Printed Blog review
Did you see Bianca’s Printed Blog Review?
A brilliant article about printed Blog! Interesting is the concept of Printed Blog and then the way Bianca Reviews it. A great example for a content post which will enjoy long life on top of Google.
Yorgo
YORGOO Publishing
One strand of massive connectionism is currently called social media. The goal is to connect everybody to everybody else in as many different arrangements as possible. Twitter, Flickr, Facebook, Digg, Delicious, Yahoo Answers – the whole 10,000 strong universe of Web 2.0 sites employ various webs of humans to accomplish new things. In this regime, humans are the nodes. They generate the signals.
The other strand of massive connectionism relies on a massive number of machines, CPUs and computer transistors linked together in as many ways as possible to get things done. For example, gigantic server farms, data centers, and telecommunication networks. At the extreme level we’d have to include the mega-network of the One Machine consisting of all cell phones, PDAs, PCs, routers, wi-fi spots, satellite links, and so on. On this side, the signals at each node are generated by machines.
Of course on the side of “people connectionism” the information is still transmitted by machines (unlike the traditional social connectionism at a large conference, ancient town, or say, Burning Man). But there is a blank white space between these two realms, where both humans and machines could be tightly and massively interlinked – but are not yet.
This new territory can best be illustrated by the far-right top extreme where both sides meet in the center (red arrow) – the area where we have maximum machine connection and maximum human connection. This overlap or convergence space would be the emerging global superorganism. The entity represented by this space is not just the One Machine composed of all other machines connected together. Nor is it the Noosphere of all human minds connected into one large supermind. Rather it is the vigorous hybrid of both all human minds and all artificial minds linked together. It is the pan-mind. At this juncture the nodes are anything that generates a signal – either humans or machines.
We have a small sense of this mix in Google, which relies on both massive machine connectionism and massive human work in clicking on links. But we can easily imagine other arrangements where more of all the planet’s technology is linked up and more human behavior and thinking as well.
This cyborgian white space is also where most semantic web efforts are aimed. The idea of the semantic web is to make human connectionism readable by the machine side (and vice versa) so that both webs can work in concert. Semantic web technologies are a bridge or translation channel between the two sides of connectionism. All human thoughts, actions, and memories want to be deciphered, structured by machines, and machine structures understandable by humans.
The big white space and red arrow is what I think of as Web 3.0 and onward. It will take many decades to explore. And of course there is plenty of room for all kinds of innovations on either side as well. From this perspective, we’ve just begun.
You are not too late!
I am grateful to Nova Spivack for the inspiration of this chart. He would put his own semantic web startup, Twine, along the red arrow in the center. (Twine is a combination social bookmarking service, recommendation engine, and smart archive.)
The Publishing Network will be in a position to provide communication, publishing and web services locally and to become an opinion leader and global authority for Garden Route related topics: the source for anyone who wants to access information and services concerning the Garden Route region.
Finally, the concept is scalable and can be duplicated and applied to any geographically or theme defined target. A Franchising Concept is under development based on customer demand and the experience from YORGOO Publishing, Semiomantics as well as from this public Project.
As far as I can tell, if you visited my home today it is legal for me to slyly snatch an “abandoned” sample of DNA from you (from the lip of a cup, a fallen hair, etc.), sequence it in full, and publish your DNA online for the world to read. Of course I wouldn’t do that, but in April 2008, a seller on eBay peddled the remains of Barak Obama’s restaurant breakfast claiming that “his DNA is on the silverware.”
In England a new law prohibiting “DNA theft” makes this stealthy genetic sequencing illegal. But in the US only 8 states have any restrictions at all on sequencing others’ DNA (California is not one of them), and these restrictions are neither clear, consistent, nor absolute. (New Scientist is doing fantastic investigative reporting on the muddy state of the legal status of stealthy DNA sequencing.) Anne Wojcicki, the co-founder of the consumer DNA sequencing service 23andme told me that one of the reasons why their service requires you to fill a tube with saliva in order to get your DNA sequenced (I found it’s a minor biological feat to fill one of these with spit) is to prevent stealthy sequencing. This amount of saliva can’t be found abandoned. But many other labs, particularly forensic labs, don’t require massive gobs of protein and can work with minute amounts you might find on silverware.
It is virtually certain that most US states, if not the federal government, will rush to pass laws prohibiting stealthy DNA sequencing. There is a modern hysteria about DNA that goes in many directions. In this particular case, the initial push against “DNA theft” is being driven by two cultural taboos: paternity and sexual relations. The pioneering DNA theft law enacted by the UK was prompted by an alleged 2002 plot “to steal hair from Prince Harry to test whether he was the son of James Hewitt, a former lover of Princess Diana.” Laws in Germany were ignited by hostile attempts of feuding adults to claim paternity or non-paternity using “abandoned DNA” from children. And suspecting spouses hire labs to detect ‘foreign” DNA in underwear as evidence of infidelity.
Because DNA is seen as conveying not only paternity, and sexual activity, but also the blueprints to each person’s persona, the idea of someone else “capturing” it feels wrong. We currently perceive our DNA to be a personal code that contains our past, present and future. If we could just unlock it, we’d know our destiny. And at the same time, we’d better understand our current identity. I avidly encourage everyone to get their DNA sequenced, but I think the benefits are not what we currently believe they are, and I think the idea that these codes encapsulate us is close to superstition. For some folks, the fear of having your DNA stolen is akin to the fear by many tribal people of having their soul stolen by photography. I would argue that getting your DNA sequenced is very much like getting your photo taken. The camera takes your picture and not your soul. And your picture is well… your “picture” is not really yours.
Your DNA is not really yours, either. That statement is counterintuitive for some and stake-burning heretical for others. First, we know that 99.99% of the code in your cells is also in mine. We are 99.99% identical. There are very few genes that are unique to you. Probably none. The same can be said of our faces. But what our faces portray is the unique combination, or arrangement of very common parts. Humans have an uncanny ability to distinguish the less than .01% difference among faces and declare them unique. So we talk about “our” face, even though we share most, if not all of it with others in our extended family. To species outside of humans we probably look like identical penguins.
