Ken’s Blog

It always amazes me when people say, upon hearing that I work with computers and technology: “oh, that must be so complicated!”

I can’t help wondering, when I think about how complicated we humans are, and how complex the relationships between us, just what these people are talking about.

A computer is, in fact, eminently learnable. If you put in the time to study a computer language, technology or interface protocol, you will indeed master the instrument. No matter how complex it might seem, technology is predictable — if you poke it in a particular way, it will respond the same thing every time.

People, in contrast, are utterly unpredictable, capable of immense generosity and equally immense venality, often in the space of a single breath. Just when you think you know what’s going on, human minds will charge off in some completely unexpected direction. It is both our tragedy and our glory.

To paraphrase a grand old quote: Technology is easy. People are hard.

I find it heartening that so many people weighed in on the question of children learning a second language through the aid of on-line communities, and related questions.

It’s becoming clear that this is not one question but a web of related questions. For example, experiences for teenagers (like the one John Nordlinger started around W.O.W.) are clearly going to be vastly different from experiences for six year olds, in almost every conceivable way.

Also, as Manooh points out, there might be much opportunity simply in making the right resource available to kids, and letting them build from there, as a community of peers. The wonderful thing about that, if we can get it to work, is that we might be able to achieve a transformative level of change out of an affordable investment in resources.

Personally I find myself drawn to creating the fun exploratory environment that promotes multilingual capability for children who are still in their language acquisition age range (seven and younger). There is something so cool about tapping into that powerful potential. Besides, it gives me more excuses to play with cute little fish characters. 🙂

By the way, people I know at Google have told me that they are not actually phasing out the experiments in Google Labs, but rather just reorganizing how they roll them out. As long as these wonderful experiments keep coming, I’m happy!

Steven Pinker once said that “Language is essentially a creation of the mind of children.” He also referenced, in his book “The Language Instinct”, a study that showed that when you try to teach children Esperanto (an early artificially constructed attempt at a “universal language”), the children spontaneously start to fix it — they immediately start to change the language itself rather than learning to speak it. Esperanto does not conform to the meta-grammar common to all natural languages. It is not naturally learnable by children.

Yesterday J. Peterson commented on my post about using on-line games as a way to get kids around the world to each other their respective languages. The comment focused on the idea of introducing a shared invented language — perhaps Esperanto, or Klingon, or Elvish. It’s not prohibitively difficult to create such a language. There are even books out there to help you along, such as “In the Land of Invented Languages” by Arika Okrent and “The Language Construction Kit” by Mark Rosenfelder.

Yet I see a problem with this approach: Such languages, unlike the hundreds of naturally evolved languages, are not “naturally learnable” by young minds. Children don’t just naturally learn an arbitrary language — they will only naturally learn languages that have the features found in natural languages like English, French, Chinese, Swahili, etc.

I could see getting a group of small children to devise a new shared natural language on-lline, much as a community of children spontaneously created Hawaiian Creole, or Nicaraguan Sign Language. Such a project could be very interesting, although it’s not immediately clear how one would go about doing that. I’m just not sure what advantage it would have over simply getting children to play shared games in which they learn each other’s natural language.

In the last several days I have participated in several discussions that touch on the question of how to increase children’s knowledge of other languages by getting kids from different countries to communicate with each other on-line.

This topic is in some ways a response to the problematic nature of school-based teaching of a second language, which usually comes too late to take advantage of the “sweet spot” for proficiency in language acquisition (up to around age seven), while often devolving to teachers who are ill equipped for the task.

Putting aside for the moment the issues of security and provenance, what constitutes an effective way to use on-line social engagement between kids to promote mutual language acquisition? It came up during one of these discussions that mere conversation, such as Skype chat, seems not to work very well, whereas anecdotal evidence suggests that interacting with others by playing an on-line strategy game, such as “Worlds of Warcraft”, might be a much more effective way to learn elements of a second language.

