Ken's Blog

I am about to get on an flight.

That’s nothing new. I’ve been doing this for years, and on one level it’s completely normal.

Yet on another level, part of my mind still reels at the absurdity of this possibility. I get into a giant metal can along with several hundred other people, and we launch into the sky, traveling hundreds of miles per hour at 30,000 feet off the ground, and then arrive a continent away.

I mean, come on, isn’t there a part of you that say “Wait, that can’t be right!” It’s one of those aspects of modern life that splits my mind into two parts. There’s the part that simply accepts this as “normal” reality, and the other part that tells me that nothing so completely crazy could possibly be normal.

Then again, I often have conversations with people who are half way around the world, and I also consider that normal.

Maybe there has never been a “normal” in the human condition. Perhaps the very first people who ever built a fire, or drew pictures of animals on cave walls, were already stretching and changing the definition of the word “normal” in a way that would have startled their ancestors.

Maybe that’s just what it means to be human.

The title of this post was one of David Foster Wallace’s favorite phrases. He said it quite a few times in his various writings, always attributing it to others.

This evening I saw the Pinter play Old Times on Broadway, and was struck by how literally it adheres to this dictum. Three characters circle around each other in an intense yet abstracted emotional space, talking elliptically about their entangled romantic history.

It is very much a ghost story: Everything these characters are now is rooted in events that happened between them twenty years before — passion, betrayal, youthful intrigue.

The thought makes me think of old loves that I have had, and lost. The actual people are physically existent, on this planet, living their lives. But to me they are in some way ghosts, walking spectres of another person who was so very real and important in my life.

A lost love can seem as refracted and ephemeral as some ghostly vision spotted in a country graveyard on a moonless night. And it may be our fate, with the passage of time, to become each others’ ghosts.

Every love story is a ghost story.

This morning I had a nightmare. It startled me clean awake.

The experience, even now burned within my memory, was vivid, completely believable at the time, yet highly implausible in retrospect, as nightmares usually are. Even now I do not dare describe it, silence being my only totem against its worrisome power.

It is not all that often that our darkest demons rise up, emerging in suddenly crystaline form from the murky depths below, and announce their disturbing presence. So when they do, it is best to pay attention.

It turns out that I had had a very pleasant dream earlier in the night. Even now I remember thinking, while still asleep, that upon awakening I would recount this first dream for my amused friends.

But that was before the morning nightmare played its trump card, before I was forced to stare my darkest fears full in the face. After that, there was no room for pleasantries.

And yet, today during the day I found an odd sense of calm. I engaged in no self-destructive acts, no nagging doubts, no awkwardly missed opportunities for true communication.

It is as though the nightmare had burned me clean, leaving no tendrils of self-defeating thought within its wake. At least for now, I am stone cold sober, focused, alert, and well aware of the wolf lurking just beyond the campfire.

Perhaps this is the purpose of nightmares. We spend so much of our waking lives in blissful slumber. But like a hated yet always reliable old acquaintance, the nightmare comes when we need to be startled awake.

I love the fact that it is now definitively November, the month of autumnal weather, of pumpkins, of bright scarlet leaves, of winter threatening to encroach upon our lives, but not yet arrived. This seasonal space is delicious in its potential and possibility.

I had been struggling for months to get something working within a very popular and well written package of open source software. And I wasn’t getting anywhere.

It’s not that there was anything wrong with the software package. It’s more that it was more of a mismatch o goals: The package was built for chopping logs, and I was trying to perform delicate surgery.

Finally, a few days ago, I gave up trying to work within somebody else’s framework, and I just implemented everything I needed from the ground up.

Generally you are told that you are not supposed to do this, to “reinvent the wheel”, as it were.

Except that in this case the results were spectacularly successful. My stripped down implementation works incredibly well. And because I wrote it, I actually understand it. Which means that I know how to customize it in any way that might be needed.

It was as though I had opted to walk away from a sophisticated machine shop, and instead had chosen to work with a simple lump of clay.

It’s true that there are many things you can create with a high powered machine shop that you can’t make out of a lump of clay.

On the other hand, it’s also true that there are many things you can create with a simple lump of clay that cannot be fashioned with even the fanciest of machines.

Halloween is an appropriate time to talk about a potentially very scary topic: Possible future paths toward Artificial Intelligence.

All human and animal intelligence has evolved according to one principle: The fittest species survives. And this principle infuses every member of every species. Both collectively and as individuals, our most powerful instinct is to continue to stay alive.

