Ken's Blog

If Jim Henson were alive, he would be 90 years old today. It occurs to me that the enormity of his influence on our culture is equivalent to that of the Beatles.

Take a moment to think about our modern American concept of humor, of irony, of how we approach serious topics in a playful way. These are built upon ways of thinking that Jim Henson introduced into our culture.

Of the many things that the great man said, I will leave you with just one:

“Kids don’t remember what you try to teach them. They remember what you are.”

I find a striking structural similarity between the current controversy around A.I. and the biblical tale of the Tower of Babel from Genesis 11:1–9. Ultimately the story of the Tower of Babel is about the price of hubris.

God saw that people were trying to attain a kind of god-like status by constructing a grand tower all the way up to the heavens. For that they needed to be punished.

Recent efforts to build an ever more powerful A.I. are in some ways similar. We humans are taking upon ourselves the god-like power to create a new form of intelligent life.

We really don’t know yet how that will play out. I just hope we don’t end up as a cautionary tale in some future civilization’s biblical lore.

The president of the United States was recently quoted as saying “Something is wrong with a country that can allow people to write purposely negative stories.” If taken at face value, that would suggest we should ban Stephen King, Edgar Allen Poe and Cormac McCarthy and William Styron, among many other fine writers.

On the other hand, it’s hard for any sane rational human being to believe that the president of the United States, of all people, would not understand the concept of free speech in a democracy. So I’m guessing that it was a spelling error. What the president clearly meant to say was “Something is wrong with a country that can’t allow people to write purposely negative stories.”

Admittedly, it is theoretically possible that the president meant exactly what he said. But if that were true, it would imply that he is a complete blithering idiot. So let’s give the man the benefit of the doubt, and just assume that he can’t spell.

Gothic:
      On an evening dark and gloomy
      I did feast upon Halloumi

American Romantic:
      By the shores of Gitche Gumee
      Stood the last piece of Halloumi

Epicurean:
      That aroma! ‘Tis what drew me
      To the fine taste of Halloumi

Ogden Nash:
      oh my tummy was so roomy
      until mummy made halloumi

Borscht Belt:
      I was hungry, ok sue me,
      So I noshed on some Halloumi

Queasy:
      That last one went right through me
      Now I just avoid Halloumi

Ace Attorney player:
      In a game by Shu Takumi
      The witness said “Halloumi”

Passive aggressive:
      If you actually knew me
      You would know I hate Halloumi

Suppose, due to some future technological advances, that everyone had all the knowledge in the world in their head — at least that part of it which is publicly available. Whatever public fact you might be interested in, you would already know.

So any time you now find yourself going to Wikipedia, or looking something up in a book, that would no longer be necessary, because you would already know the answer. How would that change things?

I don’t presume to know the answer, but I think it’s a question worth asking. As technology advances slowly toward making neural interfaces a reality, we should be prepared for exactly what social and cultural impact that might have.

Here’s a comforting thought: Even if you had all of the knowledge of the world in your head, that still wouldn’t tell you the answer to the question I asked at the start of this post.

The future will always surprise you.

Even if you had already predicted it.

Sometimes I want to play a melody but I don’t have a piano keyboard nearby. Which makes me sad.

So here’s the solution I came up with: I wrote a little web program that lets me use my computer keyboard as a musical keyboard.

I call it tune typing. It’s certainly not as good as having an real musical keyboard, but it’s better than nothing.

You can try it for yourself HERE.

One of my favorite poems:

   so much depends
   upon

   a red wheel
   barrow

   glazed with rain
   water

   beside the white
   chickens

Happy birthday William Carlos Williams!

We are not the first people who have been through this. Any homeowner who has discovered mold in the attic knows the drill.

Suppose we somehow manage to remove the pestilent infestation and can begin to fumigate our house. The question remains: How long will it be before the air will once again be safe to breathe?

But enough about politics.

Many years ago I organized a morning panel at the SIGGRAPH computer graphics conference. The topic of my panel was what software tools people preferred to used to create their computer graphics.

My three invited panelists were all great pioneers in the field: Jim Blinn, Craig Reynolds and Tom Duff. As it happened, each at the time was strongly associated with a particular set of software tools, and they had all been using their very different toolsets to create amazing work.

Back then Jim did everything in FORTRAN — one of the oldest of computer languages. Craig worked in LISP, which is very different from FORTRAN in every way. Tom was known as one of the great creators of UNIX tools.

At the breakfast before the panel, I asked each of them what they thought was the best programming language. Not surprisingly, Jim said that you really don’t need anything other than FORTRAN. Craig said that LISP was the most powerful language for computer graphics.

I was expecting Tom to speak up for UNIX tools, so I wasn’t prepared for what came next. “A graduate student,” Tom replied, “is the highest level programming language.”

Shortly after that I quit my job in industry to become a professor at NYU, and I never looked back. To this day, I still don’t know whether that life decision was influenced by what Tom Duff told me over breakfast.