Ken's Blog

Over the course of the last two weeks, quite a few people have told me that I should watch “Black Mirror”, a British SciFi TV program.

In particular, “Black Mirror” is a dark and dystopian vision of possible near futures. As I understand it, each episode takes one or more leaps into the possible near future, when some technological advance or other has created a corresponding set of cultural and societal shifts.

And in every case, the results are not good. In essence, the program is a series of cautionary tales about what might go wrong — very very wrong — if we are not careful with how we use emerging technologies.

Because so many people had recommended it, I decided to sit down and watch an episode. It was extremely well made, with excellent acting, superb production, really thoughtful writing, persuasive character arcs and a powerful story. In short, everything that high quality television should be.

I hated it, and I’m pretty sure I’m not going to be watching any more episodes.

I realize that the problem here most likely lies with me, not with the program. I spend a lot of time thinking about socially positive ways that advancing technology can help make the world a better place. Now along comes this show which essentially portrays technology as the Boogeyman.

Yes, I do understand that cautionary tales serve a positive purpose. It’s important that people think about these things. Ideally we should all be thoughtful about important issues that affect our lives, and dystopian scenarios can indeed raise awareness.

Yet to see the negative side so starkly portrayed, and perhaps even fetishized, just gives me nightmares. I don’t need to be scared — I need to engage in thoughtful discussion.

When somebody walks in the room and loudly shouts “Boo!”, which is essentially what this show does, I’m not sure that thoughtful discussion is still possible.

Continuing the thought from yesterday, let’s fast-forward to some time in the future when we will all be able to see displays floating in the air between us.

In such a world, you and I won’t be looking down at SmartPhones. Rather, we will always be looking outward, toward each other and the world around us.

This is not necessarily a panacea. After all, in such a future I could be rudely checking my email while pretending to be focused on our conversation. Yet I suspect that once such technologies become ubiquitous, people will become very adept at reading those nonverbal signals, and social conventions will be worked out.

But there’s something else going on here: In such a future, every face to face encounter will have a built-in whiteboard. Drawing pictures, sketching out ideas, bringing up images, all of these things will become normal in face-to-face conversation.

If this leads to an evolution of natural language, then the major innovations may end up being made by little kids (as generally happens with natural language). I’m excited to see what they will come up with.

I had an interesting conversation today with Bret Victor, which touched on the question of how much constructionism there should be in an interactive presentation. In other words, how much should you be able to build your presentation of a simulation out of general components, right then and there in the class-room?

The distinction touches on the difference between “live” and “canned” presentations. There are people who give spectacular talks, with truly exciting visuals. Yet during the question and answer session those speakers fall back on words. All of the spectacular visuals were pre-cooked before the show.

Bret has a vision, which I admire, that in an ideal world any question can be answered using the component pieces — right then and there — of the very tool you used to give the talk. It’s an ideal of a procedural visual language.

I find that I fall somewhere in the middle between Bret’s vision and the more traditional approach. I have a practical need to lecture on certain subjects, like computer graphics. I know that if I focus all my energies on building first-principles tools for giving those lectures, that may be all I ever have time to do.

And yet I agree with Bret that it is better to answer questions from the class using the procedural tools of my presentation, if I can.

In the end, we will all play our part. I may focus my energies more teaching computer graphics, and Bret may focus more on presentation tool as real-time visually authorable simulation, but I do believe that we, and others working in this space, will eventually converge on a new kind of literacy.

I got into a discussion this evening with a friend about the movie “Her”. There is a scene in this film involving simultaneous orgams, which raises all sorts of questions. And I realized that this scene reminded me of another famous movie orgasm scene.

I’m speaking of the restaurant scene in “When Harry Met Sally” where Sally (Meg Ryan) tells Harry (Billy Crystal) that women can convincingly fake an orgasm — and then proceeds to demonstrate her thesis with spectacular success. Director Rob Reiner’s mother, as a diner looking on from another table, delivers the great line that ends the scene: “I’ll have what she’s having.”

But the scene works on multiple levels, since what Sally is actually having is not an orgasm, but a moment of feminist triumph. She has just won a knock out punch in the war between the sexes.

Which brings me back to “Her”. When you first see this film, the simultaneous orgasm scene appears to be a moment of bonding between two souls.

But if you think about what an orgasm really is, on a biological and evolutionary level, you understand that one of those orgasms is fake. It is a sign that something here is veering away from reality and toward fantasy.

Which illuminates the real significance of the restaurant scene in “When Harry Met Sally”: Sally indeed asserts her power over Harry. Yet simultaneously, by telling him the truth, she affirms their friendship.

So what is Sally really having? She’s having a relationship built on truth and friendship. In the long run, that’s a lot better than a mere fantasy.

I was co-teaching a class the other day during which I suggested that in the future we might all be walking around seeing reality augmented in some way. This is a theme I have visited often, in these pages and elsewhere, and there is a lot to think about and work through on the subject.

At one point one student asked a very reasonable question. “Why,” he asked, “after all the work on virtual reality some years back failed to create a world in which everyone wears V.R. headsets, do you now think that everybody is going to embrace augmented reality?”

It was a question that deserved a serious answer. After all, the dream of immersive V.R. did indeed founder, despite the serious efforts of some very brilliant people.

