Ken's Blog

Meetings today back-to-back
My pandemic schedule’s whack
Though travel is nil
It’s still such a pill
Well at least there is nothing to pack

Picking up on yesterday’s theme, let’s talk about some possible ramifications of future superpresence. It’s a tricky topic to discuss, because we are only now at the beginning of our collective journey toward such capabilities.

Nobody comes away from a Zoom meeting and thinks it was as good as an actual face-to-face meeting in person. There are so many things that are still deficient about the technology we have today.

But at some point there may be a cross-over moment, when the capabilities give us tools for social awareness and communication beyond what can be achieved in person. And then things might flip.

People might choose to take their meetings via remote superpresence, even if they have option for an in-person meeting. At some point, it might simply be better.

If that happens, then we will see a kind of reality reversal. To truly communicate with somebody on a deep level, we might collectively choose to use such technologies, rather than face-to-face interaction.

I don’t think such a thing will happen any time soon. But I’m not ruling out the possibility that one day we might get there.

It has long been a dream of many to effect truly successful transmission of presence. For example, that was one of the central research goals of the MIT media lab when it was first founded back in 1986.

I think we are finally getting to the point where, in the coming few years, we will be able to beam a quite reasonable representation of one person’s physical presence into another person’s physical space. That will be very exciting, but it will raise more questions than it answers.

After we have taken for granted that you and I can have what feels like a fully embodied face-to-face conversation over distance, what comes next? We will inevitably turn to adding features.

there are many things you can do when you are looking at someone’s virtual being, rather than speaking to them in the flesh. For example, you might be able to read their body temperature, know what they had for breakfast, or be aware of their favorite color.

On a technical level, anything that can be done through a combination of sensors, local computation and the power of the Cloud is fair game.

Such powers of superpresence can be used for either good or evil. In one bad scenario, they could be used to help enable a police state, and to take away values that we cherish, including privacy.

Yet those same capabilities could be used to help promote empathy and understanding. Perhaps we will have an enhanced ability to see that a person is becoming visibly angry not because they feel belligerent but because they feel fear and are in need of reassurance.

As with all new capabilities, superpresence will be subject to Kranzberg’s first law of technology.

There are so many ways that constructing software is like constructing a house. From a systems perspective they have a lot in common.

In both cases there are layers. The bottom layers are essential, yet essentially generic. You need a foundation, plumbing, electricity, proper management of heat and light.

At that level there are standards for everything, and if you deviate from those standards, you are going to run into trouble. Fortunately, at that basic level a lot of the rules have long ago been worked out by other people, so you don’t need to reinvent the wheel.

But as you go up from the lower layers to the upper layers, the design criteria change. You can experiment more, start to take risks, invent.

Now you are transitioning from the general to the more particular. You have an opportunity to make your individual statement.

I suspect that all systems of construction follow a similar pattern, whether in the field of songwriting, physics or philosophy. There are basic foundational rules that you need to observe, simply to have a space upon which to build.

After that, as you move up to the higher layers of design, you have the freedom to play. But first you have to make sure you have those basics in place. After all, it doesn’t matter how cool your house looks if it’s going to fall apart a week after somebody moves in.

I would not have believed an animated TV show could be so sublime, but Guillermo del Toro’s 2016-2018 animated series Trollhunters really turned me around.

It’s currently available on Netflix, and as long as you are sheltering at home anyway, you should binge it. I certainly am.

More than that. I am drinking it up like a long cool glass of water on a hot summer day.

I guess I shouldn’t have been so surprised. This was, after all, created by Guillermo del Toro.

When trying to predict the future, it could be useful to look at past attempts. The game of asking “hey, this is what the technologically enabled future will look like,” is an old and venerable one.

It might be useful to look at which visions of the future turned out to have a good correlation with the eventual reality. Some have done a good job weathering the test of time, and others not so much.

What are the qualities that successful predictions of the future have in common? Can we find any patterns of commonality?

For example, is there some intrinsic quality about Captain Kirk’s communicator that made it such an uncannily good predictor of talking over the SmartPhone? I wonder whether anyone has seriously studied this question.

Maybe they should.

Continuing on our topic of classic musicals, I have been thinking about the one I just rewatched the other day. I am going to assume you are familiar with Guys and Dolls.

If you aren’t, you should go right now and watch it on Netflix. I guarantee a sublime experience.

The central romantic tension of G&D is between Sky Masterson, a high rolling gambler — a man who will bet on anything — and Sarah Brown, a devout missionary who is vainly trying to convert sinners in a city filled with sin. It would appear to be the very definition of “opposites attract”. How, the audience is encouraged to wonder, could a devoted Believer and a sinful Atheist ever end up together?

In this fictional world of relatively benign gangsters — based on the short stories of Damon Runyan — all men are always referred to as guys, and all women are referred to as dolls. Even Sarah Brown — who is as far removed from the ethos of gangsters as one can get — is referred to as a “mission doll”.

Yet Sky’s central song, in some ways the linchpin of the story, is Luck, be a Lady Tonight. The song takes the form of a conversation with “Lady Luck”. He is pleading with her to allow him to win the dice roll that will allow him to get into the good graces of Sarah, with whom he has fallen in love.

In a world where absolutely all women are “dolls”, it is significant that Luck itself is referred to as a “lady”. I think this a clue that Sky is actually pleading with his own deity for divine intervention.

I believe that Frank Loesser’s lyrics were carefully chosen to clue us in here. Sky worships and believes in his Lady Luck every bit as devoutly as Sarah worships and believes in her Christian God.

When you consider this, the metaphysics of Guys and Dolls makes a lot more sense. In the end we have a true marriage of two true believers. Both partners believe in a divinely ordered universe. They just have different names for it.

I always wondered how Nellie Forbush from South Pacific would respond to Sky Masterson from Guys and Dolls. Or would Henry Hill from The Music Man be intrigued by Anna Leonowens from The King and I?

If Anna started to sing “Getting to Know you”, would Henry realize that he just has to get to know her? Or would the chemistry be all wrong?

What if we started from the premise that we can mix and match characters from different classic Broadway musicals? Could such a pastiche produce something interesting?

I am open to suggestions!

And then, of course, after yesterday’s post, the inevitable sequel: Today is the first day of a brand new month!!!

So many new opportunities, possibilities, horizons to explore and doorways to try. The first day of a month feels a bit like a blank canvas, upon which you can begin to paint the future.

And tomorrow will be my very first lecture of my computer graphics class. This semester, no surprise, will be taught entirely on-line.

I wonder whether we will learn new ways of teaching and learning over the next few months, and turn adversity into opportunity. I am eager to try!

I organize all of my computer files by month. At the start of every month I copy over whatever folders I had been working on the previous month, and keep going from there.

This means that I leave a sort of trail behind. Every monthly folder is a snapshot of where I was at the end of that particular month. I’ve been doing this for years.

I realize that there are tools that automate this process, but I’ve gotten used to doing it this way, and I guess I’m old fashioned. Maybe it’s the cyber equivalent of somebody who insists on making their own pasta, when there are perfectly good varieties available at nearby supermarkets.

One consequence of this practice is that the last day of the month takes on particular significance for me. It’s a time to take stock, to reflect upon what I have accomplished — and what I have failed to accomplish.

Today is another such day. It is an illuminating — and often a humbling — experience, coming face to face with both the possibilities and the limitations of what can be accomplished in any given month. I highly recommend it.