Ken's Blog

Have you ever enjoyed a novel so much that you found yourself feeling sad at the realization that at some point it would be over?

I’m having exactly that experience right now reading Ernest Cline’s “Ready Player One”. I was reading it on the subway today, laughing out loud at inappropriate times (people tend to get nervous when you laugh out loud on the subway), when some fool pulled the emergency brake cord.

When that happens, the rules say that a conductor needs to walk completely around the train, doing a proper inspection, before the train can start again. All of the other passengers sighed stoically, doing their best to wait it out. I must say they were all good sports about it.

But I wasn’t bothered at all. I was only too happy to be getting another twenty minutes or so to just sit there, undisturbed, while I read a little more of Cline’s fabulous book.

I just hope the other riders, trapped in that car with no way out, were not too made too nervous about the grinning madman in their midst, gleefully cackling aloud at random intervals.

If you work for a company, the bottom line pretty much comes down to market opportunity. Economic sustainability requires you to ask yourself what you can make that is of value, where “value” is defined by what people are willing to pay for.

But when you do university research, the question may be rather different. Often you ask yourself what has future value. That is, what will be of value to people ten or twenty years from now?

But then there is a second question: Of all the things you can work on that have future value, which of them have no current value? In other words, what might be valuable to people in ten or twenty years, but isn’t something people are ready to pay for now.

And those are often the things you should work on, because they aren’t being worked on by Google, Microsoft, Facebook, Sony, Amazon, Adobe or Apple. Those companies generally cannot afford to spend their time working on things that won’t be able to pay for themselves for another twenty years.

So in some sense, while corporations are in the business of looking for where the market is, academic researchers are often in the business of looking for where the market isn’t. And when we find an exciting antimarket opportunity — something that is likely to be a hot new product in about twenty years or so — we know we’ve come to the right place.

Evolution doesn’t usually result in mechanisms that do only one thing well. Rather, survival over multiple generations depends on flexibility. Macro-evolution produces protean toolkits, from which micro-evolution selects different tools as environments change.

The brain is by far the most protean and semantically complex object we have yet encountered, and it is all about adaptability. Humans happen to have physically evolved in a particular way, but that doesn’t mean our brains are limited to inhabiting these particular bodies. If evolution is any guide, human brains should be capable of inhabiting some much larger class of possible bodies.

Some body configurations might make more sense to our human brain than others. We might not do all that well as a 1000 tentacled hydra, but other bodily features might seem perfectly natural and learnable, such as functioning wings to fly with, teleportation, seeing through walls, moving objects at a distance, and perhaps new forms of natural language, or finding our way through a four dimensional world.

We don’t exactly know what sorts of possible bodies our brains would be able to inhabit, but trying on different bodies in virtual reality might be a great way to start asking that question.

We now know that the people of around 40,000 years ago that are commonly known as Cro-Magnon were, genetically, human. Yet we know relatively little about their culture.

We have learned from the physical record that they buried their dead, that they practiced decorative arts, and perhaps that they played music. Their physiognomy indicates a fully formed capability for speech.

I wonder, thinking about those people from so long ago, what they would make of us, and we of them, were we to encounter each other. When I see busy New Yorkers walking down the street, dressed in their fashionable clothes, obliviously checking their texts, I cannot help but think that perhaps the differences are superficial.

We are, I suspect, just a shadow’s distance away from who we were 40,000 years ago. Our brains, our bodies, our emotions, our need for love, for laughter and connection, there is a good chance that these have not changed one whit.

As we boldly stride forth into the future, hoping to design shiny new media for the human of tomorrow, it might be good to keep this in mind.

It has been pointed out many times that movies are somewhat like dreams. They contain sudden shifts in time and place, impossible points of view, and a sort of eerily voyeuristic quality in which you feel present yet not present at the same time.

Of course there are many differences between a film and a dream. For one thing, dreams don’t have frames. There is no rectangle around the outside of a dream to delineate its boundaries. When you dream, you are completely inside the dream world. Wherever you look, the dream surrounds you.

