Ken’s Blog

In the early days of the Web, internet cafes used to be very popular. People would go to have a coffee and surf the web together. It was all very exotic.

Of course it soon became not exotic at all, as everyone got browsers on their PCs at home. As a social practice, browsing the web because less like going to the movies and more like watching TV.

Now we are about to go through a similar set of transitions for “physically” hanging out with people in shared virtual reality. I’m not talking about the flavor of VR where you sit down in a chair and just pretend to walk around. I mean the more interesting kind, where you physically walk around with your own body, wearing a headset, but with no trailing wires to encumber you.

At first, doing this in high quality is going to be somewhat expensive, and therefore exotic. So I suspect you will see the equivalent of internet cafes popping up in your town.

Then after a few years, when the prices go down and walking around in VR just becomes a widespread capability found in the home, those “VR Cafes” will become a thing of the past, something to look back on with nostalgia.

Gosh, I almost miss them already. 🙂

Tonight I am staying with friends on Bowen Island. As it happens, the geographic area of this island is nearly identical to the geographic area of the island of Manhattan.

Yet Bowen Island has a population of only 3000, which is just about 1/1000th the resident population of Manhattan.

Right now I am very much appreciating the difference.

🙂

Today I finally found a bug in my program that I had been tracking down for weeks. That particular bug was the final roadblock preventing me from making my system a lot more useful (basically, from being able to save your work, and load it back in later).

One thing that still astonishes me about programming is how you can spend vast amount of time building huge systems, with thousands upon thousands of lines of code, and yet one little aspect of the system — a few lines missing, or a single obstinate bug — can make such a large difference.

And when you finally find that bug, it’s like a magic door has opened up in your house, and when you walk through that door, suddenly you find that your little house now has twice as much room.

It’s a nice feeling. 🙂

This evening I am participating in an informal tech meetup here at the Centre for Digital Media in Vancouver. We each take turns getting up and talking about the projects we’ve been working on, and getting feedback from each other.

There is something so wonderful about the energy in the room of people talking about something they love, to other people who really appreciate the hard work and design decisions that go into a project.

This all feels kind of the opposite of a corporate sales presentation (at least the ones I’ve seen). It’s fine if things go wrong, if the demo crashes and you need to restart. That’s all part of the realness of it.

It would be nice if more of the interactions in life between people were infused that same sense of shared love and appreciation.

Just imagine, for the sake of argument, that everything you say or do can be recorded for posterity. This isn’t really such a stretch — we are already giving up our collective privacy for the convenience of carrying around those smart phones in our pockets.

So suppose that every gesture you make gets recorded, and instantly baked into a server somewhere. I would argue that this creates an opportunity.

With the appropriate supporting technology, you will be able to see yourself in earlier moments. In fact, you will be able to layer on those moments, creating various avatars of yourself.

One can imagine a new way of dealing with one’s past, one’s legacy. Not through regret, but through creative editing. If there was something about yourself that you didn’t like, you will be able to use technology to purge it — to remake yourself, to become pure.

I’m not so sure this will be a good thing…

After seeing Alexander Graham Bell demonstrate his version of the telephone, the mayor of a major American city exclaimed, with uncontained enthusiasm, “I can see a time when every city will have one!”

I think it’s important not to fall into that trap with technologies that are just around the corner. In order to fully understand the eventual impact of a technology, we shouldn’t think of it as a rare exotic creature. Rather, we need to imagine that it is ordinary, humdrum, the thing you don’t even notice because it’s there all the time, like your chair, or the light switch on your wall.

It is precisely the invention that becomes so ubiquitous that we no longer think about it which transforms our world. The wondrous and exotic technology that stays wondrous and exotic — like the personal jetpack (which has existed in one form or another for nearly a century, but has never come into common use) — is a failure.

It’s the technology that you don’t notice — the pen, the water filter, indoor plumbing — that is the real triumph. If twenty years from now we are still walking around thinking of augmented reality as something amazing, then we will have failed. But if we’re all using it without even knowing it is there, then the future that some of us are now envisioning will truly have arrived.

The technology for self-driving cars already works. In fact, it works spectacularly well. Not only are the latest algorithms able to drive vehicles in the real world, but they can also do something far more difficult: They can anticipate the strange and irrational behaviors of human drivers, and react to those behaviors in safe ways.

