Ken’s Blog

I grew up not far from a little town named “Grandview”. So when I saw the Will Wellman film Magic Town, which takes place in a town of the same name, it felt sort of funny, as though the events in the movie were happening right next door.

Something similar happened when I saw the film Pleasantville, since I used to live pretty much within walking distance of a real town called Pleasantville.

And now the TV show American Horror Story: Asylum takes place in a placed called Briarcliff Manor. I used to leave in a real place called Briarcliff Manor (which is not far, it turns out, from the real Pleasantville).

This sort of thing happens a lot. My best friend when I was six years old was named Salvatore Romano. So when a character named Salvatore Romano showed up in Mad Men, I had a moment.

The rational part of my mind dismisses all this as coincidence. But there is another part of my mind, the wild romantic part inherited from my childhood self, which on some level believes The Purple Rose of Cairo and The Truman Show are documentaries. That part of me is paying close attention.

I’ve just been doing a little experiment: I’ve spent the last ten days not having anything alcoholic to drink. It’s not that I’m against people drinking (unless of course you are one of those people who cannot handle alcohol, in which case it is essentially poison). It’s more that I was curious what the effect would be on my mood, my sleep patterns, and my general feeling of well being.

A bit to my surprise, the result has been dramatic. I’ve been sleeping better, feeling more calm and relaxed, and generally in better spirits all through the day.

I was visiting friends this weekend where there was magnificent scotch to be had, and as part of my experiment I demurred. I love the taste of a good scotch, but my reasoning is that I can always indulge after my experiment has ended, and it’s not as though good scotch is vanishing from the planet any time soon.

But the real surprise was what happened when somebody offered me some perfectly good white wine. My immediate feeling upon seeing the wine was something in my gut pulling away. It was as though my body remembers the negative effects of drinking white wine, but not the positive ones.

I suspect that the next time I drink, whenever that is, the rush from all that alcohol metabolizing into blood sugar will reset some primordial switches, and I will again feel the familiar pull. But at least for now, my mind and body are having a lovely and quite enjoyable vacation.

Today I was telling my friend Andy that I found it interesting how both the political left and the political right in this country have their respective “pro-life” contingencies. For the left the issues include animal rights and opposition to the death penalty. For the right the issue is opposition to abortion. Although they might agree on little else, both contingents predicate their argument on a premise that “life is precious”.

Andy then pointed out to me that these positions map quite well into contrasting opinions about Patriarchy: The political right are “hunters”, for whom the traditional concerns of men are predominant. The political left are “gatherers”, for whom the traditional concerns of women are more important.

Hunters want men to have more of a say in the progeny of women they impregnate, whereas gatherers might think this assertion intrudes on a woman’s own judgment as to the best time to bring a child into the world.

Hunters might see the killing of animals for food as essential, whereas gatherers might be more inclined to view it as unnecessary violence.

Hunters might tend to see the death penalty as a necessary part of patriarchal justice, whereas gatherers might perceive it as the unwarranted triumph of vengeance over respect for life.

Of course where there is an ideal, there is often a symbol. To the hunter, the ultimate symbol is the gun. This object does not merely represent the hunter’s power over life and death; it also serves as a useful proxy for another object of vaguely similarly shape that is not usually brandished in polite company.

The gatherer’s response to both objects, and their frequent use as symbols of power, can be remarkably similar: “Put that thing away”.

I was having a conversation with some friends today about the future of Artificial Intelligence and robots. As you probably know, A.I. pervades our lives. Heuristic algorithms run our cars, our homes, and every internet search we do. Mostly these algorithms work behind the scenes, rather than being embodied by an old-fashioned robot with a face. Occasionally something like Apple’s Siri is used as a front-end puppet, so that we can have the entertainment value of “talking with a robot”.

Whether or not this stuff ends up being seen in anthropomorphic embodiments, or manifests mainly as anonymous software lurking in cyberspace, I posited that there is a key question here — one to which we do not yet know the answer.

The question is: will we ever develop A.I. that can solve novel and unexpected problems with something like the facility possessed by humans (and some other species as well). This is precisely what is missing from today’s leading examples of A.I., from Watson to Google Search — the ability to switch contexts, to understand and deal with a radically novel problem, to put together apparently unrelated clues and find a solution within a completely new solution space.

If we do ever manage to forge machines that can cross that chasm of capability, then I think the interesting questions will start. Because at that point our machines might really begin to be our friends or enemies. And then we can even start worrying about SkyNet. 🙂

I have become so used to the compression, the noise, the hectic pace of the big city and its environs, that it can be easy to forget the pervasive effect it has. If you live every moment inside of a pressure cooker, you can forget you are in a pressure cooker.

But now I am visiting friends, in a house in the woods outside of Woodstock. There is nothing around but beautiful mountains, wooded nature, the sky and the stars. There is quiet here, a kind of deep blanket of silence I never hear in the city.

I can still feel the bustle, the agitation, of the city inside me. Even after leaving such a place, that agitation stays with you for a while. But I suspect this will fade, like a vibration that only dies away slowly. The still night air, these old and silent mountains, they just need a little time to work their magic.

And I am feeling very open to magic.

Yesterday a colleague who is quite respected in the field of computer/user interfaces was giving a technical talk, and happened to mention some work of the great eighteenth century Swiss mathematician Leonhard Euler.

