Because the future has just started
“Only connect! That was the whole of her sermon. Only connect the prose and the passion, and both will be exalted, and human love will be seen at its height. Live in fragments no longer.” — E.M. Forster, Howards End
When those lines by Forster were first published in 1910, they had deep resonance. Today, alas, “Only Connect” is a phrase that evokes disappointment.
What a difference a century makes.
Having watched lots of theater recently, I am becoming more aware about the interesting relationship between good theater and likability. In particular, the need for characters to be somewhat unlikable.
One of the things that draws us to good characters in good theater is the question of the ways in which we don’t like them, and why. We can sympathize with them, but the whole enterprise fails if we just think of them as swell people.
This is because the driving engine of good theater is the underlying question: “What is wrong with this person?” The audience is being asked to do the work of figuring out the nature of the trauma that each dynamic character is working through.
There needs to be a convincing portrayal of sickness before there can be wellness. There needs to be a mystery so solve, an injury to heal.
In short, we need to understand why we are being asked to go on this journey. If we find ourselves, in just the right way, not liking the characters up on stage, then we might very well be in for a great evening of theater.
On this day of the year 1446, the king of Korea invented a new alphabet. It is an alphabet that is used today by millions of people.
King Sejong the Great was dissatisfied that only a small percentage of his subjects were literate. So he invented an alphabet that would be accessible to all.
Of course this was all frowned upon by the elite literary class of the day. But it initiated a societal transformation by creating new educational and therefore economic opportunities for ordinary Koreans.
What I find most remarkable is the scholarly consensus that the king did not commission someone to create this alphabet for him. Rather, he personally created it himself.
Can you imagine any modern ruler doing something like that? It truly is unique as far as I can tell in the annals of history.
Today I saw three plays — one in the morning, one in the afternoon, and one in the evening. We in the audience wore masks, and that seemed right.
The first play was excellent. The second was problematic. The third was atrocious.
But even if they had all been great, I am thinking that three plays in one day is too many. Each play should be given its own space and focus.
From now on, I am going to limit myself to one play a day at most.
Following up on yesterday’s post, I’ve been thinking about what will happen when the physical and the virtual become ever more entwined. We won’t think of the objects around us as being either / or, but rather as both.
When that happens, there will be a seamless bidirectional interaction between the real and the virtual. We will still move the objects around us, but those objects will also move themselves.
We will come to think of the objects around us as the arms and legs of the software that runs our world. Chairs and tables will rearrange themselves for our convenience, lights and window shades will adjust themselves in subtle and useful ways, robots that we pay no attention to will pick up our groceries, organize our tables and bookshelves, clean and put away our dishes, and generally keep our lives in order.
That reality has already been coming for quite some time. We have robots all around us in the form of thermostats, air conditioners, pop-up toasters, elevators and doors that open for us when we walk into stores. And of course the automobile becomes an ever more sophisticated robot with every passing year.
So we shouldn’t be surprised to see this trend continue. Year after year, successive advances in machine learning continue to change our interaction with our physical world.
I suspect that as time goes on, some folks will end up feeling nostalgia for the “old ways”. But I, for one, will not miss putting away the dishes.
There will come a point when our physical objects and our virtual objects weave together seamlessly. With our smart glasses, we will be able to look at our toaster, our vacuum cleaner or our household robot, and see all sorts of virtual controls.
At that point various sorts of “consumer friendly” programming languages will become more relevant. Programming the world around us won’t just be something we do when we find ourselves in front of a computer screen.
It will be something that you can do anywhere and any time. And it will be a way to customize the world around you.
I am sure that those future programming languages will be very different from Javascript or C++. They will be intended to be used by people who don’t consider themselves programmers.
Maybe learning such languages will be considered a fundamental form of literacy, taught to school children the way we now teach reading and writing. As those children grow up, they may look back at our current era and marvel that we managed to get by with the benefit of such a basic form of literacy.
I spent part of today rearranging my office. The problem, which I know is not unique to me, is that I have lots and lots of books.
So I needed to put in new bookshelves. A very pre-internet sort of problem to have.
On the one hand it was difficult work — moving around boxes of stuff and piles of books. On the other hand, it made me feel very connected to the space and to the things within it.
As we all go more and more virtual, these problems will gradually go away. Books may become thought of as a quaint artifact of another age, the way we now look at steam engine locomotives.
But that sense of physical engagement, the investment of your own body into the process, will have been lost. I suspect that after that has happened, when accumulated knowledge no longer has a physical aspect, people will not realize what they are missing.
This day in Nineteen Fifty Seven
Sputnik first flew toward heaven
Above our globe it circled round
Delighting all here on the ground
The Space Age started in that way
Sixty Five years ago today
An achievement that we so admire
Is old enough to now retire
I realize that I have an instant association with the sound of words, particularly exotic words, independent of their meaning. For example, whenever somebody talks about manchego cheese, the word sounds to me like a character from grand opera.
“In this evening’s performance,” I hear in my head, “our villain Manchego will be played by the renowned baritone Luigi Montenegro.” Which probably has nothing whatsoever to do with cheese.
On the other hand, I realize that words which sound exotic to me might sound perfectly ordinary to somebody else. For example, when I was a child, my father was fond of pointing to the name of the great opera composer Giuseppe Verdi.
“To us,” dad would tell us, “he was Giuseppe Verdi” (rolling out the sound for dramatic effect). “To his audience, he was just Joe Green.”
At some point in the future, when we are all wearing the mature version of those mixed reality glasses, the interior of your house or apartment will start to become partly virtual. There will be various features, both visual and functional, that will only exist while you are wearing your glasses.
We won’t even think about this as a thing, just as today, we don’t think about it as a thing that we have to get in the car to drive on the road. It will just be reality.
When that happens, I wonder how people will think about permanence in interior decorating. Will people generally settle upon a single motif for their home environment? Or will they think of these things as seasonal, or even vary there surroundings based on time of day or current activity?
The same room, after all, will be able to function at different times as a living room, playroom, bedroom, craft room, etc. We tend to have conventions for lighting, decoration, etc. for these different functional spaces. When we are able to change all of those things at will, will it be like switching to different phone apps? On your smartphone, you are always looking at the same screen, but you are not surprised when you are able to switch from one app to another on that screen.
Will our physical reality become virtually subdivided into reality apps?