Ken's Blog

Maybe it’s a good idea to put things in perspective. As far as we know, the founder and former CEO of Nvidia only screwed two people that he shouldn’t have.

Yesterday, our administration, in an awesome display of incompetence, managed to screw thousands upon thousands of Americans who were just trying to get home to their families.

Who decides to authorize a major computer system upgrade at 3:30 p.m. on a busy Friday afternoon? Have these people ever even seen a computer?

At some point in the future (it is not clear exactly when), driving as a common skill will go the way of the horse and buggy. We will all be using self-driving cars.

At that point, personal transportation will essentially replicate the logic of the internet. How you get from one place to another will be calculated at run-time by a set of cooperating Cloud servers.

Packets will be routed through the network via globally optimized algorithms. Except that instead of digital bits, those packets will be our human bodies.

But there will need to be privacy protections, just as there need to be privacy protections in today’s internet. If you value your privacy, you will be able to password protect the location of your house.

Your friends and family will be able to get in a self-driving vehicle and direct it to take them to your home. But if you turn on privacy protections, anyone else will be out of luck.

If some random stranger gets in a vehicle and tells it to take them to your address, they will get the obvious message: “Address not found.”

When I look at the list of notable people on Wikipedia whose birthdays are today, I can often mouse over their name and see their picture. Presumably Wikipedia is running a script that fetches the article about that person and looks for their image. If it finds the image, it displays it as long as your mouse is hovering over the person’s name.

But this is not really satisfying, because people live long and varied lives. For example, today is Neil Young’s birthday.

When I mouse over his name I see an image of him the way he is now. But in the collective minds of music fans, there is still that other Neil Young — the young man who helped to revolutionize popular music in the late 1960s and early 1970s.

I think that ideally every image should come with an age slider. When the image pops up, you have the option of choosing the age at which you would like to see them.

This should not be too difficult, since there tend to be large numbers of images of notable people on-line. One might object that it would be prohibitive to scrape the Web to fetch all of those images, and then synthesize them on the fly.

Which is why we might want to rethink the way we represent on-line images of people. Rather than the current fixed formats like JPEG or PNG, we could convert each person’s visage into an composite created by training an AI model from multiple images, each labeled by age.

A person’s image would then be stored as a latent space representation. When someone asks to see an image of that person at a particular age, a variational decoder would quickly produce the desired result.

Look at how the time goes past. Happy birthday, Neil Young.

I don’t think the Democrats should crow too loudly about their recent sweep of the midterm elections. This administration will go down in history for its astonishing combination of ineptness, cruelty, and sheer obliviousness.

They have lost trillions of dollars of our nation’s collective wealth, and harmed our nation’s ability to develop scientific advances in a way that will take years to recover from. They have also terrorized innocent American citizens who happen to be the “wrong” ethnicity, and alienated our allies around the world.

Just DOGE alone, by taking a wrecking ball to USAID, is on course to causing the senseless, cruel and completely unnecessary death of literally millions of innocent people, a large portion of them little children. And they did all this while managing to embroil us in an unwinnable war with Iran while sending gas prices through the roof.

So before the Democrats pat themselves on the back too smugly, let’s be honest with ourselves. It’s not us, it’s them.

Today I led a discussion on a technical topic of great mutual interest. There were a tremendous number of great ideas.

We started a Google doc, and everybody wrote down their thoughts. In the end, the number of wonderful original ideas greatly exceeded my expectations.

I think the key for me, as the discussion leader, was to give everybody space to take ownership of their train of thought. That wasn’t always easy, since my natural tendency is to jump in a say “Yes, but what about this?”

Somehow I managed to mostly repress that tendency, and the results were very positive. It turns out that the most difficult thing to do when you are leading a discussion is also the most productive: Just shut up and listen.

I had everything exactly where I wanted it in my room. But then the painters came, and I needed to move everything into a big pile in the middle.

