Dawn of the new everythi.., p.36
Dawn of the New Everything, page 36
2. This means of stopping a car might sound utterly terrifying, but in the early years of the automobile, it wasn’t unusual, and in our impoverished region the early years hadn’t quite ended yet. Not commonplace, but not outlandishly extraordinary.
3. Atoms for Peace recalls both a famous United Nations speech by U.S. president Dwight D. Eisenhower and a policy of broadening the use of nuclear technology beyond weapons to manage the level of fear instilled by the dropping of nuclear bombs on Japan in World War II.
4. This is an example of what is known to economists as the Averch-Johnson effect.
5. If engineers can demonstrate a design that is safe and efficient, irrelevant to weapons, and doesn’t present a deadly, unsustainable waste problem, then nuclear power could be just great. It’s an unknown if that will happen, but there’s no proof that it can’t be done.
Chapter 7
1. Just so you know, Cynthia and I are still friends, all these decades later. The connection was real. She’s a professional cellist living in Vienna.
2. Why a tarantula? I had just hiked a mountain in the Bay Area where they swarm to mate.
3. Emphasis on “some”; looked around at the audience accusingly.
4. There’s also a story behind this choice of creature. Around the same time I would have given this talk, a few friends and I tried to launch a robotic Loch Ness–type creature to inhabit the opaque waters of the San Francisco Bay. It was intended to be undetectable most of the time but would rear up into the air near tourist areas like Fisherman’s Wharf once in a rare while.
Chapter 8
1. Decades later, when the computers had long been connected, “cracker” showed up again as a derogatory term for “white male who doesn’t appreciate his innate privileges.” Almost all the crackers back in the 1980s were crackers.
2. The Prisoner’s Dilemma is one of the most famous game theory thought experiments. It has been adapted into game shows and movie plots. I won’t explain it here; look it up. It’s interesting from a mathematical point of view, but it’s a horrible way to think about real life, which is never so clear cut. I find it heartbreaking to watch people on game shows or other real life enactments of the Prisoner’s Dilemma learn to become cruel and deceitful to one another. I suspect the stench of this use of math has turned off as many kids who would otherwise like math as the usual demons like awful teachers and textbooks.
Chapter 9
1. Hacker culture was more or less a subset of hippie culture during this period, and hippies often felt entitled.
There were hackers, for instance, who thought that sex was supposed to be “free” like software or air. Consider the slogan of a techie commune in San Francisco that we all used to visit: “Every human being deserves to have enough air, water, sex, food, and education.” The implication at that time was modest—almost ascetic; only “enough” and not in excess, so that there would be enough to go around. Communitarian, sustainable sexual entitlement. Meaning, by the math, sexual obligation.
Why did I even bother to argue? “What if a woman, or a man, for that matter, doesn’t want to have ‘enough’ sex from someone else’s point of view?”
“You’re worrying about a problem that doesn’t exist. Everything balances out.”
“But what if it doesn’t?”
I’d eventually have a version of this argument with every imaginable California utopian. Libertarians, socialists, AI idealists. They all discount the possibility that someone might not fit into a “perfect” scheme, whether about sex or anything else.
2. A search for “rent-a-mom” in 2016 yielded a number of nanny, home care, and au pair services. None of these contemporary concerns have any connection to the legendary 1980s specter, so far as I know. In our age of text-based search, every name for everything is used by somebody for something.
3. We all wished there were more female hackers. The act of programming was a female invention, for the most part, but since the end of World War II, the profession had gone more and more male. There was one woman who programmed a hit arcade game called Centipede for the first video game company, Atari, and a scattering of others around the Valley.
In those days, the larger culture did the exclusion, not giving Silicon Valley a chance to show what its true colors might be: We deeply wished more women were coming out of math or computer science departments, but they weren’t.
I recall this as a genuine feeling arising out of a sense of equity crossed with arrogance, for we thought being a hacker was the most glorious and important thing one could do.
4. No one knows for sure, but about one in forty people are thought to have the condition, and many of those, like me, do not become aware of it for years. There are undoubtedly others who never become aware.
You can compensate by recognizing people in other ways. Individuals can be identified by where they are found, and who with; by quirks of how they move or through strategic chitchat, or by fashion and accessory choices (the popularity of tattoos has been helpful).
5. Scott Kim is known for his symmetrical calligraphy and a mathematical dance troupe as well as his work in visual programming. He was featured in Gödel, Escher, Bach, the bestselling 1979 book by Douglas Hofstadter that brought a digital perspective on life and the universe to the general public for the first time. Warren Robinette created Rocky’s Boots, one of the first “maker” video games, in which players constructed functioning visual programs on the screen of early 8-bit computers. Warren later joined the VR lab at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill.
