Sean Carroll's Mindscape: Science, Society, Philosophy, Culture, Arts, and Ideas - 26 | Ge Wang on Artful Design, Computers, and Music

Episode Date: December 10, 2018

Everywhere around us are things that serve functions. We live in houses, sit on chairs, drive in cars. But these things don't only serve functions, they also come in particular forms, which may be emotionally or aesthetically pleasing as well as functional. The study of how form and function come together in things is what we call "Design." Today's guest, Ge Wang, is a computer scientist and electronic musician with a new book called Artful Design: Technology in Search of the Sublime. It's incredibly creative in both substance and style, featuring a unique photo-comic layout and many thoughtful ideas about the nature of design, both practical and idealistic. Ge Wang received his Ph.D. in computer science from Princeton University, and is currently Associate Professor at the Center for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics at Stanford University. He is the author of the ChucK programming language for musical applications, and co-founder of the mobile-app developer Smule. He has given a well-known TED talk where he demonstrates Ocarina, an app for turning an iPhone into a wind instrument. Stanford Web page Artful Design home page (and Amazon page) TED talk on the DIY Orchestra of the Future Stanford Laptop Orchestra Smule Wikipedia page Twitter

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These products are not intended to diagnose, treat, cure, or prevent any disease. Hello, everyone, and welcome to the Minescape podcast. I'm your host, Sean Carroll. And as I've said before, one of the major motivations for me personally in doing a podcast project is to be able to explore things other than what I do for a living, mostly physics, a little bit of philosophy. So the podcast lets me talk to other scientists, neuroscientists, biologists, chemists. And it also lets me go beyond science. We've talked to poker players and movie directors and musicians and so forth.

today's podcast is definitely one of those examples of going well beyond my comfort zone. Go Wong, today's guest, is actually a computer scientist, officially, a computer programmer at Stanford University, and that's my comfort zone, okay, but his specialty is computer programming of music. So he builds instruments that make computers into musical instruments. He puts on performances with laptop orchestras, things like that. Go-Wong has a famous TED Talk where he demonstrates an iPhone Akarina. You can actually, if you have an iPhone, go to the app store, download an app called Akarina, which will turn your iPhone into a musical instrument. You don't need any extra hardware. You blow into the microphone and make beautiful music. We'll actually

have a demonstration on the podcast today. However, Goh wrote a book that was not about computer programming or musical instruments, but about the general idea of design, artful design, designing anything, whether it's computers or musical instruments, but cups of coffee or pencil boxes or anything like that, the general principles that relate form and function, the human needs and the possibilities of the technology or the shapes you're doing, whether it's music or art or industrial design. I know nothing about this. I think it's a cool and important topic, so we had a great conversation. But this is definitely an example where we're learning new things.

You know, I bring no special predilections or pre-existing notions to this conversation. And therefore, we had a lot of fun. Design is everywhere in our lives. And thinking about it with someone who is also an expert in computer science and music was a great experience. So let's go. Most concerts, you're in a seat. You're watching. Downtown Rocks at Fremont Street Experience is something else.

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That's hero.co. Per serving, not a low-calorie foods and products contain allulose, nutrition info on hero.com for sodium and sugar content. Go Wong. Thanks for coming on the Mindscape podcast. Thanks, John. Thanks for having me. Now, I'm going to admit right away that this is going to

to be one of the more adventurous podcasts that I've done. You've written a book about design, which is something I know nothing about. Even when I know nothing about things like neuroscience or whatever, I still have opinions about them. And here's something I don't even have opinions about. So hopefully we'll have a wide-ranging conversation and you'll be able to guide me through the rough spots and so forth. But let's start with the fact that in some sense, you're a computer programmer, you're a computer scientist. Is that a fair thing to say? That is a fair thing to say. My PhD in undergrad, we're both in computer science, even though now I'm an associate professor in the music department, actually in the Center for Computer Research and Music and Acoustics, CCRMA or Karma, Stanford. But that's within the music department.

It's within the music department. I have a what's called a courtesy appointment in computer science, so I'm kind of really ever, kind of in both places and neither places. I actually don't know what I am exactly, but I think it's fair to say I'm a computer scientist. It's the best place to be, not knowing where you are. But you have to get to not knowing where you are. I mean, did the computer interest come first or the music interest? You know, at some point those were both interesting because I love building things. And I think the computer science eventually spoke directly to that. I could really realize things that I wanted to see how this works. And then I always loved music.

Did you grow up at playing instruments? I grew up playing the accordion at age seven. Wow. That's hardcore. And then my grandparents got me that. Then my parents got me an electric guitar for my 13th birthday. And that changed my world. Are you one of these people?

Because I know some people, like, they're handed an instrument. They never played it before. And like within minutes, beautiful music is coming out. And I'm completely the opposite of that. I don't know. I don't know about beautiful music, but I love just playing instruments, figuring out how they actually interact and how they work. And yeah, some sounds will likely come out if you hand me an instrument.

it might not be beautiful. And at some point, I mean, when did you realize that the computer side of things could have a musical component? Really, towards the end of undergrad. I mean, I was taking music classes, taking computer science classes, and then I took a class at Duke, where I did my undergrad from Professor Scott Lindroth, who's actually now the vice provost of the arts at Duke. And he's, you know, I think he's been a lifelong mentor. And I took this computer music class, and I heard music that was just like,

I didn't hear anywhere else and realized I couldn't really hear anywhere else except in the medium of the computer. And that fascinated me. Were you already a computer science major at that point? Yeah, I was already a computer science major. Okay, cool. And so then you go to your PhD and help write programming languages and things like that. Yeah, so I think having had that experience with like electronic music, computer music, undergrad, I applied to grad school in computer science, but really kind of looking for programs that did computer music.

and I was very fortunate to find, well, my advisor, Perry Cook at Princeton, using computer science, but he also was jointly appointed at Princeton in music. So he's actually, it was Princeton's first joint hire across engineering and arts and humanities. That's very difficult to do, I know, yeah. Yeah, and so I ended up working on things like, yeah, programming language for generating music. It's called Chuck. We ended up working on laptop orchestras. But writing a programming language, that's.

That just sounds very hardcore. Are you in there? Is it an assembly language? How do you write a programming language? Or do you write it in a different language and then compile it? So Chuck was written in C++, and the way I wrote it was, well, I took a compiler class. And then I basically, well, it's, I followed basically chapter by chapter, this textbook on

how to, basically how to make a compiler in programming language. It was by Andrew Appel, who happened to be another professor at Princeton at the time. And I literally, I knew nothing about making a programming language. So I literally just followed the textbook, but then I deviated when I needed to. And I think I designed it really backwards. I designed it backwards, and I mean that in a good way, in that I kind of wrote down on paper the kind of code I wanted to write and I wanted to get the kind of music I want. So I kind of said, you know, what do I want this thing that looked like? And now I went back and see if I can actually do it by writing code to kind of implement these.

