Ken's Blog

One of the stranger aspects of being human is the way that what is going on in one person’s mind affects what is going on in the minds of other people. On a physical level of course, we are all completely separate beings, each with our own body and our own personal space.

Yet when people get together, all sorts of strange transferences occur. It’s as though there is some sort of extra dimension, parallel to this one, in which bodies and brains are connected by a psychic cable.

My mood affects your mood, and your mood in turn affects the mood of the next people you meet. This mental transference can be either good or bad, but it is rarely negligible.

I guess it is a large part of what makes us human.

Bodies are weird. There are many things about the human form that seem completely capricious and arbitrary.

If we were an alien species on a different planet, we might have a completely different type of body. I suspect that on a distant planet somewhere there is an alien contemplating its own body.

And I suspect it might be having exactly the same thought that I am having. It’s nice to think that we have something in common.

When I am programming, there is a point at which everything is working. I’ve caught all the bugs I can think of texting for, and the code can safely be distributed for use by others.

But that’s when I start polishing. It makes no difference to anybody else, but to me it matters.

I double check all the naming and style conventions, find and remove any extraneous code, and add more little comments here and there. Functionally, these changes make no difference, but on some level they matter.

I suspect this is similar to the mindset of someone who polishes the parts of their motorcycle that nobody else can see. It may be just a conversation between you and yourself, but it’s a conversation that matters.

We had an interesting discussion this morning about my posts of the last two days. The question on the table was whether an AI-enhanced literary work is still a book.

We concluded that it comes down to the intention of the author. If your goal is to use words to make a painting, then you are making a painting. If your goal is to use words to create an interactive game experience, then you are creating a game.

But if your goal is to tell a story with words, and those words are subsequently enhanced through automated means, then your book is still a book. For example, an e-book on a Kindle is still a book, and an audiobook with A.I. narration is still a book.

Intentionality matters.

Continuing the topic from yesterday’s post…

The reason it is still a book is that there is still only a single author. Contrast this with a movie or a theater production, which is a collaboration between an entire team of professionals with complementary skills.

Such creations require not just a screenplay, but also a production designer, director, camera operator, lighting designer, sound designer, and so forth, as well as a cast and crew.

But a book is the product of a writer’s mind. What you read emerges from that writer’s imagination and ability to tell a story.

In my “future book” scenario there is still only you and the writer. Yes, there is also Artificial Intelligence, but that is a tool, like a camera or the process of printing and book binding, not another human artist.

Eventually we will come to see A.I. as just another tool, like a movie camera or a paint brush. What really matters is the judgement and skill, for better or worse, of the person who wields that paint brush.

If you put on your XR glasses and walk into it, is it still a book? If the pages you are looking for appear as you wander through the room, is it still a book?

If the illustrations come to life when you play with them, is it still a book? If you can ask it a question, and it immediately puts together a little movie to act out the answer for you, is it still a book?

I say yes.

There are sunsets every day. They are so common that we completely forgot about them.

And yet each sunset is beautiful beautiful and priceless, a crown jewel of nature’s miracles.

I wonder whether we could all learn not to take such miracles for granted. That would indeed be a miracle.

Jaron Lanier once told me why he chose to work with Microsoft rather than Google or Facebook. “It’s because,” he said, “Microsoft charges for the use of its products and services. In contrast, everything on Google and Facebook is ad driven.”

“Their revenue model is based on selling your personal data, so they have no choice but to be evil.

Some time later, I was talking with Yann LeCun. He told me why, as an A.I. reseaercher, he chose to work with Facebook rather than Google. “Both,” he explained, “gather people’s data. But Facebook is better, because people who use Facebook annotate their own data.”

I am fascinated by the way these two conversations are related.

Today I showed my computer graphics class some examples I’ve made of interactive diagrams. These are notes for a textbook that will be meant to be read on-line.

The basic idea is that every diagram in the book tells a little story. When you move your mouse over any diagram, it does something in response that aims to advance your understanding of whatever concept is being discussed.

You can check it out for yourself here.

For homework I asked the class to make their own interactive diagrams, and I gave them my software library to work with. I look forward to seeing what they come up with!

You would think that the situation most conducive to productivity would be one in which you have lots of time to think, without any distractions. After all, that would seem to be the optimal condition for entering a “flow” state.

Yet oddly enough, I seem to get much more done when I am overworked and busy and already have way too much on my plate. It appears that the need to multitask triggers some sort of psychic survival mechanism.

I begin to push in new directions, and I start tying projects together in new and different ways. In a sense, it feels as though the need to hold onto multiple things at once is causing me to temporarily grow more limbs.

I am not sure that this is a good thing.