Ken's Blog

At different times, we all project different energies. Sometimes we are distracted and worried, even fearful, and other times we feel hopeful and optimistic, and our hearts are filled with wonder.

I realized quite a while ago that I measure different human psychological energies on an internal scale, a kind of psychic rating system that runs somewhere in the back of my mind. This is not something I do deliberately. Rather, I just noticed at some point that I had been doing it, probably for years.

I call it the “potato to moonbeam scale,” and it goes something like this: When a person is feeling heavy, burdened by existence, perhaps defensive and closed in, then they are kind of like a potato. They just sit there upon the earth, a slave to the forces of gravity that hold them down (both literal and metaphorical).

But every once in a while you encounter a human energy that seems unaffected by gravity, a mind that dips and soars, apparently without fear. This kind of energy — which I think of as channeling one’s inner moonbeam — allows us go to new places in our minds, to see things around us that are entirely invisible to us when we are in our potato-like defensive crouch.

Every soul travels along the scale between potato and moonbeam. Some people spend an awful lot of time at the potato end. You can feel their fear and their heaviness. And if you’re not careful, it wan weigh you down as well.

But then there are those astonishing souls who seem to be almost pure moonbeam. I love being around people who are in such a state. The experience is always both a revelation and a delight.

Back when George Lucas was making the first Star Wars film, he had the chance to negotiate for an additional $150K from Fox Studios, since American Graffiti had been a success at the box office. Instead, he left that money on the table, in return for licensing and merchandizing rights. At the time, it probably seemed like a weird decision to industry observers.

But of course he went on to parlay that move into a fundamental restructuring of the way movies are monetized. It’s hard to believe that before 1977, the whole concept of making a fortune through toys, T-shirts, novelizations, etc. wasn’t really on the radar. Now, like it or not, we live in the world that George created. Revenue from these sources has earned hundreds of millions for Lucasfilm.

Today a friend sent me a link to a video in which the chief creative officer of Sphero is interviewed as he demonstrates their computer-controlled toy version of the new Star Wars robot (if you’ve seen any of the trailers, that robot is in the very first shot). Watching this video, I was struck by how completely the concept of “owning the character” has seeped into the DNA of big budget sci-fi movies.

He talks about his childhood, and how he and his colleagues grew up watching the Star Wars films. Then he says, talking about Sphero’s development of the toy: “For us it was a chance to make the character that we always wanted to buy.”

Something about this sentence jumped out at me. It seemed oddly off, as though some essential concept had been misplaced. I spent some time today trying to figure out what, exactly, was bothering me.

And then I had it. It was the way his description had completely erased the line between the magic of seeing a movie character and the concept of buying one. As though they were one and the same thing.

But they are not the same thing at all. No matter how commercial all of this gets, a little kid goes to the movies not to engage in a commercial transaction, but to visit exciting new worlds, where they hope to encounter wondrous characters and stories.

And that, my friends, is precisely what is ingenious about the monetization strategy that George Lucas pretty much invented: After little kids go to the movies, they don’t buy toys and other merchandise.

Their parents do.

I finally got around to seeing the new Star Wars movie, days after many of my friends had seen it. One of the advantages of waiting so long is that you can get really really great seats.

Then again, one of the disadvantages is the increased chance that somebody might spoil the plot for you. But I had managed to avoid reading any reviews, and I’d been staying away from social networks, so I came in fresh, not knowing anything that wasn’t in the trailer.

Arriving just a little early, we had our pick of locations in the Ziegfeld (Manhattan’s grandest and most glorious movie theater), so we chose seventh row center. Those are perfect seats for a big 3D movie.

And the movie was good. I mean really, really good. Yes, there was cheesy dialog, but that was part of the fun. After all, this is a Star Wars movie.

And it was beautiful — breathtakingly beautiful. Also smartly paced, wonderfully edited, with a fun plot and great action scenes.

I’m not going to say any more, because I’m very against spoilers. But for the three or four of you out there who were not thinking of seeing this movie, you really should see it. You won’t be disappointed.

For me, it was a total treat. After all, it’s been more than thirty years since I last had the opportunity to go to a movie theater and see a good first run Star Wars movie.

I wish, sometimes, we
Could truly open ourselves
To see each other

If you had the human mind that you have now, but could temporarily assume any physical form you wish, what sort of form would you choose?

I think we need to set some ground rules here. Obviously if you were to show up at the office tomorrow as a ten foot tall giant squid, it might cause a certain commotion among your co-workers. So let’s just keep this on a theoretical level, and put aside real-life social considerations.

On the other hand, I don’t think we should restrict your hypothetical temporary form to the nearly human. Perhaps you could choose to live in a four dimensional space. Or you could become a vast cloud of particles drifting through the galaxy. Or your consciousness could collectively inhabit ten million bees around the world. Or you could spend the day as a gentle rainfall in Hawaii.

Once you start thinking this way, it’s not really clear what are “better” or “worse” answers. I guess it depends what sort of adventure you want to have.

Any ideas?

Just this past week I have picked up three great bits of advice that are directly relevant to my life. They come from a remarkably disparate set of sources, and I suspect they would be directly relevant to many peoples’ lives.

One was a piece of advice I read just the other day that the financier Warren Buffett once told his shareholders. I am now finding it very helpful when thinking about the best ways to commercialize research we’ve developed in our lab:

“A horse that can count to ten is a remarkable horse — not a remarkable mathematician.”

