Ken's Blog

April 25 has historically been a great day for invention. On this day in history, Watson and Crick published the landmark research paper that described the double helical structure of DNA.

Also on April 25, Bell Telephone demonstrated the first practical solar cell. And on another April 25, the first U.S. patent was granted for an integrated circuit.

And it also was on an April 25 that a submarine, for the first time, managed to travel all the way around the Earth underwater. And on yet another April 25, for the first time ever, a human-made object wandered out of our Solar System to enter into the great beyond.

To me, all of this makes April 25 a very auspicious day for human invention. I would like to think that on some future April 25, somebody who is reading this will invent something profound and beautiful.

Most of my projects focus on software. Occasionally I dabble in hardware, making stuff with microprocessors, little cameras, batteries and various sorts of exotic connectors.

But today’s project is purely arts and crafts. My main materials are things like fabric, velcro, and scissors, and it’s all about getting things to work in the physical world.

I have to say, compared with the other two realms, this is very very satisfying. I should really do more of these projects.

I realize that meaningful non-trivial person-to-perosn communication via direct brain interface is still quite a ways off. Still, it’s interesting to think about what will change after that technological milestone is achieved.

One thing that makes this tricky is that it is unclear exactly what to expect from DBI. Presumably communication will continue to include grammatically constructed sentences.

But will those sentences consist of words as we now know them? Or will we have a kind of enhanced language, in which we can directly transmit the images in our minds?

Rather than say the word “elephant”, perhaps I will show you a particular elephant. I will still be using language — constructing sentences to convey meaning — but the building blocks of language might mutate.

I don’t know the answers to these questions, but it seems like a useful conversation to begin. At the very least, I hope I have started to paint a picture in your mind.

I participated in a TV shoot today, which was great fun. It was a science show, and we mostly talked about math.

But we also got to talk about a lot of topics related to math. And some of those topics had less to do with math itself than with what it means to be human.

After all, so far as we know, humans are the only beings on our planet who think about mathematical questions. We eagerly grapple with questions of infinity, even as these bodies of ours remain trapped within a finite reality.

Thinking about thinking, I realize how fortunate we are. Even though we are stuck within this Earthly plane, we have these incredible minds that are free to roam through boundless infinities, unfettered by the chains of mortal existence.

I read an article in the New York times this week about OpenAI’s GPT-3 — a supercomputer specifically designed to learn, without explicitly being told how, to write proper English prose.

By using a very practical form of A.I. technique called Convolutional Neural Nets (CNNs), and after training on extremely massive quantities of human prose, the program can answer all sorts questions sensibly in what looks like very cogent English.

Which is all well and good. The problem I had was with the sensational way that the article was written.

Steven Johnson, who is himself a very good writer, gave the story a persistently sensational slant. He interviewed one expert after another, and all of them said the same thing: This is not at all an example of intelligence in the human sense.

It is, rather, extremely advanced mimicry. The computer has absolutely no self-awareness or consciousness. It is simply processing data.

But that would not have made for as fun a story. So we are introduced to the tantalizing “possibility” that we are witnessing the emergence of intelligence.

But in fact we are not. CNNs, while very useful, are not in any sense sentient beings. In human terms, they have all the smarts of a doorknob.

Which could have been made crystal clear in the article, for the benefit of non-expert readers. But I guess that wouldn’t have made for as fun a story.

This evening I thought I would implement Conway’s Game of Life. But after I did that, I decided it needed some sort of graphics twist, so that it wouldn’t just be yet another implementation of Conway’s Game of Life, if you know what I mean.

So I decided that instead of displaying whether any one square was on or off, instead I would display the accumulated number of times that any square happened to be on, so it would look something was growing and coming to life. Then I decided it would be cool to make those squares gradually turn green, to suggest plant life.

Once I committed to this more organic direction, I decided to go all in on making it feel like life emerging. So I made it all happen on a circular disk, rather than the more traditional square.

When the program starts up, I seed the disk with random values (half of the squares are on and the other half are off). So every time you refresh the page, you grow a new life form.

You can see the result here.

My progress today was terrific
I don’t need to get too specific
      But it all went so well
      I can rest for a spell
In a word, I am feeling beatific

I woke up this morning and, for some reason, one of the very first thoughts I had was about the connection between being complicit and being impolitic.

You and I spend our lives in a heady soup of social connection, whether we like it or not. Every day we define ourselves (and are defined by others) via our social, cultural and political beliefs and choices.

So there is always the temptation to simply identify with a particular group, and be passively complicit in whatever is the latest stance of that group on any given issue. Given that we are highly social beings, that might seem like the politic thing to do.

So there is a strong temptation to simply “check the boxes”, to not think through each issue on your own. Turning off your mind and choosing the complicit path can certainly save a lot of time and effort.

Alas, that approach to life will inevitably lead to a bad outcome. When you stop exercising our individual judgement, you gradually lose the ability to do so.

Even within your own chosen group, you need to be able to stand up and say “Here is how I think we need to adjust our focus.” If you simply adopt a herd mentality, then you end up being of no real use to those whose values you share.

Ironic as it may seem, two words that seem at first to be opposite are actually apposite. In the long run, to be complicit is to be impolitic.

I’ve been working with a colleague for months to get something working. In particular, this was the key technical step that would allow us to move forward on the project.

Getting it working involved surmounting a lot of hurdles, and there have been many setbacks. But today, for the first time, it finally worked. Hurray!

There are still many steps to be done until the project is completed, and I realize now that I had been holding off on taking those steps. Because what would have been the point of taking those steps until we knew the whole thing is feasible?

So now I can give myself permission to tackle those other problems, and it feels great. It’s like a door opening onto a whole new world.

Time to step through.

I spent some time today working with a colleague on a programming project that involved hardware. Which is a lot more frustrating than a purely software project.

With software you know what you are getting. Either you have a bug in your code or you don’t.

But with hardware there are so many things that are out of your control. Is this cable working? Do I have a faulty board? Is the download rate too fast for the embedded CPU chip?

It can take forever to figure out why something isn’t working properly. Fortunately, by trial and error we managed to solve a ten minute problem in just a little under two hours.

Which isn’t so bad, all things considered. As Robert Towne might have said: Forget about it Jake, it’s a hardware problem.