This suggests that it is not merely engagement in conversation which leads to second language learning, but invested engagement — there needs to be something at stake.

Which leads to the question — could we construct an international on-line multi-player game that specifically promotes multilingual skills through invested engagement? And if so, how would we operationalize the question of how effective such a game is?

One strategy might be to build in design variations along various dimensions, instrument the game to measure effectiveness for language acquisition, and then gradually tune our design variables, in response to gathered data, so as to optimize the game for maximum language acquisition.

Another strategy might be to reward actions in the game that require multi-lingual proficiency — such as the ability to say a “magic spell” in two different languages, as in the recitation of the two spells: “place the magical cup upon the rock” and “coloque o copo mágico sobre a rocha”.

It might also be most effective to target such games toward kids seven years of age and younger, when facility for language acquisition is at its peak. This suggests, among other things, using spoken words and pictures in the game mechanic, rather than relying on written language.

There are so many possibilities — as well as unique challenges, such as the difficulty of building any computer software that must understand the speech of younger children.

Wouldn’t it be wonderful if such a project were successful, and on-line game play could lead to greater understanding between people around the world?

I’m having dinner this evening with my old friend Bill Buxton. Bill is the only person with whom I ever rode an elephant. He also told me the other day that I am the only person with whom he ever rode an elephant.

Since then my relationship to individuals of other species has evolved, to the point where I would never again ride an elephant — since, in retrospect, it is clearly not an experience that the elephant enjoys.

It is therefore quite likely that Bill and I will remain true to each other — that we will each remain the only person with whom the other has ever ridden an elephant.

Which, I believe, makes us both monopachydermous.

How many people can say that about each other?

Last week, during a workshop at Google, I was asked to do a verbal report about our break-out session on “the future of gesture on mobile devices”. The Google V.P. presiding over the day, Alfred Spector, whom I quite like, said we could do these reports in any fun way we like — “even in iambic pentameter”.

If you know me at all, you’ll know that of course this was music to my ears. I composed and on the next day presented a faithful report entirely in iambic pentameter rhyming couplets. Which our hosts seemed to like, because today, on the Google blog, they linked to my little poem.

Alas, you can’t get the full effect of my presentation from reading the poem. There was a whole level of physical comedy in the performance that doesn’t show up in the words (with some of my more expressive comic gestures unsuitable for publication on Google’s blog). I’m thinking now that I might need to create a procedural character to act out the performance here.

OK, that was the good news. The bad news was that the very next posting on Google’s blog — also today — was an announcement that they are terminating Google Labs. As many of you know, Google Labs is where they put all the cool edgy crazy delightful stuff that may or may not turn into a product.

I love the brilliant randomness of Google Labs, and will be sad to see it go. There is something admirable about a company that has the courage to float brilliant innovations out in public, before those innovations have been neatly wrapped into a specific product. Hopefully Google will find some other way to put their researchers’ wonderful creative ideas out there for us to try out, without feeling they need to wait for official product cycles.

In the last week I attended a number of very different events that had in common the theme of “how do humans communicate with machines?” One of these events was Heather Knight’s brilliant first annual “Robot Film Festival” (full disclosure — I was one of the members of the film jury).

Essentially, this was a series of short narrative films all centered around the theme of robots — or, in most cases, how humans and robots might interact with each other in social situations.

A few days later I found myself at a Microsoft Research event, in which one of the burning questions on the table was “What is a natural way for people to interface with machines?” And it occurred to me that there were very strong connections between these two scenes. As I believe I was the only person to attend both of them, I feel like some sort of ambassador between worlds.

For the most part, the Microsoft contingent clearly looked at computers as mere machines — soulless mechanisms that ideally would simply follow our instructions. In contrast, the robot film folks were mainly asking deep philosophical questions about the blurred line between machine and reality. To them, a robot is an entity that may in fact have a soul — like us.

