Ken's Blog

At some point in the future, people will no longer be looking at physical screens. Somebody might look at a virtual screen in order to simulate the experience of looking at a physical screen, but that will be a software construct.

Eventually, the entire idea of screens may fade away, replaced by something that is much more natural and immersive and closer to the way that humans communicated before TVs and computers came along.

When that happens, future generations may come to see our old fashioned movies and TV shows as quaint, or even unwatchable. Maybe the old content will need to be processed to make sense to future generations.

Old black and white movies are sometimes colorized to make them more palatable to modern audiences. Maybe the same thing will happen with flat screen movies and TV shows. In order to make sense to future modern audiences, they will need to be volumized.

Mountains are a lot bigger than we are. And being on a mountain makes me feel very small.

Which gives me an excellent sense of perspective. I think this is a good thing.

Suppose, just for the sake of argument, that all of the information on Wikipedia was in your head as instant recall. Any factoid — whether famous birthday, significant historical event, geographic location or anatomical nomenclature — as well as any scientific explanation, economic theory or notable literary quote and its associated meaning, would be right there in your head, without needing to be looked up.

What would this change? Would it mean that we work differently, play differently, socialize differently? Would we remain fundamentally the same as a social species, or would there be a radical shift of some sort?

I don’t know the answers, but I suspect that these are going to become important questions.

Today I went to a Costco in a strange city. Although I had never been in this Costco before, it seemed eerily familiar.

It’s because the layout was exactly the same as the Costco where I often shop. For a moment I had the crazy thought that I was back at the other Costco.

And then I started thinking, wouldn’t it be cool if Costco’s were actually cosmically connected. If you have the right sort of membership, you could enter into one and exit out another.

This would be such a good way to travel. It might not even require a mandatory purchase.

If that were true, I would definitely say that membership has its privileges.

Today I truly took a day off from work. This is not something that I do often.

It could be argued, in the larger view of things, that this was the most productive choice I could have made. That is, if you look at total cumulative productivity, amortized over time.

I definitely prefer this view of things.

I distinctly remember the first time I saw someone with a cellphone at the beach. It was 1992 on a lovely beach in northern Brazil.

A man was lying peacefully on the sand, eyes closed, sunning himself, his cellphone right beside him. Which was unusual, because in that year cellphones were unusual, at least in the U.S. If you had one back then, it was because you needed it for work.

I remember thinking that this could be terrible or it could be great. Terrible because the man clearly was unable to get away from whatever work and responsibilities were glueing him to that phone. Great because he was able to be at the beach even while he was working.

Today I was looking at my Quest Pro, and thinking that in 5 or 10 years some more advanced version of this will have the form factor of sunglasses. And then, in some form, I will probably see a repeat of exactly the same scene.

A person will be lying on the beach with what look like sunglasses, but which I will know to be functioning smart glasses. And I will be left thinking that this could be terrible or it could be great.

I wonder whether AI will advance to the point where we can each have our own personal soundtrack. Wherever you are, the computer will figure out the right mood to fit your current situation.

It might even compose something original, based on your tastes. Maybe it would be a new way to create music.

Today I sleep.

There was a lot of excitement at Siggraph this week, but a surprising lack of vision into the future. I guess that makes sense for a technical conference.

For the most part, people were focused on the next thing, whatever that may be. So they weren’t generally thinking about what computer graphics might be like in another ten years.

Well, ten years from now computers will be a hundred times faster than they are now. So things are indeed going to be qualitatively different.

Computer graphic imagery (CGI) will be completely integrated into our everyday life, as wearables become cheap and ubiquitous. The real and the virtual will be seamlessly intermixed to the point where the distinction between the two will start to become meaningless.

CGI will be continually created by generative AI in response to our casual conversation and gesture. And we won’t even think about it, because it will all just be normal.

But at Siggraph this year, they weren’t really talking about any of that.

As I was saying, one experience yesterday morning at Siggraph jumped out at me. At the nVidia booth, they were showing how they can use machine learning to turn a single photograph into a 3D model. The interesting part was that the process takes three seconds.

My first thought, after all this week’s talk about Moore’s Law, is that in another ten years this process will take one hundredth as long. This is because every ten years, computers become 100 times faster.

In other words, by 2033, we will be able to turn a single photograph into a 3D model in real time. At that point it will seem instantaneous.

Like Turner Whitted said, certain effects go beyond the quantitative, and become qualitative. When we can create 3D worlds instantaneously from single images, that will be a qualitative change in our ability to manipulate reality.