Ken's Blog

Suppose, due to some future technological advances, that everyone had all the knowledge in the world in their head — at least that part of it which is publicly available. Whatever public fact you might be interested in, you would already know.

So any time you now find yourself going to Wikipedia, or looking something up in a book, that would no longer be necessary, because you would already know the answer. How would that change things?

I don’t presume to know the answer, but I think it’s a question worth asking. As technology advances slowly toward making neural interfaces a reality, we should be prepared for exactly what social and cultural impact that might have.

Here’s a comforting thought: Even if you had all of the knowledge of the world in your head, that still wouldn’t tell you the answer to the question I asked at the start of this post.

The future will always surprise you.

Even if you had already predicted it.

Sometimes I want to play a melody but I don’t have a piano keyboard nearby. Which makes me sad.

So here’s the solution I came up with: I wrote a little web program that lets me use my computer keyboard as a musical keyboard.

I call it tune typing. It’s certainly not as good as having an real musical keyboard, but it’s better than nothing.

You can try it for yourself HERE.

One of my favorite poems:

   so much depends
   upon

   a red wheel
   barrow

   glazed with rain
   water

   beside the white
   chickens

Happy birthday William Carlos Williams!

We are not the first people who have been through this. Any homeowner who has discovered mold in the attic knows the drill.

Suppose we somehow manage to remove the pestilent infestation and can begin to fumigate our house. The question remains: How long will it be before the air will once again be safe to breathe?

But enough about politics.

Many years ago I organized a morning panel at the SIGGRAPH computer graphics conference. The topic of my panel was what software tools people preferred to used to create their computer graphics.

My three invited panelists were all great pioneers in the field: Jim Blinn, Craig Reynolds and Tom Duff. As it happened, each at the time was strongly associated with a particular set of software tools, and they had all been using their very different toolsets to create amazing work.

Back then Jim did everything in FORTRAN — one of the oldest of computer languages. Craig worked in LISP, which is very different from FORTRAN in every way. Tom was known as one of the great creators of UNIX tools.

At the breakfast before the panel, I asked each of them what they thought was the best programming language. Not surprisingly, Jim said that you really don’t need anything other than FORTRAN. Craig said that LISP was the most powerful language for computer graphics.

I was expecting Tom to speak up for UNIX tools, so I wasn’t prepared for what came next. “A graduate student,” Tom replied, “is the highest level programming language.”

Shortly after that I quit my job in industry to become a professor at NYU, and I never looked back. To this day, I still don’t know whether that life decision was influenced by what Tom Duff told me over breakfast.

There is a perpetual problem one faces when designing interfaces for new communication technologies. This is true whether the technology is a smart phone, a pair of XR glasses, or an AI assistant.

The problem is that you generally know that the technology is coming well before it actually arrives. Which means that you want to figure out how to use it, but you cannot — because it does not yet exist.

That’s one reason I’m a big believer in emulation. Make a fake version of the thing, and play with that.

Cheat if you have to. In this particular case, cheating is a good thing.

Make something that looks and acts like smart phone, but with a hidden wire running to a powerful computer. Create fake XR glasses that act like the real thing, but only in your lab. Have a person behind the scenes pretend to be an AI assistant.

The future is indeed coming, but it’s not here yet. When you are trying to design user interfaces for the future, and that future has not yet arrived, emulation is your best friend.

Have you ever noticed that the U.S. Army uses somewhat odd words to define how individuals are positioned in its military hierarchy? Many of them are words that have entirely different meanings in other contexts.

For example, in civilian life if you can have a General idea that something is wrong, then you can have a Private discussion about it. Especially if it has become a Major issue.

OK, I admit that these are rank puns. Possibly deserving of corporal punishment.

I am finding that this new way of using Google — asking questions of Gemini — is much more fruitful than the old style of Google search. So far it has not really been a question of what Gemini is capable of, but rather a question of my learning how to ask the right questions.

I am reminded very much of my first experiences using Google in 1998. There was a learning curve there as well.

Eventually I acquired the skill needed to chain together a good set of keywords to properly narrow down my searches. Learning to work with Gemini is something like that, but on steroids.

We’ve certainly come a long way in 28 years. I wonder what will the process will be like 28 years later.

I am glad that in the end everyone in New York City came together in a respectful way to honor and pay their respects — both to the victims 25 years ago, and to the courageous firefighters who tried to help them.

Even Rudy Giuliani managed to move past his Islamophobic hate-mongering and share a respectful moment with our Mayor. For him that was a stretch goal, and I have to give him credit for putting aside the poisonous and deeply un-American MAGA playbook long enough to remember what actual patriotism looks like.