Month: March 2025

Sometime soon, you won’t need to go out and buy furniture. You will just describe any piece of furniture that you want in your house, and a virtual representation of it will appear, thanks to artificial intelligence (AI) and wearable blended reality (XR).

As soon as you start your design process, you will be able to see the furniture sitting in your house or apartment, as long as you are wearing your future XR glasses. As you speak, or gesture with your hands, your AI will respond by evolving the color, shape and materials of your future piece of furniture.

You will be able to see your virtual furniture at any time of day, from all different points of view. So this will be a far more informative experience than today’s nearest equivalent — looking at a virtual chair or couch or table through the little screen of a Smartphone.

When you are finally satisfied with your design, your custom furniture will be shipped to you, to take its place in your abode. It will look just the same to you as it did the day before, except now you will be able to touch it.

This process will be empowering for you, because you will get exactly the furniture that you want. But I wonder what impact it will have on the furniture industry.

That industry will clearly not be going away. After all, we will always need furniture.

But the value proposition, and therefore the economics of the process, will be radically different. It will be interesting to see how this plays out.

Here are some questions that I have been nervously asking myself. And I suspect I am not alone:
What happens if the executive branch of our government simply ignores the rulings of judges?
In the constitutional crisis that follows, will we still have a democracy?

I hate deadlines. I am sure I am not the only person who feels this way.

Yet I like finishing things. And I suspect that without deadlines, I would never finish anything.

To quote a certain Dane who would soon be meeting his own deadline, “Aye, there’s the rub.”

There is an argument that our tools make us smarter. There is another argument that our tools make us more stupid.

According to Plato, Socrates believed that written language was harmful, since it could lead to relying on external memory aids, and therefore impede true understanding. If anything, humanity has gone deep into the waters that Socrates warned against.

Where things get complex is the way that we are intertwined with our tools. If you grow up with a particular technology, it can be argued that the technology becomes part of you.

If, throughout my life, I know that I can write things down, then the act of writing things down becomes a kind of extension of myself. The written words that I leave behind are arguably a part of me, and they help to define my identity.

One day in the future, when each of us is integrated with his or her personalized A.I., will we be smarter for it, or more stupid? We will certainly seem to be outwardly more capable, the real-life equivalent of Trinity knowing how to fly the helicopter in The Matrix.

But will that capability truly be part of who we are, or will we just be kidding ourselves? I wonder what Socrates would think.

I was thinking today about the creep’s latest conspiracy theory — his claim that his predecessor’s presidential pardons don’t count because some of them may have been signed with an autopen. It’s a completely idiotic assertion, particularly given the number of times that he himself signed via autopen during his first term.

Of course the assertion itself doesn’t actually make any sense. But I don’t think that making sense was the point of this latest bit of craziness.

I think the point of all of his wild falsehoods and actions — claiming that Ukraine started the war that Russia started by invading Ukraine, randomly deporting university professors for no reason, I could go on and on here — is to relentlessly pile one obvious falsehood on top of another, so as to continually stoke rage, to the point where the very concept of rational discussion breaks down.

If there can no longer be rational discussion, then truth doesn’t matter. And that’s how autocrats destroy democracies on their way to absolute power.

So sure, the creep is once again being crazy. But he is being crazy like a fox.

My post yesterday was somewhat tongue in cheek. There are all sorts of practical reasons why neither the U.S. nor Canada should annex the other.

But if annexation were to happen, we would need a fair way to decide which country should annex the other. Here is a simple suggestion.

Add up all of the square miles of each of the two countries in question, and see which one is bigger. After all, it would be absurd for a smaller country to annex a larger country.

So whichever country is larger should be the one to annex the country that is smaller. Simple, right?

On the other hand, we all need to acknowledge a simple fact: Anybody who would seriously suggest that either of these two countries should be absorbed into the other is a blithering idiot.

In late breaking news, Canada has just annexed the country immediately south of its border. The Canadian prime minister welcomed the country’s new eleventh province.

“I love our new province of America,” he said. “I love the people of America. I know many people from America that are good friends of mine,” he said with a smirk, before explaining why the country shouldn’t exist anymore.

“America only works as a province,” he went on. “If you look at a map, they drew an artificial line right through it, between Canada and the province of America, just a straight artificial line. Somebody did it a long time ago — many, many, decades ago, and it makes no sense. It’s so perfect as a great and cherished province.”

The only sour note was the stubborn refusal by the Associated Press to call the Gulf of Canada by its new name. But the Canadian government didn’t ban A.P. from its press conferences, because Canadians are nice.

Today is Albert Einstein’s birthday. The great man was born on March 14, 1879.

If you ignore all of the many great contributions that Einstein made during his lifetime, and focus only on 1905, you will still come away dazed and astonished. In just that one year he published foundational scientific papers that completely transformed four different areas of science.

That year he published a landmark paper on the photoelectric effect, on brownian motion, on special relativity, and on the equivalency between matter and energy — popularly known as E = mc².

Our modern views on space, time and matter were fundamentally altered by those four papers. For example, quantum theory arose from his paper on the photoelectric effect.

I doubt that such a streak of scientific brilliance will ever be duplicated. To me, there is something profoundly satisfying in knowing that it happened even once.

In addition to being the 5th anniversary of the official start of the COVID pandemic, yesterday was also the day that the New York Times published the 2500th edition of the daily Spelling Bee puzzle. As an avid fan of the Spelling Bee, I was delighted.

It was also a very special day in Spelling Bee land because yesterday, for the first time, the creators of that puzzle broke one of their most notable rules: Among the seven letters, yesterday’s puzzle included the letter “s”.

Of course the inclusion of the letter “s” changes the puzzle greatly. You suddenly get double the number of nouns and verbs, because for those words you can just add an “s” to the end.

Some people might object to this sudden change in their daily word puzzle. Personally, I thought it was fabulous.

How astonishing that it has been precisely five years to the day since I left New York City because of the pandemic. I did not come back again for a very long time.

NYU went completely virtual on that day. For a while classrooms were a shared idea rather than a physical thing.

Those times are long gone, yet they made their permanent mark on us. For one thing, our concepts around meeting have changed — and we often forget how profoundly.

It used to be that meeting over video chat was something you did only when you had to. Now most of my meetings seem to be done that way — even when I am meeting with someone who is in the same building.

Before March 12, 2020, that would have been unimaginable.