Another was told to me by my cousin, who happens to be a renowned spiritual leader and political activist. He was told this many years ago by his own spiritual teacher. It’s probably the best advice I have ever heard about how to run a multiperson project:

“It’s not how much you do. It’s how much you get done.”

The third bit of advice may be the most useful of all. It was given to me by a close friend just last week. She said she was told this by her snowboard instructor, back when she was taking snowboarding lessons. I think the underlying principle applies to just about every situation in life:

“Don’t look at the tree.”

Things that are fun in computer games are often the same things that are very unpleasant in real life. Transposing an ostensibly tedious task into a game can transform that task, turning ennui to enchantment.

Take for example Eric Zimmerman’s brilliant game Diner Dash, in which the player essentially waits on tables in a busy diner, trying to satisfy customers’ needs throughout a high stress shift. In real life, this could be a nightmare. But when you’re playing it as a game, it’s fun.

I think this disparity may have great relevance for future reality, as we become able to use the tools of virtual and mixed reality to seamlessly merge physically lived experience and simulation. Ostensibly thankless tasks performed within the “magic circle” of game play may end up feeling like great fun, even if the tasks themselves remain exactly the same.

Traditional computer games are played while sitting in front of a computer screen. But emerging virtual and augmented realities are going to allow those tasks to be performed in the real world itself. What if the difference between “fun” and “not fun” turns out to merely be a question of context? What if the same physical act can feel very different, based on what we believe is going on?

Perhaps in future reality, all physical chores — doing laundry, taking out the garbage, shoveling the sidewalk — will be recontextualized as games. While doing those activities we will be able to gain points, move up leader boards, master tutorial levels and play challenge rounds with our friends. What today is the most thankless chore will become a fun pastime that we cannot wait to do again.

Today I spent some time at the headquarters of Verizon in Basking Ridge, NJ. Some of you with long memories might remember this campus as the former headquarters of the once mighty AT&T.

It looks the same, yet not the same. Different logo at the entrance, some redecorating, a gloss over everything to add a bit of contemporary hipness. But underneath their new skin, these buildings have the same old bones.

This is my third such experience in about a week. Last week I paid my first visit to the Facebook campus in Palo Alto. The last time I had visited that campus it was still headquarters for Sun Microsystems, a fascinating and storied company which sadly is no longer with us.

Back in the Sun days the campus was very stark and no-nonsense, reflective of the serious tone of the company itself. Now it has all been made over to project a casual spirit of youthful fun, sort of the architectural equivalent of adding party balloons and a large Mexican hat.

Similarly, at the Google headquarters in Mountain View the other day, I knew I was walking into buildings that I had originally visited when that site was the headquarters of Silicon Graphics, back in its glory days. A few of the original buildings still remain, although Google has expanded the campus enormously.

Google didn’t even need to change the signature bright purple of the two formerly-SGI towers that loom over its campus. Their bold color scheme actually meshes perfectly with the playful architecture of Google’s other buildings.

Today as I was checking through security, the man behind the reception desk at Verizon asked me whether I had ever been there before. After a moment’s hesitation, I gave the most accurate reply I could: “Not since before this was Verizon.”

The man smiled. I am guessing he might have heard that response before.

Broadly speaking, there are two major ways that entertainment experiences are monetized: Through payed content and through ad revenue. Game platforms like Microsoft XBox and SONY PlayStation generally rely on paid content — a very reliable and high quality form of income.

Aggregators like Google and Facebook rely mainly on ad revenue. This is a lower quality form of income, in that many users are needed to accumulate sufficient value to advertisers. Each user provides only a small amount of value by virtue of his or her ability to act as a target for ads. On the other hand, you can accumulate a lot more users if you give them stuff for “free”.

It’s already clear that the early tethered VR systems coming out in the next few months — SONY Morpheus, Facebook Oculus and Valve/HTC VIVE — are going to roll out with high quality content, and that will be paid content. But this is not a model that will generalize. Hard core gamers may expect to pay for their entertainment experience, but most people just want to get stuff for free.

So are we going to live in a world where most people are going to see ads popping up wherever they look? I don’t think so, because I think it’s going to be even weirder: The “free” wearables that will be provided by aggregators like Google will be able to detect exactly where you are looking, all the time. They will even be able to track your level of pupil dilation. They will therefore be able to aggregate your interests so well that they will no longer need to show you ads.

But the next time you go to buy anything, be it clothing, groceries, wallpaper, or just a stick of gum, you will see the choices that advertisers have personalized for you, based on everything they have learned about you.

You will love almost everything you see, and will want to buy it. You will be the perfect customer.

Continuing on with the theme of future reality and experience jockeying…

When you and I enter a shared immersive virtual world together, using whatever forthcoming technology will support that, we have a choice as to what level of realism we want. We can choose to be extremely abstract characters, or extremely realistic ones.

It’s not clear to me that there are inherent advantages in opting for greater realism. Rather, it depends on the context and the situation. For one thing, choosing a more abstract and less detailed, or more “cartoon-like”, representation for everyone would make it easier to believably populate our shared virtual world with a mix of human avatars and software robots.

That might make things more interesting. Or it might just make things more confusing. I am reminded of the 1999 Cronenberg film Existenz, which took place almost entirely in a VR game. Characters were never entirely sure whether they were talking to a real person or to a Bot. The results were definitely interesting.

It will probably be quite a while before we are able to simulate the subtleties of human movement and speech with sufficient fidelity that a realistically rendered Bot would pass the Turing test. But if we abstract things enough, say by placing everybody in a cartoon world, it is possible that Bots could “pass” as human, at least for brief encounters.

And that might be fun.