Are you telling me that form follows function? Sometimes, yes, form often follows function. Sometimes function follows form in a weird way as well. Who was the guy who said that for the first time? It was American architect Louis Sullivan. Louis Sullivan, okay. Yes. And of course, he's trying to make a point, but in reality, like you say,

there are two things, form and function that go back and forth. And so is it safe to say that designing this computer programming language is one of the first ways you came into contact with that principle? Yeah, I mean, I didn't really think too intentionally and consciously about design at the time. I just wanted to build things. It was actually my advisor, Perry Cook, who said this cryptic thing to me and said, you know, go, whatever you make, whatever you do, do it with aesthetics. And I was like, I have no idea what that means. No one never told me that before.

I'm a computer science major. Right. But it oddly made sense. and Perry still denies that he's ever said this. He doesn't remember he actually said this to me, but I was like, this completely changed the way I do things. Things are not just pure functional things.

We are not purely functional creatures, but we actually, you know, you say that you don't know anything about design, but I would beg to differ. And I think we all have and cannot help them make aesthetic judgments on things. You know, what's not just what's pleasing, but what's beautiful,

what's truthful, what's just, and what's just plain awesome. These are all, I think, aesthetic judgments. Well, that's good. I mean, that's what I want to get into that at some point. But let me just back up a little bit because, despite being a computer scientist, despite having an appointment in a music department, you didn't write a book about computer music. There's computer music in there, but you took a grander palette, right?

You aim for bigger fish. Yes, I think artful design, And I, well, it took me three years to write it, and I still don't know exactly what it's about, at least or anymore. I thought I did. It has a lot of computer music in there, but I think it tries to address, you know, three questions. And, you know, I would say they are, you know, what is the nature of design and the meaning it holds in human life? What does it mean to design well and to design ethically? And how can this shaping of technology reflect our values as human beings?

So those are kind of these broader questions I try to tackle. Yeah, these are pretty big questions. Yeah. Very interdisciplinary and also, you know, very grand. But like you say, everyone has some kind of design sense, right? I mean, like I say for scientists, sometimes degrading philosophy, I always tell them, look, you can't not do philosophy. You can do it well or you can do it badly, right? And if you're not educated, then maybe you do it badly.

And maybe design is the same way. I love that. I personally think that's absolutely right, is that you just. just, you know, whatever, I think design is really, you have an outcome or something in mind, and you go about very intentionally shaping or changing things to kind of achieve that outcome. You're kind of putting the pieces together, making them fit to actually, you know, get at some result or for a certain purpose. And when you do that, you're designing. And at what point did you go from, you know, you have been designing, of course, computer programming languages,

and we'll get into actual musical instruments and orchestras and so forth. But what is it that made you think that the book you should write should be about the idea of design rather than about these more specific examples of it? That's a good question. I think a couple of things. For one, I think I was realizing what I was doing is like engineering, it's like art,

but it's also not like engineering exactly and not like art exactly, right? It embodies engineering precision. you do need to really get to the nuts and bolts of, you know, how you program or how you do software engineering or how a certain technique or technology actually works. And you build hardware things as well, right? From time to time, I'm mostly a software guy, but sometimes I dabble in hardware as well. And like art, there's a certain artfulness you can definitely bring into the things you engine, and not just in how it looks, but kind of, you know, how it actually works.

And does the way of working actually reflect something you wanted to reflect? These more, I think, tacit and intangible qualities of something that we clearly care about. You know, if you just look at buildings, right, people design buildings. And if we just cared about the function, we all be content living in warehouses. And clearly we're not. So I think that we know to think about buildings in that way. But, you know, I think when it comes to things like software, tools. games, social experiences,

these are, I think we're just learning to think about more aesthetically about these things. It reminds me a little bit, I interviewed Scott Derrickson, the movie director for the podcast, and I was remarking to him that, you know, I'm very happy with books and words and pages, and also equations and figures and other physics-y things. So I could imagine in an alternate life being like a movie screenwriter

or a novelist or something like that. I couldn't imagine being a director because there's a million other things you have to worry about, like that personalities of the actors, but also the design of the sets and the costumes and everything. And he said which sort of the obvious answer, but, you know, that's what he likes. He likes the fact that there's a little bit of everything involved. And it sounds like you were drawn to the fact that you were computer programming, but in a way that, you know, given that it was music and instruments and so forth, design just became a necessary element, pretty obviously.

Yeah, and I think that's right. And it felt like design is really this universal thing that we all do, but only more, you know, recent times do we think about design as kind of a discipline or a thing onto itself. But I think we've always designed. We can't help but design. But I think, well, like anything else, it's also possible to do well or do poorly. Right. And I'm really interested in how we can think about doing it well or doing it better. I mean, obviously, Archimedes or Leonardo were designers, even though they wouldn't have called themselves that.

Right. So it's, I mean, is it true, or are we just fooling ourselves to think that there is a separate discipline called design, right? You know, we design so many different things from music to, you know, teapots, right? And are there common principles there? That's a wonderful question. I like to think that the design shouldn't be its own actually separate discipline. Actually, I think it's just something that all of us do. And there's a certain universality.

I think that actually does pervade design really everywhere. In Artful Design, I think I try to offer a few of them. One is this idea that, you know, in looking at the motivation, you know, design is all about purpose. It's like, what are you trying to do? And then how are you going to go about doing it? And I would also add, why would you want to do that? So there's all these different dimensions that I think that's common to any design. And then part of this why, you know, I break it down into this,

into means versus ends. And what I mean by that is means as a means to an end. Like I do this because I want to achieve some of the purpose. You know, I'm, hey, I'm going to make this thing to open a can for me. Right. So that's a means to an end.

But end in itself, that's the other side, are kind of the more intrinsically interesting or valuable or beautiful things about a design. Form would fit into that. This is the idea we don't want to all live in warehouses. We want to live in an aesthetically pleasing space. Yeah, aesthetically pleasing, but also place things with meaning.

You know, buildings aren't just pleasing. It's great when they are. Right. But also, you know, buildings can serve as kind of symbols, can serve as meaning for the people or even the city that it's in. And also, I think there's a certain, well, for lack of better word, truth that we can get at when we actually design things. Okay.

It's something that reflects who we are and kind of our values. And I think that all from, that from me is all kind of in this aesthetic dimension of design. So there is certainly this idea that let's make things look really, look and feel good, but I think it actually goes much deeper than that and that we can, you know, it's a tool, even if you're building a tool, you know, it's a tool making people's lives better? Does it speak to your well-being? And what are the values that actually, that's actually a play here? Yeah, I think that this is, I mean, like I said, since I'm not an expert

and I have no prior experience to the formal aspects of this way of thinking, I was trying to, you know, struggle with how to even grasp what the essence of design is supposed to be. There is an aesthetic component, obviously, but it's not just hanging art on your wall. It is this functional aspect of things, right? And so, at the trivial level, there's this marriage between doing things or having things done for purpose and having them aesthetically pleasing. But what you're pointing at is that there's like, I'm not sure if it's another dimension or an extra movement in the same direction of meaningfulness and some connection with what it means to be human is reflective in the best design.