I wish I could have gotten these two groups in the same room with each other. In a way this was the classic cultural divide between scientist and artist playing itself out in the context of human / machine interaction. To the scientist, we are alone, and machines are mere tools. To the artist, a machine is a creature of infinite possibility, into which one can breath a soul.

Which is right? Darned if I know. But I would love to get them all talking to each other, and see what comes out of it!

The other day I wrote about the delicate balance between a society’s need to create fearless children — young people who dare to break the mold and find the courage within themselves to do things nobody has done before — and that same society’s need to indoctrinate its young people to obey authority, to reflexively listen to those in charge.

I was discussing this dialectic with a colleague over dinner this evening, and my colleague pointed out that society only needs some young people to be originals, to break out of the mold and come up with new ideas. Even if only, say, five percent of children grow up to be interestingly creative, then society as a whole can still evolve to meet challenges as they arise.

And then it occurred to me that the barrier society builds within its citizens’ minds against freedom of thought, by inculcating a tendency to conform, to defer to authority, to listen to anyone wearing a uniform or a badge, is perfectly fine (from the point of view of the needs of society), as long as that barrier is porous.

If ninety five percent of the population never questions authority, while five percent realizes that there is a kind of scam going on, and that each individual is actually free to pursue their own thoughts and develop new ideas, then society will still derive benefit from its free thinkers.

Of course a country can become too fascist, to repressive, and thereby squash the potential of even its eccentric five percent. But such societies tend to be unstable over time, since they don’t have the mind share to evolve either socially or economically.

Most people won’t ever feel the need to question authority, to look critically at the world around them, to ask whether things can be different or better. But as long as a thoughtful few are doing so in an interesting and intellectually powerful way, as long as even five percent manage to evade those porous barriers against nonconformity, then everything will probably turn out fine.

I know there is a law in the U.S., has been for a while, that makes it illegal to attempt to engage in humor when going through the security X-ray at an airport. People always say “whatever you do — don’t try to be funny. You could end up in jail — or worse.”

Even so, this morning I took my life in my hands. On my way to board a flight at J.F.K. airport, there I was, about to walk through the X-ray body scanner, the one place where everyone works very hard to avoid the unexpected, when I was startled to see the woman in line in front of me start to walk through the X-ray machine holding a cat.

The guard told her she couldn’t take the cat through with her — she needed to run it through the baggage scanner. Don’t laugh — having watched Monty Python, I am well acquainted of the dangers posed by exploding cats.

I realize that this would have been a very good moment to remain silent, but there are forces that move deep within our souls, forces that are more powerful, more primal in their pull, than such mere niceties as self-preservation.

And so I went for it. Looking the guard straight in the eye, I asked him “Doing CAT scans today?”

For a moment he just stared at me, the wheels in his head seeming to turn. Then his face broke out in a broad grin, and he burst out laughing.

Today, it seems, would not the day my government puts me in jail for inappropriate humor.

This week I learned about the Internet Light bulb. In effect, each light bulb with NXP’s “GreenChip” has its own IP address and can therefore be accessed over the internet. I know this might sound like some sort of bad light bulb joke, but it’s for real.

The advantage in potential power savings is enormous, since millions of lights programmed to follow sensible patterns of usage can vastly improve our general energy footprint.

But what fascinates me most about this is the value proposition. Only a few years ago, to have proposed such a thing would have been absurd. Light bulbs were cheap throwaway items, so the approximately $1 extra cost per bulb of the GreenChip technology would have been prohibitive in the extreme.

But light bulbs themselves have changed, thanks to innovations targeted at reducing power consumption. A new generation of light bulbs is coming out that are designed to last years, which means it’s ok for a bulb to cost $20. Suddenly that extra $1 is a very good value indeed, given its potential to allow the power to a “smart bulb” to be optimized to follow patterns of usage.

This notion that an idea seems crazy until something else changes in the technology ecosystem, and then the same idea comes to seem obvious — perhaps inevitable — is one of the fun things about our rapidly changing technology landscape.