Ken's Blog

Have you ever thought
That all of this has been just
Someone else’s dream.

I got a little pushback from someone whose opinion I respect, about yesterday’s post. The specific objection was to my implication that it could be possible to separate one’s physical body from one’s individual identity.

I had an experience recently that suggests my friend might very well be right. At the ACM/SIGGRAPH conference the other week I tried out the “Real Virtuality” demo, which was great fun, extremely well done, and highly thought provoking.

It’s a shared virtual reality experience for two people. You each put on a VR rig consisting of a backpack, a headset, and markers for your wrists and ankles. Then you walk around together in a virtual room, where you each “see” the other as a computer graphic character.

One of the characters is male, the other female. I went into the experience with another guy, and when asked, I immediately volunteered to be the female. After all, if you’re going to be virtual, why not be as virtual as possible?

After donning the rig, I looked down to discover that I had very impressive breasts — a personal first for me. And to my surprise, the female hips and thighs on my avatar were significantly more narrow than my own male thighs. Perhaps, for a female user, this avatar was meant to be aspirational.

But here’s the thing: At no time did it feel as though I was anything other than myself. I always felt like I was just me, a man wearing a woman costume.

So maybe my friend is right. We continue to carry our true bodies around with us in our minds, even when we happen to find ourselves in somebody else’s body.

This evening, taking the subway back from a trip to see someone off at JFK airport, I was very aware of the energies of the people around me. Not so much their appearance, but their energies.

Most people were simply tired, trying to pull deep into their psychic casings, just wanting the ride to be over so they could move on to something they might find more pleasant and meaningful.

Some people — particularly young people — were thrumming with wild crazy energy, an overflowing sense of music and pounding beat and euphoric party time fever. This second group of people was clearly freaking out the first group.

And then there were the loners with strange energy. Maybe down on their luck, maybe schizophrenic, or maybe just endlessly exploring some private planet of their own. There was no need to look at them to feel it. You knew what was going on the moment they entered the subway car.

As I think of the possibilities of future reality — of some new technology or other enabling us to project our personalities into the world and into the air between us with a sense of visceral presence — I think of this subway ride.

We may one day free ourselves from the tyranny of our physical selves, but that’s the least important part of it all, isn’t it?

You can ditch your appearance, your physique, hell, even your body, but you cannot ditch yourself. Because, as old BB memorably said: “No matter where you go, there you are.”

Yes, I know, I’m not supposed to write things like that in public. Unless I’m doing the whole YouTube anonymous trolling thing, and then apparently it’s ok.

But please, let me explain myself.

I have just watched the 1994 indie Australian film “Muriel’s Wedding” on Netflix. This movie breaks many rules. In fact, I think it breaks all the rules. Yet it all works, in a way that Hollywood films, with their rigid layers of studio oversight, never could.

Whatever genius drug writer/director P.J. Hogan was on when he made this film, I hope that somewhere there is a factory full of it, because we really need more of this stuff.

And Toni Colette, who was unknown at the time, is breathtaking. I can’t really think of any other cinematic performance to compare it to.

Just the ending alone, which I love to death, would get the movie nixed by any Hollywood studio executive. In my more ambitious moments, I like to think that one day I could make a film this completely brave and pitch perfect and insane.

That’s probably not going to happen. But what probably is going to happen is that a few of you will read this post, watch this film, and know exactly what I’m talking about.

Recently I have found it convenient, when saying why I like the term “Future Reality” to describe our research focus, to talk about shoes. Specifically, future shoes.

Imagine you could travel back in time to, say, the year 1863. As PhilH points out, you can’t actually do this, for very sound relativistic reasons. After all, if you were to attempt such a foolish thing, Novikov consistency dictates that our entire timeline would immediately collapse down to a zero probability event, and *poof*, we’d all be toast.

Fortunately we are just doing a thought experiment here, so you’re not actually putting yourself, all your loved ones, and the entire Universe itself at risk by reading this.

Anyway, where was I?

Oh right, shoes. In our hypothetical thought experiment, you set your Wayback Machine to 152 years ago, because you’d like to discuss some finer points of the Emancipation Proclamation with Abraham Lincoln. To your surprise, as soon as he meets you the 16th president of the United States looks down at your feet and says “Hey, where did you get those shoes?”

At this point you realize that the shoes on your feet are impossible objects. They rely on materials, methods of manufacture and assembly, and global shipping practices that will not exist for a very long time. So to Lincoln, they’re going to look like future shoes — because they are.

But to you, they’re just shoes. And that’s the point.

In our research we are not interested in studying fantasy worlds where you sit in your chair holding a game controller and pretend to travel at warp speed to far off galaxies while shooting mutant space zombies out of the sky. Not that there’s anything wrong with that.

Rather, we are interested in experiences that at some point in the future will be so ordinary that nobody will even think about them — as ordinary as the shoes on your feet.

