Ken's Blog

This evening I went to see six short one-act plays, all new original works by young playwrights.

The results were all over the map. One was pure schtick, another turned out to be a very entertaining joke with an unexpected punchline. A third was a wry and knowing examination of the complexities of friendship.

Yet another was a full frontal assault on the very concept of narrative theatre, which pretty much took a metaphorical Uzi to the unities of Aristotle, and blasted the hell out of them.

What was wonderful was that the whole thing was even happening — new works written, directed and acted by young people in New York, in a tiny but well maintained theatre space at affordable prices.

The odd thing is that earlier in the day I had seen one of the hottest tickets on Broadway — an SRO showing of a wildly expensively, sumptuously produced, perfectly executed juggernaut of musical theatre. The big show aimed very high, and delivered on all its promises.

But a part of me, against all economic reason, liked the little fledgling experimental one-acts better.

The acquisition of the venerable Washington Post by Jeff Bezos seems like one more sign that the internet is literally devouring printed media. Where will it all lead?

Plato took on the voice of his teacher Socrates to deride the rise of printed media. His ersatz Socrates argued that the ability to write everything down would be the death of memory, of direct human transmission of culture and wisdom, of personal intellectual responsibility.

Plato was being coy, for he knew full well that he was using the written word to make these arguments. They have, in fact, come down to us thanks to the ability of written language to transmit human culture across a span of centuries.

One day, sometime in the future, people may laugh at the absurdity of fretting over the death of print. “How silly people were to worry,” they might say, as they gaze into a re-constructed past through implanted lenses. “We wouldn’t even know about any of this, if it weren’t for the internet!”

Last week I was with my friend David, who likes bad puns (something we have in common). We were discussing space flight and the possibility of colonizing Mars, and I pointed out a certain irony.

At which point David said “That makes sense, because Mars is irony.”

Which is true — Mars is red because it contains iron. But it was also, as those of you who pun will know, a signal that our conversation had left the realm of substantive discussion, and had entered a Pun War — a strange sort of combat in which all that matters is how outrageous a pun you can make. The contest generally continues until somebody comes up with a pun that can’t be topped.

“I was merely testing your mettle,” I said.

“How elementary!” he replied. “Maybe we should table these puns.”

“I’m willing to do that,” I said, “for a small fee.”

At which point he gave in, for David recognized that “Fe” is the symbol for iron in the periodic table of the elements.

The next day I was relating this episode to my friends Craig and Lisa, and their fifteen year old daughter Dana happened to be there. As I got to the punchline I started to worry that perhaps this was all going over Dana’s head.

“Did you understand that?” I asked her.

“Of course I understood that,” she sniffed. “After all, I’m fe-male. And you know what that means, don’t you? I’m Iron Man!”

I happily conceded defeat.

In his comment yesterday, J. Peterson sensibly argued that in a future world where your very appearance is mediated by cyber-technology, someone who means you harm could conceivably hack into the system and alter the way people see you.

I would argue that there is solid historical precedent against this. Society has been more or less tolerant of hacking when the consequences are low. But once the stakes get high enough, various legal, social and technological mechanisms start to kick in. This response is not dependent upon any particular technology or historical era, but is instead a fundamental characteristic of all functioning societies down through the ages.

For example, if you are like most people in Western cultures, the bulk of your wealth is kept in a bank. These days, there is no actual pile of cash representing the size of your bank account. Rather, your money is represented as a set of binary digits in a secure computer account, in a bank that answers to government regulation and oversight.

Both the government and the citizenry are well aware that if our collective bank accounts were successfully hacked, the result would be chaos and perhaps worse. And so safeguards are put into place.

The same thing will happen when your very identity depends upon cyber-security. In theory somebody could hack into the database and erase or modify your perceived identity. But in practice we as a society are not going to let that happen, short of an event that leads to complete social and legal breakdown.

And if that were to happen, we would have bigger things to worry about.

In a restaurant today I was saying to a friend that if somebody were to walk in the door stark naked, people would probably be very upset. Furthermore, the proprietor would most likely call the cops, and the indecently exposed citizen would be issued a summons and perhaps carted away.

“And yet,” I continued, “a state of being naked is certainly more natural than a state of being clothed. So what is legal and socially accepted is, in this instance, precisely what is not natural.” My friend agreed upon this last point.

I said all this by way of leading up to a conjecture on the future of augmented reality glasses. “There may come a day, after everyone is wearing, when your appearance, from a social perspective, will be entirely mediated by the eyewear worn by others. After all, if everyone sees you visually transformed in a consistent way, then that transformation effectively becomes clothing.”

“And should this future come to pass, then it might become illegal to go about in public without wearing your AR glasses. To look upon people in their natural state would be considered indecent, an intrusion on their right to privacy. The man who walks around with naked eyes might find himself arrested for disturbing the peace, and perhaps thrown in jail.”

My friend seemed to find this prospect disturbing, but he did not argue against its plausibility.

