Ken's Blog

Quite a while back I talked about how our interactions with each other are framed by our inability to read each others’ minds (in September 2008, actually).

Recent events — as you might imagine if you’ve been reading this blog steadily — have led me to wish, at least for a moment, that I could actually read the mind of another. People have the ability to put on such smooth smiling faces, and we may never learn about their inner pain until it is too late to help them.

But as I think more carefully on this thought, I realize that society as it is now constituted could not exist if we could read each others’ minds. Just about any social, legal or ethical convention you can think of would be torn apart beyond recognition if we could peek into each others’ heads.

In fact, it’s not really clear that the notion of an “individual”, as we currently understand that word, would continue to have any meaning. So much of our essential being is predicated on the inviolable privacy of our own thoughts, and upon our ability to navigate the difference between those inner thoughts and the self that we outwardly show to the world.

Even to those who are closest to us.

The more I think about it, the more it seems that if we were all to wake up tomorrow morning with the ability to read each other’s thoughts, the result would be a vision from hell.

Guess we’ll just have to muddle through without the mind reading.

In the last few days there has been a tragedy in Haiti of immense proportions. Perhaps more than a hundred thousand dead, with millions left in a state of extreme suffering. There is no way to fully take in something this huge. Intellectually we can understand the enormity of such a calamity, but on an emotional level I don’t think our human minds are built for events on this scale.

At the same time — literally at the same time — an event occurred to which I obliquely alluded in my blog post the day before yesterday. At the time I was too overwhelmed to speak of it directly. The essential facts were as follows: Somebody I knew personally, a man I esteemed highly from within my own everyday life, died suddenly, and quite unexpectedly. I had last spent time with him that very same day.

Not surprisingly (or so people tell me) as I’ve walked around New York City these last two days I have seen him everywhere. A stranger will walk into a restaurant, or out of the subway, and for a moment, out of the corner of my eye, it appears to be the man I knew. But of course it isn’t, and won’t ever be.

As many of you know, the immensity of an unexpected death can for a while overwhelm everything else. For some period of time after, everything looks just slightly off — you temporarily lose track of “normal”. You observe people discussing politics or relationships, having a stupid argument over something or other, you see the texture of everyday life, and none of it quite adds up. Part of your mind thinks “What difference does any of this make?” There’s a necessary period of readjustment, a gradual feeling of the day-to-day reemerging, of things going back to approximately where they had been. But not quite exactly where they had been.

Because the reminder stays with you that the day-by-day life we live, that every touch of a friend’s hand, that every conversation over dinner (even the stupid arguments), is infinitely precious, infinitely worth fighting to preserve.

And that brings me back to Haiti. I understand that what I have just witnessed in my own personal sphere these last two days, the sense of loss and incomprehension, is also happening about fifteen hundred miles away, but on a vastly larger scale. All of those many thousands of individual lives, colleagues, mothers and daughters, fathers and sons, beloved spouses and lifelong friends, taken in an instant. And the ones who survived are left trying to figure out what “normal” is — how you can recapture the simple innocence of being able to take a day for granted, without constantly questioning reality itself, without continually seeing the dead out of the corner of your eye.

I think the best way we can honor the suffering, in addition to giving to the rescue effort, is to try to keep in mind — however difficult it may be — that every single life lost in Haiti is as deep a tragedy as the loss of someone we know in our own life. We must try to look at what has happened straight on, rather than from the corners of our eyes. I know that this is not possible to do well, but it is necessary to try.

Stepping gingerly away, for now, from the sad events of yesterday, I turn my mind to something altogether less difficult.

I was giving a lecture the other day during which I happened to mention that I had been using Google for several years before somebody finally pointed out to me that there were ads on the right side of the page. Not only had I never clicked on any of these ads, I had not even noticed them.

After my talk, a woman came up to me and pointed out that the fact that I had not noticed the ads did not mean they had been ineffective. “Do you think,” she asked, “that your buying patterns might have been influenced by the presence of those ads in the periphery of your vision?”

So. Perhaps these ads had been working on me all the time on a subliminal level, slipping in beneath my radar, as it were. But how could we test such a thing?

I’m thinking it would be interesting to run user tests in which we modify Google search pages (through some sort of proxy server, presumably). We would insert little artificial ad lines, mixed in with the real ads over on the right side of the page. These artificial ad lines could contain, for example, references to two different colors — one color for half of the participants, the other color for the other half.

After having been exposed to one or the other of these ads over a period of time, participants would be asked to chose one color from a selection of colors. If we see a systematic preference for the color mentioned in that participant’s artificial ads, then we will know that there is indeed a subliminal effect from these ads, even if the ad is never clicked on.

After all, if people are managing to put thoughts into your head, it might be useful to know about it.

Today I am trying to deal with some tragic news.

I suspect that tomorrow I’ll find a way back to my sense of optimism, and will once again be able to talk about the many ways that the future has just started. But today isn’t a good day for me to attempt that.

