Ken's Blog

Today in my Future Reality Lab blog post I talked about the far future. In that post I focused on the positive, in a sort of rah-rah cheerleader way.

Yet I am aware that the possibilities I described also have a potential dark side. That dichotomy leads to an ethical quandary.

Should we refrain from developing certain promising new technologies because of the risk of potential misuse? Or should we continue to develop those high stakes technologies, while also continually working to develop appropriate safeguards along the way?

I don’t have an easy answer to those questions. Given that humans are tool builders, I suspect we will be needing to ask them for as long as we are on this planet.

I recently rewatched Four Weddings and a Funeral, and found it even more delightfully hilarious than I had remembered. So I recommended it to a friend, who had never seen it.

He reported that he found it very hard to watch. By about ten minutes into it, he was cringing in embarrassment for the main character.

Of course this was a classic case of Mel Brooks’ dictum: “Tragedy is when I cut my finger. Comedy is when you fall into an open sewer and die.”

I was seeing the main character’s plight through the prism of comedy. Somehow I was able to separate myself from the acute embarrassment he felt as he went from mishap to mishap.

My friend, on the other hand, was experiencing something closer to tragedy. He identified with the character so completely that he directly felt the character’s pain.

Of course it doesn’t need to be strictly one or the other. Some situations manage to be both ridiculously funny and unbearably tragic all at the same time.

Then again, I don’t feel like discussing national politics today.

I’ve been spending a lot of time with the Oculus Quest VR headset. It’s a $400 consumer device that you can order on-line or just pick up at your nearest BestBuy.

Unlike previous VR headsets for consumers, the Quest lets you walk freely around a room while exploring VR worlds. There are no wires so your movement is unconstrained.

To me the difference this makes is as fundamental as the difference between the telephone that used to hang on the wall in your parent’s kitchen and the SmartPhone that’s sitting in your pocket right now. It completely changes the nature of what VR is for.

The Quest is just the first step. We are about to enter an entirely new era of VR technology that will give us an amazing level of freedom to communicate and explore together.

The next few years are going to be lots of fun. I for one am very excited.

There will come a point, some decades from now, when nobody alive will have ever experienced life before SmartPhones. When that happens, the entire concept of a moment of ordinary life being “off the grid” will have disappeared.

In that future, will people even be able to fathom what life was like before the internet was absolutely everywhere? Or will it seem to them completely crazy that anybody could have gone even a day without being “connected”?

On the other hand, by then modern medicine may have figured out how to extend the human life span to several hundred years. In which case, old geezers like me will be quite happy to talk about the good old days when you could get through an entire day in peace.

we think it’s the text
but it’s the subtext that finds
where we truly live

I was thinking I might write something clever on the aforementioned topic for today’s post. But the reality is just too ridiculous.

Everybody I ran into today pretty much started laughing uncontrollably whenever the topic came up. It seems that they all had that initial moment when they just thought “Wait, is this some kind of out-of-season April fools joke?”

By now we are used to seeing crazy stuff whenever we look at the news. But at what point is something simply too inane to even be real?

Every day the threshold of “too ridiculous to be true” continues to creep a little higher. But some days that threshold jumps clear out of the atmosphere and floats right to the moon.

This is one of those days. I mean, seriously folks.

Sorry, have to stop now. I just can’t stop giggling.

Today a colleague of mine, who is from Russia, explained an aspect of the international Space Race of which I was not aware. It seems that the docking of the U.S. and Russian space stations had led to an interesting difference of opinion.

Each country, she explained, wanted its space station to take on the male role: Both the Americans and the Russians felt strongly that their space station should be the one to penetrate the other.

I told her that I found this to be ironic. After all, in the larger geopolitical struggle the situation was quite the reverse.

“How so?” she asked.

“If you think about it,” I said, “the real desire of each country was to envelop the other.”

There is a well-known tale about vampires. They cannot enter your home unless you invite them in.

I love the idea of this as a metaphor. It applies to so many things in real life.

In a work environment, you don’t end up with dysfunctional people who will destroy your professional team from within unless you agree to hire them. If you are the person responsible for that team, and you let in one of those people, then the bad things that happen to productivity and morale are your fault.

Similarly, the citizens in a democracy are free to elect a weirdly incompetent self-absorbed fascist who promotes racism. But if those citizens do invite in the vampire, they shouldn’t expect it to end well.

Just saying.

People are able to discuss some topics rationally. But shift the conversation to other topics, and pretty much everybody seems incapable of holding a meaningful discussion.

Let’s take two examples: “intelligence” and “racism”. When we discuss the general topic of intelligence, we don’t reduce the conversation to “this person is smart and that person is stupid.”

We all know full well that intelligence is on a continuum, and most people are at least somewhat aware that it is multi-dimensional. You can be a straight A student and yet be lacking in emotional intelligence.

You can be a genius at musical composition, yet terrible at analytic reasoning, or vice versa. A great writer may be a terrible conversationalist.

Nobody thinks any of this is strange or contradictory. After all, we spend much of our day parsing the varying categories of intelligence of the many people we meet, work alongside or happen to be related to.

Yet when you say the word “racism”, people seem to lose all ability to make such fine distinctions. People simply classify other people into the bin “racist” or “non-racist”.

In reality, there is no bright red line separating “racist” from “non-racist”. There are, in fact, many different kinds of racism, and everybody’s racism is on a multi-dimensional spectrum.

But that’s not how we talk about it. In fact, we don’t even seem to have the language for talking about those many subtle distinctions.

In the case of racism, I find this to be quite discouraging. After all, how can we work on the corrosive and pernicious problem of racism if we don’t even have meaningful language by which to discuss it?

nice day in L.A.
except for the strange and absence
of any weather