So it stands to reason that as computers continue to increase in power, and artificial intelligence is therefore able to come ever closer to the level of richness and complexity that we associate with natural intelligence, there are at least two possible ways we can achieve “sentient” level AI.

One way is to evolve it the way natural intelligence has evolved: By some survival-optimizing fitness function. From a developmental perspective, this strategy has clear benefits.

For one thing, we know it works. All natural intelligence that we know of has come about as an optimization of survival fitness.

For another thing, it is a relatively easy path to success, compared to the alternatives. Genetic algorithms have the ability to optimize themselves. We don’t even need to completely know how they work in order to improve them. We just need to know how to iterate them.

The other way that AI can evolve is through explicit design. In this scenario, we figure out over time how to construct sentient level AI without recourse to a self-evolving survival optimization strategy.

This second path is much more difficult, because it requires a much greater level of explicit modeling. But it also has one very useful advantage.

Any AI that develops through survival optimizing iteration will probably value its own existence above anything else. And that includes us. If something goes wrong, that could be scary. We’re talking Skynet level scary.

Whereas AI that has not gone through this development process won’t have any intrinsic motivations. It will just be one more machine for us to use. And it won’t care if we switch it off, any more than a light switch cares if we switch it off.

I find that idea reassuring.

This evening, as it happens, I had dinner with Marvin Minsky and Nolan Bushnell.

Which should tell you everything you need to know.

If you have questions, feel free to send me an email, and we can discuss. If you don’t know who those people are, there’s probably not much to discuss. 🙂

I was inspired by the heroic undertaking of Boyhood to think about other dramatic uses for “extreme long form” production. As you may know, Richard Linklater filmed Boyhood over the course of 12 years. In the final film, we literally see actors grow up or grow old before our eyes.

In the last few years, many films and TV shows have dabbled in the concept of multiple parallel timelines. Groundhog Day, Sliding Doors, Fringe, The Butterfly Effect, Dr. Who, Time Cop, Source Code, Looper, The Man in the High Castle, these are but a few of many offerings based on the premise of multiple alternate realities proceeding in parallel.

Suppose we were to start a twelve year long film production with the express purpose of capturing all of those parallel realities as they progress? The result could be something truly new.

Imagine tuning into your favorite TV show every week and seeing the same actors progress through different multi-year narratives. One week they would be growing up or growing old in a comic universe. The next week in a thriller, or a horror story, or a RomCom.

You would see the same actors literally going through a large chunk of their lives every week. Except in each episode they would be living different lives.

Of course there would be a certain amount of risk involved. For example, if one of the actors were to die before the 12 years are up, their disappearance (and possible replacement) would be reflected simultaneously in every fictional parallel universe. And maybe that would be ok.

I would love to try something like this. Or perhaps, in another life, I already have. 😉

This evening I taught about splines.
When you start to interpolate lines
It turns out you get
A curving point set,
The basis of many designs.

Suppose I go from A to B
While you’re going from B to C
Then anyone who
Travels from me to you
Will move curvilinearly.

I really should show more reserve.
Dear reader, you do not deserve
To be plunged into math.
I have strayed from the path!
So sorry for throwing a curve.

The first time I saw the computer animated film Final Fantasy, the Spirits Within, when it came out in 2001, was on a night I was supposed to be going on a first date. Well, sort of.

I thought that was the night of our date, but I had gotten the day wrong. Our date was actually the following night.

Since this was in the pre-cellphone days, I wrongly assumed that my date had stood me up, so I bought myself a ticket and went to see the movie by myself.

And I hated it. I hated everything about it. In fact, I was appalled by it. The story made no sense and the computer animated characters were deep into the uncanny valley. For all the money up there on screen, it felt like a complete fail.

The following day I realized my scheduling mistake. In the end, I never told my date that I had already seen the movie. I just went ahead and watching it again with her, as though nothing had happened.

And this time, I really liked it! Because I’d already seen the film, I could now easily follow the convoluted plot. And now I knew to just ignore the clumsy character animation. Instead I focused on the beautiful backgrounds, and found myself on a spectacular ride through a fun and inventive world, filled with endless visual delights.

I don’t think it would have been possible for me to have had that experience the first time. And I don’t think I ever would have seen this film again, had fate not intervened.

It makes me wonder — how many wonderful experiences have I missed because I thought it’s only the first time that counts?