game for the first time. There is a plot twist in this film that most people don’t see until fairly late in the story.

But for some reason, I realized early on what was happening. From that point onward, my companion and I were essentially seeing two different movies. Which was weird, because we were sitting side by side in the same movie theater, watching exactly the same film up on screen.

In today’s conversation, my friend said that he has experienced that kind of things several times. For example, the first time he saw The Usual Suspects (another film with a late plot twist), he didn’t know what was coming. But then he saw it again, this time with his wife, who had never seen it, and he became aware that he and his wife were effectively watching two completely different movies.

He also said that when he saw October Sky, a film about a boy who builds rockets, with his wife and kids, they all had different experiences. Each one of them saw a movie they liked, but for extremely different reasons. One saw a movie about kids on an adventure, another saw a movie about parent/child connectinos, and so on. In some sense that’s the definition of a good family film: There is a good story up there on screen for everybody, even if everyone feel like they are watching a different movie.

I am fascinated by this idea of people sharing an experience, yet having highly asymmetric responses to that experience. I wonder, as writers begin to explore the immersive possibilities of shared virtual reality, how such subjective asymmetries will evolve, in the future of storytelling.

Strange to be flying
Past so many lives, people
I will never know

If you and I are walking around in some future version of everyday reality, and we are wearing those cyber-glasses that visually transform the world around us, we are going to want some other powers as well. And we will get them.

For one thing, I am going to want to point to an object across a room and then see that object float toward me until it ends up in my upturned palm. But that’s not going to happen by itself.

Instead, there will be an army of invisible robots acting as proxies between us and the physical world around us. Most of the time we won’t see these robots.

It’s not that they will be invisible, but rather that there will be no reason to make them look interesting or to make them part of our constructed visual landscape. When we walk across a room they will get out of our way, so there is no particular reason for us to even know they are there, as separate objects.

This idea of things unobtrusively operating on our behalf in the physical world is far from new. The plumbing that brings water to your tap, the restaurant kitchen that you never enter, the engine inside your car, these are but a few examples of things that work on your behalf in the physical world that you do not ordinarily see.

After a while, people won’t even think about the fact that they are always seeing a constructed version of reality. After all, most of us forget that the concrete sidewalks beneath our feet are a constructed reality.

Everyone will simply have the power to make any physical object float through the air and come to them just by pointing at it and issuing verbal commands. This power will come to seem so ordinary that people of the future will wonder how anybody ever got along without it.

Three Coins in the Fountainhead

Three young women travel to Rome to find romance, but only one of them is found worthy of true love, from an objectivist perspective.

Typhoid Mary Poppins

A magical nanny visits a dysfunctional family in London and employs her unique brand of lifestyle to improve the family’s dynamic, before inadvertently killing them all through a disease that would have been completely avoidable with proper hygiene.

A Clockwork Orange is the New Black

In a dystopian future, Alex and his Droogs find themselves unprepared for life in a woman’s prison.

A Hard Days Night of the Living Dead

Four lovable and musically gifted young lads from Liverpool turn into flesh eating zombies, infecting everyone they meet and changing the world forever.

The Rules of the Game of Thrones

A glimpse into bourgeois life in France at the onset of World War II, as the rich and their poor servants meet up at a French chateau, and then kill each other.

Before Midnight Express

Nine years after Jesse and Celine first met, they encounter each other again, before being caught smuggling drugs and thrown into a Turkish prison for the next nine years.

An American in Paris Texas

Gene Kelly plays a romantic soul, looking for love while trying to figure out how to dance to the twanging laconic music of Ry Cooder. Special appearance by Harry Dean Stanton.

When I am lecturing and I discuss possible future interfaces in which people use glasses or contact lenses or perhaps eye implants to see virtualized versions of reality, I often get variants on the following question: Isn’t this all taking us away from reality?

My standard answer is that we already live in virtual reality. Every communication technology ever invented is a form of virtual reality. It’s just that after a while we become used to any given artificial mode of communication, and then we relabel it as reality.

But I think there is a more specific principle at work here: “Natural” is not really about the absence of technological intervention, or even about how much or how little technology is involved.

Rather, there is only sensible question to ask about how “natural” a technology is: How well does it fit our current state of human biological evolution?

Humans have evolved over millions of years toward a particular kind of brain and a particular kind of body. This biological evolution, which occurs over extremely long periods of time, has essentially been at a fixed point throughout the entire history of human civilization (an extremely tiny span of time in evolutionary terms).

So we are pretty much stuck with these brains and these bodies. Of course we can perform technological interventions to make them operate differently. For example, written language is a technology that allows humans to transfer knowledge to other humans who will not even be born until centuries later. This remarkable technology works only because it is consistent with the capabilities of our human biological brains — which are essentially the same brains that the Cro Magnon possessed 35,000 years ago.

Similarly, automobiles and musical instruments are designed to be operated by human brains and bodies. We don’t need to change our biological self to play the instrument or to drive the car (nor could we). Rather, we design the car or the piano to work with our existing brains and bodies.

It is not our brains or bodies themselves that evolve over time, but rather the technologies that we create to work with them. So I would argue that a “natural” interface is one that works well with this current biological fixed point in the evolution of our species, and therefore can be gracefully and widely adapted by our species.

It makes no difference how “weird” a technology might have seemed in earlier times. At some point in the past, before their invention, a car or a telephone might have seemed completely alien to the humans of that earlier era.

And so, if it turns out that humans some day end up using computerized lens implants, and that such a technology meshes well with our biological nature, then that will be a natural technology. Whether that technology would have been seen as natural by a previous generation is ultimately irrelevant.

After having worked out a numerical expression for 2016 yesterday from the digits 1…9 just by intuition, and then seeing Paul’s very cool count-down version, I decided, true to one of my recent posts in these pages, to write a program.

The required code turned out to be surprisingly small. The below Javascript program computes 1…9 arithmetic expressions for the years 2000 through 2030, in all cases that use at most a + – or * between the digits.

for (year = 2000 ; year <= 2030 ; year++)
for (N = 1 << 16 ; N ; N--) {
   s = '1';
   for (i = 2 ; i <= 9 ; i++)
      s += (n = N >> 2*i-4 & 3) ? (n<2 ? '+' : n<3 ? '-' : '*') + i : i; 
   if (year == eval(s))
      console.log(year + ' ' + s);
}

A small variation in this program would generate all the "count-down" versions. Interestingly, it turns out that there are just about twice as many count-up solutions as count-down solutions.

Doing this exercise made me realize that what I really want is a programming language that would let me describe such patterns very simply, and then ask questions like: "Which of those patterns adds to 2016?"