But while your face is unique in a very narrow sense, and thus “yours” it is less “yours” in terms of ownership that it appears. It is the most public part of you. You are required to display it as ID. We use faces to track each other and as an interface to each other, if I may use such technical language. I have some rights to capture your image in public. Your face is sort of “ours” in many ways.
I think in the long run (maybe after the next 50 years) our DNA profile will go the same way our image profile has. Our DNA sequence will likely become as public as our faces. Perhaps not all of it, in the way that parts of our bodies are covered, but most of it.
Right now, laws can regulate DNA sequencing because this work must be done by big machines owned by legit companies: the Navigenics of the world. Think gigantic printing presses. But these large, capital-intensive, and easily regulated machines will be disappearing as the price of DNA sequencing keeps dropping. Sequencing is dropping in prices as fast as computer chips (because that is what powers them). The price of gene code is plunging in half every 20 months, which is roughly the 18 months of Moore’s Law. In about 25 years, it will cost only a few cents to get your entire chromosomes done. At first we’ll decipher them once in our life, then once a year and then once a day, in order to detect the effects of environmental toxins.
Chart by Rob Carlson
Up to 70% of the fish sold in markets and restaurants today are misidentified by species. Catfish is sold as Grouper fillet and so on. When we have our handy tricorder species identifier in hand at the supermarket, we’ll be able to label the exact foods we eat with their province and pathway to our mouths. And anything that can identify one species can identify another (with the proper software).
This means that just as computers make regulation of the press and control of copies impossible, computers embedded in DNA-tricorder devices will make regulation of DNA sequencing as impossible to control. Anyone will be able to sequence anything they want.
We will have regulations preventing the publication of sequences which some one else wishes to keep private but I suspect culture will route around this. Long before we have daily DNA sequences, we’ll begin to share our code fervently. The big surprise for me has been how eager the early adopters of personal genomics have been to share their DNA. Privacy experts have argued that nothing is so private as our genes, but I am finding that nothing is so widely sharable as our genes. Since after all, we share most of them.
Right now, there is a belief that genes are destiny, but as Steven Pinker stated so well in a recent New York Times Magazine story (“My Genome, My Self“), while our genes collectively shape us more than anything else, individual genes don’t tell us much. It is a bit like prime factors in mathematics. Any two primes (any two genes) multiplied will give you a predetermined and precise outcome each time. But trying to unravel a given outcome into its two unknown prime factors (genes) is so difficult that this operation of “deciphering the genes of the product” is the basis for most encryption. Genes shape us, but determining which gene shapes what part of us in particular is very very difficult. There are few single-gene or even double-gene mutations which cause curable diseases. Most ills are far more genetically complicated.
The only way we’ll decipher genes is through the brute force mapping of genes to bodies and behavior, which will require disclosing and sharing our genetic codes. Mapping genes without tracing their effects upon a body will not be very valuable. But each time a person reveals their genes to the science collective and starts to correlate their genes to their own bodies and behavior, the more valuable their sequence gets. This is the very recipe for the increasing returns and “network effects” that we’ve seen unleash the internet, the web and cell phones. The more who join, the better it gets. The more folks that sequence and share, the more valuable your sequence becomes. Increasing returns and network effects penalize early adopters and favors the late, but once the cycle quietly begins, it can suddenly pass the tipping point and gallop into a stampede.
Eventually, the cost of sequencing will be so cheap, that it will become mandatory for certain purposes. For instance, thousands of effective therapeutic medicines today cannot be sold because they induce toxic side effects in some people. Sometimes the sensitive will share a cluster of genes. If this group can be excluded using gene testing, the otherwise effective medicine can be prescribed to the rest. Several drugs on the market today already require genetic screening for this purpose. Because such screening can save pharamseutical companies billions of dollars in drug development, I predict the pharmacy companies will fund DNA sequencing; they will pay the fees for sequencing.
There will surely be people who will not share any part of their genome with anyone under any circumstances. That’s okay. But great benefits will accrue to those who are willing to share their genome. By making their biological source code open, a person allows others to “work” on their kernel, to mutually find and remedy bugs, to share investigations into rare bits, to pool behavior results, to identify cohorts and ancestor codes. Since 99.99% of the bits are shared, why not?
It will become clear to those practicing open-source personal genomics that genes are not destiny; they are our common wealth.
Helena Zwarts 2010 Soccer World Cup Project
This morning I had an interesting conversation with Hanno Coetzee from South Africa about a Business Directory Project and I got an email from Helena Zwarts about a Project in relation to the Soccer World Cup which will take place in 2010 in South Africa.
Both projects are interesting and [...]
Your dog wants to go outside. Your cat wants to be scratched. Birds want mates. Worms want moisture. Bacteria want food.
The wants of a microscopic single-celled organism are less than the wants of you or me, but all organisms share a few fundamental desires: to survive, to grow. The wants of a protozoan are unconscious, unarticulated, and more like an urge, or even tendency. A bacterium tends to drift toward nutrients with no awareness of its needs. There is no room beneath its membrane for a will as we know it, yet in a dim way it chooses to satisfy its wants by heading one way and not another.
Perhaps not much room is needed to want. The astrophysicist Freeman Dyson claims that we should view the smallest known bits of organized matter — quantum particles – as making choices. For millions of years a particle will exist and then suddenly it decays. Why then? Dyson says that from the individual particle’s viewpoint, this moment can only look like a choice, a satisfaction of a want. It is only on the scale of statistics with millions of particles that a particle’s choice shapes up as a predictable radiation half-life. But even individual human wants and desires average out to weirdly predictable laws in aggregate.