So please bear with me, as I try to find a bridge between yesterday and tomorrow.

There was a day, some years ago, when you and I walked along a beach, in the sincere belief that our lives might become intertwined forever. On that day we did not speak of this, but we each knew, in our hearts, there was more at stake than a train ride from the city and back.

Then you were with him, and I with her, and the secrets we shared from that day stayed with us, unviolated, entire. Only we two have glimpsed that other life, that other future, the one never lived.

There are moments, for each of us, when we still stand in a harbor, watching the tall ships sail out to sea. They are magnificent, lovelier by far for the unknowable secrets they keep.

I have often thought of you in the time from then till now. Perhaps if the wind had blown the other way, if a certain moment had lasted but a moment longer, we would have sailed to sea together.

It was just a day, only one among many. Yet even now it stays with me.

That other life. The one we didn’t have.

Today a colleague told me “I wish I could live in the future”. My immediate response was to point out that this is de facto impossible, even if you were to possess the requisite time traveling tech. I was actually thinking, as I said this, of those immortal words of Buckaroo Bonzai: “No matter where you go, there you are.” I didn’t bother quoting Mr. Bonzai (co-inventor of the oscillation overthruster, for those of you who didn’t know) because I was pretty sure my colleague would not have gotten the reference.

My larger point was that the human brain is simply not wired to sustain a sense of novelty. Unfortunately, all new things on our event horizon become reduced to the mere normal with astonishing rapidity, and our voracious and fickle appetite for the new and different can all too quickly lead us to consume the very change we wish to enjoy. We eat the future for breakfast, by mid-morning we have indigestion, and by lunchtime we are hungry again.

One of the projects of Will Wright’s wonderful Stupid Fun Club is a robotic waiter. Unsuspecting customers in an ordinary looking diner find themselves being served by a very polite robot, an attentive cybernetic being crammed with mechanical relays, electric motors and blinking LED lights. The results, surreptitiously recorded on video, are rather interesting. After a moment, most customers simply take their unusual new waiter in stride. After all, they’ve seen robots in the movies — why not at their local restaurant?

To make things more interesting, Will and his colleagues then have the robo-waiter get the order wrong. The unfailingly polite mechanical servant brings back coffee instead of tea, or a bagel instead of biscuits. At this point all customers react in the same way. Completely putting aside the wonders of being served by a mechanical man, a marvel of the future, a harbinger of the world to come, they just get annoyed. They ordered tea, not coffee, dammit.

And so I come to my thesis. Even if you were to build a time machine, put on your silver lamé suit, set your flux capacitor to full forward thrust, and emerge two hundred years in the future, you would have only about five minutes to enjoy the sensation, more or less. During that time you might marvel at the wonders of antigravity, the graceful arc of the protective energy dome over your city, the glint of sunlight off the floating skyscrapers in the sky above, or the way your brain tickles from the seamless techno-telepathy that that appears to have rendered both TV and the internet obsolete.

But after about a minute or so, your brain’s novelty normalization filter will begin to kick in. Within three minutes everything around you will start to seem obvious, even prosaic. After five minutes you’ll once again simply be living in the ordinary present. Yes, it will be a present that contains floating cities, free infinite energy, shimmering holograms you can control with pure thought. But none of that will matter once you get used to it.

It will just be normal.

Today I attended a wonderful panel discussion between Donald Margulies, John Patrick Shanley and Beth Henley, three of my favorite playwrights. The conversation touched on many topics, but I found one moment in particular quite powerful.

The moderator, Robin Pogrebin of The New York Times, asked the discussants whether the theatre is dying out. John Patrick Shanley (the writer of “Moonstruck” and “Doubt”, to name just two of his many great works) mentioned the various new information technologies that are now all the rage, and then said (I’m paraphrasing from memory here) that “after the movies, after the internet, when the lights go out we will still have the theatre. And one day the lights will go out.”

He went on to observe that theatre — arguably the oldest of the performing arts — requires no technology other than one’s fellow human beings. Theater literally cannot die. If all else fails, you can gather your friends in a living room to perform a play. He went on to point out, rather cheerfully, that “It’s actually every one in this room who is in danger of dying out. But the theatre will continue.”

I found this to be a very profound observation. Particularly given his answer to a later question from an aspiring young writer in the audience, asking how, as a playwright, you can avoid selling out your principles. With a broad grin, Mr. Shanley gave a very compelling reason why unlike, say, Hollywood screenwriters, playwrights are never really tempted to betray their principles. His exact words were, if I recall, “The beautiful thing about the theatre is that there’s no money in it.”

This evening I saw the pieces of a wooden chair crawl along a floor, gradually assemble themselves together, and then stand up.

