Ken’s Blog

There may come a time when everything people make is created with the help of artificial intelligence. Children will learn, from the time they are little, how to use A.I. in everything they do, and the ability to do that will be what we mean by “skill”.

Songs and novels will be created with the aid of A.I., as will the speeches of politicians, the opinions of doctors and lawyers, and the works of leading filmmakers. When that day comes, anybody doing things without the aid of A.I. will be considered eccentric, a throwback to the days when people made their own soap, or fashioned their own shoes.

I wonder whether such an arcane ability, assuming that it even still exists, will be respected, or just considered weird.

Generally, Wikipedia’s “Births” section on any given day of the year focuses exclusively on our own species. But today Wikipedia is branching out.

In particular, Wikipedia today celebrated the first birthday of Moo Deng. Moo Deng is a pygmy hippopotamus who was born on July 10, 2024.

I wonder whether this is the beginning of a new era of non-species-specific birthday celebrations on Wikipedia. Or maybe Moo Deng is just special.

My recent high school reunion got me thinking about how certain things change over time. In particular, I realized that I and all of my classmates shared a superpower that is no longer available to teenagers of today.

We were free to spend our days unburdened. We would hang out with one another, have long conversations based on our mutual interests, or share books and favorite songs.

There were no influencers. There was no social media and no algorithm. When we wanted to learn about something, we would go to the library and check out a book.

When we were in class, the teacher had our full attention. Class discussions were all in and completely participatory. Nobody was sitting in the back of the classroom staring at their phone.

I don’t think those days are coming back. So that may well have been the last time in history when American kids had a chance to simply take the time to figure out who they want to be, without somebody trying to answer that question for them.

For me today has been a house cleaning day. No computers, no algorithms, just good hard physical work and putting things in order.

At the end of the day, it works really well as a metaphor. But also, at the end of the day, you end up with a clean house.

Life happens. And not always the way you want it to.

There is a much cruder way of saying that. But today I am in a polite mood.

Pretty much our entire collective cultural experience of the digital world exists within rectangles. We spend much of our day looking into the little rectangular screens of smart phones or at the somewhat larger rectangular screens of the computers on our desks and in our laps.

When the XR singularity occurs, millions of people will be able to start experiencing the digital world all around them. Those rectangles will no longer be necessary.

Will we continue to carry over the conventions of the early digital age, with all of the digital information in the space around us getting crammed into rectangles because that’s what people are used to? Or will we be able to break free?

I am reminded of early automobiles. Early cars were steered by controls very much like those on a horse and buggy.

Eventually that convention fell away, and the modern steering wheel evolved to take its place. In the coming age of wearables, I wonder what will eventually take the place of the rectangle.

When I was a kid we used to have a dog that loved to run around our backyard. But of course it would swerve to avoid the big tree in the middle of the yard.

One year my dad had the tree taken down. Even though there was just an empty space where the tree had been, the dog still kept avoiding the tree. Whenever he got to that empty spot in the yard, he would always go around it.

I think people are like that. Everyone, in their own way, needs to run around trees that other people cannot see. In some cases, those trees were cut down many years earlier.

But still, people will keep anything they can to avoid that tree, and nothing you can do will make them run through it. Once you start to understand that, you start to understand people.

There was a weird hit piece in the NY Times yesterday targeting. Zohran Mamdani, the democratic candidate for NYC Mayor. The attempted smear itself was so stupid and badly executed that it’s not worth discussing.

But what is worth discussing is why the NY Times is running nonsensical “articles” trying to take this man down. This is the sort of thing that I have come to expect from the idiot in the White House, but not from the newspaper of record.

I wonder what the three people who wrote this article — Benjamin Ryan, Nicholas Fandos and Dana Rubinstein — thought would be the result of such an ill conceived and transparent attack. If the goal here was to turn voters against him, it was a very poor move.

Anyone with half a brain will see this kind of smear attempt for what it is, and will become only more sympathetic to the candidate. After all, we are left wondering, who is so afraid of this man that they are trying to use ridiculous “smears” to derail his campaign?

One can only conclude that Mamdani is doing something right.

One explanation for why the Republicans in the U.S. Congress have voted for this incredibly destructive bill — a bill that is particularly (and deeply) harmful to their own constituents in red states — is maybe the simplest explanation: Fear.

It is already clear that this administration is methodically laying the groundwork for an authoritarian outcome. In another two years, our country might very well come to resemble Viktor Orbán’s Hungary, or perhaps something even worse.

In 2026 we may have what will be called elections. But given all that is going on, those might turn out be elections in name only.

The upshot is that Republican legislators do not dare cross the boss. The long term consequences might be unpleasant for them, to say the least.

The most important moment in the history of television wasn’t any particular engineering innovation or technological advancement. All of those were necessary, but they were not sufficient.

The most important moment in the history of television was when Milton Berle first hosted the Texaco Star Theatre in the new medium of television, on June 8, 1948. It turned out to be a perfect fit of performer and medium.

The popularity of “Uncle Miltie”, and his ability to use what worked best in the new medium, quickly turned a somewhat niche technology into a mainstay of American family entertainment.

I wonder when the next newly developed medium, something that is not quite on our collective cultural radar yet, will achieve its Uncle Miltie moment.