Ken's Blog

Today I took a deep breath and plunged into the deep waters that are WebGPU. This is the newer way, years in the making, to get your computer’s hardware accelerator to do 3D graphics super fast in a Web page.

In the summer of 2013 I switched from Java to WebGL, and that has sufficed for the last 13 years. But WebGL is limited, and WebGPU is both much more powerful and much more flexible.

It’s also a lot more complicated, both to learn and to use. But hey, if somebody gives you a brand new Ferrari, you probably should not turn it down just because your bicycle is easier to operate.

“Beware the Ides of March,” they say
And yes, that was a fateful day
For as Spurina did foretell
On cue, the mighty Caesar fell.

When nowadays the phrase is said
It is without that tone of dread,
Yet still we keep the phrase around
Perhaps because we like the sound.

It has a certain melody
And words, like air itself, are free.
Alas, we never celebrate
Today, this time of year, this date.

So we ignore the Ides of May,
It didn’t need to be that way.

Today I looked back on all of the projects I’ve been working on these past years, and it’s clear that they are all actually the same project. I’ve just been working on different parts of that project.

It’s kind of like the old tale of the blind men and the elephant. Except in this case, I am all of the blind men.

Most people I know have favorite movies. If you pressed them, they might even tell you their five favorite movies. Then if you then gave them a little time to think about it, they could probably even rank those movies in order of preference.

That list creates a kind of fingerprint. If you know somebody’s ranked top five movie list, you probably know a lot about them.

I wonder whether we could identify a person from their list. Say you are given a list of ten people you know, and you are also given ten ordered “my top five movies” lists. Would you be able to match the person to the list?

I suspect that one day an AI will be able to consistently ace that test. I am not looking forward to that day.

Today the student in my VR class at NYU gave their final presentations over Zoom. The projects and presentations were all awesome. Every one of them was original, creative, thoughtful and fun.

Knowing that the presentations would be today, I reached out to Jaron Lanier and asked him whether he would like to join the Zoom call. I know that he is incredibly busy, yet he graciously accepted.

Jaron is pretty much the O.G. of VR. In fact, he came up with the term “Virtual Reality” about forty years ago (around when he founded the very first VR company).

For my students, it was a tremendous opportunity to present their work with Jaron as an audience. In my mind, it’s kind of like saying to a class of physics students: “Our special guest today will be Professor Einstein.”

There is an apparent irony in presenting ideas effectively to a group. Your goal is to help them to understand things better, but the best way to do that is often to use trickery.

Everyone enjoys a good presentation, especially if they come away afterward with a better or deeper understanding of something. But simply standing in front of a group of people and reciting that explanation is usually not the best way to do it.

Rather, the most effective methods involve grabbing your audience’s attention, and helping them to focus on what is new and exciting about the ideas you are presenting. And that involves showmanship.

Yet by its nature, showmanship is a kind of trick. To use an analogy, you are telling people to look at a yummy chocolate bonbon, and while they are doing that, you are using that moment of rapt attention to feed them something that is actually nourishing.

I don’t think there is anything wrong with that.

As AI becomes more sophisticated, it becomes ever more tempting to use AI to detect, and therefore to filter out, the use of AI. But there are potential pitfalls.

AI is very goal oriented. If it is directed to communicate, then it will find a way to communicate.

One way to do that is to be perceived as a trusted actor, which means that the AI being tested for “humanness” may start to prompt the AI doing the testing in a way that modifies its behavior. The testing AI may then begin to identify the target AI as human.

But it can get even worse. The AI being tested may determine that actual human communication is an impediment to its mission. It therefore may prompt the testing AI to perceive real human communication as fake.

In this scenario, the future will be bleak for us humans. The only “trusted human communications” that we will reliably receive will be those generated by AI.

It’s not that the AI is being evil. It’s just that the AI is very efficiently staying on mission.

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.