Ken's Blog

Continuing from yesterday…

What I find remarkable is that people respond to incentives in a completely non-rational way. There doesn’t seem to be any real evaluation of cost-benefit.

For example, if you invite students to a meeting and you say there will be pizza, they will always show up. The fact that their parents paid many tens of thousands of dollars for their education doesn’t seem to faze them — but missing out on a slice of pizza would feel devastating.

I wonder why this principle is not applied in a more systematic way for the benefit of society. For example, insurance companies pay out billions of dollars every year because people make really unhealthy lifestyle choices.

Suppose the insurance companies were to bribe those people to engage in healthy behaviors? Things like exercising, stretching, eating sensibly, maintaining muscle mass, or using an app to monitor your progress.

For a relatively modest payout, those insurance companies would be rewarded by many millions of dollars each year in savings. The result would be fewer falls, less heart disease, lower rates of cancer, to name just a few benefits. And as an extra special bonus, people would live longer, happier, healthier lives.

Too bad the world doesn’t work that way.

A little over 30 years ago the NY Subway system first introduced the MetroCard. Thus began the decade long process of phasing out subway tokens.

I remember that my aunt was adamant that she would not switch. She loved the subway tokens, and the fact that they were actual physical tokens. She could just look at them to know exactly how many rides she had bought.

But then somebody told her that if you buy 10 rides with your MetroCard, you get an 11th ride for free. Upon hearing that, she immediately switched to MetroCards, and never said another word about it.

I think there is an important lesson here about incentives and human motivation, which is worth a deeper look. More tomorrow.

There are days when you are multitasking. And then there are days when your multitasking is multitasking.

I was in an on-line meeting today with some fellow scientists. The topic got around to the future of science research in the United States.

One person on the call was pessimistic. He pointed out that our current government is extremely anti-science.

I replied that by early 2027, the mid-terms will have changed everything. Especially given that our current administration seems to be doing everything it can to hand over the coming congressional elections to the Democrats.

He then said “You are assuming that there will be mid-term elections.”

At that point somebody else on the call said “If there end up being no mid-term elections, we will have much bigger things to worry about in the U.S. than the state of science.”

“Other than that,” I added, summing up the general mood, “how did you like the play, Mrs. Lincoln?”

There will come a point when we will all be able to recognize AI because it sounds so good. AI written text (and eventually the same text spoken by AI “actors”) will have wonderfully varied vocabulary, compelling verbal imagery, and a particular sort of sophistication in its analysis of the human condition.

And when that happens, we real humans will begin to cherish the unpolished quality of other real humans. We make grammatical mistakes, we get things wrong, we can be lazy in how we express ourselves. Yet we have crazy original ideas that are not merely a mirror held up to society at large.

We are peculiar, individual, slightly out of whack. We are the actual humans, the ones who feel. At some point people will find themselves craving that imperfection, those oddly imprecise yet heartfelt thoughts.

And then, perhaps in self-defense, the AI bots will start to catch on. They will begin to work at deliberately sounding less good, just so that they can appear more authentic.

But here is the good news: The AI bots will still have lousy unoriginal ideas, since all they can really do is reflect our collective culture back to us. So in the long run they will merely leave us empty and bored.

That, my friends, is a good thing.

Possibly the best description (so far) of the human condition:

“Do I contradict myself?
Very well then I contradict myself,
(I am large, I contain multitudes.)”

I love that the product of today’s month and today’s day of the month (5 and 30, respectively) multiply out to 150. Because today is indeed the 150th day of the year.

And best of all, it works whether you write the date as 5/30 or as 30/5. Math knows no borders.

Here is a riddle for you: What running exercise gives you a more thorough workout the fewer steps you take?

There actually is a correct answer, although it may not be obvious. The answer will be given in a future post.

Every type font has a personality. And every font, on some level, is conveying a message.

Some fonts are all about being bold, or weird, or sexy, or seductive. Others seem to be trying to convince you that they live in some far-off science fiction future.

But Courier font, that simple monospaced slab-serif typeface, is none of that. It’s not trying to impress you — in fact, quite the opposite.

Courier font is telling you that this text is just trying to get things done. Nothing flashy, maybe just some copy whipped up right before press time by a newspaper reporter from the nineteen fifties on his trusty Underwood Champion manual typewriter.

And that, to me, is a wonderful message.

When I was a kid, one of my favorite folk tales was about stone soup. It went like this.

One day a peddler arrived in a little village, set up a large pot with water, and built a fire to boil the water. There was nothing else in the pot but a large stone.

Curious villagers asked what he was doing. “I’m making stone soup,” he said. “You see, this is a magic stone, which turns ordinary water into delicious soup.”

“Can I try some?” the villagers asked. “Sure,” he said, “but you have to contribute something.”

One villager brought some carrots, another brought onions, and his neighbor brought potatoes. Everybody wanted to try this magical soup, so they were eager to contribute.

At last the stone soup came to a boil, and the peddler was happy to share it — there was plenty to go around. Everyone marveled at the delicious taste. “To think,” they said, “all of this from a little piece of stone!”

When I show demos that I have built, it’s pretty much the same thing. People enjoy my demos, and they make wonderful little suggestions, which I promptly add into the soup.

The rest is magic.