I think that's exactly right. I think it's this meaning. There's actually a principle in the book that actually was talking about AI and automation. And I think the principle is a two-part one. It says, you know, that which can be automated should be automated, except where in cases where, you know, if something cannot be meaningfully automated, it should not be automated. So I'll give you an example. Meaningfully automated. Yeah, what's an example? Well, for example, this act of playing to play, like I like, we all like playing, hopefully, right? And to play, like, I don't, it doesn't matter how well I play. I just want to play. And I don't ever want that automated, because the whole point of playing.

playing is to do it yourself, right? Right. You don't want to build a computer program to play your video games for you. Exactly. And all these, you know, a lot of things that are well experiential, for example, it's meaningful for us to do. And it's, and certainly, I can have like a program or a robot kind of play in my place, but what's the point of that? You know, it's possible, but not meaningful. And at some level, I think this, you know, for all the automation that that's coming into our world with technology, I think humans at some level still have to be the arbiters of meaning. You know, we have to determine what is meaningful to do and, you know, what do we want to do?

And that gets back to this question of, you know, what's intrinsically interesting about, you know, certain activities. Well, good. So we have time here. So let's unpack this a little bit because I've had philosophers on the podcast and Will. And, you know, one of them, Alex Rosenberg, who I recently talked to, you know, kind of is skeptical about the idea of meaning at all, but I think he's an extremist on one side. So let's go at the other side. Like, what do you mean meaning? What is that, is it just, I care about that,

or is there something deeper? Do you personally delve into the philosophical literature when thinking about these things? Not meaning per se, but I do delve into some philosophical literature. I think meaning is really, like, for me it's actually simple. in the, not in the, not simplistic, but simple in the sense that I think it is what we value. Okay.

It's, the meaning is, you know, if it's, if it's meaningful to you, that means you find some value that, and I would say a more inwardly rewarding kind of a value. Okay. That's the meaning. More bling, more money or whatever. Right. It's not the, not, exactly. It's more like your soul.

And in a play, for example, I think is a good example of like this is, you know, matters to me. It may not matter anybody else, but that value of play is so fundamental to, it's, it's a, so something that speaks to this value of play is meaningful to me in that sense. So I think it, and it's interesting to think about why play exists, right? Why through the process of natural selection this came to be? I mean, I have cats that grew up with dogs, certainly other animals are very playful in their own right. Does it serve some function, Or is it just an offspring of other things that are useful? Well, I've thought about that a lot.

I have no clear answers on that. But it leaves me to think about other things like food and eating, right? I think it's a related thing to play, like eating. In one hand, it's very functional, right? We eat so we sustain ourselves, so we don't die. But clearly we're at a point where we also eat for its sheer enjoyment. And I think there's in this one thing we find, we actually have this dual

purpose. One is very functional. One is very aesthetic. And we clearly spend a lot of time and energy thinking about and going about making food, making sure there is food. And, you know, really,

cooking is an art. Right. So I sometimes I wonder if like, you know, where our aesthetics actually come from, the aesthetic of play, the aesthetic food, the aesthetic of really finding things beautiful or truthful

and do they arise from kind of traditional evolutionarily more functional things I don't have I'm not an expert in this so I don't know if I can offer a good answer on this but I think about this all the time is I like where does this is remarkable to me that

that we can experience things period you know like and it's remarkable that we find things beautiful Most concerts, you're in a seat. You're watching. Downtown Rocks at Fremont Street Experience is something else entirely. Three stages. Live music spilling into the street, into the crowd, under the world's largest overhead screen. The neon's on, the night's wide open, and you're right in the middle of it. Downtown Rocks at Fremont Street Experience. All summer. All welcome. All free. Search Fremont Street Experience for the full lineup and date. Love bread, bake goods and pasta, but not the way they make you feel? What if I told you there are macro-friendly options that don't taste like sawdust and sadness? Satisfying sandwiches, fully loaded bagels, noodles that can stand up to your favorite chunky sauces, all delicious.

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Shop now on hero.co. Use code iHeart for 10% off. That's hero.co. Per serving, not a low-calorie foods and products contain aluosy, and nutrition info on hero. over sodium and sugar content. And even if we knew the answer to the question of where it came from was, it wouldn't change the fact.

That's exactly right. That we find that meaningful and beautiful, right? I often end some of my talks when I talk about the big picture, the book that I wrote, there's a lot of sort of deflationary messages. You know, we're bags at atoms. We live for a very short period of time. We're small compared to the universe. But then you show a picture of the universe, the Hubble ultradine field with all these galaxies.

And the point is we took that picture, right? Like we decided to spend millions and millions of dollars to take that picture, and it's not helping us feed ourselves or anything like that. We just wanted, we had the curiosity and the interest in the beauty that was brought out by that. That's exactly right. And, you know, fundamental research, like, you know, theoretical physics, it's, for me, it's, I think of it more, less like science and engineering, but more as really, it's like the humanities in a way, right? It's really getting at some fundamental truth of about the world. world. It's in like with a capital W or whatever. What is there? Yeah. And also our place in it. And it's so human to want to, to want to understand like that, you know, just a little bit more. I completely agree.

I don't tell my colleagues I'm saying this, but it does have a lot to do with, you know, the humanities. It's driven by curiosity, not by immediate practical interests. But as you point out, you know, even the areas of discipline, Larry's study that are driven by immediately practical interest, engineering, biology, medicine. They still have this aesthetic component. So maybe let's come back, ground ourselves a little bit. You got here through this journey of music and computers and so forth. So tell us about some of the designing you've done in that arena yourself, you know,

the making of different kinds of musical instruments, orchestras, and so on. Sure. I make tools, toys, games, and social experiences with technology for musical purposes. And I can give you a demo of one, if you like. You would love a demo. That would be awesome. So this is an app I designed 10 years ago. I started a company called Smule. Smeil is still around, and it's a way to make music socially together with people.

I stepped down five years ago, but Smeil is still going strong. But designed this as part of Smuel 10 years ago. It's Ocarina. And it's an app for your phone. You play it by blowing into it. I'm actually... Okay, before you play, is it coming out of that speaker? Yes.

Okay, so we should put that in front of the microphone. Okay, so how directional is this? It's pretty darn directional, so... Okay, so let's try that. You may have to edit... You have to edit part of this app. No, we're going to leave this in. We're going to...

All the messinesses here. This brought more paraphernalia than any other podcast guest I've had so far, so this is awesome. So, uh, I'm holding my phone by not in the usual way. I'm kind of holding it like a sandwich, and I'm blowing into the microphone on the bottom, and I'm using my fingers on the screen to, there are these four circles that expands, can track when I, when I press down on them, and those control pitch. Accelerometer in the iPhone controls vibrato, so if I hold the phone flat, versus tilting it downward, that's vibrato.

You can play all kinds of little ditty with this, and it's a very physical use of the phone. And you haven't, there's no hardware enhancement to the phone. You didn't put a, you know, pickup or anything like that. How does your blowing on the phone get registered? So I'm blowing into the microphone. In there, there's actually a little software program that's tracking the strength of how hard I'm blowing into the microphone. You know, when blown the microphone, I'm not going to do it here, but, you know, we get the,

and from there you can just basically do an envelope follower and see how much, roughly, how much energy is in there. and then you map that to sound that's being generated on the device. Okay. And that's pretty much it. And then you're mapping the interaction from the multi-touch and the accelerometer to different parameters in the sound synthesis. And this is called Akarina because it is very much like an existing instrument called the Akarina. Right.

