Ken's Blog

In today’s New York Times, William Grimes wrote an art review on ‘Marks of Genius,’ Works From the Bodleian, at the Morgan.

Most of the review was fun to read, but one sentence I found completely horrifying.

Speaking of Euclid’s “Elements” and Newton’s “Principia Mathematica”, and thinking back on his own failure to learn geometry and calculus, he remarked that these “immortal works, beautifully printed and bound, are, in the end, math books.”

I am sorry that Mr. Grimes had a bad experience in high school, but personal experiences of adolescent trauma have no place in a discussion of works of unsurpassed intellectual beauty and genius.

After all, if you were once beaten up in tenth grade by some angry Hassids, does that mean you should dismiss the work of Arthur Miller, because the great playwright was “in the end, a Jew”?

The U.S. House of Representatives Majority Leader Eric Cantor, one of the leading forces in the Republican party — and, because of his longevity, one of the most politically powerful — was unexpectedly defeated in his own party’s primary by an unknown Tea Party candidate.

Apparently he was insufficiently zealous in his portrayal of Barack Obama as an evil force intent on nothing less than the total destruction of America and our way of life.

I cannot resist the temptation to misquote Douglas Adams:

“There is a theory which states that if ever anyone discovers exactly what the Republican Party is for and why it is here, it will instantly disappear and be replaced by something even more bizarre and inexplicable.

There is another theory which states that this has already happened.”

Near the start of my career in computer graphics, I came up with some techniques that played with the boundary between order and chaos. It seems that people have found those techniques to be useful.

When it comes to visual stimuli, humans love order, and we also love chaos. But we especially like our signal and noise together, in just the right mix.

I wonder whether this principle can be extended to all human thought. Maybe we look at all things — politics, music, personal relationships — in terms of an optimum balance of order and chaos.

We may not always know how to find that balance, but we can generally feel it when we’ve hit the sweet spot. And perhaps our need to strike that balance drives much of our decision making.

When life feels too chaotic and out of control, we seek order. But when everything seems to be going well, with perhaps a bit too much clockwork precision, we might feel a powerful urge to create some chaos.

Who hasn’t had that urge at one time or another — just to mix it up a bit, to add a little noise?

I’ve been thinking about CC’s comments on my recent post about computers and artificial intelligence. And it brings up an interesting question in ethics:

Suppose we had every reason to believe, due to some unforeseen breakthrough in artificial intelligence research, that computers would, in our own lifetime, first reach and then far surpass our own intelligence (and here I mean “intelligence” in the human sense).

Would we have an ethical obligation to teach those emerging entities, to protect them, guide them, help them as they travel along their path? After all, in a very real sense we would be their parents.

Or would we have a greater obligation to ourselves, our own human kind? If we knew that in a few short decades their intelligence would be to ours as our intelligence is to that of a rat, would we try to block their development — or even their very existence?

One reason this is an intriguing question is that humans have come to highly value nature’s experiment in human intelligence. Naturally enough, we see our own intellectual capacity as a kind of pinnacle of evolution. So in one sense we might be inclined to see that experiment go as far as it can.

On the other hand, we might just decide “To hell with this — I’m not going to let my species get replaced by some machine.” That too would be a very human response. 🙂

Connections between people are tricky things. If you and I are friends, then who am I to you, and who are you to me?

Clearly my sense of you is vastly different from your experience within your own head. No matter how close we are, you remain — in my universe — a construct, a set of theories about who you might actually be.

Things get even more confusing in the case of a love relationship. There is so much more room for projection in a romantic entanglement, more yearning for the illusion that “you complete me”.

One great thing about merely being friends, rather than lovers, is that you generally don’t need to deal with that extra layer of confusion. Of course, you also miss out on a lot of fun. 🙂

So how can we ever be sure that we know another person — I mean the real other person, not the construct that our own mind creates around them?

Maybe we can’t, and maybe that is what makes it all so interesting.

I was delighted to see, at this evening’s Tony Awards, Meredith Wilson’s The Music Man finally recognized as an early progenitor of rap music. Hugh Jackman brought out L.L. Cool Jay and T.I. to join him in rapping “Rock Island”, the brilliant opening number of Wilson’s masterpiece.

The moment was all the more sweet when you consider Wilson’s full history. More than ninety years ago he was a member of John Philip Sousa’s band, playing a style of music that couldn’t be further in our collective cultural consciousness from the edgy streetwise milieu of rap. Which makes the achievement of “Rock Island” — first widely heard in 1957 — all the more impressive.

Of course Meredith Wilson’s association with edgy modern popular music long predates this year’s Tony awards. In 1963 — more than half a century ago — the most famous rock band of them all, the Beatles, recorded “Till There was You”, also from The Music Man.