“First of all,” I said, “we already live in an augmented reality. Everything around us is made up — the chairs, walls, tables, books, coffee cups. None of those things exist except through an effort of collective human will. We can talk about levels of technological sophistication, but there is no fundamental difference, from a cultural perspective, between the completely artificial object sitting on your desk and the one floating in the air in front of you.”

“Second,” I continued, “Virtual Reality had the problem that it didn’t bring people together. It was a fundamentally isolating experience. The information technologies that people embrace are the ones that best connect us to other people — which is, after all, the thing that people care about most.”

I’m not sure my answer was right in every detail, but I am sure about the most important part: Other people are always the killer app.

Thinking more about yesterday’s post, I believe I may have cleared up a mystery from my younger years.

When I was an undergrad, some of my fellow students seemed to travel in a different orbit from the rest of us. A case in point is Peter Sellars, now well known as a theatre director (he once directed me in a play when we were both at Harvard), was already, as an undergrad, getting the world to do his bidding.

For example, for Sellars avant garde student version “Boris Godunov”, which he directed while he was still a sophomore, he got the city to let him stage the famous coronation scene as a parade down one of the busiest streets of Cambridge.

To put this all in context, when I was a sophomore I was still watching reruns of cartoons featuring Boris Badenov.

I think one difference between us was that Sellars had already mastered a powerful skill that many of us only develop much later: The skill of truly paying attention to the world outside of one’s immediate circle, and understanding that world on its own terms. With this skill comes the ability to make things happen on the larger stage of life.

Today I found myself back at the dorms I lived in as an undergrad at Harvard. In all the intervening years I had never been back, so it was quite a singular experience.

The quad was nearly empty on this cold crisp winter’s day, but in my mind I could see all the people I had shared this space with, as though they had just stepped away, and would be back at any moment.

At first I wondered whether I was really different after all these years. “Was that me, or somebody else?” I found myself thinking. “And how would I know?”

But then something unexpected happened. As I wondered around the neighborhood, checking out houses and shops, I noticed a difference in myself. For example, I stopped in at the local grocery, and greeted the man behind the counter while I picked up a few things — and realized he was the same guy who’d been behind the counter when I was a student. Turns out he’s been running that place for forty years. We got into a nice conversation about the neighborhood.

I realized that in all the time I had lived at the dorm, I had never explored these places, just a few blocks away. I hadn’t learned the geography, hadn’t noticed where the stores were, hadn’t gotten to know the shopkeepers, hadn’t been curious at all about the world outside.

The teenage version of myself had not been an explorer of strange neighborhoods — quite the contrary. In all the time I was at school, I had learned next to nothing about the vibrant places just beyond the dorm.

For the person I am now, such a thing would be unthinkable.

So it seems that people do change, after all.

I was telling a colleague this evening about an experience I had recently. I had been fortunate enough to be invited by a good friend to a book launch party for “The Annotated and Illustrated Double Helix”, a newly revised and expanded edition of James Watson’s classic account of the search for the structure of DNA.

There were many brilliant people in attendance — world famous scientists, authors, philosophers, Nobel prize winners. It was quite the gathering.

I stood in the back of that illustrious crowd as one personage after another stepped forward to tell stories that illuminated the saga of Watson and Crick. One speaker even managed to properly acknowledge Rosalind Franklin, which I thought was a bold and important gesture.

It seems that Watson has a way with pithy sayings, and over the course of the evening, various people quoted memorable things he has said. My favorite was this: “If you’re the smartest person in the room, you’re in the wrong room.”

When I heard that, I leaned over to the woman standing next to me and said “Clearly, I am in the right room.”

I am very impressed with AMTRAK. Despite the snowstorm, the trains ran on time today. Which was important to me because I needed to get from New York to Boston before the first class of the semester. The journey took a little longer than usual, given how much snow we needed to plow through. But our train soldiered bravely on, and got there nearly on schedule.

On a day when buses were canceled, planes grounded or delayed, and driving would have been a questionable adventure in risk taking, the trains were dependably there, right on track.

But the best part was the magical transformation of the New England landscape outside the window. Little towns like Mystic and Old Saybrook, streams and docks and bridges and snow dappled trees, all of it had turned breathtakingly lovely, like something out of a fantasy novel.

So I spent my morning happily gazing through the train window at the winter wonderland outside, sipping fresh coffee from the cafe car, and marveling at how, despite its many problems, this world of ours can sometimes be a beautiful place.

This evening I gave a talk about my group’s research.

From a practical level the timing was completely absurd. Tomorrow morning I need to take a train to start a semester sabbatical at MIT, then two days after that I need to fly to the West Coast, and then to Chicago for the AAAS meeting a week after that, and of course I have a million things to do before leaving NY.

So why did I agree to give a talk just now?

I’ve come to realize that I did it precisely because all of these things. I needed to force myself to get up in front of a group of people and take stock, to take a risk during a time of transition, to show brand new demos of brand new research that I’ve never shown before.

You can stay in a little bubble and work on your stuff, and of course you’ll like whatever you’re doing. But in moments of change, it is important to get outside opinions.

In this case, what I learned from peoples’ reactions, from their questions, to which parts they liked or didn’t like, was worth its weight in gold.

In a very important way, giving a talk about your research is itself a kind of research.