This is an instrument that's been around in various forms for thousands of years, actually. And it's one of the more, I would say, the simpler instruments to start playing. the interaction really is, you know, you blow into and there's a few holes you can hold down and you can control pitch. And to answer your earlier question, yeah, this is no, no add-ons to the phone. The part of the design was, say, can we design something that require, those are the constraints that require no additional components. And in a way, and I talk about this in our design, this is inside out design. This is actually a function following a bit of form. And a form in this case being your phone. Yeah, you have a phone. What are you going to do with it? What are all the

things that's on the phone and, um, and what makes sense? And if you go through this exercise, like, well, a piano is like a little too big and the interaction, you know, however keys you have 88 keys and or guitar or drums. These are all, but a four whole English pendant ocarina is about the same size as the, uh, as the iPhone and also the complexity of interaction is comparable. About the same, yeah. So that was kind of... It's a perfect match.

And so it's this backwards, like, you know, I say we designed backwards from really the end user's experience, and we designed backwards from the medium. In this case, the medium was the iPhone and all the things that's available. But you had in mind, number one, you wanted to make a musical instrument. And number two, you had an iPhone available. And so, and our listeners can go download this on the app store? Yeah, Ocarina is available. Look for Smule Ocarina.

and actually there's another component to Aquarina as well. Okay. This is a social component. There's a global visualization. And here I'm actually seeing this double helix graphics coming out of actually possibly Southern California. Playing out to joy. Someone that calls themselves a belted biscuit. Who's this person?

A classic. A classic. An undiscovered genius. out there probably across the street. We wouldn't know, right? The physical space doesn't matter. Yeah, but you know roughly where they're coming from. Here's Amazing Grace from, it's like London, Adam.

Okay. And that's all you know about, you know, who these people are. You know, the app is designed for you not to, what's a weird social network? So it's basically, all that's doing is other people are playing and we can listen to whatever they're playing. Yeah, that's all it is. And when I play it, that means they can listen to me. Because now I feel bad.

Well, the app is kind of taking in these little snippets and then a few interaction and sending those up to basically a server. And then that's, when someone's listening, they kind of randomly get served something in the recent past. Okay. So it's not quite in real time. Not quite in real time, no. So this morning when I was just trying to make it work at all and not really completely succeeding, that is not probably sent to anyone.

That likely it was not. But you can turn this feature on and off. but it's kind of anonymous, like, listening. You know, it's to say, in this social system, identity doesn't matter. It's about, like, you know, physicality, because you're blown into the phone to make music. And it's about, you know, this little sense of connection you have with someone, you know, if you're, like, final countdown coming from Korea, you'd be like, who is that person? And the app gives you no answers on that.

But it does want you to ask that question. Yeah, that's cool. And is there some, this is probably not a fair question? Is there follow-up? Like, do people make orchestras? Do they join together? Not in this app. There's no follow-up. And I think this is a, I think it as a logical end here.

It's not a tool to study, kind of how people make music. For me, it's not a social network. It's not a social network. It's a place to feel a little connected with the, you know, and that's the end. And so, in that sense, you know, it goes back to this, like, that's an end in itself. I just want people to feel connected. It's not here to serve another purpose beyond that. What I thought was a really good point about the fact that, let's say, 200 years ago,

but maybe even more recently than that, what families would do in their leisure time is create music together. That's right. And we almost never do that anymore. We listen to music and maybe because it's just so easy to put it on a record or play Spotify or whatever or Pandora. I should mention Pandora because my podcast appears on Pandora now. maybe it's too easy or maybe there's a skill or are we just exposed to really, really good musicians so far that we're embarrassed about our own skills

but you want to kind of bring it back the ability to get around late at night instead of watching TV we can play music together. Yeah, I think it goes back to this question of meaning and values. I think music making to me is a value and that's something that I think does a person good. And I don't know why. I think it's probably a lot of different factors that that's changed kind of our relationship with music making.

Technology really is the thing that's changed it over the last, really last hundred years. Before household electricity, you know, to get music, there's no broadcast, there's no internet, there's no recording. You had to be where music was, you had to listen to music where it was made. And if you look throughout human history, there's never been a civilization. or a culture that's been without either music or dance. So music has been with us. And of course we find flutes made out of like bear femur and human bones even like kind of dating tens of thousands of years.

So, you know, music has really been with us. But only really in the last 100 to 200 years has, you know, kind of music is, you know, for better, for, well, well, for the better. You know, it can be recorded. It can be disseminated over long distances. and then we can capture, like, you know, kind of like the musicians that really speak to us and we always have their sound. And I think that's a good part of it.

Perhaps possible side effect and possible downside is that we might be making less music than ever before. And maybe it's because, I don't know, I don't, I refuse to believe it's because we hear, we hear people that are, like, so amazing that we are intimidated to, I think sometimes they, even inspire us. But I think it's really just now we have so much that we could do that can, you know, it's so much easier just to fire up like a video game, which I do and I love playing, or to just watch streaming video or whatnot and all things that I love to do. Yeah. But there's CDs out there with a lot of music and I don't know, I'm not, I get your desire to not think that it's because we're intimidated by people who are better than us.

but I bet that there's a lot of people who used to think they could sing, and now we can listen to Aretha Franklin and Freddie Mercury and go, well, maybe I'm not as good as them, or playing the piano or whatever. Well, I think that's, it gets back to, well, to this idea, I think of the intrinsic value of making music. Again, I think play comes back. You know, you're not making music to be good. You're making music because it, like, enriches you. And it's just, you know, to learn.

and amateur musicianship was like a good thing, you know, I hope it still is. Because you learn an instrument for this, just because you like, one, you want to know, you want to learn, you know, and I think the, for this sheer intrinsic worth of knowing how to play the piano, play the guitar, and, you know, if you have a favorite song, you want to know to play that song, are you doing this so you can, you know, be on stage performing for thousands of people, not necessarily. I think that could be, that, that, that's good, too. but I think if you take everything else away, just making music for yourself.

I think there's something really awesome about that. I would say the same thing about making art, right? Doing painting. This is something that most people don't do, but it's not that hard. I mean, you can paint. Well, you'll paint badly compared to an expert, but that's okay.

The activity itself can be rewarding. Exactly. So do you think of the kinds of things you're designing will help bring back the actual personal creation of music to people? the hope is to help people realize that there's this intrinsic value to doing this. And I think what they do, I don't know. For example, I don't think the apps that things I do are, well, certainly kind of the apps on mobile phones are not.

I don't think of them as educational tools at all. I think of them more as like personal expression windows. Like for people to feel, you want to lower the sense of innovation. Right. And for people to feel this joy of making music, to play, like in all sense of the word, play an instrument, but also just play. The more things like laptop orchestra and things like Chuck, the programming language for music, those are, I think, for perhaps a different audience, even though they overlap somewhat.

