Ken's Blog

These virtual worlds
To which we are always drawn
Are they our future?

I vividly remember the Lousiana Governor’s election in 1991, as does everyone I know from this country who was old enough back then to follow politics. It was, after all, one of the most notorious elections in American history. Former Governor Edwin Edwards was running for election, and his challenger was the neo-Nazi and former Grand Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan David Duke.

To put this election in context, it is important to point out that the corruption of the Edwards administration was not only very widely known, it was legendary. At the time of that election, he was already facing multiple federal indictments, including mail fraud, corruption of justice, and bribery (he was eventually found guilty of racketeering charges and sentenced to ten years in Federal prison).

By 1991 Edwards had lost the Governorship, and had completely fallen from power. Many people had written off his chances for a comeback. But then he got lucky: His opponent turned out to be a neo-Nazi former Grand Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan.

To many people, given how scary Duke was, Edwards was very much the lesser of two evils. One bumper sticker during that election read: “Vote For the Crook. It’s Important.”

Edwards won the election.

So when Donald Trump said, when told by Jake Tapper on CNN that David Duke, the former Grand Wizard of the KKK was supporting him, that he didn’t know who Duke was, Donald Trump was lying. He wasn’t maybe sort of kind of lying. He was flat out lying.

Just to avoid any confusion, Tapper clarified the question: “I’m just talking about David Duke and the Ku Klux Klan here,” to which Trump responded “I don’t know David Duke … I just don’t know anything about him.”

In fact the Donald had himself previously publicly condemned Duke and his racist extremism. Trump knew exactly who Duke is. Millions of Americans who were over the age of twenty in 1991 know exactly who Duke is.

So the question I have is, why lie?

Let’s be generous here and posit, as implausible as it might be, that Trump had somehow simply forgotten one of the most notorious figures in American politics. If somebody tells you that the former Grand Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan (whoever they may be) supports your candidacy, shouldn’t you immediately disavaow that endorsement?

The only theory I can come up with is this: Maybe the Trump campaign, building on resentment in certain quarters about the ethnicity of our current President, is betting that there are more racist white voters in the U.S. than there are black voters.

I can’t think of any other theories. Maybe somebody else can.

As a thought experiment, I’ve been imagining how else we might appear to each other, other than as our literal selves, if we were all to walk around wearing future reality glasses. There are many possibilities.

We could choose to appear to each other as space aliens, as dolphins, or as glowing points of astral light. I am particularly intrigued by the possibility of appearing as robots.

There is something elegant about everyone choosing to look like a robot in the early stages of future reality. For one thing, it reiterates the basic theme of physical presence refracted through the lens of high technology. What could possibly be a more iconic symbol of that theme than the robot?

For another, this approach gracefully avoids the problem of the uncanny valley. For example, when we talk to each other on the telephone, and all that we perceive of each other is voice, then we accept the reality of that voice. We don’t say “oh, this is a vocal representation of my friend John.” Rather, we just feel that we are talking to John.

A visual representation of John as a robot similarly sidesteps all questions of fidelity. The robot represents John, but could never be mistaken for John. So it becomes simply a token of his presence in the conversation. Our own knowledge of John is then free to fill in the rest.

Or at least, that is the hypothesis. To see if it really works that way, we’ll just need to try it and see.

Visiting the Montreal Botanical Gardens last weekend, I thoroughly enjoyed the huge variety of exotic plants on display. The sheer variety of flora, gathered from all climes and all regions of the world, was overwhelming and delightful.

One particular species of plant, hanging on the wall, looked for all the world like what antlers would look like, if they belonged to the plant kingdom. You can see for yourself, below.

If I were going to open a vegan hunting lodge, I would definitely hang these on the walls.

If sometime in the future we are all walking around in the physical world, and we are sporting eyewear that lets us see whatever we want, then we are going to be shown things that are consistent with the immediate physical world around us. Walls, chairs, tables, and other potential physical hazards are going to be made visible.

But beyond that, anything is possible. In particular, we might find that the question of whether an other person is “present” becomes interestingly complicated. For example, we may see another person standing in the room with us, but that person might actually be physically located in another part of the world.

Or perhaps that’s not a real person at all, but an NPC (non-player character), a behavioral simulation created through an Artificial Intelligence algorithm.

Another possibility: Maybe there really is a person standing in front of you, but you can’t see them — in this alternate view of reality they are invisible. This option would be useful, for example, for immersive theatre. When you open a window, you can feel the wind blowing in your face. You just don’t see the person standing in front of you holding a fan.

Yet another possibility: You see a person, but you are actually physically interacting with a robot. When you shake that person’s hand, you are actually shaking a puppet hand. The robot can either be teleoperated by an actual human being, or can be actuated algorithmically by computer.

