Ken's Blog

On other planets
Do they also think about
Fermi’s paradox?

The first day of our event, AR in Action, went really well. There were a lot of interesting points raised, touching on technology, ethics, societal norms, and the general meaning of the profound (if gradual) shift from SmartPhones to wearables.

But in the middle of it all, I received a delightful surprise. Apparently some supporter of our Republican President was unhappy with my pointing out the obvious fact that said President is acting like a complete idiot. So I got an insulting would-be comment.

I am somewhat sympathetic, because I understand that the commenter is suffering from confirmation bias, which is only human. After all, after you vote to put somebody into higher office, you feel committed. That can remain true even after your candidate makes a complete idiot of himself, deeply embarrasses his country, and pretty much pees down his leg.

By all means, those of you who are still suffering under the delusion that our President is not a total embarrassment, keep those insulting comments coming. That is how I know that I am standing up for our beautiful country. That is one way I know that I am being a patriot.

We are organizing a major conference at our lab, which will be running from morning through evening for the next two days. Needless to say, today has been a very busy day of prep for our entire crew.

There are so many logistical details to get right, from Wifi to running cables to projection to microphones to recording to building access to catering to the care and feeding of demos and more. Much more.

And if you get one of them wrong, that’s all people will remember. Which is weird, but that’s the way it is.

So I’m going down our lists, trying to be as organized as possible, and hoping we haven’t missed anything. But when it really comes down to it, we’re putting on a show.

So when the conference starts tomorrow morning, I’m going to try to remember to smile, and act like it was all easy.

We evolved as a species to respond properly to a world that was more or less consistent. Whether trees, rocks, food or other people, the objects in our environment tended to be consistent in their appearance from one moment to the next.

Therefore it is not surprising that humans (and many other species as well) exhibit change blindness. When some object within our view changes in appearance, while we are not focusing on that particular object, we tend not to notice.

This has enormous potential consequences for the coming age of wearable computers. Since these wearables will be tracking our gaze direction, software designers will be able to know where we are focusing our gaze direction, and when we are in the middle of a saccade between one object of interest and another.

This will make it easier for malicious software to modify the appearance of objects in our augmented view, without our ever realizing that anything has changed. In other words, we may no longer be able to rely on the evidence of our own senses.

We might need to start relying on algorithms that analyze the visual scene before us, looking for unexpected alterations. Such algorithms could, for example, be able to determine whether somebody is really handing you a dollar coin, or whether they are actually giving you a nickel that was just made to look, for a moment, like a dollar coin.

Which, when you think about it, gives a whole new meaning to the phrase “change blindness”.

Let’s say you are on an airline run by a culture you know is different from yours. You respect this culture and its people, yet you must acknowledge that there are some significant differences. For one thing, they eat dogs and cats.

You request the “non-pet meal”. The people who run the airline understand that you are from a different cultural background, and they respect that. They honor your request for such a meal, as foreign as the idea may be to them.

When the tray arrives at your seat, it is indeed a pet-free meal. Yet you also see, incongruously, a fried puppy appetizer on your tray.

“I did not order this,” you say to the flight attendant.

“That appetizer comes with all the meals,” she explains helpfully.

On your return flight, you receive a side dish of roasted kitten. You now understand that there is no point in raising a fuss. You offer the dish to the young woman sitting next to you. She is delighted to accept it, and eats it with relish.

This has pretty much been my experience on several recent flights, with just a few culture-specific details changed.

The orange one challenged us to figure out what he meant by “covfefe”.

After much careful analysis, and given this latest news about his pull-out from the Paris climate agreement, I finally figured it out.

It is actually a description of his three step plan:

(1) Con our voters
(2) Fuck economy
(3) Fuck Earth

I know that the last few months have seemed random to many of you. Yet when you actually understand his plan, the man is remarkably consistent.

The strange thing about being in Dublin, apart from the amazing beauty of this place, is the sense of dislocation. I had thought I was truly away, but it seems I was wrong.