And those are more, I think, on the, on a different side of research, like what kind of tools can we build and what kind of instruments can we build. and what kind of instruments can we build for like laptops, for orchestras of laptops and humans? Yeah, tell us a little bit about the laptop orchestra project. Was there more than one, or is there a laptop orchestra? Now they're more than, I think, I would say probably more than 70 worldwide. And most of them in academic institutions, the first one of its kind really started at Princeton.

And while I was a grad student, this was started by my advisor, Perry Cook, and Dan Truman, who's still a music professor at Princeton. and they've been exploring kind of really kind of how we can design instruments, but also design instruments that preserve some of the things we love about traditional instruments. One, how they emanate sound. You know, if you were to play like a violin, like in a room, the sound doesn't naturally come from a PA system.

It comes from the artifact itself. And that's a certain sense of presence and intimacy that comes with that kind of sound. Different concert halls have different feelings, right? It's a feeling, exactly. And so they've been looking at kind of like different ways to build speakers that capture the sonic intimacy. And this eventually led to the laptop orchestra. And this started at Princeton, is the Princeton laptop orchestra or Plork in 2005?

I graduated in 2008 and started Stanford and then started the Stanford laptop orchestra or Slork. And the idea is that in the laptop orchestra, we have computers, of course. We have humans. And also we have these hemispherical speaker arrays. Now, they look like the dome of R2D2. And they're actually, they're made out of 11-inch diameter wooden salad bowls with holes drilled into them. And we put speaker drivers in them.

And the whole idea is that we pair each salable with a computer. so that the sound that the computer is making comes out locally to where it's being played. And then you have that multiplied by 20, and you can really have an orchestra that can build a wall of sound. But the physical playing is tapping on the keyboard of the laptops? It varies. To date, we've designed more than probably 200 different instruments, and some of them are tapping on the keyboard, it uses the mouse.

Some of them are using things like Wii modes, game controllers. We've used this thing called the game track, which is like a, basically it's, it was made to track your hand in 3D space. It was made for golf games. Oh, okay. And so it's tethered to this base that's on the ground and you have wore gloves that the ends of the tethers are attached to. And that basically just gives you the six to your freedoms, uh, freedom of where your two hands are. A little bit theramine-like? You can make theremonds out of it.

Yeah. So you can, you can basically have like, you can move your, your, your, um, you can basically have like, you can move your, arms around, your hands around, and you can translate this gesture into sonic gestures. So anything we can get our hands on, we basically can become a potential interface for music making in the laptop orchestra. Now can I ask another unfair question. Is the music good? Sometimes. We'd be trying to make good music. Sometimes it's like we're always trying to make music that's interesting. You know, that kind of challenges or ask certain questions about how we make music or, you know, does this bring about kind of a different way you think about creating an

instrument or performing music? And certainly we, you know, to the best of our ability, we try to make music that's good. But the music is, that might be a matter of taste as well. Well, or is it just, you know, first, it's remarkable you can do it at all. And down the road, people will start putting it to more artistic uses. I think it's definitely exploratory. Yeah, we're definitely in the early stages. But part of that, I think, has to do with the medium of the computer itself, you know, as a thing you make instruments out of. And Perry had this principles, like when you're designing computer music instruments, often you're making the piece, not the instrument, first and foremost. Oh, okay. You're kind of figuring out what you want the piece to sound like. That sounds

exhausting. Every time you want to make a new musical piece, you have to make new instruments. Actually, that's exactly what we end up doing is that, you know, we have like 200, let's just, let's something like 200 instruments now in laptop orchestra, we have just about that many, that many pieces. And we generally don't create general purpose instruments that can be used for a number of pieces, but we were thinking about what is this specific piece and what is exactly the right instrument that we can craft to play that piece. And so we have these very specialized instruments. And I think that speaks to the medium of the computer. It's possible in a matter of days sometimes to actually have an idea and actually prototype an instrument. And you have a lot of,

have a piece of music that we've never heard before. And this is not supposed to bring music making into people's living rooms. This is just exploring a new kind of music that you could imagine playing in a concert hall and people coming and listening to. I think that's right. Yeah, this is a different way of thinking about how to make music. This one's less about kind of self-expression as something like Ocarina is trying to do. This one's more like researching kind of how we make music together with this new medium of

the computer. Have you, have there been collaborations with professional composers or musicians? Yeah, Plurke has done quite a few of these. And, I mean, Plurke's played with Sakhir Hussein, who is the amazing topler player and so percussion. And they've done some amazing things. Do they travel? Is there a tour? I don't know if there's a tour.

There was definitely a few concerts a few years ago that featured them. and it's really kind of, I think it's born out of curiosity. It's like how do we, what kind of instruments are possible? You know, the medium is very different. So you probably get different instruments out of the medium. And because the instrument is different, the music is going to be different and the way you perform. So it's this cascading, like, cause and effect, you know,

it's designed at every stage. Right. You design one, you know, it's attributed to Marshall McLuhan that, you know, we shape our tools and they're how. after they shape us. So the laptop workers is like by the shaping things in every stage, the end result is going to be really, really different. Most concerts, you're in a seat.

You're watching. Downtown Rocks at Fremont Street Experience is something else entirely. Three stages. Live music spilling into the street, into the crowd, under the world's largest overhead screen. The neon's on, the night's wide open, and you're right in the middle of it. Downtown Rocks at Fremont Street Experience.

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Shop now on Hero.com. Use code iHeart for 10% off. That's hero.co. Per serving, not a low-calorie foods and products contain alulose, and nutrition info on hero.com for sodium and sugar content. Well, I was going to ask about the technological aspect here, the role of technology. It seems very technological if you're making a laptop orchestra or an ocarina out of an iPhone. But in some sense, every musical instrument is technology, right?

Like they've been technology all along. I mean, in what sense are we exploring new music spaces because, the technology is allowing us to do that? Well, the medium, first of all, that's exactly right. Every instrument is a technology, whether it's vibrating strings or vibrating columns of air. I think for computer music, we're exploring the very medium of the computer itself. And the thing that, you know, sets that apart perhaps from other mediums is that, well, one, it's programmable. And two, in some ways, I think of traditional instruments is, you know, that's really like form follows physics.

