Ken's Blog

Today, via text message:

My friend John: “Did you hear about Oculus?”

Me: “Yep.”

My friend John: “It says something about VR, right?”

Me: “That it’s almost as trendy as thermostats?”

Today at least three times I had a premonition that I was about to say or do something that would cause more problems than it would solve.

In each case I couldn’t figure out what the problem was, so I went ahead and did it. And in each case, my premonition turned out to be correct.

So here’s the dilemma: In such situations, clearly something is being worked out by our subconscious mind, which then shouts out a warning to our conscious mind. Sadly, these warnings usually don’t come with an instruction manual.

Which can lead to much false interpretation. If we were to heed everything from our unconscious that felt like a warning, we might not get much done in life. Besides, at some point somebody might ask you “Why didn’t you do that?” And if your conscious mind has no answer, things can get pretty embarrassing.

I seriously doubt we’re ever going to get our conscious and unconscious minds to speak the same language. So how do we get them to communicate better?

Maybe this is one of the reasons to meditate, and to do other things that increase mindfulness. If we can rid our mind of some useless clutter, then we might be able to hear our unconscious more clearly, the next time it tries to tell us something.

This weekend I attended a workshop that contained a very impressive research talk by someone from Adobe. The speaker showed a picture of a little girl looking somewhat bemused. Then, using a second photograph of the same girl smiling, he demonstrated how to transform the first picture, so that the girl was now smiling.

This is harder than it might seem. The two photos were taken at different angles, with different lighting. Furthermore, to make the resulting picture work, the entire facial expression needed to be transformed, not just the mouth. For example, when we smile the shape of our lower eyelids changes. Despite all that, the algorithm got it right.

By convention, after each talk speakers took questions from the audience. Until that point, all of the questions at the workshop had been technical. But my question broke the pattern.

“After you add the smile,” I asked the speaker, “would you still call it a photograph?”

He seemed a little unprepared for the question. After a bit of thinking out loud, he said “I’d call it a Photoshopped photograph”. Which made sense, since Photoshop is an Adobe product.

But of course the issue is larger than that. Maybe there was a reason that little girl was unhappy. When we can change a facial expression in a photograph, we are rewriting history. And not in the obvious way that Stalin “disappeared” Trotsky and many others from official photos, but in a more subtle and perhaps more insidious way.

In the end it’s not really a question of technology. It’s a question of where we want to go as a society. Eventually technology will allow us to walk around seeing the entire world through a Photoshop lens, in real time. When that happens, what will we see? And what will we never see at all?

We all have the concept of the warm furry mammal, running between the legs of the doomed dinosaur, and replacing it for predominance upon this earth.

But we don’t generally bring this concept down to our own lives, day by day — even though we ourselves are the descendants of that warm furry mammal.

What if we could actually witness, on a cultural level, a translation from old media to new, from dinosaur to whatever. something profound and yet inevitable? Sometimes, if we are paying attention, we can see a societal evolution as it is happening.

Would we argue, would we put up a fight? Would we object to a paradigm shift out of our comfort zone? And if so, what exactly would we rail against?

I recently encountered an interesting take on what Fischer and Applin refer to as “Mixed, Dual and Blended Reality” — the phenomenon whereby people using various modern technologies may not be psychologically located where they are physically located.

Consider one familiar example: If you are crossing the street and talking obliviously on a cell phone, then your mind is having a pleasant chat with a friend while your neglected body, perhaps crossing against the light, has become a soft fleshy target for oncoming traffic.

I had mainly been thinking about such situations from the perspective of the pedestrian who, being psychologically absent, is in danger of serious injury or worse. I hadn’t really thought about it as thoroughly from the perspective of the driver.

Then yesterday a colleague — who often has occasion to drive through pedestrian-heavy intersections — told me of her unusual strategy for preventing oblivious pedestrians from wandering through red lights into the path of her moving vehicle. It’s a very simple strategy, really.

As she approaches an intersection where it looks as though people are about to cross against the light, she picks up her cellphone — which is actually switched off — and holds it to her ear, as though carrying on a conversation.

She reports that this works like a charm: Rather than cross against the light, people in the crosswalk, even if they themselves are on the phone, wait until her car has gone by.

This is certainly a form of dishonesty. On the other hand, everybody gets to go home alive.

Bret Victor gave a guest lecture today to a class I’m co-teaching with Hiroshi Ishii at the MIT Media Lab. As always, what Bret had to say was inspirational and highly thought provoking.