Sometimes a friend will send me a cool link to a video or animation or other noteworthy object of interest on the Web. Later I may want to show that same thing to somebody else, but sometimes I can’t find it.

It’s true that I could carry around a SmartPhone, use it to dig through my emails, and either retrieve the link to type it into the browser of my new friend, or else forward the email to them, so they can click on the link.

But why should I need to do that? Why can’t I just type something like “Animated Taiwan deranged 3D characters act out news” into a search window?

It seems to me there should be some sort of inverse search facility, which starts with a URL and converts it into some easy to remember phrase. When you type in that phrase, the top search hit is the site you want.

Is that asking too much?

A friend pointed out today that you can often tell when people don’t really follow “Dr. Who”, because they think the main character is called “Dr. Who”. Those who actually follow the show know better.

That reminded me of another instance of a similar phenomenon in popular culture. There was a time when you could tell the real fans of the musical group “Blondie”. They were the people who didn’t keep referring to the lead singer Debbie Harry as “Blondie”.

I wonder how many other instances of this there are: An inaccurate identification of a brand name with the brand’s representative character, an understandable mistake that separates the real fan from the fake.

Today I had a chat with Philip Rosedale, who is planning a sequel to his “Second Life” shared virtual world. We agreed on a lot of things, but on one point we ended up having a little bit of an intellectual tug of war.

Philip feels that because people really want to communicate with each other, it is extremely important to convey the nuance and subtlety of things like facial expression and head movement. On some level this makes a lot of sense to me.

Yet I feel that on another level it may not be the best goal. The more you try to recreate reality, the higher you raise people’s expectations, since people are experts at experiencing reality itself. The resulting dissonance is often referred to as the “uncanny valley”, which I think is largely a result of unmet expectations.

We have no problem relating to Bugs Bunny, but most people had quite a bit of difficulty relating to the far more literally realistic characters in “Polar Express” or the 2007 animated “Beowulf”. The more we work to make something look/act “real”, the greater the disappointment when those efforts fail.

There is another reason I would like to see a shared world with less focus on realism: It would be far easier to have something I think such social on-line worlds should have (which Second Life did not): Cool non-player characters. For one thing, things get a little more interesting in a virtual world if you are never quite sure who is real and who isn’t.

When people look back at Google Glass, what will they think of it, I mean as an historical artifact?

It’s possible that it will go the way of the Nintendo Virtual Boy, a bold venture into uncharted user interface territory that went down in ignominious defeat.

The odds are very small that Glass itself will be embraced by millions of users. It is simply too soon — the technology is not quite there yet, and the requisite killer apps have not yet been developed (or even conceived).

My guess is that Google is expecting, and has been planning for, a third outcome: That Glass itself will remain something of a curiosity, but it will push the agenda of wearables forward, by getting it on everyone’s mind.

I think this is why the design is so conservative. There is no attempt to create a true augmented reality device, or registration with objects in the scene. Rather, Glass mostly just supports networked audio reception, image capture, and a kind of visual annotation off in the corner of your field of vision.

Google is not trying to create an Apple Newton — a daring attempt to rethink the future in one fell swoop. Rather, Google is aiming more for the PalmPilot: Something simple with a basic feature set that introduces a new form factor in a very basic way.

The Newton was defeated by its own ambition, trying to do things (like true handwriting recognition) that were not yet supported by available technology. In contrast, the PalmPilot kept expectations low, opting for relatively low resolution/cost, a few well chosen features, and a very solid, if clunky, input method.

Almost exactly ten years later the Applet iPhone came out — a great example of what Bill Buxton calls The Long Nose of innovation.

So somewhere around 2023, partly thanks to a timely and prescient seeding of the space by Google, we might see a wearable device that will seem not only right, but inevitable.

Today I was over at a friend’s house, and he showed me the cool drone model airplane he’s been building. Then he demo’d the FPV (first person view) goggles he uses with it.

The idea is that you wear the FPV goggles while flying the plane, upon which is mounted a video camera. As your drone flies through the air, you see everything from the plane’s point of view.

To demo the FPV, my friend had me wear the goggles, while he held the camera and wandered around the various rooms of the house. Just standing in one place, I had the eerie feeling that I was roaming through his house. It was fascinating, but it also felt a little surreptitious, as though somehow I was snooping around where I shouldn’t be.

Not being familiar with his house, I didn’t realize until the very last moment that my friend had circled back and reentered the room from another door, until the moment I saw the back of my own head, and realized he was directly behind me. Suddenly I was seeing myself as a character in a third person shooter!

In that moment I realized that advancing technology — wirelessly networked cameras everywhere, in Smart Phones, in Google Glass and its progeny, in flying drones, and who knows where else — are going to end up interacting with the coming generations of wearable displays in unprecedented ways.

At some point, we will all be able to untether our visual points of view from our physical bodies. We will be able to fly overhead, or jump into each others’ viewpoint at will. We will become a communally roving eye of Sauron.

To me this prospect seems very eerie. But I am sure that generations to come will find it all perfectly natural.