Ken's Blog

Don’t let anyone talk you into getting “smart vegetables” for your urban garden.

They might turn out to be part of a plot.

Yesterday I talked about computer graphic systems that are able to synthesize realistic faces of people who don’t exist. They do this by looking at large numbers of real peoples’ faces, and computing all sorts of statistical data from those faces.

When faces are analyzed this way, each real person’s face ends up being represented in the computer as a single point in a high dimensional mathematical space. If two data points are near each other in that space, then they will tend to produce faces that look similar, but not quite the same.

Once this framework is set up, then to create a new realistic face you can just choose a new point in that high dimensional space. The face that you create will end up looking more like some real people and less like others, but it won’t look exactly like the face of anybody who actually exists.

To me this raises an interesting ethical question: If you are training this model on the faces of all people, then are you violating anybody’s privacy or ownership over their own appearance? Or are you just doing what we all do every day inside our heads — building a model of what a face looks like based on the people we see around us?

And if that is the case, do you then have free license to use that data to create any new faces you want? And if not, then why not?

I am confused as to why some Hollywood studios attempted to gain ownership of the likenesses of extras. The topic is timely because it is one of the issues that led to the current actors’ strike.

As I understand it, studios wanted to insert a clause into contracts that would allow them to scan the likeness of actors hired for the day — and then to retain the right to reuse that data in perpetuity.

The reason I find this puzzling has nothing to do with the ethical considerations, as large as those are. What stumps me is this: Anybody in my field of computer graphics will tell you that it is totally unnecessary.

For quite a few years the technology has existed to synthesize an extremely wide variety of highly realistic human faces. Many technical papers were published showing how to do this, long before the recent A.I. craze.

Didn’t anybody at those studios do even a little research? If they had simply talked to their own effects people, they would have learned all about these existing techniques.

I’m starting to think these studios might not be all that well run.

Bar hopping in Manhattan is more expensive than you drink it is.

If I were a member of SAG-AFTRA, I would certainly do everything I could to fight for the right to not eventually be replaced by an AI. And I think this issue goes beyond monetary interests. It speaks to questions that are far deeper.

An analogous battle once took place on the Broadway stage. At some point technology had advanced to the point where musicals could replace orchestras with high quality recordings. To do so would certainly have saved a lot of money. And some theatergoers might not even have noticed the difference.

But there would have been a difference. Local 802 of the American Federation of Musicians fought long and hard to not be replace by machines. And our collective theater-going experience is far richer because of their victory.

The same goes for human actors in movies. There is something beautiful in the bond between human performer and human audience. It would be a shame if that bond were to end up being broken, or replaced, by some technological alternative, simply in the name of cost-cutting.

At midnight last night the actors of SAG-AFTRA went on strike, joining the already striking screenwriters. To kick things off, the SAG-AFTRA union president, Fran Drescher, gave an fiery and defiant speech.

This is the first time that two major Hollywood unions have been on strike at the same time since 1960. when Ronald Reagan was the president of the actors’ guild. Reagan, of course, famously went on to become president of the United States.

Maybe one result of all this is that Fran Drescher will also one day become president of the United States. That would be a fascinating turn of events.

But if that happens, the worst nightmare of Republicans will come true. America will finally become a Nanny state.

I was talking with my mom today, and the conversation got around to the future of wearable technology. We found that we agreed very strongly on one thing.

It would be great to have an ordinary looking pair of glasses, with a little unobtrusive camera and a little unobtrusive display that does just one capability: When you are talking to somebody, it shows you their name.

Just think how much social awkwardness and embarrassment would be saved by this one simple innovation. I suspect that if it came on the market today, millions of people would buy it.

I’ve been thinking that it would be fun to explore puzzles that combine math challenges with lexical challenges. Here is a simple example:

Consider the following sequence:

Four
Twelve
Thirty three
Thirty six

(1) Can you figure out the pattern?

(2) What number might come next in this sequence?

I will give the answer in a few days.

If you were to read the Wikipedia “about today” page faithfully every day, eventually you would see the names of nearly all the famous people. For example, today I learned that it’s the birthday of both E. B. White and Robert the Bruce.

Theoretically you could follow all of the links, and use the Wikipedia to learn about the lives of the famous people. By the end of a year, when the cycle repeats, you would have learned quite a bit.

I wonder whether that would make you a better person.

The central mystery of human existence is faced by every individual sooner or later. The mystery is this: We do not know when we will die, but we know for certain that we will.

Think about how much philosophy, literature, and religious thinking has circled around this one basic fact of our existence. We will never completely come to terms with this mystery, but we will always be in mutual orbit around it.