Ken's Blog

The irony of life is that precisely because it is so random, and tragedy can lurk just around any corner, we must never forget just how incredibly fortunate we are.

In 1966 the original Star Trek series introduced the idea of a universal translator. It was a very clever conceit. Our intrepid heroes could communicate with any alien races they happened to meet, thanks to the handy-dandy little translators built into the com-badges on their Federation uniforms.

But what would be the effect of a universal translator in reality? WOuld it be a good thing or a bad thing?

Right now, if I wanted to spend time in Korea or France, I would need to learn the language in order to truly understand the culture and its people. If I never needed to learn the language, I might simply spend time there in a bubble of ignorance, believing I was learning another culture, but not really ever understanding the people or their values.

So maybe it’s just as well that we don’t have a universal translator. Then again, we might very well find one built into those XR wearable glasses that will eventually end up replacing smartphones.

I hope that leads to an era of greater inter-cultural understanding, but I fear that it might just lead to an era of blissfully unaware inter-cultural ignorance.

Forty years ago today, the Apple Macintosh went on sale in the U.S., and it was one of those moments that changed everything. People who are old enough to remember the Ridley Scott commercial know that it was one of the rare cases where the hype was justified.

It’s true that the IBM P.C. started the democratization of the computer. Yet it was the Mac which finally positioned the personal computer as a consumer device first and foremost.

In a sense we live in a world that was created on January 24, 1984. There are things we all take for granted about our comfortable relationship to our computer technology that were simply not yet true on January 23, 1984.

So happy 40th birthday model M0001. Because of what you started, many people are now looking forward to seeing whether February 2, 2024 will turn out to be as momentous a day of birth.

I wonder what new skills we will develop, as we all start using AI based on General Purpose Transformers. The sorts of magical scenes that we are used to watching in science fiction and fantasy movies will no longer seem magical, as they become everyday skills.

For example, if you and your friends are designing a house, you and your collaborators will soon just be able to talk through what you’d like to see and it will start to show up. Acts of creation and design will simply be woven into your conversation.

You might say “the roof should be pointed and green,” and I might add “the driveway curves this way, and there is a dog running across the lawn,” and these things will appear before us. As we go on in our discussion, we continually refine our design, adjusting, adding details, gradually making things more specific.

The experience will not be that different from how today we might hire a 3D expert to make rendered sketches of our ideas, except that the process will be faster and cheaper, and the results will be more visually realistic.

Another similarity will be that there will be no magic bullet — the act of creation will still be “Garbage in, garbage out.” If you are a bad designer, your A.I. will faithfully deliver to you a highly detailed and impressively rendered bad design.

There will be a shift in the nature of expertise, but not in the need for expertise. Bad designers might find themselves out of a job, but good designers will still get work — even more so than today.

The difference will be that those good designers will be paid for their talent and good judgment, rather than for their time. And that will be a much better deal for the good designer.

Descartes said “I think, therefore I am,”
Which can lead to a tough philosophical jam,
For if thinking precedes our existence, of course
That’s putting Descartes before the horse

Because all of our thinking is done in our brain.
Yet back when he said that, it wasn’t insane
To think of the parts as much less than the whole
If everyone has their own God-given soul.

But then there arose a new view of reality
In direct opposition to just this duality.
God was kicked out, replaced by psychologists
And a new breed of thinkers called phenomenologists

Who made quite a meal out of Descartes’ defeat.
Now the spirit is served only after the meat
And everything’s changed just by flipping the link.
Put simply: “I am, therefore I think.”

Have you heard that old saying? It has quite a rep:
“A journey of ten thousand miles begins with one step.”
But I have since learned the truth, after difficult trials:
“A journey of one step begins with ten thousand miles.”

I realized today that two of my favorite songs, White Christmas and California Dreaming, are exactly the opposite of each other. One sings of longing for the lovely snowy Northeast winter, and the other is sung from the point of view of someone stuck in freezing weather and longing for the warm sunny shores of Los Angeles.

Knowing that Irving Berlin wrote White Christmas while stuck in LA one winter helps to underline the point. And of course, John and Michelle Phillips wrote California dreaming while stuck in the cold northeast.

I wonder how many other songs can be paired this way — perfect opposites, and eerily well matched.

Today someone asked me what I thought would be the future of virtual reality. To me it seemed like an odd question.

The way I see it, the only real virtual reality is our human capacity for language. After that, everything that follows is detail.

At least ninety percent of solving a problem is understanding it. Once you understand what you’re really dealing with, getting to a solution is usually easy.

Alas, the journey of getting to easy can be long and difficult.

When there is still time
you love how the precious sand
runs through your fingers.
And then it is gone
leaving nothing
but a broken
hourglass.
And still
just then,
in a moment,
you realize you
want to break every
hourglass in the world.
As though that could defeat
the tyranny of time.