If a little one-celled protozoan – a very small package – can have a choice, if a flea has urges, if a starfish has a bias towards certain things, if a mouse can want, then so can the growing, complexifying technological assemblage we have surrounded ourselves with. Its complexity is approaching the complexity of a microscopic organism. This tissue consists (so far) of billions of dwellings, millions of factories, billions of hectares of land modified by plant and animal breeding, trillion of motors, thousands of dammed rivers and artificial lakes, hundred of millions of automobiles coursing along like cells, a quadrillion computer chips, millions of miles of wire, and it consumes 16 terawatts of power.
None of these parts operate independently. No mechanical system can function by itself. Each bit of technology requires the viability and growth of all the rest of technology to keep going. There is no communication without the nerves of electricity. There is no electricity without the veins of coal mining, uranium mining, or damming of rivers, or even the mining of precious metals to make solar panels. There is no metabolism of factories without the ingest of food from domesticated plants and animals, and no circulation of goods without vehicles. This global-scaled network of systems, subsystems, machines, pipes, roads, wires, conveyor belts, automobiles, servers and routers, institutions, laws, calculators, sensors, works of art, archives, activators, collective memory, and power generators – this whole grand system of interrelated and interdependent pieces forms a very primitive organism-like system. Call it the technium.
The technium is the sphere of visible technology and intangible organizations that form what we think of as modern culture. It is the current accumulation of all that humans have created. For the last 1,000 years, this techosphere has grown about 1.5% per year. It marks the difference between our lives now, verses 10,000 years ago. Our society is as dependent on this technological system as nature itself. Yet, like all systems it has its own agenda. Like all organisms the technium also wants.
To head off any confusion, the technium is not conscious (at this point). Its wants are not deliberations, but rather tendencies. Leanings. Urges, Trajectories. By the nature of self-reinforcing feedback loops, any large system will tend to lean in certain directions more than others. The sum total of millions of amplifying relationships, circuits, and networks of influence is to push the total in one direction more than another. Every owner of a large complicated machine can appreciate this tendency. Your machine will “want” to stall in certain conditions, or want to “runaway” in others. Left to its own devices, complex systems will gravitate to specific states. In mathematical terms this is called the convergence upon “strange attractors” – sort of gravity wells that pull in a complex system toward this state no matter where it starts.
Of course we humans want certain things from the technium, but at the same time there is an inherent bias in the technium outside of our wants. Beyond our desires, there is a tendency within the technium that – all other things being equal — favors a certain solutions. Technology will head in certain directions because physics, mathematics, and realities of innovation constrain possibilities. Imagine other worlds of alien civilizations. Once they discover electricity, their electronics will share some, but not all, attributes with our electrical devices. That which they share can be counted as the inherent agenda of electrical technology. Throughout the galaxy any civilization that invents nuclear power will hit upon a small set of workable solutions: that set is the inherent “agenda” of technology.
It would be wonderful if we could survey all alien technological civilizations to extract the common tendencies in technological growth. A large number of technological evolutions would reveal the culture-free dynamics beneath them all. Since we have a solitary sample of one technium back on Earth, we have fewer methods of unraveling inherent system bias in technology. Three lines of evidence present themselves:
1) We can look back in history to when technological development was more culturally isolated. The pathways of technology in early China, South America, Africa, and Western Europe out with only minimal cross-over influence. Examination of their parallel developmental sequences can reveal inherent biases.
2) More importantly, the major predecessor system to technology is organic life. Many of the dynamics of evolution and syntropy extend from living organisms into artificial systems, primarily because they share similar disequilibrial states. We can see the direction of technology in the direction of life and evolution (that is if you accept evolution has a bias as I do).
3) The long-term history of our single technium shows high-level patterns which we can project forward. We can ignore individual inventions and chart long-term flows which enable them. Much as we might want the compressed history of a growing creature and guess where it goes next. If the organism is a caterpillar we are out of luck; if it is a worm, it will succeed.
Strandbeest by Theo Jansen
So, looking at the evolution of life and the long-term histories of past technologies, what are the long-term trajectories of the technium? What does technology want?
Possibilities
To increase diversity
To maximize freedom/choices
To expand the space of the possible
Efficiencies
To increase specialization/uniqueness
To increase power density
To increase density of meaning
To engage all matter and energy
To reach ubiquity and free-ness
To become beautiful
Complexity
To increase complexity
To increase social co-dependency
To increase self-referential nature
To align with nature
Evolvability
To accelerate evolvability
To play the infinite game
In general the long-term bias of technology is to increase the diversity of artifacts, methods, techniques. More ways, more choices. Over time technological advances invent more energy efficient methods, and gravitate to technologies which compress the most information and knowledge into a given space or weight. Also over time, more of more of matter on the planet will be touched by technological processes. Also, technologies tend toward ubiquity and cheapness. They also tend towards new levels of complexity (though many will get simpler, too). Over time technologies require more surrounding technologies in order to be discovered and to operate; some technologies become eusocial – a distributed existence – in which they are inert when solitary. In the long run, technology increases the speed at which it evolves and encourages its own means of invention to change. It aims to keep the game of change going.
What this means is that when the future trajectory of a particular field of technology is in doubt, “all things being equal” you can guess several things about where it is headed:
• The varieties of whatever will increase. Those varieties that give humans more free choices will prevail.
• Technologies will start out general in their first version, and specialize over time. Going niche will always be going with the flow. There is almost no end to how specialized (and tiny) some niches can get.
• You can safely anticipate higher energy efficiency, more compact meaning and everything getting smarter.
• All are headed to ubiquity and free. What flips when everyone has one? What happens when it is free?
• Any highly evolved form becomes beautiful, which can be its own attraction.
• Over time the fastest moving technology will become more social, more co-dependent, more ecological, more deeply entwined with other technologies. Many technologies require scaffolding tech to be born first.
• The trend is toward enabling technologies which become tools for inventing new technologies easiest, faster, cheaper.