Chapter 10
1. You can see Marie interviewed in the documentary Century of the Self.
2. To learn more about the original and evolving meanings of the term “mixed reality,” see the upcoming section called “Flags Planted,” starting on page 237.
3. Bill was one of the founders of Sun Microsystems, which used to be one of the Silicon Valley giants. He wrote a famous cautionary essay about the future of technology called Why the Future Doesn’t Need Us. Richard conceived the open-source movement, and you can read about how we argued in my book You Are Not a Gadget. Andy wrote the original Macintosh operating system.
4. Derived from the Greek haptikos, meaning “able to come into contact.” It was proposed as a word in English in Isaac Barrow’s 1683 Lectiones Mathematicae, but wasn’t used much until recently.
5. The people who engineer glass for smartphones are able to talk about these things using quantitative engineering terms, but their vocabulary has not bolted out into the language at large.
Chapter 11
1. Hands, like butts, are uncommonly easy pun fodder; they’re primal in human identity. If you meet me, don’t go trying out a bunch of VR puns. I’ve heard ’em.
2. Must mention Columbia’s Steve Feiner, who has done wonderful work along these lines, pardon the pun.
3. http://publicationslist.org/data/melslater/ref-238/steptoe.pdf.
4. http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/jcc4.12107/full.
Chapter 12
1. LISP machines were computers dedicated to, you guessed it, LISP, an early computer programming language beloved by mathematicians and artificial intelligence researchers of a certain age.
2. It also might be dangerous; I am not advocating its use. Indeed, a parent of one of the Veeple died from a cardiac event while using it.
3. Instead of pointing fingers at other people (the present leader of the free world, say) who might not be at their best when they use social media, I’ll reveal that I decided that I can’t handle the stuff as it exists today. I don’t have any social media accounts, even though I have books to promote and other motivations. I have experienced myself becoming petty in online exchanges. I’ve gotten into feedback loops with people who either love my work or hate it, and we’ve both been driven to extremes when that’s not what I wanted. I fear social media would bring out the worst in me.
Maybe social media would help my career, but that’s not a good enough reason to do harm to my character. I’m not saying it’s necessarily bad for everyone. Maybe it’s like alcohol, fine for some people, but some of us should avoid the stuff.
I worry about the amplification of alt-right paranoia, but this isn’t a partisan observation. Criticism of the left from the right has often centered on how cranky college students have become. So sensitive! So quick to take offense! Recognize a pattern? The personality dysfunction that’s derided by critics from the right as “poor little snowflake-ism” is the same as the one seen in President Trump. There are social media addicts all over the political spectrum.
4. Not Esalen. Sorry, will not disclose the location.
5. The Wizard of the Upper Amazon was the favorite in my circles, though the extremely influential books of Carlos Castaneda—ostensibly about a different drug in a different region—might really have set the tone.
6. As long as we’re on hair, I guess I can say something about my weight. It wasn’t easy, but I lost the weight I’d gained as a child after about a year out of the hospital, but then it came roaring back in my teens. In my twenties I battled mightily to lose weight and did, over and over. Each time, it came back with seemingly supernatural force, and overall I found I was gaining weight in the longer term. I suspect that if I hadn’t tried to change back then I would weigh less today.
Occasionally a stranger will happily tell me that I ought to work harder at it, that it was easy in their experience, and then in practically the same breath whine about how they can’t get their startup funded, or their book published, or are subject to some other misfortune that seems to them to not be a fault of their own.
Silicon Valley is drowning in quantified self-help and productivity cults that are supposed to sculpt one’s life into an ideal in every way. This is not only foolish but destructive. The impulse to pretend that we already understand everything is antiscience, just as surely as the antivax or antievolution movement. It also is a stealth conveyor of conformity. Everyone is expected to embrace the same definitions of productivity and success. And personal appearance.
There are loads of tangled, often contradictory results coming in from legitimate science about weight, as well as a cosmic, stunning amount of manipulative pseudoscience. But in reality, it’s one of the many things about the universe that are not yet well understood.
Weight will probably be understood someday, however, and possibly soon, since there are so many wonderful tools for investigating biology today. When people can someday choose, they should be able to make varied choices. Diversity is an intrinsic good.
Has my weight had a negative effect on my life? In some ways, perhaps. Cameras like thin people. Maybe, if I were thinner, I’d be on TV more when the time comes to promote a book or debate the cyber-topic of the moment. But my life is about as successful as it could be, given my preferences. On some levels I might even play to type inadvertently, since smart technical people are supposed to look a little weird; Einstein with his hair. Overall it hasn’t mattered much, for the simple reason that I’m male. It pains me to say that a fat woman would probably not have been able to have my career.