Right. Yes, exactly. But with the computer, you kind of, for better for words, have this completely compartmentalized way of thinking about instruments. Like, what's the input, what you wanted to sound like? Those can be very different. And then there's a mapping layer in the middle that you map the input to the output. And you can change the input without changing the output, vice versa. In practice, this doesn't always work well. And you want to really design everything in a more, call it a more embodied kind of.

a way. But that's kind of the difference is that this medium is something that, you know, for better for us, frees you from kind of the physics, the physical kind of nature of things and into kind of rules that are more governed and in a more virtual realm, I suppose. Yeah, I'm interested also, you know, how much we can formalize this, right? I mean, there's things you can do. Like, so now that you have a laptop, when I was a kid, kid, I was in an undergrad. graduate, this is the first laptop era, right, the mid-1980s, with IBM PCs and Macs or everywhere. And I definitely, you know, programmed our little IBM PCs to make, I would call them noises, more than musical sounds, but it's a very natural thing to do. So then how much once you're,

after you've done that, can you step back and say, oh, here are the principles? I know you've mentioned Kronzberg's levels, laws of technology, right? I mean, how intellectualized is this versus just kind of playing around and learning things? well that's a great question it goes actually goes broader to this whole idea of like what design principles can be capture about designing things in you know in general more specifically

and this is where design and really computer music design is well it's not entirely formalizable but I think it's more formalizable than like it is if you say it is right I think there's some middle ground and if I were to go back to Aristotle he said

something like the following, you know, we should not expect more precision than a topic naturally affords. Right. Actually, I love that quote in your book because I was exactly thinking that, like, you know, should be, is there the right answer to design? But Aristotle is saying, like, no, that's not the kind of thing you should be looking for. I think sometimes it's valuable to say things, you know, generally or, you know, in a broad sense. And so design is really in this tacit dimension in between, like, you know, engineering, precision and really, like, full formalizability to kind of like there's no, I think there are things we can say,

but there are more like lenses to think with than like recipes to follow. Right. And so, you know, Perry, for example, in computer music design, he had these principles, you know, first one is like instant music subtlety later. Okay, good. He's a way to think about, a particular way to think about how you design instrument. And, you know, he had a coffee mug that makes music. And you really pick it up.

and the sensors on it enable you to start making sound and music immediately. But over time, you can learn kind of, kind of its personality. The artful way to drink your coffee. Exactly. So it's, you know, I think the principles in artful design really was inspired by kind of Perry's principle, which to me said that there is a level of specificity and precision, but only to the extent and make sense. And if we expect too much, if we try to formalize it too much, it actually loses something of its essence.

I should mention that there are a lot of principles in your book. There's not like three principles. At the end of the book, it closes with one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten pages of principles with like 15 principles per page. So there's a lot of principles. It's not hard to remember. Do you remember all these? No. But I think when a situation arises, sometimes it's a way to, you know, it's a way to be.

to think about it. It doesn't tell you what to do, but it gives you kind of like, you know, kind of the principle of automation, you know, it says that there is kind of this membrane we can look for beyond what you make sense to automate. And on the other side, we should really be confident about what we don't need to automate and what we should, we ought not automate. And I think so design is as much of how to automate or how not automate as it is figuring out where that little boundary is. And that's, I think, you know, really a responsibility of the designer as well. Have you worked on the automation of the composing of the music?

Do we have artificial intelligence writing scores for the laptop orchestra? Occasionally we have had algorithmic components and generative components. I think it's still a pretty open problem, but also goes back to the question of meanings. Like, why do we want to do that, right? And if I may, I remember this conversation had heading to grad school, And, you know, this is before I went to, it was all my way to Princeton. And someone asked me, what are you going to do in grad school? I'm like, I'm going to computer science, but I'm really doing computer music.

And it's like, okay, what do you want to do? And it's like, I want to write a program for the computer to generate, to make music. Yeah. Right. And that person asked me, what's the point? Ah, terrible question. And I was like, yeah, that's, I don't know how an answer for that. And so instead of actually working on.

It is actually a very good question, but it's a terrible question. but it's a terrible question. It's a terrible, it's a, it, but I think there's a, it really changed the way I think about things. And I, I'm really glad that person asked it, because I could not answer that. Because I think the meaning, I realized that, you know, so instead of actually building, trying to build like this, like the world's most, like, amazing algorithmic composition system, I went to make a tool with which others can actually get their hands dirty and, uh, and build things. themselves. And if they want to make an algorithmic composition system, they can use Chuck the programming language to do it. So I've kind of taken one step back and designed something like framed it completely. It's a framing issue. It reminds me a little bit of, you know, in chess and go, artificial intelligence not only is better than the best humans, but comes up with new strategies. I wonder if, you know, someday it's a much harder problem, whether artificial intelligences won't be playing music in ways that humans,

never thought of, or, you know, kinds of compositions we hadn't yet hit on. I think it was somewhere in chapter 8. I think a fellow colleague at Stanford, actually, I captured this moment. She asked me, you know, well, we have robot musicians, you know, really AI that play music, and I say you mean as well as humans. She's like, yes. And she's a philosopher, so I gave her kind of a tongue-in-cheek answer, which happened to believe.

I think, you know, the day we have robot musicians is, well, have that day when we have robot philosophers. And I think, and she's like, oh, you know, so that means that maybe on that day the AI will have understood something more subtly human. And I think, I think that's right. It's like, I don't know what that really means, but I think robots need to have. Yeah. It again comes back to the question of meaning, right?

Well, even in the very most basic kind of pattern recognition tasks, which computers are getting very good at. it's still really easy to fool them just by putting things, you know, outside of their normal context, right? Right. You know, if you, I just saw this morning, for some reason, someone was showing a photograph of a bus on a road and you ask the computer what it is and it says it's a bus. But then you just like in Photoshop, rotate the bus 90 degrees and it says, oh, now it's a snowplow. It doesn't say it's a bus in 90 degrees because it has no background framing for that. Yeah, and some things are...

I mean, for things like, you know, go or chess and image recognition, there are, you know, kind of what might be considered correct answers. And there are a lot of things, I think, in life that we value to have no correct answers, you know, like art, music, you know, there are things that are, well, that just aren't problems to be solved so much, but things that we clearly care about. We want to do. Right. So this, I mean, maybe this is not a perfect segue, but you wrote a book.

And number one, it's a book. You didn't write an opera. You didn't write a musical piece. You chose to write a book. That's a conscious decision. And secondly, it's a graphic book, right? It's not mostly hand-drawn, but photographs and overlay text and so forth. And I notice on the cover page, on the title page, it says that you go along are the author and designer of the book.

So what made you think that a book was the right way to do this? After all, there's so much sound in your work, and there's no sound in the book. And then what made you think that this graphic way of doing it was the right thing? That's a great question. I'm still wondering that sometimes myself, but I'm really glad I did it this way as a photocomic book. Well, I think it's a book about design. So I felt like I really wanted to very clearly and intentionally designed it. And the medium, I think design is really how you connect the medium to the message.

And it absolutely changes how you write the book. So actually I started writing like a what I thought would be a more conventional book about 300 pages of words and text. Yeah, I was like, it's going to be great with some figures. And I thought I actually have a lot of photos. I was like, you know, maybe just have more photos and figures than normal. And then I was like, you know, what if there's some things that's easier to talk about if it's talked about not so formally, but also with visual guides. And also more of like kind of a, you know, conversation. What if, like, I don't know, the pencil bag could talk?

