Alan Kay Invokes Shannon as Zoom Feedback Loop Garbles Pre-Talk Test
During an AV test before Kristen Nygaard’s 100-year birthday celebration, Alan Kay heard his own voice return about 21 seconds late over Zoom and responded with Claude Shannon’s noisy channel coding theorem, joking that he was being rerouted to Mars.
The post says the problem arose because somebody had the live stream playing out loud near an open Zoom microphone during setup. Kay had been scheduled to talk about how encountering Simula sparked his early thoughts about objects. Instead, his voice kept arriving back in his ears repeatedly, creating an improvisational, layered audio feedback loop.
Kay did not treat the disruption as random. The post quotes him saying, 'Shannon gave us a way of dealing with noisy channels.' He also said, 'I think about that almost every day. I realize what the fuck is going on and it's just so amazing.' The post notes that Shannon’s noisy channel coding theorem is the math for exactly the kind of channel that was garbling him as he praised it.
He joked that the audio was 'being rerouted to Mars and back.' At the speed of light, the post says, a 21-second round trip is about 3 million kilometers one way, eight trips to the Moon and back, and not even a twentieth of the way to Mars at closest approach.
The post describes the accident as a Zoom-era version of Alvin Lucier’s 1969 piece 'I Am Sitting in a Room,' in which Lucier re-recorded his own voice in a room until only the room’s resonance remained. In Kay’s case, the post says, what remained was the network: delay, compression, and dropouts. It also notes that YouTube’s auto-transcript bleeped Kay’s enthusiasm into '[ __ ].' The full chain, according to the post, included Kay’s voice, Zoom, the stream, the room, Zoom again times three, a screen recording, YouTube’s speech recognizer, and a censored transcript.
The post says the fix was straightforward: 'Just turn off the audio at your end on Zoom.' The Hacker News entry had 22 points and four comments.