What Abraham Lincoln might once have called future shoes, we now just call shoes.

Likewise, future reality may seem exotic now. But one day, we will just call it reality.

Daniel looked at the sign on the door. “For use by Entomology faculty and students”. That seemed about right. After all, he was here at the university to study a particular species of insect. Although it was not yet clear what that species was.

He opened up the laptop computer, plugged into the power socket, and got down to work. There were so many possibilities. It should be possible to determine species within Lepidoptera, just from larval markings. There was tremendous variety, but the patterns were pretty clear. He already knew Brock and Kaufman practically by heart, and having a live specimen to work from should make everything much easier.

He was so immersed that he didn’t hear the door open.

“What are you doing here?” The woman looked more bemused than anything else.

“I’m researching butterflies.”

“Of course you are,” she said with a kind smile. “I’m afraid this room is for faculty and students.”

“I’m a student,” he said. Daniel thought that should be obvious. Every kid he knew was a student.

“I see,” she frowned thoughtfully for a moment, and then left. Which was just as well. The woman had seemed nice, but he had a lot of work to do.

Coming home, after many weeks away, I recognize so much that is familiar. “Ah yes,” I tell myself, “this is my coffee, this is my New York Times in the morning.” There are so many familiar touchstones, from the walk along Washington Square North to the studied indifference of fellow New Yorkers, which was long ago raised to a high art.

And yet.

And yet, I find myself both here and not here, torn between the New Yorker I was six weeks ago, and the person I have become since then. My mind is filled with new people, new faces, new ideas and possibilities.

I will carry all this new experience within me, in my daily life here. But perhaps this time, after having gone away and come back, finding that my soul has been touched in transformational ways, I can no longer simply say “I am a New Yorker”.

Perhaps it would be more accurate to say “There is much that is New York within me. But there is more besides.”

When we talk to each other, we are using natural language. One of the qualities of natural language is that it is “naturally learnable” — it doesn’t need to be explicitly taught. Nearly 100% of children born into any society will, in the first seven or so years of life, master the grammar, and much of the vocabulary, of that society’s verbal speech.

Written language is something else entirely. Although it might seem to many of us to be essentially the same as verbal speech, it is not naturally learnable. Very few children will spontaneously learn to read and write. Rather, it is a skill that generally needs to be explicitly taught.

Our lab’s research has recently advanced to the point where we can put people into a shared simulation of social “future reality”. We can now (sort of) simulate those futuristic contact lenses which will allow us to graphically augment gesture: Other people will be able to see the shapes that you make in the air with your hands.

So it may at last be possible to find empirical answers to a question I’ve been thinking about for the last seven years or so: Will the shapes that we make in the air end up being more like natural language, or more like written language?

In other words, will the resulting visually enhanced speech evolve toward something that every child will learn, in the normal course of their growth and development? Or will will it be something that needs to be explicitly taught, the way that written language needs to be explicitly taught?

I strongly suspect that it will be a bit of both. In any case, it will be fun to do the research and see what happens.

One day, after we live in a world where cybernetic information from the cloud is superimposed on our view of other people, somebody is going to get the bright idea to superimpose mood and personality information on top of our view of other people.

There are good things and bad things about this. Among the good things, such a capability could provide a useful caution. If somebody has a short temper, or is sensitive to certain topics, or is just coming out of a bad encounter that could throw them off their game, you might be able to get fair warning, and adjust accordingly how you interact with that person.

Among the bad things, this sort of capability is prone to social media hacking. Your view of somebody might become colored by some person or group of people who dislike them, and are therefore prone to providing an unfairly negative or otherwise biased view of them.

And then of course there is the question of privacy.

I am quite confident that the sort of capability I am describing will be possible sometime in the near future. But I am not at all sure that it is something that will make our world a better place. Maybe we will end up collectively deciding to opt out of this particular superpower.

I had a conversation today on the subject of styles of teaching. When you are trying to impart some knowledge or understanding to a group of people, there are various strategies you can use.

One way to approach the task is what might be called the “mountaintop” strategy. In this approach, you are essentially standing on top of a mountain, and your message is aspirational: “If you pay attention, work hard, and be the best you can be, then you might some day be able to reach the height that I have reached.”

Another way to approach it is what might be called the “mountain climber” strategy. In this approach, you stand next to the student, while look up at the mountain. Essentially you are saying “Hey, this sure is a tall mountain. I’m going to try to climb it. Want to try it with me?”

There are advantages to both strategies, and each will work better for a particular kind of student. But I think it’s also true that each will work better for a particular kind of teacher.

For me, the second strategy works better as a teaching strategy, because it matches my personality. For one thing, I really like climbing mountains, especially old favorites that I have visited before. For another thing, when I go mountain climbing, I very much enjoy having company.