Which is a far more difficult problem than those algorithms will need to tackle in a world where all cars are driven by computer. In a future where there are no human drivers, traffic will essentially be a physical analog to today’s internet packet switching. Rather than many independent and often conflicting decision makers, the system will consist of cooperating actors with complete knowledge of each others’ goals and priorities.

In essence, what will superficially look like independent vehicles will actually be a single highly granular mass transit system. The network will efficiently weave its “packets” through that system, bringing people to their intended destinations in an optimal way.

But how do we get here from there? What would induce people to give up their beloved habit of driving? I think there is an analogy with smoking: Cigarettes were once ubiquitous in the culture. But after people were faced with the stark facts of the effects on life expectancy, smoking fell out of favor.

So here’s my prediction: Google, which is currently bankrolling much of the development of self-driving cars, will eventually realize that it needs to create a large scale working example. It will then design an economic inducement for some town or city, somewhere in the U.S., to go “driverless”. In that town, deaths and maimings will plummet. Life expectancy will tick upward dramatically.

Once the populace is faced with the facts on the ground (literally), our culture will shift accordingly. In a few years we will reach a tipping point, after which the entire country will quickly go driverless (except for some hobbyists here and there, under controlled conditions).

In a few years, people will look back on earlier decades and wonder how anybody could ever have lived in a society where to go out on the road meant risking your life.

vancouver summer
a breeze from the sparkled shore
washes over me

The other day I mentioned season 7, episode 7 of the great Matthew Weiner series Mad Men. If you’ve seen the episode, you know it’s a key moment for the character played by Robert Morse. From the beginning of the show, I was fascinated by the casting or Mr. Morse as Bertram Cooper, because of his earlier signature role as J. Pierrepont Finch in the 1961 musical How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying — as well as in the 1967 film of the same name.

In a way, the world of Mad Men is Weiner’s homage, looking back half a century, to the world of How to Succeed, except that the latter was describing a contemporary phenomenon. Morse was born in 1931 — one year after the discovery of planet Pluto — and he was a young man of 30 when he won the Tony award for How to Succeed. Now he is 83, and half a century has been framed by his two iconic roles of Finch and Cooper.

The pairing in Mad Men of Robert Morse and John Hamm, as grizzled old veteran and ambitious young up-and-comer, is well paralleled by the earlier pairing between Rudy Vallee and Morse a half century earlier, as boss Biggley and Finch. In both cases it is obvious that the older man recognizes himself in the younger one, perhaps as he was back in the day, when his soul was filled with ambition and fire.

But here’s the funny thing: Like Robert Morse, who rose to fame in his callow youth, Rudy Vallee had risen to stardom in the early 1930s as a musical idol, the first bona fide pop superstar of the twentieth century. By 1932 — when he was the same age that Morse would be when he won his Tony — young Rudy Vallee was arguably the most popular singing star in the world.

Maybe there is a code at work here, with Morse as a sort of connective tissue, a link in the “old man / young man” genre between the long distant early 1930s and now. I wonder whether, early in his film career, Vallee ever played the young man opposite an old and grizzled actor, somebody who had, once upon a time, played a young man on the stage. Perhaps the chain stretches backward through the generations.

Just maybe, forty or fifty years from now, John Hamm will play the old guy opposite some rising young actor, in a nostalgic tale about our own time. And the chain will be unbroken.

Imagine it is the year 2045. All little children are fitted with either cyber-contact lenses or lens implants. Young Ada, age one, who is just taking her first steps, can see not only from her own eyes, but from any point of view.

This child is going to learn to walk, to point and gesture, to pick up and grasp objects, in a physical reality where her viewpoint can wander freely — much the way the players of many of today’s video games can freely change their point of view.

As Ada grows, she will learn to balance and to manipulate the objects around her, to open doors, to run and play, with a freely ranging set of virtual eyes. These are not skills she will be conscious of learning, but rather an intrinsic part of the process of how her developing brain and body will learn to navigate in the world.

She will see what is behind her as easily as what is in front. And before she enters a room, she will be able to look around the corner and know what is there.

Like Moses atop Mount Nebo, we will be able to watch young Ada enter this promised land, but not to follow her there. We may well be the last generation in history to lack the power of extraproprioception.