You know, these things suddenly, you know, I think about comic books that I grew up with, including The Ventures of Tintin and Chinese, by the way. I was born in Beijing, and I grew up early reading Tintin. And then, you know, I was like, what if half the book was a comic book? And at that point, I was like, you know what? Yeah, let's do that. Once you say that, yeah. So, and then the whole thing, then it was this commitment to just,

it's like what what is this book really about now that it's and it seems to fit the idea that what you're offering is not the single grand unified answers to what design is but more of a invitation and a conversation and a set of ideas that work together in interesting ways right that's the hope yes and the aim yeah i mean having pictures of you in the book talking to us using you know thought bubbles and speech balloons invites a conversational kind of response to the book yes i think I wanted to make it feel like a kind of a face-to-face conversation. And I also want to feel like I'm there for you, you know, through this like this inferno of design and, you know, kind of.

And also I think it's a way to kind of offer certain, you know, truths more, like, in a more informal way. Yeah, more accessible. More accessible. Yeah. I mean, anyone, anyone, who sees a it's not a graphic novel

because it's not a novel, a graphic text? What is comic book? I think it's called it a comic book. Photo comic book. It's kind of an interesting genre these days. I interviewed Clifford Johnson, who is a physicist, a string theorist, who did a graphic novel based on physics and string theory. And there's been these famous examples of

graphic novels about philosophy and history and so forth. It's a growing genre. It's a growing genre. sounds like. I think so. I mean, I love comic books. And one thing more I can say about the fact that this is a photo comic book rather than like a drawn comic book is that for me, like, you know, I want design is, design may reach for the sublime. The subtitles like technology in search of the sublime may try to reach for the transcendent, but I think its feet must be grounded

in everyday life, you know. And I think the photo aspect is to say this is, you don't have to parse in this extra aesthetic layer of how stylistically it's drawn, but rather to say this is, I mean, it has its own aesthetic, of course, but these moments happened. And it's, it's, you know, I think it's very different. Like, for, like, a comic book of Spider-Man probably, like, I prefer it to be drawn. Right. Because it's, it's fictional. It's not, and that gives me, like, my mind a different place to go. But aesthetically, if it's not drawn, but photographs, it would be very strange of like Spider-Man comics were photo comics

because then you'd be wondering who's acting as Spider-Man under the mask and what's the you kind of start thinking about these like but here it's nonfiction right and you want to be grounded

you want to be real so like every thing you're describing is a thing you can take a picture right right and how I mean since I'm an author I'm kind of tempted now to write a more graphic comic bookie physics book

but is you are the the designer of the book, like, how does it work? What is the actual process? What program are you using to make these pages? I think I horrified, like, pretty much everyone that discovered how I actually did this. I did this in an old version of Omnigraffle, which is an outlining program I was using since grad school to make figures from my papers. And I got really...

There's nothing like familiarity when it comes to technology. Nothing like familiarity. Yeah. And so every person. page in the book and of which they're 488 and many many pages that never made it into the final book right and each one of those is a separate file in in omnigraffle and i've learned to you know have like a lot of these little tools of like commonly used speech bubbles and other things if i can incorporate images into this kind of and i pull up those pages when i need to make a page um and and i've got I think I got pretty, at least after a year or two, I got pretty fast at doing this.

And it really felt like this is, yeah, it feels good. Most concerts, you're in a seat. You're watching. Downtown Rocks at Fremont Street Experience is something else entirely. Three stages. Live music spilling into the street. Into the crowd. Under the world's largest overhead screen.

The neon's on, the night's wide open, and you're right in the middle. Love it. Downtown Rocks at Fremont Street Experience. All summer. All welcome. All free. Search Fremont Street Experience for the full lineup and dates. Love bread, baked goods and pasta, but not the way they make you feel? What if I told you there are macro-friendly options that don't taste like sawdust and sadness? Satisfying sandwiches, fully loaded bagels, noodles noodles that can stand up to your favorite chunky sauces, all delicious. Criveworthy and smart, each serving of hero bread has up to 19 grams of protein and 32 grams of fiber, and just 0 to 5 grams net carbs and zero grams sugar. Hero bread bakes with heart-healthy olive oil and delivers the soft, fluffy, flavorful

experience you love. Breakfast burritos, smear-loaded bagels, real mac and cheese. Hero bread bakes loaves, bagels, and tortillas that don't taste or feel like cardboard. Noodles that don't fall apart in hearty sauces. Plus, limited edition small batch bakes like the 2 grams net carb hero croissant or 1 gram net carb hero cheddar biscuit, handmade in a sonoma. based French bakery. Shop now on hero.co. Use code iHeart for 10% off. That's hero.co. Per serving, not a low calorie foods and products contain allulose, see nutrition info on hero.com for sodium and sugar content. I mean, maybe this is an impolitic question, but what does Stanford think about this? The university, not the press. That's, I think Stanford, I don't know. I hope they like it.

Yeah. So far, people have really supported them. Actually, this book was supported by, both the school of engineering and the school of humanities and sciences, which to me is like, I feel like symbolically, that's awesome. It's like this is actually, this is a book that is at these intersections. You know, it's not,

it's not one or the other, but like an other. Right, right. And was it very different, you know, sort of in your personal experience in the sense that you've been doing so much music and now you are being a visual artist in some sense? I've always been drawn to the visual arts and also really the combination

of like the audio and the visual and the interactive. So, and I've always taken photographs. So I'm just kind of a hobbyist, amateur photographer, I guess. I mean, just because the audience is, this is an audio podcast, you can't see it, but it's way beyond just a set of pictures of you talking with some graphs. I mean, you really obviously put a tremendous amount of effort

into the design in terms of background images and fonts and angles and things like that. So it must have been a lot of fun. It was a ton of fun. It was a ton of work. And there are over 1,600 photos in the book, 1,300 of which I either took or a few of them I generated, and there are like a few drawings in there.

And the other came from public domain, creative commons, you know, and that's a shout out. I rely on Wikimedia when I write my books. It's so good. And it helps, you know, in your other design work, even for the audio stuff, you also care about the visual presentation, right? It's all a part of, you emphasize the human aspect of design, and we're visual creatures as much as anything else. Yeah, I think we're trying to, I think it's trying for design to speak to all as much, you know,

kind of all that we are. We are visual creatures. We are creatures that care about, is that have a sense of goodness and justice and all of these things. And so whatever those things are that make us who we are, I think design has this, you know, potential to, to address at least, you know, and the aggregate, hopefully all of that. And even an ethical dimension, where do ethics and morality come in to this discussion? So, for me, I think of design as like, what is the function of the thing? And then what is everything else beyond the function of a thing? And ethics fall into, for me, into, well, strange to say it falls into kind of the more of the aesthetic dimension of design. If we think of design

is simply like what are the pragmatics and what are the aesthetics and being as in aesthetics as in everything beyond the sheer functionality um and for me like i think you know the ethical dimension of design is that well i think the argument from the book goes you know design is all about choices you're really just making like this cascading series of decisions about you know what to build how you build it and who it's for and all of these things and if it's all about choices then you And these decisions, you know, they have implications for people that use them, the users. And if that's the case, then, yeah, making decisions as engineers, as designers, well, that's tantamount to actually taking action, you know, anywhere else in life. And if we believe that, then shouldn't we as designers and engineers be held to the same moral ethical framework as we would anywhere else?