Which might be one reason so many people are embracing virtual reality, now that it finally appears to be ready for practical wide-spread deployment. We all dream. As far as we can tell, people always have. Dreaming is one of the deepest traits we share with our fellow humans.

Perhaps the tug of fascination felt by so many toward virtual reality not is not the pull of the new or exotic, but of the deeply familiar.

Sally’s comment on my post yesterday raised an important point. The wonderful conversation I had yesterday was not so much characterized by talking, as it was by listening.

It was one of those conversations that consisted of each of us trying to clear our minds entirely of outside thoughts and distractions, listening very intently to what the other person was trying to say next, and then making sure that our own reply was a response to what they had actually said.

This is not something that I can do effortlessly. I need to focus completely to do it properly, and even then I don’t always get it right. But I usually know when I am getting it wrong, because the element of surprise is missing.

To paraphrase Alan Swann: “Talking is easy, listening is hard.” If you are talking to somebody, and you are not at all surprised by what they say in return, then there is a good chance that you haven’t really heard them.

Anyone who has played the game The SIMS is familiar with those little bubbles floating over the heads of characters in the game, showing their energy level, happiness, fatigue, hunger, and various other mental statistics. Eventually, if technology progresses in certain directions, we might be able to see similar bubbles floating over the heads of people in the real world.

But I’m thinking today about something a little less obvious. I spent several hours today in deep conversation with someone who always gives me energy. After our discussions, I generally feel wonderful — more open, more aware, more engaged in the human condition, basically more alive.

We all know people whose presence increases our mental and emotional energy, and other people who have the opposite effect. Given that we each only get a certain number of days to live on this planet, clearly a good general rule is to spend a lot of time with that first group of people, and and not so much with the second group.

Perhaps, as machine learning algorithms continue to advance, we might one day see bubbles over the heads of other people telling us how much energy we would give each other. In the long run, these little floating “cheat sheets” might help us each to live fuller and deeper lives.

On the other hand, maybe none of this is necessary. Sometimes I know, within the first second after meeting someone, which category they will fall into. And I suspect I would get it right pretty much all the time if I learned to listen better to my inner voice.

And that’s probably not something I need a computer for.

Having been required to navigate several awkward interpersonal encounters in the last few weeks, I think I can distill, into a few words, an appropriate response to such conflicts:

If the disagreement hinges on the other party asking you to compromise your deeply held principles, then never apologize. This is very important.

If the disagreement does not involve any compromise of your deeply held principles, then give in immediately, accept blame, apologize profusely. Send flowers and chocolate.

The questions I’ve been asking the last two days were intended to get at something quite specific: The evolving relationship between advancing media technology and our experience of reality.

For a very long time, we didn’t need to think too much about the choice between “media” and “reality”. They were clearly different from each other in so many ways. Reading a novel is very different from making love to one’s partner. Each of these experiences brings something to your life that the other clearly does not.

For the first half century of the computer age, interactive media was, on a visceral level, no match for reality itself. The touch or caress of another human being, the deep emotions shared when two people look into each others’ eyes, there were the province of reality.

Sure, we would play our video games, watch our high definition movies, immerse ourselves in one cyber-enabled fantasy or another, but at the end of the day, we understood that it was all make believe. The real human being lying right next to us has the power to touch our souls that goes beyond the reach of mere technology.

But what if we are nearing a cusp? What if the intensely vivid quality once reserved for physical reality begins to seep into virtual shared experience? I’m not saying that this will happen any time soon, but I suspect that it may well happen in our life times.

And when it does, we may need to rethink a lot of our assumptions.

Suppose we start from the point Sharon made yesterday in her comment, and iterate from there:

Suppose you could wander freely throughout the world, with no restrictions on you at all, in the company of just one companion, whom you really like. The two of you would be totally free to explore the world, but without other people.

In the other extreme, suppose the two of you spent your entire life in a room together. Your interactions with other people would be virtual, pure exchanges of information. You both could have a great variety of friends, unlimited social connections, unbounded intellectual stimulation. But all from within that room.

If you had to choose one of these scenarios, which would you choose?