• High tech needs clean water, clean air, reliable energy just as much as humans want the same.
These are just some of the things technology wants. We don’t always have to do what technology wants, but I think we need to begin with what it wants so that we can work with these forces instead of against them.
At the very start of creation, the universe, such as it was, was packed into a very very very small space. The entire cosmos began as a flash smaller than the smallest bit of the smallest particle in the smallest atom. It was equally hot and bright and dense within that dot. All parts of this too-tiny spot shared a uniform temperature. There was, in fact, no room for any differences.
But from the very start of its creation, this tiny spot expanded by a process we don’t understand. Every new point flew away from every other new point. As the universe ballooned to about the size of your head, coolness became possible. Before it expanded to that size, in its first three seconds, the universe was perfectly solid, with no emptiness for relief. It was so full, even light could not move. Indeed it was so uniform that the four fundamental forces we see at work in reality today — gravity, electromagnetic, the strong and weak nuclear forces – were compressed into a single unified force. In that start-up phase there was one general energy, which differentiated into four distinct forces as the universe expanded.
It would not be too much of an exaggeration to say that in the initial femo seconds of creation there was only one thing in the universe, one super dense power that ruled all, and this solitary power expanded and cooled into thousands of variations of itself. The history of the cosmos thus proceeds from unity to diversity.
As the universe stretched out, it made nothingness. This expanded “nothingness” is what we call space. As emptiness increased, so did coolness. Space permitted energy to cool into matter and matter to slow down, light to radiate, and gravity, nuclear energy and the other forces to unfold. Space made differences possible.
But the universe expanded faster than matter itself could cool and gel. This created increasing difference. The faster the universe expanded, the greater the differences in temperature and energy within its boundaries. From the genesis of a single cooling dot of ur-stuff — some primordial super something — the distinctions of current reality we call matter and energy are crystallized. All species of atomic elements, all varieties of gravity and energy are thus temporary congealed disguises of the same ur-stuff.
The escalating differential between expanding emptiness and the remnant hotness of the big bang is what drives evolution, life, intelligence and the acceleration of technology.
Energy is the potential – the difference — to cool. Energy, like water under gravity, will seep to the lowest, coolest level and not rest until all differential has been eliminated. In the first thousand years after the big bang the temperature difference within the universe was so small that would have reached equilibrium quickly. Had not the universe kept expanding very little interesting would have happened. But the expansion of the universe put a tilt into things. By expanding omni-directionally – every point receding from every point – space provided an empty bottom, a basement of sorts, down which energy could flow. The faster the cosmos enlarged, the bigger the basement it constructed.
At the very bottom of the basement lies the final end state known as heat death. It is absolutely still. There is no movement because here there is no difference. No potential. Picture it as lightless, silent, and identical in all directions. All distinctions – including the elemental distinction between this and that — have been spent. This hell of uniformity is called maximum entropy. As far as we know, this is the sole law of physics with no known exceptions in the universe: all creation is headed to the basement. Everything in the universe is steadily sliding down the slope towards the supreme equality of heat death and maximum entropy.
We see the slope all around us in many ways. Because of entropy, fast moving things slow down, order fizzles into chaos, and it costs something for any type of difference or individuality to remain unique. Each difference – whether of speed, structure, or behavior – becomes less different very quickly because every action leaks energy down the tilt. Difference is not free. It has to be maintained against the grain.
The effort to maintain difference on the slope of entropy creates the spectacle of nature. A predator, such as an eagle sits atop a pyramid of entropic waste: In one year one eagle eats one hundred trout which eat 10,000 grasshoppers, which eat 1 million blades of grass. This pile of 1 million blades of grass input far outweighs the eagle output. This excess bloat is due to entropy. Each movement in an animal’s life wastes a small bit of heat (entropy), which means every predator catches less energy that the total energy the prey consumed, and this shortfall is multiplied by each action for all time. The circle of life is kept going only by the constant replenishment of sunlight showering the grass with new energy.
As harsh as this inevitable waste is, it is astounding that material organization can persist anywhere without rapidly dissolving to cold equilibrium. Throughout most of the universe any random five kilos of atoms will clump into a cold lump of rock or drift away as a cool gas. That’s simple physics. But here and there we find five kilos of atoms ordered, heated, and assembled into structured difference as a warm blooded, perpetually active golden eagle. A flatworm, a galaxy, and a digital camera all have this same property – they maintain a state of difference far removed from thermal undifferentiation, which is the state that most of the atoms in the universe share. While the rest of the material cosmos slips down to the frozen basement, a few remarkable forms seem to rise up and dance. This rising flow of sustainable difference is syntropy, the inversion of entropy.
Syntropy is another word for negative entropy, or negentropy (also extropy). I prefer syntropy because it is a positive term for an otherwise double negative phrase meaning the absence of an absence (or minus the minus of order). Syntropy might best be thought of as the “capacity for entropy,” and increased certainty and structure. A technological or living system acts as an efficient drain for entropy — the more organized, structured, and complex the organization, the faster the system can generate entropy. In other words the more syntropic it is, the more efficient it is in creating entropy. At the same time, the creation of entropy is what you get with the expideture of energy, so this “urge” to drain entropy becomes a pump for order!
Diagram of Syntropy: Energy into a system is built up into increased order and information by generation of entropy.
This can be restated in a more technical way: A syntropic system will take the most efficient route to maximize entropy. If you leave the door open in a heated cabin the heat will drain out faster though the door than random seepage through the walls. If you install an electric generator in the wall of the cabin, heat will flow to the outside even faster. That increased flow of entropy is in fact what is powering the generator. Instead of a generator you could insert a elephant and it too would increase the flow of entropy while creating cellular order. The device that maximizes entropy is that device that also maximizes syntropy. And vice versa, the most syntropic device will generate the most entropy. This is what we see. Pound for pound the most complex apparatus we know of – the mammal brain and a laptop PC – are the most efficient producers of entropy we’ve seen. In the future, as we advance our technology, we will also increase the syntropy of our artificial systems and therefore the amount of entropy and waste heat emitted by these systems. Already the heat per kilo generated by a laptop is nearing the power density of gasoline. As computers become more dense, more complex, smart, and all-around syntropic, they are in danger of exploding.
