Month: January 2024

It would not be an exaggeration to say that Jerome Bixby’s work traced the contours of my childhood. I remember vividly the day I first read It’s a Good Life, a story which can give me shivers to this day.

I also vividly remember watching the Star Trek episode Mirror Mirror, and wondering why it was so much better than the other episodes. And then, years later, stumbling upon The Man from Earth, so deceptively simple, yet profound.

Eventually I realized that these were all written by the same person.

Jerome Bixby would have turned 100 today. Let’s hear it for him, wherever he may be in the multiverse.

I first saw Jurassic Park when it came out in theaters in 1992. Like everyone else, I was in awe.

Every moment of it was masterful. Spielberg had somehow redefined the art of filmmaking, and we all knew it.

One moment in particular jumped out at me, in its sheer ornery cleverness. Seventeen minutes into the film, a tiny “blink and you’ve missed it” event reiterates the entire central conflict of the film.

It’s during the scene in the helicopter. Technophobic Dr. Grant, played by Sam Neill, can’t manage to fasten his seatbelt, and everyone is trying to help him to strap in.

At first he sits there helplessly, holding two female seatbelt ends. But then, in a moment of inspiration, he ties the two ends together, with a look of triumph on his face. So what was this really about?

You’re probably way ahead of me here. The central twist of the film is that the creators of the park had guarded again the possibility of dinosaurs breeding by raising only females. No males, no propagation of the species.

But because they had introduced frog DNA to fix the gaps in the recovered dinosaur genetic code, the dinosaurs gained the power to reproduce by parthenogenesis. No males required.

I other words, a seemingly tiny throwaway moment early In the movie foreshadows the giant plot twist that comes to dominate not just that film, but all the sequels that followed.

Perfect, simply perfect. This is one reason I go to the movies.

In a letter written in 1657, Blaise Pascal famously said “I have only made this letter longer because I have not had the time to make it shorter.” There is a deep truth in this seemingly ironic statement.

When you are trying to convey your ideas to people, it can be fun to go on at great length. But throwing the kitchen sink at the problem can easily become a form of mental laziness.

To condense your message down to a few well chosen sentences — that is the greater challenge. If you find that you cannot describe what you want to say in a short and clear abstract, maybe you still have more work to do.

Joseph Weisenbaum, who was born on January 8, 1923, would have been 100 years old today. If you’ve heard of him, it’s probably because of his ELIZA program — the very first chatbot.

But I think his greatest contribution was his well reasoned critique of artificial intelligence. For him, it wasn’t a question of whether we can implement ever more powerful AI capability, but whether we should.

Weisenbaum made a fundamental distinction between “deciding” and “choosing”. An AI can decide many things, only a human has the moral imperative to choose between what is right and wrong.

If we create an AI and have it decide things for us, the moral underpinnings of those decisions are still based on the human choices — and therefore the moral values — that led to those decisions.

Given today’s ever more powerful achievements in artificial intelligence, these questions are more important than ever. In the end, as Weisenbaum observed more than half a century ago, moral responsibility lies not with our AIs, but with ourselves.

My colleagues in Korea tell me that things there are now pretty much post-money. If you want to buy anything, or get swiped into your office building, you need your phone.

I asked one colleague what happens if you lose your phone. He got a panicked look on his face, and told me that it can take weeks of paperwork to re-establish that you are really you and get another authorized phone.

We are starting to get a bit of this in NYC, in our primitive way. I was one of the last holdouts still using a MetroCard. Now I just hold my credit card over the turnstiles like everyone else I know.

I wonder how all this will play out when those future glasses arrive, and replace our smartphones. Will the entire concept of money as we know it begin to fade away, when the process of checking out becomes a fully automated part of your shopping experience?

Wherever you go, and whatever you do, you will be continually charged as a sort of background tax on your lifestyle. Children will grow up having the instinctive understanding that certain activities drain your account more quickly than others.

Money, as we now know it, will be one of those fondly remembered things of old, like ice delivery or like having a telephone in your kitchen.

Of all the superpowers that I could get, if I could have any superpower, I think one of the most powerful would be to be able to go back in time one minute for a do over, whenever I needed to.

Often that’s all that is needed to make the difference between a bad situation and a good situation. Unfortunately, life doesn’t give us that option.

But wouldn’t it be wonderful if it did?

Nobody really knows how we manage to find something meaningful in every day.

And yet somehow we do.

We are now all used to the fact that Google Street View provides a digital double of our physical world. On your computer, you can now wander down many streets in American cities and suburbs.

Eventually such digital doubles will start showing up at home. At night a small drone will scan your house and update a digital representation of every room. By day you will use that representation for many purposes.

Of course there will be important privacy issues to work out here, but there will also be large paradigm changes in your relationship with where you live. The representation of your home will be processed by AI, which will keep an updated model of the state of everything.

If you are running low on bananas or shampoo or coffee, your AI will know that. And eventually, robots will be able to do something about it.

If you’d like, your AI will order you new bananas, and a robot will put them in your favorite place in the kitchen. And when you are running low on clean clothes, a robot will do your laundry, and then neatly fold and put away the clean clothes.

I don’t know about you, but I, for one, am looking forward robots doing my laundry.

Yesterday somebody asked me what is my favorite Beatles Song. And I realized that for me it is an impossible question.

The music of The Beatles — particular their master works, written from 1965-1970 — have influenced me in myriad ways. I probably I have a Beatles song for every mood, and to me each of their songs is its own profound little universe.

It is still an astonishment to me that so many brilliant, daring and diverse musical ideas could flow from the same small creative team. And I am sure I am far from alone in that opinion.

The last half century of writers of popular music — from Elton John to Taylor Swift — have been inspired by their unparalleled influence. And now we all live within a rich and luminous aesthetic Universe enabled by the genius of The Beatles. It is part of the very air we breathe.

So please don’t ask me which is my favorite Beatles song. You might as well ask me which is my favorite cubic foot of air.

In the future, when everyone is wearing sophisticated smart glasses, children will grow up learning how to have face to face conversations while also looking things up, checking social media, and having little text chats on the side. I wonder what this will mean for the future of attention.

Will people in general start to become distracted, as multitasking intrudes upon even the simplest conversation? Or will those children grow up to develop an entirely new skill set?

Those kids might grow up to develop the ability to be fully present in more than one conversation at a time, something that I don’t think I’ve really seen people do in today’s world. On the other hand, society might just start falling apart, as everybody finds themselves trying to engage in too many conversations at once.

I wonder which way it will go.