Ken's Blog

When I am boiling something on the stove for, say, ten minutes, sometimes I will make the mistake of looking at the clock. As I am sure you know, when you wait for something by looking at the clock, each minute seems to a very long time.

I also find time going more slowly when I am in a contemplative or meditative mood, except in this case the sensation is more pleasurable. In contrast, when I am deep into programming something, also a pleasurable activity, the time just flies by. Those same ten minutes on the clock can feel like very little time at all.

All of this is consistent with Marvin Minsky’s Society of Mind and similar theories. The part of my brain that is engaged when I am staring at a clock or meditating about something is very different from the part that is engaged when I am explicitly performing a task. I suspect that if one were to do a PET scan of my brain activity at those various moments, very different regions would be lighting up.

In a few years we will very likely have the option to wear augmented reality glasses that give us all sorts of information about the world around us, and we will simply take this power for granted. One thing we might be able to do with those Smart Glasses is to train a machine learning algorithm to give us a customized sense of our own particular “subjective time”. This measurement will vary quite a bit based on various factors, including our current activity, objects in our field of view, and gaze direction.

I wonder whether having this information explicitly available will cause us to make different choices. Will we opt for activities that make time race by, or will we instead become drawn to more contemplative modes of being. Such meditative activities might slow down our subjective clock, and therefore in some sense allow us to live a longer life.

Just about every time I give a talk about the possibilities of virtual reality, somebody asks me whether I think there is a danger that VR will replace reality. And I always tell them that I don’t worry about that, because all historical precedent shows otherwise.

Each time a new medium comes out, people worry that it will “replace reality”. I suspect that this perception is really a consequence of the newness of the medium, which leads people to mischaracterize it.

In its time, each new medium for distributing content was worried over, as a potential “reality killer”. Books, photography, audio recording, cinema and television are just some examples.

More recently, the rise of the high speed internet has coincided with a dramatic increase in long distance air travel. When people know more about a place in the world, they are more likely to take the effort to visit it in person.

Referring to historical precedent isn’t always convincing. After all, a person who grew up in today’s world has no real connection with the advent of books or cinema, and today’s undergrads were born into a world where the Web already existed.

But today a student once again asked me the question about whether VR would replace reality, and this time I managed to phrase my answer in a more relevent way, by placing it in the context of popular music. “Album sales,” I said, “don’t kill concert sales.”

When you put an adult into VR for the first time, there often seems to be some sort of difficult moment when they are asking themselves whether its ok to be there.

In contrast, when you put kids in VR, they go crazy. To them it’s the best thing ever, and they take to the experience like a duck takes to water.

What’s even more interesting is that if they are really little kids, they don’t even go crazy for VR. They just accept it as another reality, like TV or movies or the games on their iPad. It just makes inherent sense to little kids that they can enter a completely different world, one with magical properties.

Today, during a panel discussion that I was moderating, somebody asked what we should do about all the adults who refuse even to try VR, and who therefore never know whether they would like it or not. And I had a very specific thought in response to that question, which I did not speak out loud.

I thought about the widespread adoption of the telephone over a century ago. And then I thought about those people who thought of it as crazy and disruptive, and who therefore refused to ever use it.

And I found that I just didn’t care about those people. They didn’t matter, because telephony did matter. It ended up rapidly evolving from a curiosity to a cornerstone of modern communication. And that meant that it became inextricably woven into the fabric of society itself.

If that happens with some version of VR (which I think it will) then people who refuse even to use it will cease to matter. They will become a footnote to history, an archaic artifact of a bygone age.

At first I was wondering: Why is Donald Trump sending out all those stupid tweets about “voter fraud”?

I’m sure he’s been briefed, so it’s clear he has access to the same data that everyone else has — probably more. Surely, therefore, he knows none of that is real.

At first I kept thinking “OK then, what’s Trump up to? He must know that everybody knows he’s just making this stuff up.” I was looking for some sort of plan, a coherent strategy.

But then I realized that no, there is no plan. He just makes stuff up because he can. It’s like we’ve handed a loaded gun to a little kid. A very, very big gun.

