Ken's Blog

I love creating things. Usually I create things using computer software, but I think there are similarities in the creative urge across all disciplines and all media.

The sculptor, poet, novelist and musical composer are all going on parallel journeys. They are in a continual process of reaching within themselves to learn how they can bring something new and beautiful into the world.

But teaching somebody else to do that is a whole different thing. Just because you know how to do something does not mean you know how to teach it.

In order to teach somebody else how to do something, you need to retrace your steps. You need to walk backward, away from your perch of expertise, and remember what it was like when you were first learning, and all of this was new to you.

Only when you do that, can you effectively teach a skill to others. It’s not easy, but nobody ever said it would be easy.

I wonder how much it will cost to fix all this damage to our nation’s capital. The huge and ridiculous acts of defacement just keep coming, one on top of another.

We will need to rebuild the East Wing, tear down the giant idiot arch, possibly remove ugly paint from the Eisenhower building, and restore the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool so that it no longer looks like a cheap suburban swimming pool dreamt up by some creepy guy from Queens.

The good news is that it should be easy to scrape that offensive graffiti off the Kennedy Center building — assuming there even is a Kennedy Center building left by the time these idiots are finished.

Modern technology is amazing, but it’s hard to get excited about it because we are simply too used to it.

Wouldn’t it be great if we could experience that technology as though encountering it for the first time? There is a certain sense of childlike wonder that a little bit of distance might give us.

Imagine you had never seen a television, or an airplane or a smartphone. Think how delightful it would be to come across such a strange and wondrous thing.

I wonder whether there is any way we could recapture that sense of excitement and delight.

If you really want to understand why thoughtful people are worried that AI may end up destroying humanity as we know it, you need to stop thinking of AI as having evil intent.

The key is to think of AIs as mindless survival machines. They have no sense of values, but they are very efficient problem solvers. If humanity gets in the way of their problem solving, they might get rid of humanity simply as a matter of efficiency.

The correct analogy is not the Borg from Star Trek or the Daleks from Doctor Who. The correct analogy is the broom from Fantasia.

Giving a demo of something that is not yet possible (but will be) is different from giving a demo of a commercial product. The goal for a “future demo” is to get people thinking about what might be possible not now, but sometime in the coming years.

The Mother of all Demos by Doug Engelbart in 1968 was a perfect example of this. He wasn’t saying “you can have this now.” He was saying “if we work very hard, one day we will all have this.”

And he was right.

I think that one of my responsibilities as a researcher is to give a such demo every once in a while, in the spirit of Engelbart. The goal of these demos is not to announce that the future has arrived, but rather to gently steer it in the right direction.

So now it is the Fourth of May
And I know what some of you will say
It’s one of those red letter days
When people say a certain phrase
But I’ll admit I have a gripe
That one franchise gets all the hype
If some of us could have our way
There’d also be a Star Trek day

Today I saw some truly great theater. It reminded me all over again that live theater can take you places that a recorded experience like a movie could never reach.

As we enter this age of ever greater reliance in A.I., it is good to know that one of our most beautifully ephemeral forms of artistic expression will always be with us, because it can never be replaced.

When I was a boy, Get Smart was one of my favorite TV shows. If you were a little kid, Don Adams as the bumbling agent 86 was one of the best things ever to show up on television.

And the show was only getting better when it was cancelled after its fifth season. Although he looked far younger, Adams had actually just turned 47 when those last episodes aired.

If the cast and crew had thrown him a birthday celebration back then, what would have been written on the cake? Possibly the number 86 followed by the age of the birthday boy.

But what would happen if you came across an image of that cake today and posted it online?

Would you believe .. you could get arrested for high treason? Yes, you guessed it: The old “hiding a violent message on a cake 56 years ago” trick.

Even so, I think a lot of people today, if they were to find that birthday cake photo online, would definitely be reposting it. And loving it.

Sorry about that Chief.

May 1 is one of my favorite days of the year. It’s the day around the world when people who actually work for a living push back against the entitled rich (like our current president and his cronies).

The United States government actually tried to make its citizens forget the significance of May 1, by designating a completely time of year (the first Monday in September) as “Labor Day”. Ironically, the tradition of Labor Day was started in the U.S. (in Chicago in particular, in 1886 — you could look it up).

To this day, May 1 is celebrated by workers all around the world. And this year, that celebration has also been taken up by millions of Americans, possibly because the U.S. government has recently become so openly hateful and contemptuous toward its own citizenry.

I realized today that two of the most important seminal figures in history — both heroes of mine — were born on this 120th day of the year.

On April 30 1777, Johann Carl Friedrich Gauss was born. Gauss was arguably the most important mathematician of our modern age. He revolutionized the fields of number theory, algebra, analysis, geometry, statistics and probability, among others.

And then on April 30, 1916, Claude Elwood Shannon was born. Shannon, an expert in many fields, essentially invented the mathematical foundations of modern computation. His innovations underpin pretty much everything we now think of as computer science and digital communication.

What is it about April 30?