The compact streams of information and entropy flowing through syntropic structures enable them to remain balanced far from equilibrium. Syntropic systems come in many sizes (bacterium to the milky way), many shapes (tornado to star fish), many densities (the internet to the sun), and in every material. Artificial systems and technological devices all share with living organisms a persistent state of difference, a permanent disequilibrium that neither explodes nor solidifies, but instead maintains a steady potential to fall into the hole.
What we call technology is created by syntropic forms (humans) and shares many syntropic qualities. Technological qualities such as flexibility, adaptation, and self-regulated power occur no where in the world of inert matter. If we let a piece of engineered material revert to rust and corrosion we can see the “natural’ state of its matter: hard, inert, plain.
Some syntropic structures can persist for billions of years (stars), some can evolve from one form to another, some can even wonder about themselves and ask why? It seems almost miraculous (if not heroic!) how these forms – spiral galaxies, atmospheric planets, underwater creatures, and inquiring minds – can sustain themselves in the face of constant entropic drain. Where do they gain their power to run up against the run-down of the universe? In the past thinkers and even many scientists believed a vital spirit enlivened living organisms, a spirit that was distinct from the ordinary natural forces at work on matter. It is now clear from thousands of careful experiments that the animation of living beings and life-like technological systems is not supernatural, and that their uplifting syntropic force does not contradict the unbreakable laws of entropy. The eagle is able to lift his wings high not because his evolution subverts the inescapable waste of entropy, but because the uplift and the difference in the warmth of his wings is powered by entropy.
To be clearer, it is powered by the expansion of the universe. To be clearer yet, it is powered by the expansion of our particular universe. For our universe could have been outfitted differently, with a different set of fundamental parameters, and under a different regime these persistent far-from-equilibrial structures would not have been possible. Cosmologists have calculated the tight window in which life-like structures are possible and some have declare the target so narrow as to be improbable we are here at all. As Freemen Dyson remarked, all the evidence suggests that “the universe in some sense must have known we were coming.”
While the appearance of any particular form of technology or life is against all odds, the appearance of technology and life as a whole were ordained as soon as the universe began to expand, unpacking room for difference. Technology is the latest in a long line of structures that manifest the expanding potential of difference in the universe with actual differences. The expansion of space/time opened up the universe to the dissipation of entropy, and thus to the appearance of entropy-accelerating forms like life, mind, and mind-life (technology). The mammoth supercollider in CERN and the tiny Intel 8080 computer chip – the big and little of the technium — owe their ultimate origins not to the minds of human engineers, but to the fundamental laws of this existence. The genesis of technology began at the Big Bang. as Weakly syntropic but persistent structures like galaxies and stars exploited entropy to sustain order. In their orbits the first bacteria and later humans extended the ruse. Now the technium delivers differences that life – in all its amazing power – cannot manage.
The technium is a difference engine. It is a machine, so to speak, that is manufacturing more and more extreme versions of structures: artifacts that burn hotter than any life, or run faster than any life, or stretch further than any life. The technium is exploiting the sink of entropy to build persistent disequilibrial clumps of matter and energy that have never before been seen in the universe. New potentials and differences. Different differences. And as long as the universe keeps expanding, technology is ordained to keep differentiating. What the technium creates is difference.
When we look at technology we see pipes and blinking lights. But in the cosmic view, technology is the acceleration of evolution.
In the abstract, natural evolution is an exploration of a possibility space. It is a way for an adaptive system – in this case life – to search for new survival forms in the universe of all-possible forms. It tries this or that form, round or long, slow or fast, with legs or with wings. It whips up any design that will keep the game of searching going. Most forms it encounters live only a short time. But over eons the system of life settles on very stable forms – on the planet earth, those stable forms might be tubular guts, plant leaves, bi-lateral symmetry — which permit life to keep searching for more forms. Each natural innovation which life “discovers” becomes a platform to discover more innovations. In this process, life expands the variety of living forms and its power to keep evolving.
The reason life can keep evolving is that several times along the way it has discovered ways to increase its own evolvability. At the beginning (as in “In the beginning”) the space of possible life was very small. The methods life had to adapt, to change, to try stuff, and to find new forms were few. This narrow range of adaptability was similar to crude technology that can’t be customized or adapted very far. At the start life had low adaptability or evolvability. But over time, as evolution worked to discover new forms, it also enlarged the suite of techniques it had for searching and changing. One way to think of this is to imagine life on a quest to find all the possible forms. But one or two of those forms are magic meta-forms that give life new powers to expand into a whole new realm to explore for more shapes. Much like a game where you find a door on one level that opens up another whole level that is much more complex, faster, and full of possibilities not present before. In evolution these special meta-portals are techniques, like sexual reproduction, that increase the evolvability of life. In addition to sexual recombination, evolution uncovered several other tricks to increase its evolvability. Horizontal gene swapping between organisms, and a whole suite of control genes (genes that control other genes) are just two ways that the process of learning and adaptation and exploration have been expanded by increasing evolvability.
So as evolution searches the space of possible forms, every once in a while it discovers a form which expands its own possibility space. In this way the process of evolution creates the very space it searches. In other words, if a new species is an answer to the question of how can an organism live, evolution is not only coming up with new answers, it also generates new kinds of questions, and new ways to ask questions.
