Ken's Blog

The other day I suggested that language might evolve in a more gestural direction, once augmented reality allows us to create visual artifacts “in the air” during face to face conversation.

It is unlikely that we will be able to come up with such natural languages merely by thinking about them. After all, the evolution of natural language is, by definition, a process that happens naturally, through actual use — and mainly through actual use by children.

On the other hand, there is a place for artificial language creation in the process. For example, Esperanto is not a natural language. In fact, there is empirical evidence that when children are taught Esperanto, they proceed to spontaneously “fix” it, converting this artificially designed language into dialects that are more like true natural language.

Yet other empirical studies have shown that when children are exposed to Esperanto, their facility for acquiring and understanding languages can improve. Which suggests that starting out by creating an Esperanto for augmented gestural reality would not be a complete waste of time.

After all, you’ve got to start somewhere.

This evening I saw yet another production of “Twelfth Night”, one of my favorite of the bard’s plays. This was the Pig Theatre’s rollicking over-the-top production, which focused mainly on the laughs and absurdities, in contrast to the Royal Shakespeare Company version recently on Broadway, which went deeper and more serious.

After seeing this production you may end up remembering Malvolio and Feste the fool. Yet in the RSC production, what you can’t get out of your head is the astonishing soulful performance of Mark Rylance as Olivia.

This contrast made me think back on all the productions I’ve seen of this play through the years, and I found myself mentally assembling an all star cast, picking and choosing from each production to create a dream team. Sort of like what people do with baseball: “What if Babe Ruth and Mickey Mantle were on the same team…”

So what would be my “Twelfth Night” dream cast? Certainly Mark Rylance as Olivia. And perhaps Marisa Tomei as Viola from a “Shakespeare in the Park” production. To me the definitive Sir Toby Belch was Fred Gwynne (known to a generation as Herman Munster) in a production from quite a few years back. His scene stealing performance as the fabulously drunken nobleman showed there was a lot more to this actor than TV had allowed him to reveal.

Perhaps one day technology will advance to the point where we can simulate all of these great actors onstage together, in a dream production. Until then, we’ll just have to use our imaginations.

When someone gives a talk or a performance or a lecture, people talk about “the energy in the room”. Everyone can tell when something magical is happening, or conversely, when the whole thing is falling flat.

This isn’t merely about counting laughs. After all, most of us can also tell when an audience is enjoying a serious drama, or an academic lecture.

So here’s an interesting challenge for artificial intelligence: Could we design an algorithm that is able to sense the energy in the room?

One approach would be to construct the algorithm as a trainable neural net. Volunteers in the audience would indicate to a computer a high or low score that reflects their own human sense of how well a performance is being received, and a pattern matching algorithm would “learn” how to associate that score with cues from the audience.

Yet the problem remains: What are valid audience cues? Breathing? Whispering? Facial expressions? People squirming in their seats? What factors are we ourselves using to “sense” an audience’s mood?

I’m not sure anybody really knows the answer to that.

Flash forward about thirty or forty years from now. Several generations of children have gotten used to using augmented reality gesture to talk with each other.

Because these kids spent time with these interfaces before they were seven, they have incorporated into their everyday natural language the ability to draw shapes in the air, create virtual objects through gesture, and navigate a space that mixes the physical with the virtual.

As much research has shown, natural language is actually created by little kids, including natural languages with a strong visual component.

Most grown-ups never quite master this new kind of natural language. They can usually muddle through, using some kind of pidgin as a serviceable approximation, although they make all kinds of grammatical errors that the kids find funny.

But a generation or two after that, those kids will have grown up, and nearly everyone will be a native speaker of our future language.

This is going to be a bit of a rant.

While driving, have you ever simply forgotten to keep your car on the road? I’m guessing you haven’t, because you’re still alive enough to read this. Some things are just too obvious to miss.

Which leads me to the rant part: In the last several days I’ve been to the theatre twice. Both times somebody’s cell phone went off in the middle of the performance.

In one case, in the performance I wrote about the other day, we were seeing Patrick Stewart and Ian McKellen in “Waiting for Godot”. Seats were very expensive in a sold out run of a once in a lifetime Broadway experience.

So you would think that people would be conscious of how important it was to turn off their ringer. Yet somebody’s phone started ringing in the middle of the play, loudly and for a very long time.

In the second case, the management made a point of telling us to turn off our cell phones. Before the curtain rose, we heard a lovely female voice with a posh British accent explaining to us how very very important it was that we switch off our electronic devices. The lady was charming yet extremely firm.

And yet, again, some damned fool’s cellphone went off in the middle of the second act.

I have been trying to figure out how this happens. After all, as an audience member in a live theatre performance you are responsible for performing exactly one action to avoid ruining the experience for everyone else: Turn off your phone (or at least your ringer). And that’s it, that’s the whole enchilada, the beginning and the end of what is expected of you.

So how could anybody miss something so fundamental? It’s kind of like driving an automobile and forgetting to keep your car on the road.

