Month: November 2025

It’s hard to write a good acceptance speech. There are so many questions to consider. Here are just a few:

Who do you thank, and who do you leave out? Do you err on the side of inclusion, or of not boring your audience?

Do you talk at length about your own accomplishments — which are, after all, the reason you got the award? And if so, can you avoid sounding like an asshole?

Some questions have obvious answers: Don’t use the occasion as an opportunity to settle old scores. That sort of thing works only if you are a corrupt narcissistic man-child who likes to starve Americans while shamelessly lining his pockets. But I digress.

How do you start your speech? How do you end it?

My sense is that the most important thing is to create the feeling of a narrative arc. Your speech should convey some important lesson, but not too obviously.

And this is important: The take-away lesson should not be about yourself. It should be about some larger principle.

Oh, and one more thing. If you really must tell a joke, make sure it is actually funny. 🙂

Today in NY City I had a visit with a doctor I had never met before. He was a bit older, quite distinguished looking, and he was wearing a yarmulke.

While he was sticking needles in me and fiddling with various equipment, he asked me whether my family name was Jewish. When I said yes, he asked whether we had had problems at NYU with the “Palestinian situation”. I said no, and that NYU had done an excellent job of diffusing tensions all around.

We then got onto the subject of how our respective families had migrated from Eastern Europe in the great mid-century wave of Jewish immigration to America. In the end he wished me a happy Hanukkah, and I wished him a happy Hanukkah.

During our chat, I decided not to bring up the topic of Mayor-elect Mandami. It seemed like the right decision, given that I was talking with a person who was sticking needles in my body.

For the last day or so I have been looking over my previous blog posts, going back many years, for an article that I am working on about the future of text. You could say that I am mining data from myself.

It has occurred to me that this process be also done by an AI. So, out of curiosity, I decided to ask Google Gemini what it thought my blog says on the topic.

Here is what Gemini had to say: “According to Ken Perlin’s blog, the future of text involves integration into immersive Extended Reality (XR) environments and augmentation by Artificial Intelligence (AI). This future envisions text moving beyond traditional screens, becoming part of shared, enhanced realities facilitated by ubiquitous mixed reality glasses, while AI enhances human communication and creativity rather than replacing it.”

It’s a pretty fair summary, albeit at a somewhat superficial level. Yet I am mindful that over time the powers of Gemini and its A.I. competitors will only continue to increase.

I can’t figure out which would be more worrisome: A future in which articles written by humans are replaced by inferior A.I. imitations, or a future in which those articles are replaced by superior A.I. imitations.

I was on a flight this evening and the plane passed by Manhattan. I had forgotten just how incredibly lovely New York is, sparkling like a wondrous jewel in the moonlight.

As I took in the sight of the Empire State Building and the city’s many other architectural wonders, I had an epiphany. In spite ourselves, we humans are capable of incredible beauty.

There was a lot of hand wringing on the left when the shutdown was shut down. To some it felt like a betrayal.

But I think it served its purpose. It gave our president a chance to show his true colors.

For anyone willing to pay attention, we learned that the Defecator in Chief not only doesn’t care about American citizens, but in fact saw the shutdown as an opportunity to actively starve American families and their children.

And why? What was the hill that the Republicans were willing to die on? Amazingly, it was so they could deny affordable health care to those same American families and their children.

The message was clear to anyone not completely locked into the Faux News fantasy world. Never before has an American administration shown such contempt and cruelty toward its own citizenry.

I wonder what future skills will emerge in the age of A.I. Certainly it will make some professions of today obsolete, much as advancing technology started to make telephone operators obsolete in the 1970s.

But what new skills will emerge? Just as the skill of photography requires the technology of photographs, and cinematography requires the technology of movies, what skills that are not yet even on our radar will start to become important?

Related questions: How will education change in the age of A.I.? Will law schools and medical schools need to radically rethink their curricula?

Sure, A.I. can do a lot for us, but it does not replace us humans. It would be more accurate to say that it offers the promise of leveling up the superpowers that we already have.

In the long run, how will future expertise and education change for photographers, cinematographers, architects, engineers, mathematicians, recording engineers, financial planners, and so on?

These are hard questions to answer. But it is important that we start to tackle them sooner rather than later.

There is really nothing quite like failure as a motivator. As Samuel Beckett once said “Try again. Fail again. Fail better.”

Today I was disappointed that something didn’t go my way which I had fully expected to go my way. In moments that disappointed turned into a fire under my tail.

I was determined that I would get something to succeed, if for no other reason than to make myself feel better. So I got to work tackling a daunting computer programming problem that I had been putting off.

Sure enough, I got it working. And I probably never could have done it without having a good and proper failure under my belt.

Maybe there is some sort of law of conservation of failure. When something doesn’t work out, it just motivates us to try harder to accomplish something else.

Suppose the president of your country, the one that you voted into office a year ago, just spent the last month trying to starve your family. Is that grounds for losing faith in him?

I wonder how many Americans are trying to figure that out right about now.

I was talking with some friends this weekend, and somebody brought up the topic of the Titan submersible. We talked about how that terrible tragedy was precipitated by the hubris of OceanGate and of its founder Stockton Rush.

Then I said “Can anyone think of any other examples of great hubris leading to a great implosion?” In response, people just gave each other knowing looks, and we quickly changed the subject.

Our wealthy New Yorkers understand that everyone in this city needs to work together to protect the hardworking immigrants who wake up early every day to build our buildings, deliver our packages, prepare the food in our restaurants, keep our streets clean, and do all of the millions of tasks that make our city run. Those immigrants are our friends and our neighbors, and we cherish them.

And just has been true in the case of Central Park, most of those wealthy New Yorkers will wish to protect their home and their neighbors. They will not stand for the world’s greatest city to be turned into a war zone just to satisfy one man’s fragile ego and lust for power.

Recently in San Francisco, the dogs were called off because a wealthy friend of the president called him up on the phone and said that he didn’t want that kind of thing happening in the city where he lived. I suspect that if necessary, the White House (what’s still left of it) will get a similar phone call from New York.

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