It was an art piece called Robotic Chair by Max Dean, Raffaello D’Andrea and Matt Donovan. The sight of this “inanimate” object slowly and patiently pulling itself together was utterly compelling. The actual mechanism was mainly built into the seat of the chair, which crawled around on the floor and, in turn, carefully docked with each of the four legs and the chair back. Once all the pieces were connected, the chair would gradually pull in its four splayed-out legs until they were vertical. And then suddenly, in one moment, it was done, and the chair simply stood there, looking for all the world like an ordinary wooden chair.

Eventually it would again collapse, and its parts would go flying. At which point the chair would set about slowly, methodically putting itself back together again from the scattered pieces.

I can’t say I’ve ever seen anything else like it. People attending the gallery opening (at the wonderful Ronald Feldman gallery) were utterly transfixed by the sight of this sisyphian chair, which would go to such great lengths to pull itself together, only to suddenly collapse again a few minutes later.

Knowing that the chair was merely executing a computer controlled algorithm did not make the experience less compelling. The piece works because it functions as art on a number of levels. Knowing that the chair is merely a robot executing a computer program takes away none of the magic, so compelling is the resulting apparition, the visceral enactment of eternal struggle, of hard won success followed by sudden collapse.

I suspect that a large part of the power of this piece comes from something very primitive within us. Human society has changed in many ways since the Cro Magnon days. We’ve developed innumerable technologies, from agriculture to the printing press, the airplane to the iPhone. But we ourselves have not changed — we are each essentially the same beings our forebears were twenty to fifty thousand years ago, before societies evolved from small hunter-gatherer tribes to large hierarchical land-based fiefdoms, presided over by presidents and popes. Long before we had our modern religions, we each had an innate sense of childlike wonder, as fundamental to our nature as walking upright and a propensity to create language.

The Robotic Chair speaks to us because, deep down, we are all animists.

“A bladeless knife with the handle missing.”
        – C. C. Lichtenberg

As I’ve been implementing my little “programming language for everyone” in stages, the question has recently arisen as to whether to introduce variables early on — basically the idea of saying “I’m going to call these things by some name, and then later when I refer to that name, I will still be talking about these same things.”

At first I was resistant. After all, an assignment statement such as “x = y + 3” — a centerpiece of traditional math-oriented programming — seems very disconnected from the day-to-day experience of most people. I think it’s not so much that the concepts are so difficult, but rather that such statements deal with abstract entities that cannot be seen or directly experienced.

And yet we do have something quite like this in real life. The reason that the above quote from Lichtenberg is so delightful is that it makes us think consciously about something we all take for granted on a very deep level — the identity of objects. Consider, for example, the dog who lives in my neighbor’s apartment. This dog might change drastically through the years. He might grow from a little puppy to a huge beast, or get into a fight and lose an ear, or one day grow ill and lose half of his fur. Yet through all of these changes he’s still the same dog. In a room full of dogs, even dogs that looked very similar, he would be the only one who is him.

We deal with this concept all the time. You or I might change so drastically over time, in appearance or behavior, as to become unrecognizable. Yet we are still, unquestionably, ourselves, in a way that no other individual could ever be. These concepts of identity — the naming of things — are so fundamental to our human way of thinking that they are built directly into all natural languages, for as far back in time as anyone has been able to trace the evolution of natural languages. They are not technological aspects of humanity, but rather part of our innate biology — a product of the way the human brain has evolved to understand and generate communicative speech and gesture.

And so I’ve come to the conclusion that a programming language for everybody needs to embody the concepts of identity and assignment of identity. You need to be able to give a name to a thing or a person — or to a group of things or people. Then no matter where the named thing goes, or how much it changes, you can refer back to it later.

Speaking of names, an astute reader sent me an email pointing out that it might be too early to fix a name — even as appealing a name as “Pie” — to a project that is still so much in flux. Naming things too soon can tie you down to ideas that later turn out to be wrong. I’m going to take his advice and keep the question open for now, rather than committing to one name so soon. Although it could turn out that my problem is not so much with the word “Pie”, as with the word “commitment”. 🙂

Time was no one could tell the rain from a poke in the ribs
And we knew three secrets for every blade of grass out back
All the ‘gators lived in a shack down by the river
You couldn’t tell them a thing they didn’t already know.

Time was every step you counted was a big old mess of trouble
And don’t even get me started on the ones you didn’t see
There was nothing couldn’t be fixed by a good walk down by the river
And nobody ever sold a damned thing before Wednesday

Time was the pigeons knew the words to all the songs
But they held that secret to their graves
And even the loneliest hobo was banking on a dream
Although he never talked about it, not even to himself

Time was there were no limos in Chinatown
‘Cause everyone who knew the score had blown this town
And the church bells started ringing every Friday at noon
One for every hour since the last time I saw you smile

Time was we were younger than even we knew
Before I could see your tears even in the streaks of rain
That run down this broke down window like there’s no tomorrow
Hell. Maybe that fool rain knows something after all