Future house design

Suppose you could design your house just by walking around on an empty lot wearing your XR glasses. You would gesture to show where the walls should go, and point out the locations of windows and doors.

The kitchen would go here, the master bedroom there. If one room was too big and another too small, you could just push on the virtual wall between them.

Everything would be adjustable, from window width to ceiling height to the location of the stairs. And the best part is that you would already know, even as you were designing your house, what it would feel like to be in that house.

I wonder whether the future of house design will look anything like this.

Preparing a presentation on a flight

It is wonderful how perfect a long flight is for preparing a presentation. You are essentially “alone in the crowd” — everybody is in their own world, and you are under no social obligation to talk to anyone.

The physical environment is so unappealing that you have no problem focusing on your computer screen. So it’s just you and your thoughts and your notebook computer, and whatever you need to look up on the internet.

Instead of a long flight being a boring waste of time, the sheer number of hours available for working turns out to be incredibly productive. You just need to remember two things:

(1) Bring some yummy snacks, and (2) Whatever you do, resist the temptation to start watching an in-flight movie.

The Sorcerer’s broom

When I talk with people who are not in technological fields, I consistently find a sense of alarm around the topic of A.I. and jobs. There seems to be a feeling that A.I. will get rid of millions of jobs, causing massive unemployment.

But at least in its current state, A.I. is still incapable of human judgement. It is the information technology equivalent of the broom in The Sorcerer’s Apprentice.

Because of this, my view is more hopeful. Like many technological advances, A.I. will remove a lot of boring drudge-work, but will also create opportunities for employment at a higher level.

I do understand the fear. When movies first emerged, there was much worry that actors would never again get work. A performance would be filmed once and that would be it. But something quite different happened.

Because so many more people could see an actor’s performance, movies (and then television) brought an economy of scale that created a lot more paying work for actors. In addition, entirely new classes of employment appeared, including camera operator, grip, director of photography, editor, gaffer, cinematographer and boom operator, to name a few.

Which strongly suggests that the use of A.I. will result in entirely new categories of employment. We don’t know yet what all of those categories will be, but we shouldn’t be surprised when they become an important part of our economy, and a rich source of employment.

Realism 101

Not to get all too clever
But within any human endeavor
    What keeps us ok
    At the end of the day
Is believing that we’ll live forever

For life’s an illusion ’tis said
And so much is all in our head
    But if you want to stay grounded
    Embrace facts well founded:
At the end of the day we’re all dead

Instant knowledge

Suppose, for the sake of argument, the technology were one day perfected that could give anyone instant access to all of the world’s knowledge? Perhaps it would be in the form a a direct brain link, combined with an A.I. driven search engine. As soon as you think about a topic, you immediately find that you have access to all of the facts pertaining to that topic.

We can sort of do this now, only not instantaneously, and only after expending a certain measure of effort. If you are talking to someone on the phone, and you have Google open before you, you can do a pretty good job of gathering facts pertaining to your conversation while the conversation is still going on.

But having that information available without needing to search for it might be a game changer. You wouldn’t be distracted by the need to continually switch your focus between conversation and search. Instead you and your conversant could both simply remain in the flow of the discussion.

I suspect that this sort of capability might change a lot of things. Literature, medicine, finance, personal relationships and many other realms of human discourse might well become transformed, just as these were all transformed by the advent of the Web and the smartphone.

But what exactly would be the nature of these transformations? It might be fun to try to figure that out.

Modern Turing test

You have been texting with a friend. At some point. Your friend is no longer available, but does not want you to know that.

So your friend switches into bot mode. You are now texting with an entity that says all the things your friend would say, but is actually an AI mirror of that person.

This is not quite possible now. We can tell pretty quickly when we are talking with a fake intelligence. But at some point this scenario will start to enter the realm of everyday reality.

Of course this won’t happen all at once. Rather, as the years go on, the length of time it will take to detect such a fraud will gradually lengthen. But then, at some point, a line will be crossed, just as a line was eventually crossed with chess playing computers.

And from then on we will look back with nostalgia upon an earlier and more innocent time, when you knew for sure that the person you were talking to was actually a person.

Fate, part 6

They say that fate is written in the stars
But all that have I seen are cloudy skies

We lock our dreams away in plastic jars
That dance on window sills, like fireflies

In half-remembered thoughts we lose ourselves
On hazy restless early winter nights

We place our sacred moments up on shelves
And say a prayer before we dim the lights

So please don’t speak to me of fate and night
Or dreams that never know the light of day

The souls that never learn to see the light
Their fate will be to dream this life away

Fate, part 5

They say that fate is written in the stars
But all that have I seen are cloudy skies

We lock our dreams away in plastic jars
That dance on window sills, like fireflies

In half-remembered thoughts we lose ourselves
On hazy restless early winter nights

We place our sacred moments up on shelves
And say a prayer before we dim the lights

So please don’t speak to me of fate and night
Or dreams that never know the light of day

Fate, part 4

They say that fate is written in the stars
But all that have I seen are cloudy skies

We lock our dreams away in plastic jars
That dance on window sills, like fireflies

In half-remembered thoughts we lose ourselves
On hazy restless early winter nights

We place our sacred moments up on shelves
And say a prayer before we dim the lights

Fate, part 3

They say that fate is written in the stars
But all that have I seen are cloudy skies

We lock our dreams away in plastic jars
That dance on window sills, like fireflies

In half-remembered thoughts we lose ourselves
On hazy restless early winter nights