Technically, the man in that tower is 70 years old. But I think we need to start dealing with something more deeply true: In any meaningful sense, the person we’re dealing with is a 12 year old kid.

I was looking out over the water yesterday near sunset in the great Pacific Northwest, and I found myself wanting to describe to a friend how beautiful it was.

Just then, I looked up and saw an Arbutus tree framed against the darkening sky. The image matched my mood at that moment: complex, and not in an easily resolvable way.

I found myself thinking that maybe that is simply what it means to be human — complexity that can not always be put into words. So instead of words, I sent the image.

A good power nap
When you need a power nap
Is a wondrous thing

My friends in Canada tell me that the ousted conservatives are trying to make a comeback by working from Donald Trump’s playbook. Some are trying to point to the Trudeau family charitable foundation as a conflict of interest for Justin Trudeau (just as the Trump campaign did to Hillary Clinton).

Others are saying that in the age of Trump, Canada needs a strongman at the helm, not a nice guy. There is a push to return to the disastrously fragile oil based economy that got Harper thrown out.

The way I see it, Canada’s great opportunity lies in the opposite direction. It wasn’t just a majority of U.S. voters who voted for Hillary Clinton — it was, more specifically, a supermajority of college educated voters.

There are many brilliant Americans — writers, inventors, artists, architects, filmmakers, neuroscientists, game designers, engineers, software experts, and more — who right now would jump at the chance to take a sabbatical north of the border. We’re not talking about giving up U.S. citizenship, just taking a little time.

Imagine the boost to Canada’s economy if much of that brain trust came to visit over the next four years. The Canadian government wouldn’t need to do much: just reach out a welcoming hand, maybe provide a few tax breaks, some grants for cooperative research.

It’s not like the U.S. would miss them. If I understand the Trump administration’s focus, it’s going to put its efforts into bringing back the U.S. coal industry, not on all that left-leaning intellectual stuff.

And boats. They’re probably going to invest in boats.

Donald Trump’s advisors are saying that his administration plans to cut NASA’s space-based climate research. Their argument, as I understand it, is that empirical data collected by NASA has the unfortunate effect of confirming that climate change is actually happening, and therefore is inherently political.

It’s kind of like those annoying scientists back in the day who kept finding compelling evidence that humans and other primates have common genetic ancestors. You know, that whole evolution thing. The problem, of course, was that their research was based on actual data, which means you can’t argue with it.

In short, reality is inherently evil, and it must be stopped. Well, sure, a lot of people are likely to die unnecessarily over the next four years from Hurricanes that NASA data will no longer be monitoring, but that’s a small price to pay for waging a righteous war against the evil of inconvenient reality.

Yet I suspect that Trump knows exactly what he’s doing. For decades he has been doing his best to build or purchase tall buildings all along the east coast of the United States — a brilliant and prescient move, when you think about it.

After all, once the rising ocean has submerged Manhattan, all of his towers will become valuable waterfront property. That’s where the real money is.

That, and boats. My recommendation is to start investing in boats.

A flight is always
A construction, a bridge to
Connect time and space.

Last weekend I went to my mom’s house for dinner. We knew we would see each other anyway for Thanksgiving in just another few days, but we also know that with the whole family there, Thanksgiving wouldn’t really be a good time to talk one on one.

We ended up having dinner at a cozy Italian restaurant in my mom’s neighborhood. As usual, our conversation roamed over many topics.

There was the obligatory post-election analysis. Fortunately for both of us, we are essentially in agreement on politics. If you manage to guess my political leanings from having read this blog (yes I know, it’s difficult), then you’ve got a good idea of my mom’s political preferences.

But mostly we discussed people we knew, family, relationships, all the really important stuff. My mom is incredibly insightful about these topics, and I find myself discussing things with her that I wouldn’t talk over with anybody else.

At last the check came. I took out my credit card and put it on the bill. My mom asked if she could split the cost of dinner with me.

That’s when I had one of those insights that one is privileged to get every once in a while. One of those moments of clarity when the clouds of the everyday part, and the light of the Universe manages to shine through.

“It’s ok,” I told her, “You gave me life.”

My mother, gracious as always, bowed to the unassailable logic of this argument. She agreed to let me pay for dinner.