7. This is the celebrated prime directive for attendees of the mostly unconstrained Burning Man Festival, which brings tens of thousands of people into a wild desert region of Nevada once a year to enact eccentric art and happenings.
8. Sorry for all the terminology, nontechnical readers. Some of these terms are introduced in the appendix on phenotropic computing.
Chapter 13
1. Yup, a shout-out to Diana Vreeland.
2. There are different kinds of tracking: Since the eyes are approximately spherical and approximately rotate on their centers, you can often get by only knowing only where the eyes are, not where they’re looking. As long as you can present a wide enough virtual panorama around where the eyes are, they can look around and see virtual stuff properly. That’s called eye tracking. In fact, the eyes are in fairly fixed positions within the head as they swivel, so you can sometimes get by with mere head tracking. In some kinds of VR displays you must know the direction in which the eyes are looking, not just their positions. That’s called gaze tracking. (There’s no end to tracking, just as there’s never any end to measurement. Sometimes it’s essential to track the focal distance of each eye, or how open the iris is.)
3. An astonishingly dramatic yet everyday example is the blind spot. Each of your eyes is blind within a sizable zone that is not too far from the center of the field of view because that is where the optic nerve attaches to the retina and blocks its sensing function. And yet you are not aware that your brain is filling in that hole.
4. For “Head Mounted Display,” which was an early term for a VR headset.
5. This is one example of an important principle: Cheap chips make other parts do more.
Along with machine vision, chips that can sense motion though inertia have been getting better and cheaper. Every portable device has an accelerometer these days. Combine the data from an accelerometer with data from cameras and it’s possible to create an even faster, more accurate tracker. Moore’s Law swallows everything.
And there’s more: Fast chips make it worthwhile to attempt to predict the future. The usual math involved is called a Kalman filter. Just as your brain (probably the cerebellum) can predict where your hand will need to be in order to catch a baseball that is still in motion, Kalman filters predict where the head is about to be positioned. More specialized algorithms can take advantage of the particular anatomy of the body and neck; your head can only move in particular ways, so there’s no need to consider impossible head motion.
Furthermore, by the time you’ve rendered a 3-D scene, it might be a little out of date because 3-D graphics are still a lot of work, even for today’s cheap chips; so high-performance VR setups will make last-microsecond adjustments on a simpler basis to make the images just a little more current. (The overall image might be shifted, tilted, and warped, for instance.)
6. VR starts to feel good when certain perceived latencies get down to around 7 or 8 milliseconds.
7. http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/virtually-there/
8. A second generation came out that produced much smoother and finer data.
9. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ho8KVOe_y08
Chapter 14
1. Apple famously fired Steve Jobs, and the whole Mac team quit. Then Apple almost died until he came back, and then it became the world’s most valuable company. This is why people like Mark Zuckerberg are shown such deference today.
2. Patricof was one of the people who didn’t do well, ultimately, from VPL. I feel bad about it. What I hear is that he never invested in VR again.
3. If it was ever true, it is no longer true today. Silicon Valley is now graced by some remarkably brilliant, decidedly non-asshole CEOs.
4. A startup must define successive rounds of stock with a specified number of shares, cost, and shareholder rights. Typically a round is sold out before a new round is introduced, and the earlier investors get better terms but higher risks.
5. Pronounced “no-oh-sphere.” This used to be the preferred hacker term for the world brain superorganism posthuman artificial intelligence that would supposedly come about because of algorithms on the Internet. A noosphere might incorporate humans as cognitive elements or might function without humans. No one saw much distinction. The term was originally coined by Pierre Teilhard de Chardin in the 1920s as a way to focus thinking about the sphere of human thought. Hacker thinking today doesn’t use the term as much, but it still embraces visions of a future global level of organization that would surpass earlier structures such as religions, markets, and nations.
Chapter 15
1. To bring the little display screens mounted in front of the eyes into focus and fill a wide field of view.
2. At I write this book, the most publicized device in the genre is probably Snapchat’s Spectacles.
3. Appendix 3 examines this problem.
4. There are a few ways to slightly fake the impossible. You can heat air up with powerful lasers until it ionizes and thereby cause little bright bluish stars to spark into being in midair. A small number of such sparks can be coordinated and replenished often enough to form rudimentary floating 3-D phantasms, (This is just the flavor of extremist VR experiments that one expects from the energetic Japanese VR research community.) See http:www.Lashistar81;p/pdf/2016to6.pdf
