Ken’s Blog

I know it’s Tuesday, but today I would like to talk about Wednesday.

I am referring to the new Netflix series. I just saw the first episode, and I am astonished by how good it is.

We’re talking Andor level good here, and that is very high praise. I am still trying to analyze what makes this show so compellingly watchable, and I think I’m starting to figure it out.

Of course Jenna Ortega is brilliant in the eponymous role, but it’s more than that. I think it has a lot to do with the way the writers invite their viewers to be part of the meta-fiction at the heart of the Addams universe.

The appeal of Charles Addams’ cartoons was always that we, the audience, are in on the joke. The impossibly spooky Addams family manages to hold a perfect mirror up to the “normal” society whose norms it is defying.

Remember that Addams was doing this starting back in 1937. That’s 85 years ago.

And yet his fundamental point still resonates perfectly today: “Normal” society is incredibly weird. We just don’t care to admit it.

The creators of this new show have perfectly captured the humor and wisdom of that brilliant insight. Frankly, dear reader, I cannot stop watching.

Let’s skip forward to the near future where any painting you want to create or essay you want to write is manifested simply by describing it to an A.I. One problem with such a future is that an A.I. can only imitate styles that already exist.

And those styles do not come from computers. Computers, unlike us, are not sentient. They possess no actual judgment or opinions or creativity.

The wondrous A.I. that so many people are now playing with is an elaborate mirror. It is merely echoing back to us our own collective creative thoughts, which it obediently recombines in all sorts of ways.

As these sorts of A.I. become widely used, there will be less incentive for people to put the effort in to create new works that introduce original ideas. If we don’t want our culture to devolve into endless variations of the same unoriginal patterns, we will need to find a way for those ideas to make their way into the mix.

I wonder whether a new sort of specialty will emerge — creative people who continually insert new ideas into the ever more powerful A.I. recombination engine that everyone else will use.

It is not clear to me whether these future creatives will actually write entire novels or or paint pictures or pick out songs on their guitars. They may instead use some sort of computer interface that will immediately fill out and instantiate their creative ideas.

But they won’t be just using the A.I. engine the way most people will. They will have a more serious purpose — preventing future culture from devolving into a mass of endlessly repetitive and meaningless treacle.

We are at the beginning of public awareness A.I. driven images. Millions of people now know that it is possible to create realistic and evocative visual representations using words alone.

Once this is all past the novelty stage, where will it go? One possibility is that people will take it for granted that you can paint simply by talking. This will just become another part of reality, the way that today we take for granted that you can hold a casual conversation with someone who is on the other side of the planet.

But to me the interesting part is what will happen after that. Language itself will begin to evolve, as people start to learn how to create visuals through speech, somewhat the way people learned a few decades ago how to do internet search through keywords.

As you and I have a conversation, we will be collaborating, without really thinking about it, to create visuals that represent our combined thoughts. To edit or add to this imagery, we will simply talk some more.

It will all seem perfectly natural. As happens with many technological advances, people will look back to our current primitive times and wonder how we ever got along without being able to paint by talking.

She dwelt in Possibility
A fairer House than Prose
More numerous of Windows
Superior for Doors

She sang the tune without the words
And never stopped at all
For hope is the thing with feathers
That perches in the soul

When I am in Manhattan, I don’t measure distance by distance. I measure distance by time. I think to myself, how long would it take to go to this store, or to visit that person, or to travel to that doctor’s appointment?

When I am in a more spread out place, like Kansas City, I asked myself the same question, even though in this case I am driving. How long will it take to get to this store, or to visit that person, or to travel to that doctor’s appointment?

So it is clear that distance, measured in feet or in miles, is not at all what is significant to us. What is significant to us is time. The distance we measure is the distance from morning until evening, and ultimately from the beginning of our lives to the end of our lives.

After all, isn’t that the kind of distance that really matters to us?

There is a mysterious alchemy that occurs when people enjoy entertainment together. When we are part of an audience for a movie or a play or a concert or lecture, we feel a kind of kinship with one another.

This is not true in all group situations. We don’t feel the same sort of kinship when we share a bus ride or a plane trip with strangers. Nor do we feel any particular kinship with our fellow diners in a restaurant, or with the other people we see wandering around in a store or a gallery or museum.

The feeling of kinship only occurs when we are having a synchronous experience together — when we know that everyone around us is simultaneously experiencing the same narrative that we are.

There must be something wired into our collective DNA, some distinct evolutionary advantage, to the formation of this situational emotional connection with strangers.

I just want an A.I. assistant that will create for me the great email reply that I would have written, if I actually had time to write a great email reply.

Is that asking too much?

There is something anticlimactic about the jury verdict affirming that the Trump family business has been guilty of tax fraud and a slew of other financial crimes. I mean, it’s something everybody knew, including Trump supporters.

Maybe especially Trump supporters. The appeal of these billionaire icons is precisely that they are able to get away with stuff that ordinary mortals cannot.

I can see how that sort of misbehavior would inspire hero worship in people who feel powerless in their own lives. In a way, the utter lack of ethics reminds me of that great scene in Casablanca:

Rick: How can you close me up? On what grounds?
Captain Renault: I’m shocked, shocked to find that gambling is going on in here!
Croupier: Your winnings, sir.
Captain Renault: Oh, thank you very much.

When I teach computer graphics, many of my students are mainly interested in learning how to make things that look cool and pretty. This is understandable.

But I don’t think that teaching how to make pretty things is really what computer graphics is about. It is actually, at core, about conveying visual ideas.

As the great Lance Williams liked to say, computer graphics is “limited only by your imagination.” Having accurate surface reflectance or a high polygon count is nice, but it really isn’t the core of why computer simulated imagery is so amazing.

The truly wonderful and amazing thing about CGI is how you can use it to get across concepts and ideas that would be difficult or impossible to convey any other way. When we see things that make visual sense, which feel as though they should exist — but which do not actually exist in our own world — our minds begin to open up.

And after taking in those new visual possibilities, we might start to expand our ways of thinking. We might become more than we were.

And isn’t that what education is all about?

A beautiful thing about going to the theater is that you and all the people around you are the only people who will ever see this particular performance.

After tonight, this moment will be gone forever. But all of you will have shared it, and you will never lose that.