Afterwards,I was so happy that I could put my room back together, with everything exactly where I wanted it. Except that’s not what happened.

As I started to reassemble my space, I started to see all the things that had been wrong with my “perfect” arrangement. And I started to make changes.

Now everything is much better, and I am very happy in my space. And it would never have happened if I hadn’t been forced into a reorg.

There is a lesson here somewhere.

Suppose we were to conduct a poll of everybody on the earth to ask them whether they would wish to live forever. I wonder what the results would be.

Perhaps a more interesting question is how the results would break down by demographics. Who would want immortality, and who wouldn’t?

For example, does the desire for immortality increase or decrease with age? Is it dependent upon household income?

As far as I know, we all have that one thing in common — one day we will all face the Grim Reaper. But I imagine that among the roughly 8.3 billion people currently on this planet there are many and varied opinions about that event — or the possibility of avoiding it.

As I attended the UIST conference this past week, it became more clear to me than ever that there are two distinct kinds of AI. One kind is trying to be your best friend. The other is one you never meet, but every day it makes your world better behind the scenes.

I understand that there are many billions of dollars to make by selling consumers a powerful drug in the form of a make-believe best friend. Eventually people will catch on, and everyone will understand that like any powerful innovation — think automobiles and opioids — chatbots will need to be regulated. Appropriate regulations will follow.

But meanwhile, there is a different kind of AI everywhere, below the surface. The fact that you can buy inexpensive sensors which used to cost hundreds of dollars or more, that your mail is efficiently and accurately sorted, that your monthly utility bill is much less than it might otherwise be, all of this is due to machine learning working away for your benefit, in places where you never see it.

As we rightly come to grips with the epidemic of make-believe humans unleashed on an unprepared public, we might take a moment to appreciate the distinction. It’s not AI itself that is the problem — in fact it’s great. The problem is people who are profiting off particular varieties of it in arguably unethical and questionable ways.

Breaking news in The NY Times:
The President Elevates Hannibal Lecter, a Hard-Liner, to Chief of Staff

The president is elevating Hannibal Lecter, his powerful domestic policy adviser, to be his next chief of staff in the wake of shattering Republican losses in the midterm elections. The decision to replace Susie Wiles, set to take effect on Monday, will fundamentally shift the circle of advisers around the president.

Mr. Lecter, a deeply ideological loyalist and noted gastronome, has been the architect of some of the most polarizing domestic policies in Mr. Trump’s second term. His promotion signals an aggressive doubling-down by the president days after voters delivered a decisive rebuke of his handling of a range of issues, including the economy, the war with Iran and the aggressive deportation campaign directed by Mr. Lecter.

Bill Pulte, the administration’s finance housing chairman who Wiles allies believed was undermining her with the president, was quick to praise Lecter as the new choice. “Congratulations to my dear friend and colleague, Hannibal Lecter, on your promotion to Chief of Staff,” Pulte wrote on social media. “I can’t wait to work with you!”

When reached for comment, Mr. Lecter said “That’s a very kind thing for him to say. I look forward to having him for lunch.”

I have been having a lot of conversations with friends and colleagues since the election. Of course everyone is elated and relieved, but there is also something deeper at work.

The nearest analogy I can think of is something personal. Suppose you learned that someone close to you, somebody you love, had been beaten up by a vicious gang of thugs.

When they were found, they were suffering from broken bones and internal injuries. You go to visit them in the hospital.

You try to say something reassuring, to let them know that you love them, that the worst is over. But you both know that they will carry those wounds with them for a long time. Bones will heal, but psychic wounds run deep.

They now understand that safety is an illusion. You feel helpless, knowing that no matter how much you love them, you cannot restore what has been taken from them.

This is how I feel about what has been done over the last two years to our beloved country. A gang of vicious thugs broke into its house, and harmed it in ways that might take years to heal.

Yes, the monsters have been vanquished, for now. But we also know, with terrible clarity, that safety is an illusion.