Ken's Blog

To me one of the ultimate puzzles in life is the motivation for working on puzzles. Case in point: Every day I work on solving a word puzzle that I see in the newspaper.

I spend time working on that puzzle even though I receive no reward other than solving the puzzle. But it gets even stranger than that.

I’ve realized that I work on the daily puzzle precisely because it is a perfectly recreational activity. If someone were to offer to pay me to engage in exactly that same activity every day, I would probably not do it.

If you are confused about the difference between chatbots and actual humans, you can ask yourself a simple question: What is their quality of life?

We generally have a pretty good idea of the quality of life of a person, if we observe them carefully enough. We can even do a reasonable job of ascertaining the quality of life of a dog, or a horse, or a mouse.

But what does it mean for a chatbot, whether Gemini or Claude or ChatGPT or one of their rivals, to have quality of life? The question is actually meaningless.

In order to have any sort of quality of life, you need to have a life. There needs to be an actual self.

Humans instinctively understand the vast difference between “alive” and “not alive”. When it comes right down to it — in cases where it really matters — we are not going to be confused by sophisticated illusions.

A few weeks ago I posted a simulation of eyewear that uses a half-silvered mirror to let you simultaneously see what is in front of you and to one side. The problem with that approach is that you can’t really get more than 60 degrees of horizontal view angle.

So I developed a variant that uses a compact half-silvered magnifying mirror pointing into a lens. To verify that it all works properly, I built an on-line simulation to trace the rays of light through the system.

My simulation first shows just an eyeball, then as you click it adds a parabolic curve that will contain the magnifying mirror, then clips that curve to just the curved mirror, then adds a lens to complete the optical path, then replaces the lens with a fresnel lens, which saves weight.

You can see it for yourself HERE.

They say you should never meet your heroes. But this evening I had dinner with one of my heroes, and the entire experience was quite wonderful.

The people who say that might just have the wrong heroes. Maybe people should get better heroes.

Today is an important day in invention history. On this day in 1879, Thomas Edison famously applied for a patent for his design for an incandescent lightbulb.

Somebody once told me that Edison actually invented the lightbulb so that people would stay up all night listening to his phonograph.

I don’t know whether that is actually true. But if you think about it, that may have been the beginning of social media.

Astonishingly, the U.S. president claimed this week that his use of the word “Shylock” in a recent speech was not meant to be antisemitic. When called on it, he claimed that he had never known it to have that association.

Given that he and I are both fromages New York City, I know for a fact that this cannot be true. Every New Yorker knows exactly what that word connotes.

So what exactly is he really saying here? That he is becoming senile? Or is he simply demonstrating that as a fact?

In a comment in response to my recent post about A.I. in code development, J. Peterson made a very trenchant observation: Software developers used to reach out to each other for coding advice. Now we increasingly reach out to A.I. instead. Or, in J. Peterson’s words: “Social aspects of software development, slowly slipping away.”

I wonder how many aspects of life this is happening to. Where once we formed human communities around giving mutual advice and support, now we are each working in little bubbles, talking only with our A.I. helpers. In such diverse fields of practice as cooking, woodworking, music, painting, creative writing, and so on, more and more people are turning to machines rather than to each other.

I fear that this may be one of those one-way cultural journeys. Once we have all gone there, there may no longer be a way back.

In science fiction movies, a repeating trope is the virtual window. You’ve probably seen this: In some distant future, people living in a tiny apartment have a magnificent view, which turns out to be completely artificial.

Essentially, their window is a hologram, which creates the illusion that the apartment’s inhabitants are surrounded by nature. When in fact they are probably living five levels underground in an overcrowded future megalopolis.

I have long wondered when the technology will exist to implement such a window for real. A simple engineering analysis, which I conduct every few years, tells me that we are still far from being to make that virtual window a reality.

But such a thing is indeed theoretically possible, given the right future breakthroughs in micro-optics. I wonder if or when we will ever get there.

This morning a student asked me why, when they create something with the help of AI tools, it doesn’t quite feel as though the result is entirely theirs. I responded like this:

In answer to your question, I think the reason that the project doesn’t feel completely “yours” is that it is not completely yours. To a large extent, when you work with an AI, you are working with the many other people whose expertise has gone into training the AI. You never meet these people, and you don’t know who they are, but the output of the AI reflects their work in addition to your own work. So in a sense you are actually engaged in a collaboration with a very large number of anonymous collaborators. It’s definitely not the same as the experience of building something all on your own.

I’m a little surprised that everyone doesn’t already know this.

In the mixed reality research at our lab at NYU we are starting to work with educational robot arms. One that we really like is the SO101. The robot provides continuous feedback about its position, is easy to work with, and is relatively inexpensive.

Another nice thing about the SO101 is that the people who make it provide all of the information that you need to 3D print your own parts, which also means that with a little bit of hacking, you can create your own digital double of the robot. A digital double lets us do research with the robot arm even if we don’t happen to have a physical robot arm handy.

So one of the first things I did was write a program to create an interactive visualization of the SO101 robot arm that runs in a Web browser. I managed to make it move around kind of like a dinosaur, and that looks very cool, so I thought I would share it HERE.