Of all the tricks that evolution came up for increasing its evolvability none compare to minds. Minds – and not just human minds – bestow on life a greatly accelerated way to learn and adapt. This should not be surprising because minds are built to find answers, and one of the key things to answer might be how to learn better, quicker. If what minds are good for is learning and adaptation, then learning how to learn will accelerate your learning. Even though most of the learning a mind does is not transferred directly into biological evolution, there are several ways in which minds accelerate evolution (see the Baldwin Effect), even in the lower animal kingdom. So the presence of minds in life has increased its evolvability; the discovery of mindness has driven evolution in many new directions while also creating a new territory to explore – the territory of possible minds.
The most recent extension of this expansion is technology. Technology is how human minds explore the space of possibilities. We power our minds via science and technology to make possible things real. More so technology is how our society learns and introduces change. It is almost a cliché to point out that technology has brought as much change on this planet in the last 100 years as life has in the last billion years.
Ray Kurzweil can provide you with dozens of graphs charting the accelerating change brought about by technology in the last 100 years or so. From the speed of computers, the bandwidth of communications, the power of engines, the yield of crops – all are accelerating in performance. Change is this century’s middle name.
But meta-change is not about acceleration itself; it is not about faster change. Rather, the acceleration of evolution or increased evolvability is about the change in the nature of change. The basic mechanism by which our collective minds – as expressed by technology – adapt and produce change is undergoing a shift. In fact the most important change at work in our world right now is “the change in how change happens.”
This meta-change is at the heart of the evolution of evolvability and is the natural extension of evolution’s long-term trajectory. Meta-change propels our technology towards an increase in the speed of change, an increase in the ways changes can happen, and the second order (next level) possibility of yet more evolvability.
The evolution of the Evolution entry in Wikipedia, an evolutionary agent itself. The color stripes indicate different editors working on the entry between Dec 2001 and Oct 2005.
Technology is a continuation of a 4-billion-year force that pursues more ways to evolve. The technium is the best way evolution evolves (that we know about). But what might come after that? What is the future of evolution? Evolution will likely continue in the direction it has been going –whether on this planet or off it – which is toward more agile, smarter, rapid, broader, and more surprising evolvability.
As the process which generates learning and change becomes faster, wider, and more surprising, it begins to resemble a mind. As even people who don’t believe in evolution will tell you, if you speed up the history of life and compress all its change into a few hours, it greatly resembles an intelligent mind at work. Since technology is the current major vehicle for the evolvability of evolution, the future of technology also begins to resemble a mind. Or to put it another way, the mindful aspects of technology begin to dominate.
Ownership is not as important as it once was.
I use roads that I don’t own. I have immediate access to 99% of the roads and highways of the world (with a few exceptions) because they are a public commons. We are all granted this street access via our payment of local taxes. For almost any purpose I can think of, the roads of the world serve me as if I owned them. Even better than if I owned them since I am not in charge of maintaining them. The bulk of public infrastructure offers the same “better than owning” benefits.
The web is also a social common good. The web is not the same as public roads, which are “owned” by the public, but in terms of public access and use, the web is a type of community good. The good of the web serves me as if I owned it. I can summon it in full, anytime, with the snap of a finger. Libraries share some of these qualities. The content of the books are not public domain, but their displays (the books) grant public access to their knowledge and information, which is in some ways better than owning them.
Very likely, in the near future, I won’t “own” any music, or books, or movies. Instead I will have immediate access to all music, all books, all movies using an always-on service, via a subscription fee or tax. I won’t buy – as in make a decision to own — any individual music or books because I can simply request to see or hear them on demand from the stream of ALL. I may pay for them in bulk but I won’t own them. The request to enjoy a work is thus separated from the more complicated choice of whether I want to “own” it. I can consume a movie, music or book without having to decide or follow up on ownership.
For many people this type of instant universal access is better than owning. No responsibility of care, backing up, sorting, cataloging, cleaning, or storage. As they gain in public accessibility, books, music and movies are headed to become social goods even though they might not be paid by taxes. It’s not hard to imagine most other intangible goods becoming social goods as well. Games, education, and health info are also headed in that direction.
As creations become digital they tend to become shared, ownerless goods. We can turn this around and say that in this realm of bits, property itself becomes a more social endeavor. Property may be less about title and more about usage and control. An idea can’t be owned in the way gold can; in fact an idea has little value unless it is shared or used to some extent. Its value paradoxically can increase the less it is owned privately. But if no one owns it, who gains the benefit of that increase in value? In the new regime users will often assume many of the chores that owners once had to do. And so in a way, usage becomes ownership.
According to the principle of dematerialization, all goods are having their atoms infused with bits, decreasing their weight per performance, so that all material goods increasingly behave as if they were intangible services. This means that lumber, steel, chemicals, food, cars, plane flights – everything made – can also be governed by the principles of intangible goods (see the New Rules of the New Economy). As goods become disembodied, infused with slivers of mind, and packed full of bits, they will also obey the new dynamics of property. Soon enough everything manufactured will potentially become social property.
As cars become more “electronic” or digital, they will tend to be swapped and shared and used in a social way. The more we embed intelligence and smarts into clothing the more we’ll treat these articles as common property. We’ll share aspects of them (perhaps what they are made of, where they are, what climate they see), which means that we’ll think of ourselves as sharing them.
Our sense of ownership is a funny thing. If you purchase an ebook and download the book’s PDF file to your computer, you’d say you owned it, and expect the rights of ownership. However if you went to a link where a PDF of a book was opened on your screen for free and automatically, you might not feel you owned this book, even if it was copied to your disk. Possession of a copy turns out to be less important in the feeling of ownership than does the price. Free things don’t generate strong feelings of ownership. Gifts do, which we think of as “free,” but our sense of ownership is related to their “replacement costs” – how much they would cost us to buy elsewhere, their market value. If an item has a marketplace cost of zero, we tend not to feel we own it. So as more economic activity gravitates toward the free, less will feel owned. As more is shared, less will act like property.