Until that moment, I had always assumed that there are two kinds of people in the world: People who have simply never heard of Euler, and people who revere him and his influential work. But suddenly I realized that there is a third category.

For my colleague had pronounced the great mathematician’s name as “Yoo-ler”, whereas the proper pronunciation sounds more like “Oiler”. So here was someone who knew about Euler, and was even properly citing his work, but apparently had never before heard the great man’s name spoken aloud.

There should be a word for this phenomenon — getting the work right but pronouncing the name wrong. I vote for “eulergy”.

It’s a cool word, isn’t it? Now I just need to figure out the right way to pronounce it…

In 1962 John D. MacDonald wrote a wonderful science fiction novel called “The Girl, the Gold Watch & Everything”, which was later made into a TV movie. The premise was simple and elegant: A young man inherits from his millionaire uncle nothing but a gold watch. But it turns out that the watch has the ability to freeze time — its bearer can inhabit the space between one instant and the next, doing (and changing) whatever he wants in the interval.

Obviously this is an enormous super power. The novel contains comedy and adventure, good guys and bad guys, a love story and thrilling chases, but much of the fun simply derives from observing the young man as he gradually figures out just how much power he really has.

Yet as Lord Acton observed, “Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.” Suppose (suspending disbelief for a moment) that you really had such a watch. Would it be possible to continue making ethical choices, to avoid over the long run becoming corrupted by the possession of such power?

Thinking more generally about this, I wonder whether we can rank any given super power by its tendency to corrupt its possessor. Consider invisibility, super-strength, teleportation, control over time, mind-reading, immortality, and all the other power-ups in the D.C. and Marvel canon. In ethical terms, just how much self-control does each demand?

After all, the only difference in the superhero universe between a “good guy” and a “bad guy” is whether or not they have become seduced by their own power.

Since I mentioned the word “crowdsourcing” in a post a few days ago, maybe this is a good time to talk about it a bit. The basic concept behind crowdsourcing — solving a substantial intellectual problem by asking a large amorphous group of people to contribute — is quite old, dating at least back to the six million volunteer contributed submissions by the citizenry to the Oxford English Dictionary starting in 1857.

But suppose we restrict the term “crowdsourcing” to refer only to internet-enabled collaborations. Notable examples include the SETI project and, Mechanical Turk, and, more recently, Foldit.

But I would argue that the granddaddy of them all is the Web itself. The thing that Ted Nelson hated most about Tim Berners Lee’s version of the Web was its haphazardness. Rather than orderly two-way links (as in Nelson’s original Xanadu concept), Berners-Lee allowed just for one-way links, with no enforcement policy whatsoever — a link could simply go nowhere. If you clicked on such a link, you would be told by your browser that the page does not exist (and you still are to this day).

But that, it turned out, was precisely the strength of Berners-Lee’s concept. Any schmo could put up a web page and start adding links to any other web page. With nobody overseeing the process, people just organized things for themselves. Ordinary members of public became the weavers of a virally expanding enterprise of Web-building.

You could say that the creation of the Web itself was the first internet crowdsourcing project.

Fast-forward, if you will, to some time in the hypothetical future when our brains have been properly scanned and downloaded, and your mind will find itself physically existing as bits, rather than atoms.

Admittedly this future might never come to pass, but it’s certainly a plausible thing to think about — even with brains made of mere atoms, as they still are in these primitive times.

What I’m wondering is what place the “mind’s body” will have in such a reality. People who meditate, who get proper sleep and exercise, tend (on the average) to have a significantly more calm, alert and rested state than people who put their bodies through hell.

Does this mean that in our cybernetic far-future we will need to maintain virtual bodies? Will our mental health be improved by thirty minutes a day of virtual yoga? And what about sleep? Will there still be such a thing as sleep?

I find myself pondering the mental state of some digital entity thinking back on when he had been human. Would he miss his body? Or would that body have been so perfectly re-created in his mind that he wouldn’t even notice it was gone?

These are weighty questions, puzzling and vexatious. If I were that digital entity, I’d be tempted to pour myself a stiff virtual drink.

Today at the UIST conference (User Interfaces and Software Technology) Andrew Cross, Edward Cutrell and William Thies from Microsoft Research India presented a really neat idea — using a single camera to look at people holding up paper containing Augmented Reality tags in order to inexpensively conduct a poll of hundreds of people at once. The technology can also be used to enable truly affordable class polling of students in India.

At one point, to demonstrate their technology they asked three questions. Whoever got all three right would get a present. I really love these questions, so I will share them with you:

(1) What was the original Mechanical Turk for? (A) To predict the weather; (B) To play chess; (C) To do magic tricks; (D) To multiply large numbers.

(2) Where did the word “crowdsourcing” first appear? (A) At the SIGCHI conference; (B) At the UIST conference; (C) in Wired magazine; (D) In the New York Times.

(3) Which of the following was not sent into space with Voyager I? (A) The sound of a wild dog; (B) A one hour recording of a brain wave pattern; (C) A photo of Boston; (D) A schematic of the Cray supercomputer.

I won’t give any of these away just yet, since you might want a chance to answer them. If you’re going to try, do it it without using a search engine or other reference.