Sharon’s comment on yesterday’s post really resonated with me. I too have had the experience, as an adult, of reading the journals of my sixteen year old self, and finding myself shocked at how similar we were. From that experience I came to the realization that at sixteen, we already have all the emotional equipment — we just have none of the experience to know what to do with it.

This notion of reading journals from a different time in one’s life does raise some possibilities for science fiction. If we could read the future journals of our older selves, then time would take on a far more interesting shape. Every time we looked at those journals, we might make choices that veer us away from the reality they describe.

And so, as we then grew older, we would write different journals. Our new younger self, reading those “reality spoilers”, would then create yet another version of reality, and so on.

Eventually scientists might discover properties that govern such reality shifts — some sort of operational rules of cause and effect. If you want to help cure world hunger, or make a world where people will be kinder to one another, it might turn out that certain kinds of journal entries are more effective than others.

Of course there will be other people writing journals only for selfish gain, trying to optimize their own personal time loop karma. All through the world, opposing forces would arise and do battle, one journal entry at a time.

If we really could steer reality itself in this way, I wonder what kinds of universes we would collectively create.

Today I read with interest an article by Tom Gauld in the NY Times Magazine about tattoos that have outlived their usefulness. It’s called The Existential Anguish of the Tattoo, and it’s a great read.

That article, plus my recent experience wandering through my old undergrad stomping grounds, got me thinking about this strange relationship we have with our younger selves. That person is us, more than anyone else could ever claim to be, and yet at the same time that person is not us.

I know other people think about this as well. Last weekend when I mentioned to an old friend that I had gone back to see my college campus, my friend said “Now you are one of those mysterious older people who sometimes shows up on campus, looking slightly lost.” And it was true.

But I wonder, what if we could actually sit down in a room and meet our younger self face to face (or, conversely, our older self). Suppose you were given an opportunity to do just that, through some unknown technology (all things being possible in science fiction and politics).

Would you say yes? Would you see it as an opportunity? Or would you find the idea of such a meeting too disturbing?

I often feel inundated by emails. Not the personal emails from friends, which are always a great pleasure, but the ones reflecting professional obligations.

Students stuck on a problem, potential collaborators, upcoming lab visitors, conference organizers, people requesting reviews — each by itself is perfectly reasonable, but in the aggregate they can become overwhelming.

You would think that it would be even worse when I’m programming. After all, when you’re in the zone, trying to work out some interesting problem, that would seem to be the worst time to get emails about something else entirely.

But it doesn’t work that way, because when I program, time slows down.

It’s like I’m in one of those slow motion scenes in a movie. I’ll be working intently on something, thinking through a problem, writing tons of code, trying something five different ways, and I’ll feel as though I’ve spent an hour. And it will turn out that the whole process took only ten minutes.

It’s as though my mind has one kind of internal clock for programming, and another kind for everything else.

And one good thing about this is that the world around me is still moving at its usual pace, so when I’m programming those emails seem to come very slowly.

It’s actually rather peaceful.

I had been looking forward, for quite a while, to the performance we saw this evening of Samuel Beckett’s “Waiting for Godot”, with Patrick Stewart and Ian McKellen in the lead roles. I’ve seen Godot quite a few times through the years, in various productions, and it never fails to surprise.

On one level the set-up is very simple: Two old tramps with way too much time on their hands try to make sense of their moment-to-moment existence.

But that’s just the launching point for a dizzying array of ideas. And these ideas are never presented straight on, but rather are coiled in elliptically, so we often don’t see them coming, until we are already immersed in them.

What is really surprising and delightful about this particular production is how funny it is. Stewart and McKellan play Vladimir and Estragon as a kind of old married couple, their souls by now so deeply intertwined that one without the other would be unthinkable. In this production their constant bickering as merely a front for their powerful love for each other, and the audience responds to this love.

It’s a kind of irony which highlights Beckett’s genius: We the audience are laughing with delight, having ourselves a rollicking good time, at a tale of two souls who are so lost and rudderless that they are continuing wondering whether they should bother to keep living from one moment to the next.

It may seem strange to those of you who know Beckett’s work, but this production actually manages to make him seem like a romantic: Yes, life may be meaningless and filled with despair, but it all starts to make sense if we find a way to love one another.

This seems like a good day to talk about relationships.

I was explaining to a non-native-english speaker today the phrase “taking a break”. While this phrase has various meanings, one in particular has recently come into common parlance: Taking time off from a romantic relationship.

When I explained this concept, my friend expressed disbelief. I forget the exact words she used, but the basic meaning was “Are these people for real?”

After all, if you are in a romantic relationship, this implies that you are with the one person in the world whom you most want to be with. So what does it mean when one party asks to take a break from the relationship?

One possible meaning is this: “I want to break up with you, but I haven’t even explained that to myself yet, let alone to you. So I’m arranging a way that I can get away from you, while not actually needing to say I’m breaking up with you.”

Of course this might be an overly cynical interpretation. But how could we know?

Well, here’s a way to test the question empirically: What percentage of the time, when somebody says to their romantic partner “I need to take a break”, does the couple end up getting back together again?

If the percentage is very low, then perhaps my friend’s reaction of disbelief was simply common sense.