We have always had a vague sense in American culture that rap is the successor to rock and roll. It’s fascinating that Wilson’s music has managed to connect them together, more than half a century apart in time, after having first emerged out of the era of silent movies.

And there is at least one more connection here between rap and the era of classic rock: In order to use “Rock Island” in this evening’s Tony Awards broadcast, the show’s producers would have needed permission from the person who has long held the rights to Meredith Wilson’s entire catalog.

That would be none other than Sir Paul McCartney.

I was having a discussion with a friend today about the future of artificial intelligence. My friend was excited about the prospect of computers evolving to human-like intelligence and beyond.

I said that this was a subject which never really interested me. And that’s not because I am afraid of Skynet-like nightmare scenarios, where the moment the computers achieve sentience they try to wipe us out.

But rather, I simply don’t think of a computer — or a computer network — as a fellow being, the way I think of a person, or a dog or an elephant as a fellow being. I’ve never been drawn to the entire subject of trying to reverse engineer whatever it is that allows us to possess consciousness.

I think of the computer as a tool, like a piano or a screwdriver. It’s something we humans use to express ourselves, to communicate with each other, or to help make things happen that we want to happen in the world.

I am indeed interested in making a computer appear to convey the appearance of intelligence, but this is really a form of puppetry — clearly not at all what people mean when they talk about computers becoming intelligent.

I don’t think this is an intellectual disagreement, but rather a difference of temperament. There are those who wish to create life itself. And then there are those like me, who simply want to put on a good puppet show.

I was watching “House of Cards” the other day when Kevin Spacey’s character said — as an aside to the audience, in full creepy Richard III mode — what a ridiculous thing slavery was.

I was brought up short by this. In 2014, even the most despicable and morally reprehensible character is happy to disavow the concept of slavery. That’s how far we have come in the last century and a half.

Which got me thinking. In another hundred and fifty years, what widely accepted social/economic norm of today will seem equally foreign and repugnant? I don’t know about you, but here’s my candidate:

In 2164 people will be puzzled and amazed that the children of today who happen to be born into poor families are not given the same respect, nor guaranteed the same opportunities, as the children of the rich. Not only will this custom of ours be seen as cruel and capricious, but it will seen as bizarrely self-destructive.

After all, what nation in its right mind — particularly a nation that is in economic competition with other nations — would not throw everything it can into building up the potential of its children, its future citizens? To do anything less is, in the long run, an act of economic self-immolation.

People in 2164 will probably regard us much the way we regard people who advocated slavery in the early nineteenth century: With bemused horror, mixed with a sense of relief that civilization has advanced beyond such a state of savagery.

In recent years I’ve caught on to a curious phenomenon in my own psychological make-up: I can’t stay still for long.

I need to be doing something, and if I don’t find anything useful and productive to do, I end up doing something self-destructive. Needless to say, the former generally works out better than the latter.

It’s as though there is a need within me to expend energy, and which doesn’t care a fig just how that energy is spent.

I’ve learned to deal with this phenomenon by maintaining a handy list of useful and productive things to do. I do this not only because it is useful and productive, but also because it keeps me off the streets and out of trouble.

The good thing is that once I get into one of those “virtuous” phases of keeping it all together — exercising, eating right, not indulging in bad habits — everything seems to flow. The work gets better, pesky little chores seem much easier to get out of the way, and my mood becomes a lot more upbeat and untroubled.

Those of you who have ever gone waterskiing will be familiar with the general idea: It can be tricky to get up on those skis. But once you manage to do that, it’s not so hard to keep your balance.

And it’s also kind of fun.

In recent times I have gotten used to ordering pretty much everything on Amazon, from books to bookshelves to coffee makers, blenders, razor blades, magnets, and pretty much anything you can think of. It’s hard to beat the convenience of having my address already in the system, and the free shipping you get with Amazon Prime.

But in these last few weeks, as I’ve become aware of Amazon’s strong-arm tactics in its negotiations with book publisher Hachette, I haven’t ordered anything from Amazon. I don’t think there was a point where I made a conscious decision to do this — it just sort of snuck up on me.

At some point I realized that it felt unpleasant to give my business to a corporate giant while it was ostentatiously bullying a much smaller company. Yes, I know that corporations are fundamentally amoral self-serving entities. But I could always take comfort in the balance of power in that jungle — the fact that competition dictated some approximation, however crude, to a level playing field.

But this was different. Amazon is vastly larger and more powerful than Hachette. There is no parity in this particular fight — I can feel the sense of bullying in my gut.

Amazon claims that it is just trying to get the lowest possible price for its customers, but I find that argument problematic. To me, a healthy and viable marketplace is more important than pushing for the lowest possible price.

I’m not closing my Amazon account. I’m simply waiting them out. At some point I suspect Amazon will realize that its entire customer base is watching, and that many of us are not amused.