Ken's Blog

Here’s a history question:

When the first Europeans came over to what we now call the Americas, there were about 75,000,000 people already living here.

So what was it, exactly, that Christopher Columbus was supposed to have discovered?

This week I saw one of those electronic billboards. Unlike traditional billboards, the electronic ones can show lots of different messages.

Which means that the same space can be multiplexed — used at different times by different advertisers, each with a targeted message.

Of course the people who put these things up need to make sure that there are enough advertisers to fill all 24 hours a day. Which means they need to convince advertisers to use their billboard.

This week, looking at an electronic billboard, I realized I was watching exactly that — an ad targeted at the advertisers themselves. But what caught my eye was how delightful the ad was.

The ad copy referred obliquely to the cultural trope of the young man who uses a billboard to convince his estranged girlfriend to come back to him. This ad riffed on that trope, in a very clever way.

It said, in big bold letters: “You can’t win her back, but you can be on a billboard.”

Ringling Brothers Barnum and Bailey Circus went out of business a little over two years ago. Not only were fewer people going to the circus, but our society also evolved.

Many people stopped looking at tiger and elephant acts and the like as innocent entertainment. Rather, the ways these animals were treated started to become a much discussed issue, as more people became attuned to questions of animal suffering.

The people who used to run the circus are now focused on creating shows involving life sized mechanical dinosaurs. You can now see a triceratops walking around, or a tyrannosaurus rex opening its mighty jaws.

Clearly there is no animal suffering, because there are no animals. Instead, people are being treated to the spectacle of highly detailed life sized puppets.

These events tend to take place in large venues such as sports stadiums. Stadium owners welcome such uses of their facilities, because they are sources of revenue between games.

I find this kind of large scale location based entertainment exciting, because it is one tick away from the vision Luc Besson showed us in Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets. Someday soon, we will all be able to enter a giant sports arena together with thousands of other people, put on our XR glasses, and enter the future circus.

In that circus, we will be able to see and hear, all around us, spectacular entertainments and mind boggling visions far beyond the capabilities of even the most advanced puppetry. And no animals will need to suffer for our pleasure.

Last night, for the first time I can remember, I told a joke in a dream.

It was at some sort of family gathering, and somebody asked for a joke. I said “Two Jewish peanuts were walking down the street, and one was a salted.”

I remember that the next thing that happened in the dream was that I found myself analyzing the moment. The sheer stupidity of being attacked just for being, specifically, a Jewish peanut was actually the point.

And in fact my dream audience had laughed, which didn’t surprise me. It was the right joke for my audience, because people in our family have all had experiences of being assailed just for being Jewish.

I don’t think the timing of this dream was random. The other day an old friend in California told me that his Lyft driver started ranting angrily at him for being a Jew. My friend said he hadn’t heard that sort of language for many decades, and certainly not in California.

So I suspect it was on my mind.

In fact, I suspect this sort of thing is on a lot of peoples’ minds these days. It used to be that people in charge of our country didn’t call people ugly names, and make random verbal attacks on those with the least power in society.

Alas, the era of civilized behavior at the top seems to be over, at least for now. Maybe we will all wake up soon and realize that it as all just a stupid joke within a dream.

I gave a talk today about our research to a class of grad students. From the Q&A, I learned that quite a few of them are concerned with how technology can be used ethically, and ways to prevent it from being used unethically.

It is wonderful that they are interested in this, yet I found the tone of some of the questions to be problematic. The question is inherently difficult, and I sensed that some of the students were frustrated that I could not supply an easy answer.

Yes, we should do all we can to create and use new technologies in an ethical way. But no, alas, there is no silver bullet.

The problem is that the biology of human brains has not evolved significantly in the last 200,000 years. By nature, we are still the same creatures we were in the Paleolithic age.

Ideas of morality and ethics can be culturally superimposed, but they don’t actually change inherent human nature. People remain, and will continue to remain, highly capable of dishonesty, theft, betrayal, and tribalist xenophobia.

