Ken’s Blog

I am at a conference that I have been going to for quite a number of years. It’s really quite nice, with a great community, interesting sessions, and a really cool opportunity for all sorts of discussions.

But one thing is a little unnerving. Precisely because this is a small conference, and the number of people is relatively contained, it is all too easy to line up the different years in my mind: This year, the previous year, the one before that, and so on.

And this leads to an odd telescoping effect, as though no time at all has passed from one year to the next. It’s like some sort of strange fantasy story in which everyone ages a year every week.

I’m not complaining. To paraphrase Woody Allen, getting a year old every year sure beats the alternative. But still, it is unnerving to see the passage to time placed in such stark relief, and to bear witness to the clear juxtaposition of successive years, as though time had suddenly advanced with the snap of the fingers.

On one level it’s all very fascinating, but I’m not sure how many times I can snap my fingers.

I’m off, I’m off,
To Dueseldorf!

🙂

The day before a long trip (I will be out of town for six weeks) brings a special sort of anxiety. Not that I have anything to complain about. The next month and a half will bring me to Berlin and Paris, among other wonderful places.

But there is always the nagging feeling that something has been forgotten, an essential detail missed. It is a larger, more amorphous version of the classic panicked question “Did I leave the stove turned on?”

So I have one more day of worry, of neurotically checking todo lists, cleaning out the fridge, suspending the newspaper, paying a pesky bill or two, and making sure I have all my ducks in a row (whatever that actually means).

The payoff will come at liftoff, when I can at last sit back in my airplane seat and relax, secure in the knowledge that whatever I have forgotten, there is no longer a damned thing I can do about it. 🙂

Faulkner once said: “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.”

Well, I just saw Ibsen’s Ghosts at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, on the recommendation of a friend. It was a fabulous production, utterly heart wrenching, and it pretty much nailed what Faulkner was getting at.

The play starts out so light hearted, almost like a drawing room comedy. But then the clouds begin to circle and swirl, and before you know it you are lost in a dark mirror, reflecting upon the ways our past can come back to haunt us.

In real life, we all tell ourselves a few lies to make peace with the choices we have made. We may even come to believe that these lies are harmless. Ghosts reminds us that a life built upon self-deception is like a house built upon sand.

And it does so with remarkable economy and rigor. Every word and phrase and glance is important — nothing is wasted. This play is an exquisitely cut gem, all bright glistening facets and edges sharp enough to cause damage.

How odd that seeing so much pain on stage can bring so much pleasure to an audience. That might seem wrong, until you realize that we are responding not to the pain itself, but to the telling of truth, and the beautifully clear illumination of the human soul.

After dinner at a great New York restaurant this evening, we talked about the fact that the restaurant had printed cards for us to walk away with. In the age of the Internet, with instant Web access to everything, there is something quaint about this retro form of advertising.

My friend pointed out that the card serves other purposes. When you are at work, say, and you want to order out lunch from a great restaurant, you reach into your pocket and hand the card to the person doing the ordering. There is something direct and primal in this physical act, which goes well with the primal act of having a meal.

After all, as Groucho Marx once said: “I’m not crazy about reality, but it’s still the only place to get a decent meal.” And presumably, even as technology continues to advance, we will still need to eat. And we might still want to hand physical cards to each other.

But that doesn’t mean that human readable ink needs to be printed on those cards. In an eccescopic world, when we are all wearing those cyber contact lenses, a physical card need only convey the illusion of physical printing. In reality, our personal body computer will be able to look at an infrared pattern on the card, do a rapid look-up, and create a computer graphic simulacrum of printed information.

This has the advantage that every business card becomes an active display. Text can scroll or expand, 3D visual objects can appear to float off the card and animate, or we can use the same physical card to flip rapidly through our entire rolodex.

We would still perform the same physical act of handing a card to another person, because this act makes sense to us. But that act would merely be in support of a charmingly quaint illusion, a relic of a bygone time, much as the sound of a ringing sound on your smart phone supports the charmingly quaint illusion of an actual bell.

At NYU we are making great progress on our “shared Holodeck” — a virtual reality space where you can walk around freely, with no wires attached. The ability to use your own two feet to explore an alternate world makes a big difference.

My colleague Atley pointed out recently that one interesting quality of such an experience is how you feel when you come out of it, after you are back in the real world. As you look around the world, you feel a sense of expanded horizons, a feeling that anything is possible.

Since she made this observation, a number of people have reported something similar. Once you have have the experience of drawing a picture in mid-air and then walking around it, your mind accepts this as perfectly reasonable. And it seems to you that this reasonable experience should always be possible.

And sometime soon it will be. 🙂

address: Where to find clothing in a plus size.

disappointment: Sadness after losing one’s time slot.

foresight: Knowing about the golf swing before it happens.

history: The study of sexism since antiquity.

information: Data advancing uniformly.

invent: Devise a new kind of air duct.

overcast: Too many actors on a cloudy day.

remember: Recall a lost limb.

reverse: Keep getting poetry backwards.

sandwich: Food served at seaside covens.

I was talking with a colleague today over lunch and the topic came around to the future of machine learning. One day, we joked, the machines would get so smart that they won’t need us anymore, and then they could just get rid of us.

I suggested that as we make the machines smart enough to achieve sentience, we need to also make them grateful. After all, if you are grateful to your creator, then you don’t want to destroy your creator.

I made an analogy with religion. Throughout history, many people have believed that they were created by a divine being, and have felt grateful for that. Generally speaking, people don’t wish to destroy the god or gods who made them.

So in a way, what we really need are religious robots. A religious robot is a safe robot.

This computer program:

      happiness = you + me;
      loneliness = me – you;
      narcissism = me + me;

computes the following interesting result:

      happiness = narcissism – loneliness

But is it art?

Gene Roddenberry’s initial pitch for Star Trek was “Wagon Train to the Stars”, referencing a Western TV show that had been popular for over six years. It was a nice shorthand phrase that got across the point that although this was a Science Fiction show, it would really be a Western at heart.

When people talk about sending space explorers to other stars, journeys that can take thousands of years — but perhaps only a few years in subjective travel time, if you have enough energy to accelerate to nearly the speed of light.

The problem is that once you get to that other star system, everyone you have known back on earth will have been dead for the last few thousand years. There is no point in trying to communicate with them, since they are long gone.

But maybe we can think about all of this another way. If our goal is to maintain a sense of connectedness, community, and cultural identity, perhaps we can literally build connectedness into the process.

Rather than sending a lone ship into the wilderness, future humans can periodically send ships into the same trajectory. Over time, this will create a long string of ships, each with two nearest neighbors (the ship before and the ship after), as well as some limited access to other ships that are farther away in the ever expanding train of ships.

Yes, there will be relativistic differences between ships, since each ship will be traveling in a slightly different relativistic time frame as its neighbors, but communication will still be possible, and therefore a sense of cultural connection.

Over the length of the entire vast chain of ships, many different cultures might develop, even different languages, just as humans have historically developed different cultures and languages when geographically separated.

Yet there will be coherence, and a sense of a single species will be maintained. Most important of all, there will be true human intelligence aboard each ship, so that any message sent or relayed from one ship will be received by sentient minds, who will be able to decide, before too much time has passed, what to do in response to that message.

It will truly be a wagon train to the stars.