Sharing is not very different from renting. We could say that the sharing economy currently emerging from social media is really a renting economy. But we don’t use the word “rent” logically. When we watch a movie on a pay-TV channel we are actually renting it, although we don’t use that word. Yet in fact we use a movie (movies are used by watching them) without owning it; instead we pay for the right to borrow it. That is rent. It doesn’t feel like rent because there is no visible unit to swap. If we view a Netflix movie it feels more like renting because a little plastic disk is mailed to us. But if Netflix were to suddenly switch to digital download of the movie (as they are doing) we will still be renting the movie without the disk. The main reason we don’t ordinarily use the metaphor of “rent” with digital goods is because we associate renting with things, rather than services. We rent a tuxedo, but we don’t rent internet service. But when we rent, we are sharing the cost of ownership across a group. The legal ownership may reside with the company renting, but the effective ownership – the ownership of use – is held by the group borrowing the good or service.
In a rent relationship the renter enjoys many of the benefits of ownership, but without the need for capital, or upkeep. Of course renters are disadvantaged as well because they may not gain all the benefits of traditional ownership, such as rights of modification, long-term access, or gains in value. The invention of renting was not far behind the invention of property, and today you can rent almost anything. Women’s handbags are a $9 billion retail industry in the US. Top of the line bags with famous brands sell for $500 or more. Since bags are often matched to outfits, or seasonal fads, a selection of fancy bags can get expensive real quick. In response to the high prices of bags a sizeable bag rental business has emerged. In large cities one can rent bags from a tony rental storefront. Or anyone can head to a half dozen handy online bag rental websites, and rent a near-new copy of a high-priced bag for their own use. Rentals run $30-60 per week, depending on the bag’s demand. Renting thrives because for many uses it is better than owning. Bags can be swapped to match outfits, returned so one does not need to store them. For short-term uses sharing ownership makes sense. And for many of the things we use in the upcoming world, short term use is the norm.
As more items are invented and manufactured – while the total number of hours in a day to enjoy them remains fixed – we spend less and less time per item. In other words the long-term trend in our modern lives is that ALL goods and services will be short-term use. Therefore all goods and services are candidates for rental, sharing, and the social commons.
Once you have a trendy bag, you might need some trendy shoes, jewelry, scarves – all of which can also be rented. And its not just women’s fashion today. There is a growing market for luxury good rentals of all kinds. Expensive men’s watches, yachts, fine china, and artwork can all be owned temporarily from a company today. Less expensive stuff has a much longer history of rentals. Furniture, baby cribs, folding chairs and tables, construction tools, party tents, tools for do-it-yourself, and health care equipment can be borrowed from some 12,000 rental companies in the US alone.
What kind of stuff people rent-to-own
Leasing, licensing, subscribing are all types of shared ownership. (In general we rent for short-term and lease for longer; we’ll rent a car for a week, or lease it for 2 years.) There are other variations in the sharing economy, such as rent-to-own, where regular payments go towards the purchase of the good when the purchase price is reached. Low-income families without good credit will often rent-to-own (at predatory lending rates) furniture and appliances they can’t afford to purchase. Technically a mortgage is a type of rent-to-own agreement in which ownership transfers to the “renter” at the start of regular payments, but since the mortgagee enjoys the rights of ownership it doesn’t follow the patterns of rent.
The latest twist in shared ownership for tangible physical goods is called fractional ownership. It is like time-sharing, but with full ownership privileges and responsibilities. Popular fractional ownership arrangements grant the co-owner a certain number of hours flying in a private jet to the destination of their choice, or driving a super car for 5,000 miles per year, or spending a limited number of days at a resort villa. With fractional ownership you can also share owning a sports team, a racehorse, or a vineyard. A website built to promote fractional ownership of primarily luxury goods puts it this way: “Fractional ownership and asset-sharing gives you an ideal way to get the most out of your investment by purchasing only the shares or time you require from an asset. All other aspects are split, both the benefits and the costs, amongst a limited number of shareholders or members.”
The downside to the traditional rental business is the “rival” nature of physical goods. Rival means that there is a zero-sum game; only one rival prevails. If I am renting your boat, no one else can. If I rent a bag to you, I cannot rent the same bag to another. To scale your rental business you have to buy more boats or bags. But of course, intangible goods and services don’t work this way. They are “non-rival” which means you can rent the same movie to as many people who want to rent it this hour. Sharing intangibles scales magnificently. This ability to share on a large scale without diminishing the satisfaction of the individual renter is transformative. The total cost of use drops precipitously (shared by millions instead of one). Suddenly, ownership is not so important. Why own, when you get the same utility from renting, leasing, licensing, sharing?
But more importantly why even possess it? Why take charge of it at all if you have instant, constant, durable, full access to it? If you lived inside of the world’s largest rental store, why would you own anything? If you can borrow anything you needed without possessing it, you gain the same benefits with fewer disadvantages. If this was a magic rental store, where most of the gear was stored “downstairs” in a virtual basement, then whenever you summoned an item or service it would appear at your command.
The internet is this magic rental store. Its virtual basement is infinite, and it provides omni-access to its holdings. There are fewer and fewer reasons to own, or even possess anything. Via omni-access the most ordinary citizen can get hold of a good or service as fast as possessing it. The quality of the good is equal to what you can own, and in some cases getting hold of it may be faster than finding it on your own in your own “basement.”
Access is so superior to ownership, or possession, that it will drive the emerging intangible economy. The chief holdup to full-scale conversion from ownership to omni-access is the issue of modification and control. In traditional property regimes only owners have the right to modify or control the use of the property. The right of modification is not transferred in rental, leasing, or licensing agreements. But they are transferred in open source content and tools, which is part of their great attraction in this new realm. The ability and right to improve, personalize, or appropriate what is shared will be a key ingredient in the advance of omni-access. But as the ability to modify is squeezed from classic ownership models (think of those silly shrink-wrap warranties), ownership is degraded.
The trend is clear: access trumps possession. Access is better than ownership.
