Ken's Blog

I was going through the list of phone numbers in my SmartPhone today, and noticed that one of them is not useful anymore. I would delete that number, except for the reason it is not useful.

It’s not that the person has moved to another place on this Earth. Rather, it’s that the person is no longer on this Earth at all.

I find myself hesitating to delete the number of a deceased friend. Somehow it seems disrespectful.

It feels as though the number within my phone is a sort of mini-shrine to our friendship. Were I to delete it, that would somehow feel as though I am severing an emotional connection to someone I still care about.

This is undoubtedly silly, from a practical point of view. After all, that phone number is useless. Were I to dial it, I am sure a complete stranger would pick up, and would no doubt be annoyed by the intrusion.

Still, I refrain from hitting “delete”. I shall keep this number on my phone, together with my other cherished memories of my friend.

Warning: spoilers ahead.

When considered formally, the denouement of the first season of The Mandalorian follows a classic pattern for children’s fantasy adventure stories. Let us consider.

The title character himself is clearly the Tin Man. Over the course of the season, he gradually finds his heart.

Greef Karga is clearly the Cowardly Lion. In the course of his character arc, he finds his courage.

The only character I can’t figure out is Cara Dune. If she were the Scarecrow, then her journey would be to find her brain. Maybe it counts that she gains in wisdom over time.

For example, she comes to truly appreciate the title character and his young charge (who is, of course, on a journey to return home), but I’m not entirely convinced.

Oh well, it’s only a theory.

Today on our Future Reality Blog I talked about one of the challenges of working collaboratively in mixed reality: How can you give people a reasonable experience of reaching out their hands and grasping, holding and manipulating a mixture of real and virtual objects?

It’s a deep and challenging question, since real and virtual objects behave quite differently. In fact, I don’t think there are any shortcuts to getting good answers.

Here were my thoughts about it today on our lab’s blog.

Because we are all human, we share a certain kind of subjectivity. All of you reading this are processing your thoughts through the use of a human brain, which is our shared heritage after millions of years of evolution.

We know that there are non-human sentient creatures out there. For example, an octopus is highly intelligent, but in a way that is vastly different from us.

In the first chapter of T.H. White’s novel The Once and Future King, Merlyn teaches valuable lessons to young Wart by magically turning him into various species of animal.The boy comes away from these experiences with a profoundly expanded view of reality, which will help him to rule wisely when he eventually grows up to become King Arthur.

As I think on this, I find myself wondering, what is the shared subjectivity between one octopus and another, or — a bit nearer to home — between two cats, or two hawks or badgers? Two intelligent beings that have the same biological brain structure will have an intuitive understanding of each others’ view of the universe around them.

We literally cannot comprehend the world as it is comprehended by a dog, or a cat, or a horse, or a badger, or an octopus. Yet we know, intellectually, that there is a shared understanding between all the members of any intelligent species.

I wonder whether we ever could get a non-trivial insight into the world-view of another species. And if we could ever do that, would we come away with new kinds of wisdom?

For me today was that rarities of rarities: A day off. Just a day to hang out at home, relax, eat good food and watch The Mandalorian.

I didn’t bring any work home from the lab last night. So it was a day at home without any work commitments.

Now, in the evening, I feel relaxed, well rested, and wonderfully balanced. I suspect that I will be more productive this week for having done this.

Maybe I should try this every week!

One fascinating topic that has been coming up recently in our lab’s research meetings is the near future of gestural interfaces. That’s because a radical change is coming within the next few years.

Sometime in the next five years or so we will reach a point technologically where you will just be able to reach out a finger and draw something in the air. You and the other people in the room will be able to see a glowing 3D trace of your drawing, floating in the air.

What happens next is the interesting part. That drawing will be able to change into various things as you speak and gesture. With just a few spoken sentences and movements of your hands you will be able to create cities, creatures, thought experiments, entire worlds.

A new and powerful way of expressing ourselves to each other will begin to emerge as a fundamental part of the human experience. Children will take all of this for granted, while we grownups struggle to play catch-up.

But here’s the odd thing: Even though this new power of communication will change everything, we have no way of actually knowing what it will really be like.

It’s ok to live on the edge
Stare down the abyss from the ledge
But between each new thrill
You need time to just chill
And sometimes you want to just veg

When everybody is walking around with those future wearables, it will be technically possible for you to see all sorts of information about a person you are meeting for the first time. For example, you might see an annotation telling you that person’s age, or their net worth, or their prison record.

But that doesn’t necessarily mean those things will happen. As rules about privacy shake out, it might become illegal to see certain kinds of information about another person.

Clearly the concept of privacy has been evolving, as new generations embrace the convenience of SmartPhones. People really like the ability to see where they are on a map, or hail a car whenever and wherever they need one, or quickly order things on-line.

With such conveniences at one’s fingertips, niceties such as not being on the radar of governments and major corporations tend to get overlooked. But will that trend continue when we make the transition from SmartPhones to wearables?

Will there be certain kinds of information that could certainly be looked up with some effort (such as a person’s age or religion or sexual preference), which will be deemed inappropriate to be instantly accessed by random strangers on the street? I honestly don’t know the answer, but I think this is a good time for us to start asking the question.

I wonder whether there are ways we can encourage people to learn the difference between having knowledge you can reason with, and just having isolated and unconnected facts. The first gives you real power. The second doesn’t give you much of anything.

For example, the student I discussed yesterday who knew that the Sun is about 8 minutes away from Earth — in terms of the speed of information in a vacuum — had a solid basis for working out solutions to interesting problems. The fact that she didn’t need to look it up meant that she had that knowledge available at her fingertips.

Perhaps we should refrain from teaching “facts”. Instead we can focus on encouraging students to think in terms of working toolkits.

Ultimately, I suspect the best sort of education is one where we learn to work creatively with some set of tools. It’s ok to be able to follow a recipe, but far better to understand how to create one.

A few days ago in my computer graphics class at NYU, I was talking about why we can often get away with assuming that light rays are parallel. It’s because we are used to seeing things lit by the Sun, and the Sun is so far away that its rays are extremely close to parallel.

In the spirit of class participation, I introduced the topic by asking the 30 students in the class how far away the Sun is from the Earth. “Can someone tell me?” I asked.

Dead silence.

One student volunteered that it takes 8 minutes from the light from the Sun to reach the Earth. To her credit, that was correct. To get the distance to the Sun from that, you would just need to multiply 186,300 miles per second times 60 seconds per minute times 8 minutes. But I was still hoping somebody would give me a direct answer.

Finally, after another minute or so of silence, another student piped up. “Google says about 93 million miles,” she said.

In that moment I became very sad. I tried to explain to the class the enormous difference between factoids and actual operational knowledge.

Now I worry that this is generational. Are we getting a crop of students who are being discouraged from having working operational knowledge? Is Google inadvertently destroying a generation of thinkers and potential innovators?

Frankly I am worried.