We are also tool builders by nature. We have always built tools, and we will continue to build new ones, for as long as our species exists. Which means that these same difficult questions will always continue to recur.

I wish I could tell the students that there is an easy answer to how to create and manage new technologies in a way that is sure to be ethical. Yet I cannot.

I can tell them to continue to fight the good fight, and perhaps win some important battles along the way. But I cannot in good conscience tell them that we can ever hope to win the war.

The fault, dear reader, is not in our tools but in ourselves.

I was having a conversation with a collaborator today about a forthcoming project. We realized that whatever we end up with, it will need to have a strong emotional arc.

People enjoy spectacle. They like seeing talented actors moving about amidst great scenery, evocative lighting, brilliant editing. But none of that is enough.

A good work of narrative art needs, at its core, to be something you can sum up in a single sentence. We want to go on an emotional journey with a character who starts here and ends up there.

Truly great films, plays and novels can all be boiled to a simple essential idea. Sometimes we lose sight of that, but we really shouldn’t.

Especially not if we want to create good films, plays or novels. 🙂

Suppose, just for the sake of argument, that Neanderthals and Denisovans had survived. Yes, I realize that humans in some parts of the world today have a bit of Neanderthal and Denisovan ancestry.

But I am talking about full blooded representatives of our near-relatives. I wonder how such people would think, and how their thinking would be different from ours.

Would they be better or worse at math, at spatial reasoning, at emotional engagement and theory of mind? Would they tend to be highly analytical or intuitive?

If Neanderthal or Denisovan children were to go to school alongside Homo Sapiens children, how would that work out? Would everyone get along?

I realize there is very little chance we will even know the answers to these questions. Theoretically we could bring back such individuals from their extant DNA, but I don’t believe anybody seriously thinks that would be a good idea.

Still, it’s an intriguing set of questions. Sometimes it is useful simply to ponder a mystery, even if you never expect to know the answer.

I have been using a standard feature of the Chrome Web browser for the last several years in my Chalktalk program. About a week ago, in the middle of giving a presentation to a class full of students, I found that in the course of several hours it had mysteriously stopped working.

My friends, I was a victim of browser drift.

I had literally just tested everything a few short hours before my talk. In that time, my computer must have upgraded to the latest version of Chrome, which had proceeded to — well — break stuff.

Now, a week later, after many hours of debugging, I have figured out how to get around the problem. Essentially, I have completely abandoned that feature of Chrome.

Instead, I implemented something entirely different, which happens to look and behave the same to end users. It’s kind of like dynamiting an entire building down to its very foundations, and then using entirely different construction techniques to erect a new building which just happens to look exactly the same.

Browsers are built according to standards that are carefully overseen by large and quite conservative committees. One would think the programs we write for the Web would therefore be immune to this sort of nuttiness.

Alas, I should know better. After all, my NYU webpage is littered with the sad rotting corpses of once beautiful Java applets that will never again come to life.

I am having a very good time reading Ted Chiang’s newest collection of short stories Exhalation. Such a good time in fact, that I wish I had a forgetting pill.

That way, after I finish the book, I would be able to jump right in and read it again for the very first time. In fact, I would then be able to read it every day for the very first time, and each time I would feel the same delighted sense of discovery.

There is probably a downside to my plan that I’m not thinking of. Come to think of it, this could be the premise for a story by Ted Chiang.

There were so many fascinating things to see at OC6. But as you can see from this photo, there was one phenomenon that was far more compelling to most attendees than any of the technology on display.

That was, of course the presence of John Carmack. Wherever he went, he was mobbed by worshipful acolytes. Every young game developer hoped to get at least a moment with their hero.

John, as ever, was happy to talk with any young person who approached him. He spent much of the conference just like this, meeting with the young game developers one-on-one, diving into whatever level of technical detail was needed to help them work through their game design.

If only all famous and influential people were so gracious and generous with their time.