Ken’s Blog

A friend, while giving me a rid to the airport this evening, observed how patient his GPS is with him. “She never gets upset, no matter what I do,” he said.

I agreed that this has been my experience as well. No matter what sort of boneheaded mistake I make, no matter how many wrong turns I take, the voice on my GPS never gets in the least upset with me. She just says “Recalulating”. Then, after a slight pause, we are on our way again, cheerful as ever.

I told my friend that it would be amazing if our human relationships were this way. That time you somehow don’t walk the dog, or you leave your socks in the sink again, or you forget her birthday.

And in response your partner just says “Recalculating”. Then, after a moment’s pause, we’re on our way again, cheerful as ever.

It seems like this would be very nice. But I wonder, would it be a good thing?

There are technologies everybody thinks are cool, and there are technologies nobody thinks about at all.

In the first category you can find things like flying cars, holographic displays, and missions to Mars. In the second category are things like air conditioning, washing machines and toilet seats.

The wonderful irony is that the less cool technologies tend to be the ones that have truly changed peoples’ lives. It is their very success that has made them invisible.

Maybe one measure of the success of a technology is how it has managed to disappear from our consciousness. Perhaps we will know that virtual and augmented reality are truly successful when they pass a simple test: We no longer notice them.

Today I come to understand, a little better, what a number of my female colleagues have been trying to tell me for years: That men do not realize they are sexist.

I’m not talking about obvious sexism. That kind is easy to spot.

I mean the sexism of highly educated, politically progressive men, thoughtful intellectuals, who would be horrified to be labeled as sexist. That is why theirs is the most insidious kind of prejudice.

I think Simone de Beauvoir framed it very well: Men think of themselves as genderless. So to invite a woman into a an intellectual conversation is perhaps to introduce a “person of gender” — to bring gender into what would otherwise be a purely genderless discussion.

Of course such thinking doesn’t make any rational sense. But irrational thinking can become the norm when a prejudice is so pervasive that it becomes part of the very air a culture breathes.

Perhaps that is why it can be so difficult for even the smartest men to see their own acts of prejudice.

In a discussion today about the future of virtual and augmented reality experiences, Alan Kay told me that what the medium really needs is the equivalent of classical music. It took me a few minutes more of conversion to work through the thought and understand the full dimensions of what he was suggesting.

Basically, he was positing that things will really get interesting when the audience of works created in such media are literate, in the way that audiences for classical music tend to be literate. It is not sufficient that audiences just think “this is cool”. They need to understand the language of what is going on well enough to appreciate why something is working.

Of course this sort of expectation of audience literacy is not limited to classical music. It is found in other genres, including various types of jazz, theater, poetry and computer games.

I was struck by how similar Alan’s observation was to something Marvin Minsky told me in 2003. When I raised the subject of the potential benefits of everybody learning to program — and computer languages that might make such a project easier — he said: “Computer programming doesn’t need a shared grammar. It needs a shared literature.”

In the news recently I’ve been seeing a lot of diverting fluff. We’ve got people pouring buckets of ice water over their heads, Ted Cruz working extra hard to make sure he gets no votes in the Bronx, Miley Cyrus doing a pitch-perfect reenactment of Tom DiCillo’s 2006 film “Delirious”.

It’s all very entertaining, but none of it really matters.

Yet I don’t see daily stories about those heroes in Liberia, sacrificing their lives to save others during the Ebola outbreak. I am in awe of these nurses. They know that their very courage will almost certainly cause their own death in a matter of weeks, yet they put their fear aside to save as many lives as they can, while they can.

How many of us would have the strength of character to make such a decision? In a sane and sensible world, the pictures and personal stories of these courageous nurses would dominate the front page of every daily newspaper around the world.

Of course we don’t live in a sane and sensible world. Oh well, at least we can pour buckets of ice water over our heads.

I went to visit another long time favorite restaurant, Soy and Sake, only to discover that it had shut down forever on the same day that Gobo closed its doors. Now I am wondering whether there is a connection.

Could it be a coincidence that two of the best vegetarian restaurants in New York City both close, after many years in business, on exactly the same day? Or is it just that August 30 is a common “last day of lease” date, and that both establishments happened to get caught up in the same general rent spike?

I am suddenly feeling very protective of our city’s remaining veggie restaurants. On the one hand, there are still a lot of them left here. On the other hand, the U.S. once had so many passenger pigeons that the sky would go dark whenever a flock would fly overhead.

And look how that turned out.

