Ken’s Blog

How strange that Yahoo is gone. Today, in fact, was the last day of its existence.

It was such a huge and influential company in its time. Back in the dotcom boom Yahoo was the very symbol of internet success.

It’s a bit like seeing a mighty oak falling in the forest. You know that the once invincible tree is hollow inside, yet you still stand in awe at the sight of a fallen giant.

I guess it’s good to remember that no corporation, no matter its reach or power, is immune from such a fate. Digital Equipment Corporation, Compaq, Sun Microsystems, TWA, Eastern and Pan Am, EF Hutton and PaineWebber, Standard Oil, Woolworths and Westinghouse, so many more, were towering giants in their day, seemingly invulnerable. Yet they are all gone.

I look at Microsoft, Google, Amazon, Apple and Facebook, and ponder that possibility. As indestructable as they may seem now, in twenty years any of them might be just a memory.

There are things one is proud of for the right reasons, and things one is proud of for the wrong reasons. This is probably an example of the second sort of pride, and I’m ok with that.

At our AR in Action conference last week, at some point I entered the auditorium and somebody suggested that I join the artist’s panel. Which, as it happens, was already in progress.

The atmosphere felt very serious. It was clear that the artists on the panel had been engaged in a heated debate about the relationship between Augmented Reality and art.

It was also clear that people had strong opinions on the subject. But since I hadn’t been in the room for that discussion, I wasn’t quite prepared for the very first question one of the other panelists threw at me.

Firmly grasping her hand-held microphone and fixing me with a steely gaze, my fellow panelist wished to know where I stood on the issue. “How,” she asked me, “do you make art out of AR?”

I said the very first thing that came into my head, which was probably just as well. I told her: “You add a ‘t'”.

The other day I outlined the progression of how wearables will be integrated into everyday society in the coming years. Several readers raised very important issues about privacy.

Whenever you are dealing with very large groups of people — whatever the historical era — you can no longer rely on family connections and tribal kinship to guarantee trust. So if you are dealing with anything of value, you need a way to protect it.

Otherwise everyone ends up in a state of fear. Societies that are socially broken are often characterized by roving bands of marauders going into homes and stealing at will. Which leads to the very opposite of freedom.

In other words, in any large and heterogeneous population, if you are going to have doors, then you need to have locks. Freedom requires security.

We already have the technology required to protect against the sort of unwanted tracking, monitoring, reporting, surveillance, etc. that Sally and Adrian warned about in their thoughtful comments. One-way encryption can already provide the required level of security and anonymity.

The problem is not a lack of technology, but rather a general lack of awareness of the importance of putting that technology in place. Alas, humans tend not to deal with problems until those problems slap us in the face.

We don’t think about terrorism until we’ve been bombed, and we don’t think about cybersecurity until we’ve been hacked. It’s just human nature to ignore the open barn door until after the horse has gone missing.

Fortunately, the introduction of the sort of pervasive wearable technology that I described will be gradual. There will indeed be incidents, breaches of privacy, theft of property, but initially not at a mass scale, because the technology will only gradually come up to speed.

The first incidents to reach general consciousness will therefore work as a kind of trigger to our societal immune system. As our citizenry becomes aware of the stakes, we will learn to understand the difference, in the context of wearables, between a locked door and an unlocked door.

And then people will start buying locks. Good ones.

(1) Groups of people migrate away from the equator:
To stay warm, they start to wear animal skins.

(2) Animal skins are eventually replaced by cloth:
Cotton and other plants are cultivated; weaving is invented.

(3) Clothing becomes more common in public:
People go clothed everywhere; nakedness suggests indecency.

(4) Covering one’s body becomes the norm:
People in public expect to be see others wearing clothing.

(5) Removing your clothing in public is outlawed:
Not wearing clothing is considered a gross invasion of privacy.

(1) Money disappears, replaced by “pay by SmartPhone”:
     This is already happening now in China.

(2) SmartPhones are replaced by wearables:
     Wearables become socially invisible.

(3) Wearables become legally required in public:
     We pay for everything with them; not “wearing” equals indigence.

(4) Digital makeup becomes the norm:
     People in public expect to be seen only through wearables.

(5) Removing your wearable in public is outlawed:
     Not “wearing” is considered a gross invasion of privacy.

Java programmers have class.

Haskell programmers are lazy.

Prolog programmers are logical.

SmallTalk programmers are dynamic.

Javascript programmers need closure.

.sdrawkcab era sremmargorp tpircStsoP

APL programmers are X[⍋X+.≠’ ‘;] (after a sort).

On other planets
Do they also think about
Fermi’s paradox?

The first day of our event, AR in Action, went really well. There were a lot of interesting points raised, touching on technology, ethics, societal norms, and the general meaning of the profound (if gradual) shift from SmartPhones to wearables.

But in the middle of it all, I received a delightful surprise. Apparently some supporter of our Republican President was unhappy with my pointing out the obvious fact that said President is acting like a complete idiot. So I got an insulting would-be comment.

I am somewhat sympathetic, because I understand that the commenter is suffering from confirmation bias, which is only human. After all, after you vote to put somebody into higher office, you feel committed. That can remain true even after your candidate makes a complete idiot of himself, deeply embarrasses his country, and pretty much pees down his leg.

By all means, those of you who are still suffering under the delusion that our President is not a total embarrassment, keep those insulting comments coming. That is how I know that I am standing up for our beautiful country. That is one way I know that I am being a patriot.

We are organizing a major conference at our lab, which will be running from morning through evening for the next two days. Needless to say, today has been a very busy day of prep for our entire crew.

There are so many logistical details to get right, from Wifi to running cables to projection to microphones to recording to building access to catering to the care and feeding of demos and more. Much more.

And if you get one of them wrong, that’s all people will remember. Which is weird, but that’s the way it is.

So I’m going down our lists, trying to be as organized as possible, and hoping we haven’t missed anything. But when it really comes down to it, we’re putting on a show.

So when the conference starts tomorrow morning, I’m going to try to remember to smile, and act like it was all easy.

We evolved as a species to respond properly to a world that was more or less consistent. Whether trees, rocks, food or other people, the objects in our environment tended to be consistent in their appearance from one moment to the next.

Therefore it is not surprising that humans (and many other species as well) exhibit change blindness. When some object within our view changes in appearance, while we are not focusing on that particular object, we tend not to notice.

This has enormous potential consequences for the coming age of wearable computers. Since these wearables will be tracking our gaze direction, software designers will be able to know where we are focusing our gaze direction, and when we are in the middle of a saccade between one object of interest and another.

This will make it easier for malicious software to modify the appearance of objects in our augmented view, without our ever realizing that anything has changed. In other words, we may no longer be able to rely on the evidence of our own senses.

We might need to start relying on algorithms that analyze the visual scene before us, looking for unexpected alterations. Such algorithms could, for example, be able to determine whether somebody is really handing you a dollar coin, or whether they are actually giving you a nickel that was just made to look, for a moment, like a dollar coin.

Which, when you think about it, gives a whole new meaning to the phrase “change blindness”.