For me one of the highlights of the class was a spirited discussion between Bret and Xiao Xiao — one of Hiroshi’s Ph.D. students, and also a brilliant musician.

Bret had used The SIMS as an example of a simulation world that is deliberately stylized. As Will Wright has explained, the unreality in the look and behavior of the characters in this game is a key part of its design. This feeling of unreality creates a sense of mystery, which allows players to project their own stories and emotions onto the characters.

Xiao then pointed out that in fact character behavior in The SIMS goes beyond merely mysterious — SIMS characters often do things that no real human would ever do. In fact, their behavior can be at times downright alien. She posited that this feeling of the SIMS characters being “impossible” people helps to remind players that this is an alternate world, thereby increasing the sense of freedom and possibility.

Which leads to an intriguing question: Is there an “optimal” level of unreality in a virtual world, at which a sense of possibility is maximized? Science fiction plays with this edge all the time. If characters and stories are too weird and incomprehensible, then the reader can become lost. But until this point is reached, the experience of encountering strange beings and unfamiliar ways of thinking can be very mind expanding.

Which is, after all, one of the reasons we make art.

A friend posed a riddle to me recently: “What’s the difference between a chemist and a plumber?”

The answer I came up with was “A chemist ionizes, and a plumber unionizes.” Although, I added, the chemist also unionizes.

Turns out this was fairly close to the ‘right’ answer, which is, in its written form: “Ask them each to pronounce the word ‘unionize’.”

Yet if you explain the answer out loud, you need to say something like “The way they pronounce the word “un–Ionize.” If you say “The way they pronounce the word ‘unionize'”, a lot of people will just be confused and not get the joke at all.

After thinking about it for a bit more, I then sent my friend the following email: “On the other hand, whether it’s the chemist or the plumber who unionizes, the world still ends up with fewer free radicals.”

My new answer was kind of opposite to the first answer. Whereas the standard answer depends on sound, this one depends on deliberately ignoring sound — as though words have no pronunciation at all.

So here we have an example of humor that can exist only in written form. I wonder how common that is.

This evening we were discussing music, and the topic drifted to the wide range of styles one can find in different work by the same composer. And a kind of game occurred to me:

Find, for any given composer, his or her two most opposite works. For example, Mozart’s two most antipodal compositions might be Ein musikalischer Spaß and his Requiem Mass in D Minor.

Of course, this notion of antipodal work can be found in many realms of art, from painting to dance to sculpture to theatre and film. But if you get a good list of examples in music, there’s one thing you can do in particular that you can’t do in any other artistic field: You can make a totally cool high concept record album.

I mean, if somebody managed to choose the selections just right, and came out with the ultimate “Antipodal” music compilation, I’d buy it. Wouldn’t you?

But what should go on this album? I’m open to suggestions.

I seem to be blessed by friends who daily introduce me to many delightful, if slightly twisted, cultural influences. These introductions are far too numerous to list with any completeness, but I’ll mention just two that came up in the last day, to give you a sense of their collective wonderfulness.

One is the amazing Robert Askins play Hand to God, which I saw yesterday after I was told about it by not one but *two* friends. In addition to containing the best performance I have ever witnessed of explicit onstage sex between hand puppets (if you’ve only seen “Avenue Q”, you have no idea, trust me), it also contains one of the best lines I’ve heard in the theatre in years. After a guy has made a suspiciously aggressive homophobic remark, a gal tells him: “You are so far back in the closet, you’re in Narnia.”

Gosh, I wish I could write like that. 🙂

And for reasons that I cannot even begin to fully explain, I am endlessly in love with this YouTube video, a link to which was sent to me today by yet another friend: Vegan Black Metal Chef. I mean, how cool is that?

Today with little warning,
I think it was late morning
I was musing on technology,
Its effect on our psychology,
And my mind kept on returning
To a reverie concerning
Whether all this stuff is fated
To make us alienated.

Now that you and all your crowd
Have been wired to the cloud
I’m sure that’s got appeal
But is it even real?
With your texts and tweets and pokes
I mean, really, folks!
When you’ve become The Truman Show
Is that even human? No!

But the world is still revolving
And perhaps you are evolving
Not through your DNA
But in a cybernetic way
For all this techno-flurry
You needn’t really worry
In a twist somewhat Hegelian,
You’ve simply turned into an alien!