Yesterday at around 3pm a friend and I wandered over to Gobo, one of the great restaurant in the West Village, only to be informed by an employee that an hour earlier it had been shuttered for good.

Gobo wasn’t merely a restaurant. It was a Zen-like island of peace and calm, a beautifully crafted space where people came not only to eat great food, but to find a refuge from the intensity of life in Manhattan.

You could often spot famous people there, ducking out of their too-scrutinized lives to catch a moment of quiet, an hour or so of conversation unsullied by the fast paced world outside. A few years ago I saw Bob Balaban and Anne Hathaway, presumably working out the logistics of the forthcoming Academy Awards. If anyone else knew who they were, nobody let one.

And then, yesterday, it all came to an end.

Like all New Yorkers, I ponder the irony. It is, quite precisely, the presence of amazing places like this that makes New York a fantastic place to live. But those very qualities contribute to rising rents, which eventually force such lovely and inspiring places out of business.

I wonder what will take its place. If past experience is any judge, it will be some generic chain store that is more impervious to rental hikes. Or maybe a major national bank looking for an easy way to park its money.

It doesn’t really matter, does it? Those of us who live here will mourn the loss of one of the magical ingredients that made our neighborhood wonderful.

Yet we have learned, through the years, to live with these little tragedies. It’s not as though we have a choice.

Today I had a real treat — not one but two old friends briefly visiting from out of town. I first had brunch followed by a leisurely walk through Manhattan with one friend, and then soon thereafter I spent several hours in intense conversation with the other.

These are both long term friendships, each going back years, with lots of trust and caring all around. So both parts of the day were completely delightful.

Yet I couldn’t help noticing that the two conversations were very different, so the day also gave me a chance to see, close up, the different ways that I may relate to people I am close to.

With one friend the focus was very personal — relationships, connections with friends and lovers, how to express emotion through art, how best to deal with joy or with tragedy, and how to move forward in life.

The other conversation was almost entirely philosophical in nature, focusing on questions of ethics, metaphysics, the role of evolution in human behavior, our place in the larger picture, and the nature of our individual and collective responsibility to society and to the world around us.

I can easily envision having either sort of conversation with either friend, and indeed I have, through the years, discussed many diverse topics with both of them. Yet on this particular day, we had these particular conversations. Looking back on it now, it feels as though each of those conversations wanted to happen.

I’m not sure what it all means, but I can tell you for sure that it was a lot more fun than going to a movie.

If you do a Google search for “Picasso”, you are told there are about 109 million results. But if you search for “Braque”, you are told there are only about 1.6 million reported results.

Similarly, a search for Pollock yields about 33 million reported results, whereas “Krasner” produces only 588,000.

Yet if you study the work, you see that these were both cases where there was intense joint research. One can find it very difficult to distinguish a Picasso from a Braque during the high period of their Cubist collaboration between 1908 and 1912, and the relationship between the work of Krasner and Pollock is similarly interwoven. Each was in a continual process of influencing the other, to the extent that it would be rather pointless to try to evaluate either one without studying both.

Today Picasso and Pollock are major stars in our cultural firmament, whereas I’ll bet that most Americans don’t even know the names “Braque” or “Krasner”.

There seems to be a pattern at work here — one member of an intellectual partnership becomes a superstar, and the other, while greatly revered by those in the field, is barely known to the general public. For example, in physics we have Einstein and Gell-Man. You can find similar cases in just about every field.

Personality has a lot to do with it. Some people have a kind of star quality, independent of the work itself. When talent and charisma coincide in just the right way, the world takes notice.

But it would also be nice if the world actually looked at the work itself a bit more carefully, and took notice, at least occasionally, of the other one.

Today I saw several wonderful student projects at Trinity College in Dublin. One of them was about ghosts.

The basic idea for this project was an app for a SmartPhone that lets you see, and have encounters with, ghosts who wander about the campus. Trinity has been around since 1592, so there are lots of ghosts to choose from.

In order to make things more interesting, the students went well beyond historical tales of ghosts, creating a host of fictional ghosts to visit alongside them.

When the students presented their work, they made a distinction between “real” ghosts and “fake” ghosts. The real ones were the ones they had gotten from the historical record. The fake ghosts where the ones they had made up.

At some point I asked the students what would happen if a ghost were actually to appear. Would that be a third category? If ghosts from the historical record, in whom you don’t believe, are called “real” ghosts, then what would you call ghosts who actually show up on your doorstep?