And so that's the argument. And then the next part of the argument is to say, but that's it just it. It's like there's no recipe to be moral or ethical. And in fact, at least we don't agree on what the right one is. Exactly. And I think that's actually that we don't agree is why we have ethics, is that we, you know, values come into conflict. And we've got to try our best to apply different lenses to this to see how we can best. What does that even mean to resolve it, right?

So in some sense, like we said about philosophy earlier, you can't not do it. you can do it badly or you can do it well. And likewise, you can't fail to have ethical dimensions of your work when you're designing things. You can just pay attention to them or not. That's exactly right. And first law of Kansberg's law of technology, technology is neither good or bad, nor is in neutral, right? Because it has an effect.

And it has an effect. And you cannot pay attention to it, but it doesn't mean it doesn't have an effect, nor does that mean you're free from responsibility. And a company can't say, hey, we've built this platform. However people use it is not our problem. Not thinking of any specific companies. No, not in specific companies. I mean, certainly physicists historically have done that.

You know, we did the atomic bomb, right? You know, and chemists and doctors these days are facing up against the same thing. We're recording this only a week or two after it was announced that someone claims to have genetically engineered a baby, right? And there's science there, obviously, but there's clearly an ethical dimension as well. Right. So I think, you know, for engineers, I think to really be not just capable engineers, but actually human engineers that you have to consider all of these dimensions. And, you know, if you build something that's like useful, makes money, but you've exploited people or you've done harm in the process, I don't think the thing is aesthetic. It's not beautiful. It's not truthful, right? And the other thing I would say is I think ethics, and the world right now currently thinks of ethics. largely as this kind of like leash on technology. But I think I would, I want to offer an additional way to look at. I agree that there should be constraints.

But what if ethics is really like values? And what if those values are not the leash, but the foundation of what you make in the first place? Like that should inform what you build, how you build it. And it's much more proactive than to say, we've built this thing. How can we make sure it does no evil? Right. Because at the end of the day, you know, do no evil, that's a rather low bar.

I mean, it's a terrible thought to think, like, oh, I could do all this cool stuff if it weren't for those pesky ethics, right? Right. But it's like, but if you think about it in the other direction, it's like, what are my values? What are things I find awesome? And why do I find them awesome? And then you can get so excited about building something. And, you know, you've kind of like, and the ethical considerations are kind of. kind of built in from the get-go and not as this like, you know, checkpoint that you have to,

just like aesthetics. You can't add, as an aesthetics is not something you kind of slap on at the end, nor is ethics some, like, module you install into your system just to make it ethical suddenly. And it doesn't work like that. Do these different aspects, do they come into your teaching at Stanford when you talk to your students? Is this part of a course on design? Absolutely. So I've started using Artful Design as a textbook. And in fact, at some level, I think, was written as a textbook, as a very strange textbook. There's no exercises. I didn't see any problem sets.

There are what I called atudes, kind of like that people could try to do. They're not, you're right, they're not problem sets. But they do try to put some of the ideas into motion. And I've designed a new course in this coming winter quarter in 2019 called Design That Understands Us. And in this course, we're actually going to look at the shaping of technology, but really in this full broad spectrum, broad perspective way. And in here we're going to bring to bear really the aesthetic dimension, the ethical dimension.

We're going to look at everything from social network to artificial intelligence to instruments, to toys, to games, to really anything that we find in our everyday lives. You say one of the things, I mean, maybe to close this up, me, this is a good final topic. The title is Artful Design, the title of the book, but then there's a subtitle, technology in search of the sublime, and sublime is in a different color and underlined. And since you're designing it, these are not random choices, right?

Why is Sublime the word you chose there? I think it reflects a certain optimism, you know, that as builders, as engineers, and engineering itself is something that can be more than, quote, unquote, simply a problem solve. that it can be something that is beautiful, truthful, can be just, can be ethical. And I think when you talk about those things, we're really talking about kind of these, you know, something closer to the transcendent.

And for me, the sublime is kind of this window into looking at the transcendent. You know, I think it's, you were talking earlier about how, you know, at the end of your books, you know, we are just kind of, we are. We're basically these molecules and we're this insignificant things in this rather unremarkable, like, in the grand scheme of things like rock and space. Part of a solar system in this arm of this, you know, one of hundreds of billions of galaxies. And beyond that, who knows what's out there? And I think you do, you know more than I do, but we're... None of us knows very much.

None of us know very much, but yet we're non-zero. We exist. And if you think about how small we are, but also that we're actually here and we are experiencing things, I find that to be miraculous. And that gives me, when I think about that, that's, you know, it's sublime because it reflects a certain truth, a truth that I also find incredibly beautiful. Well, I mean, how careful should we be? Because you're using words like sublime and transcendent and miraculous that are often associated with something. beyond the natural world. Do you mean to imply that, or is you just taking it as part of the human condition?

The human condition. Inner feeling that is, you know, it's hard to articulate, but we feel it, right? I think what's a blind for me is that the natural world is, is that. Right. Is that this is, there's not, it's just like, it's insane. It's like, why do we, why are we, there's a truth out there that we clearly do not fully understand. We don't even know how to frame it, perhaps. I mean, like, why are we, we do not understand how we come into being or if there's a purpose.

And that's, you know, and I think the universe is preposterous to quote here. You know, this is, it's, it's, but in a really horrifying, terrifying, but also in a just an exquisitely amazing and beautiful way. And I think actually, you know, the natural sublime is you're standing in front of like this, huge canyon and you feel this both a sense of awe and this is twinge of fear right and um well i think if you think about the universe for example yeah i think i get both of those feelings it's just but it's not the kind of fear that makes you run it's the kind that makes you still you know and and you makes you reflect and i think technology you know back to technology in search of the sublime is getting at that same thing that i think i don't know how to you know how to you

I think for me, like the arts, the humanities, fundamental, you know, research and science, it is all trying to get at in different ways, is getting at this, like, truth, the truth of things. And both out there and also kind of in ourselves, like, who are we? And it's so human to want to understand ourselves just a little bit more than before. And that was actually my question for you, and I don't know if there's an answer for this, is that I don't really see a difference between what's out there, what's in here, but it both seem really hard to do. And I was going to ask you, like, what's harder?

Or is there, like, even a... I'm very, very quick to say that physics, cosmology, things like that are easier than anything involving human beings. Because precisely the success mode of physics and cosmology is that we reach for the simplest manifestations of the natural world, It doesn't mean they're easy in any objective sense. They're still hard. They seem even harder than they are because we can make so much progress so quickly

that we're led into these abstruse realms of equations and phenomena that our everyday life does not equip us to deal with. But we can still figure it out. You know how we figured out about physics is amazing, even given how much we haven't. Whereas even out we figure about human beings is still a little bit sketchy, right? Complex systems are the hard systems to understand. and as far as we know, we human beings are the most complex systems in the universe to date. I love that. You are a physicist, philosopher, humanist, all of that in one.

Well, Go Wong, thank you so much for this conversation. This was great. And I was wondering if maybe we could end by you playing us out on the Akarina if you have a tune ready. Oh, yeah. Let's play a little ditty here. We don't usually have musical accompaniment, but...