Because the future has just started
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?
There are places that are distant in space and there are places that are distant in time. Often the latter can seem more heartbreaking.
When I was a teenager I was a counselor at a performing arts camp. One of the people working there was a professional clown named Toby. He was there to teach the children circus arts.
Toby was a very sweet man, but he also seemed a little sad and a little lost. After camp was over I never thought I would see him again.
Then some years later, after I was all grown up, he showed up as a barista in a coffee shop on 8th Street. I happen to be walking by, and I saw him working there behind the counter, so I came in to say hello. We were both very happy to see each other.
I never saw Toby again. I often wondered what happened to him after that, but there was no good way to find out.
Just this morning I walked past that same coffee shop. Needless to say, it has changed hands many times since then, but it is on exactly the same street corner as the coffee shop where I last saw Toby all those years ago.
It’s such a strange feeling. A place can be right in front of you, just a few short steps away, yet so infinitely distant.
I always feel a little tug inside on the last day of the month. I suspect it has something to do with the way I organize my life.
Without really thinking about it, I chunk things in terms of months. On my computer I copy over all of my working files to a new folder the first day of a new month, and I start afresh.
Then at the beginning of the new month I take inventory. What did I get done the previous month? What can I reasonably expect to accomplish in the next four weeks or so?
Sometimes I end up exceeding my expectations. But other times I fall woefully short in one area or another.
Which isn’t necessarily a bad thing. Because suddenly I have a whole new month to get it right. 🙂
Has this ever happened to you? You think of some sort-of-famous person, maybe a celebrity, maybe somebody that you saw in a movie or a TV show years ago. You are curious as to what happened to them. So you look them up online to find out. And it turns out that today is their birthday.
This has happened to me a surprising number of times.
It could be that because it is their birthday, somehow you saw a mention of them online, but you didn’t consciously notice it. It could be that it is all just some kind of crazy coincidence. After all, coincidences happen.
Or it could be that somehow, in some way that you don’t yet fully understand, the Universe is speaking to you. I like the third explanation.