The more you think about this, the more possibilities present themselves. I don’t know how things will end up playing out, but I’m already convinced that future reality is going to be a very interesting place.

When Adolph Hitler was rising to power during the time of the Weimar Republic, he didn’t need to personally beat up, terrorize and assault all of those who would oppose him. Instead, he relied on a large coterie of bullies, known as Brown Shirts, who did that dirty work for him.

If you were one of his political opponents, you might one day find your windows smashed in, your name smeared, your family members attacked and brutalized. Potential opponents realized, fairly quickly, that the personal costs of politically opposing the future Chancellor of Germany were prohibitive. In the face of such unchecked terror, opposition melted away.

I am not sure there is an essential difference between the tactics of the National Socialists in 1932 and those of the Trump campaign today. Sure, all Trump and his spokespeople actually do is fabricate crazy charges against those who offend them. For example, that’s what they did to Cheri Jacobus, a Republican strategist who recently dared to criticize Trump for skipping the Iowa debate.

They knew that their on-line Brown Shirts would do the rest. Jacobus was promptly set upon by an army of on-line Trump followers: terrorized, slut-shamed, threatened with death, smeared relentlessly — horribly brutalized as a cautionary example for those who would dare oppose The Donald.

As far as I can see, Trump is essentially promising, with every speech, that he will continue these scorched earth tactics if he is elected. The concept of “representative democracy”, as we now define it, will come to seem a quaint notion, a silly idea doomed to failure, just as the Weimar Republic came to be seen.

The Western world has already lived through one Hitler in the last century. And he wasn’t the only such bully — he was just the one with the most successful brand name. What astonishes me is that anybody in this country would vote for a candidate who promises, once again, to create a society based on naked bullying and intimidation.

The Architecture Machine Group at MIT, which evolved in 1985 into the MIT Media Lab, was very concerned with issues of “virtual presence”. How can we use technology to help us feel that we are in the same place, even when we are not?

Soon, with the help of future reality technologies, we will be able to do the opposite. You will be able to walk through a crowded physical space, and if you like, perceive only those people who are nearest to you (the ones that you would physically bump into if you weren’t able to see each other).

In such an experience, people will by default seem to materialize only when they are nearby. Yet if there is one particular person in the large crowd that you are trying to find, that person can be made visible to you even when they are far away.

It can go the other way as well. People can choose to “go stealth”, and become invisible to anyone other than their nearest physical neighbors. Many permutations are possible.

In time, we might come to regard “virtual absence” as something so normal, that we will forget it was ever any other way.

Today I participated in a round-table discussion that touched on the culture of on-line virtual communities. At some point, one of the participants pointed out that in Second Life people have been known to maintain a rich parallel existence.

For example, she said, couples have gotten married in Second Life, and have even used that on-line virtual world to conduct illicit affairs. I found these two concepts both intriguing and puzzling, when considered together.

“If you marry someone in Second Life,” I asked her, “Does it still count as cheating if you only cheat on them in real life?”

When you ask most people what “stereoscopy” means, and you get any answer at all, they usually say something like showing a different image to your left eye and your right eye. But that’s not what it actually means.

When you break it down, “stereo” is from a Greek word for “solid”, and “scopy” is from a Greek word for “to see” or “to look”. So it’s not really about two eyes at all, but rather the idea of seeing solid things.

This explains why one of the more popular and original 3D printing technologies is called “stereolithography”. It’s a word that literally means “solid printing”, which is exactly what 3D printing is.

This distinction may seem subtle, but I think it is one that is going to become more and more important. A stereo movie is a particularly deficient form of “solid seeing”, because it pretty much forces you to keep your head in one place. Moving your head from side to side actually starts to destroy the illusion that you are seeing something solid.

But as we get closer and closer to future reality, synthetic objects will appear in consistent location even as we walk around in the world. When that becomes commonplace, the word “stereoscopy” may no longer be misunderstood. Rather, people will come to understand that it is not really about seeing things with two eyes, but rather seeing the synthetic visions we create as something solid, and accepting them as part of the world we share.

Only after getting to the airport today was I informed that my flight was canceled. Fortunately they were able to put me on a flight departing two hours later.

Which means I am writing this from within an unexpected bubble of time, hanging out in a mostly empty airport waiting area, just me and my laptop computer, a few scattered fellow travelers, and a large television on one wall set to CNN.

One you learn how to ignore the TV, it’s actually quite pleasant here. Everyone is having their own quiet time, although it is “quiet” here only in the metaphorical sense.

But I am counting my blessings. Bubbles of uninterrupted time can be hard to find. So when they unexpectedly come my way, I am grateful.

By the way, I have never met anybody who didn’t find the airplane waiting area TV set annoying. Does anyone actually like it? And if not, why is it there?