For me, being a prof at New York University normally means a steady stream of work, responsibilities, meetings. So you would think that being in Dublin would provide a respite from such things.

But apparently (to borrow a phrase from a recent U.S. president), I am a Decider. People ask me things and then, based on what I say, they make decisions. Some of those decisions involve questions about how to spend money.

And that means I am responsible, wherever I happen to be in the world, for budget. There is, it would seem, no escape.

Alas and alack.

A friend and I were passing by a tennis court the other day, where people were happily playing tennis together. It struck me in that moment how prevalent it is for people to enjoy each others’ company through competitive activities.

Certainly this is not true for all shared activities, but it tends to be true for many of the more active ones. I wondered out loud whether there could be a sentient species who would find such a way of spending time completely incomprehensible — who might even find such behavior downright psychotic.

In other words, could a species evolve intelligence without ever evolving a sense of pleasure in competing with other members of their own species? Or is such a species impossible on first principles?

My friend pointed out, quite sensibly, that puppies and children compete with each other as a way to grow their skills. There is clear survival value in learning through competition.

But that didn’t completely satisfy me. That merely shows that competition is one successful paradigm for evolution. It doesn’t show that competition is necessary for all possible successful paths of evolution.

I found myself positing a species that is more like The Borg from STTNG. In such a species, individuals might be physically separate beings, yet possess a kind of communication that to us would seem like telepathy, like cooperating cells in a single organism. The evolutionary advantage possessed by such creatures would be linked to an inherent quality of cooperation, somewhat the way the tentacles of an octopus always cooperate with each other, even when they are engaged in disparate subtasks.

That still doesn’t mean that evolution of this kind of intelligent species is possible. There could be sound evolutionary reasons why it is not possible. But for now, it seems at least plausible.

Today in the NY Times I read a fascinating article about a Museum of Failures. Focusing on such failed products as the Segway, Google Glass, and Harley Davidson perfume, the museum takes a look at objects aimed at consumers that did not meet expectations.

One paragraph in the article, a quote from the founder of the museum, jumped out at me:

Dr. West said the idea for the museum dawned on him when he visited the Museum of Broken Relationships. “I couldn’t believe they had a Museum of Broken Relationships,” he said. “Then I decided I had to get busy with my Museum of Failure.”

My immediate thought upon reading this paragraph was, why not go meta? Given the vast variety of museums out there, shouldn’t there be a museum of museums?

Now that we have virtual and mixed reality, we can totally do this. In one physical location, you can embark on a journey to everything from a museum of Himalayan art to a museum of Natural History to a museum of Sex to a museum of Broken Relationships.

The museum of museums would be the ultimate museum. Isn’t it about time we created this?

One of the salient features of physical interaction between humans is that we all expect each other to be roughly the same size. Between you and the person you are talking to, there might be a height difference of as much as a factor of two, but just about never more than that, and usually much less.

We are not physically co-present with people with whom we are speaking on the phone, or texting, or exchanging email. Yet we still retain a mental picture of them as being more or less “human sized”.

But with the advent of ubiquitous mixed reality, there will be no intrinsic reason why people need to appear to each other at their natural scale. If you show up on my desk for a brief virtual chat, it might turn out to be convenient for me to see you as a miniature version of yourself, whilst I might appear to you as a giant version of myself against the sky.

Technically, there would be no impediment to this mode of interaction, and there might be some practical advantages. As a tiny person, you could show me a dance sequence, or a walk a path through a proposed architectural space. As a giant person, I could draw some choreography on your floor, or arrange some lights or cloud cover for you.

The more you think about it, the more different practical uses suggest themselves for people adopting asymmetric scales when interacting virtually. But would people accept such arrangements, on a social and psychological level?

My guess is yes. After all, you regularly go to movies where you see the faces of your favorite actors at enormously large scales. And when you turn on the TV, you see those same actors looking very small indeed.

So it would appear that you are already good at dealing with people who have been virtually rescaled. It’s just that soon they may be showing up as tiny people standing on your desk, or as giants, peering into your window.