A thought experiment: If I were to teleport you to a random city on Earth in 2009 you would have a hard time telling me what city you were in based solely on technological infrastructure — absent language or scripts. For the most part different cultures employ the same general technologies of urbanization now, which makes most places similar. The young people of world today (the majority of people on the planet and the chief citizens of cities) dress very similarly, use the same gadgets and devices, follow the same media expressions in music and movies, and study the same things with the same educational technology. The lifestyle they covet is very much shared.
For the most part all civilizations are converging toward one global flavor of technology.
This was not always true. In the near past, the technology in a city in China was significantly different than one in France, or in Mali, or Lima. During the medieval ages, how buildings were designed, heat produced, food processed, clothes made, communications carried, all differed wildly — and yet we would be hard pressed to say which city’s or nation’s technology was more advanced than the other. They were just varied.
Today, technology has converged so that how we build urban life is very similar around the world. We perceive that some places are “ahead” or “behind” others. California is ahead in solar, or the US is behind in bandwidth. Or we say that Africa is leapfrogging in cell phone use. In our heads we have a sense of a uniform development path. While specific cultures may drift a little sideways in the river of technological advance, the flow is all in one direction.
There are a few modern cultural exceptions to this uniformity. In a few spots in the world, particular technology has a cultural bent. For instance:
• How the Japanese use cell phones is different from Western countries.
• Brazil’s highly developed ethanol fuel system is unique.
• Deployment of telecommunication bandwidth in South Korea is especially deep
• Ubiquitous scooter vehicles in south and southeast Asia have little analog
• Chinese herbal medicine runs parallel to western medicine.
In these examples we can see how technology might have a cultural flavor in modern times. There are three possible scenarios for what this means.
1) Advanced technology will follow the pattern of old. The remarkable organic flexibility of contemporary technology (governed by ideas rather than atoms), permits diverse and diverging flavors of technological paths. Extending these small initial forays, we can imagine culturally distinct types of technology erupting in the next 100 years, say Japanese technology, or Islamic technology, or Brazilian technology.
2) Or, these examples are variations without significance. They are isolated flourishes. Fun, useful, but not deep rooted, or deterministic. The fact that Brazil has a nation-wide ethanol alternative fuel system is less a cultural choice, and more serendipitous opportunism. A century ago Brazil had large sugar plantations (powered by slaves) which made sugar cheap. Cheap enough to ferment and burn as fuel. As early as 1927 Brazilians were making ethanol from sugar to fuel automobiles and by 1938 sugar-ethanol formed 5% of their gas, raised to 42% during WWII. As gasoline prices went up, they kept raising the percentages of home-grown fuel, since they proved the technology worked. There is nothing particularly “Brazilian” about ethanol. The same for Japanese cell phone use. In a country devoid of much private space, the cell phone provided a way to get “private” in public spaces. It is not particularly Japanese: Other subcultures, such as teenagers in the US, use phones in the same way. Chinese herbal medicine benefited from a long and rare period of isolation from modern medicine. While this approach does seem to be specifically Chinese, many of its ideas are quickly flowing into modern medicine itself, and so this technology will increasingly be used on non-Chinese oriented patients. In other words, its doesn’t need China to run. In this scenario there will always be a few cosmetic fashions, but none that are long-running, or primary.
3) These minor differences are overwhelmed by the larger degree of uniformity in the technium. The five examples are the last remnants of ethnic technological expression as our technology converges to global usage. While ethnic difference will continue to be a prime inspiration and generator of innovations, anything really good is quickly co-opted by the global machine.
My hunch is that we are headed towards a path between 2 and 3. For the most part, technology will converge to uniform usage around the globe, but occasionally some group, or subgroup, will devise and perfect a type of technology or technique that has limited appeal. But that subgroup or group will not continue to produce further isolated innovations in a sustainable offshoot — simply because the advantages and pressures of a global society constrain success towards a global standard. (Note this technological convergence should not be confused with the media-centric technological convergence predicted for television, movies, books and the internet, although that will probably happen too.)
In some ways this is more an argument about globalization than technology, but at a certain point the two become the same. If the marketing, financing, cultural demands, society expectations and status are all global, then technology will be as well.
If true, four important expectations flow from this observation.
First, if technology converges into a single global sequence of innovations this reinforces the idea that some areas are either behind or ahead of the sequence. In this way, technology resembles the sequence of development in an organism. So a specimen of this development can be ahead of the norm, or behind the norm, like a child’s height. The sense of being out of alignment will further increase pressure on those “behind” to catch up. The more of the world that catches up, the more pressure to keep up, the more development will become globally universal. In this way global technological convergence is self-reinforcing.
Second, the emergence of a developmental-like sequence of innovations suggests (but does not prove) that technological development is deterministic. When there is only one path, that one path can seem inevitable. The uniform path may not be deterministic, but it feels that way. Therefore the idea of inevitable technology is easier to embrace.
Thirdly, the emergence of a uniform technological sequence will repress (inadvertently) a certain set of possible technologies because they don’t fit in, even though they may be valid. Heretical ideas and technologies (defined here as possibly valid but not within the norm) will have less room to develop or deepen than in a world with room for ethnic alternatives. Technological convergence will tend to outlaw heretical techniques faster and make heresy more of a stigma than it is now. Truly alternative tech — say a better internet address system, or alternative hyperlinking technique, or constitutional framework — become impossible to even consider.
Fourth, the forces that conspire towards convergence don’t seem to have strong counter-forces, suggesting that convergence will tighten over time. Perhaps in one hundred years, or two, technological development will not vary much around the globe. In this sense “the future will be more evenly distributed” to paraphrase William Gibson. In reaction to this homogeneity, perhaps the variation we see in regions we will see in individuals. People will choose to abstain or forsake particular global standards of technology in a form of idiosyncratic distinction. (See my post on the Neo-Amish.) They will re-distribute the future themselves. But like the Amish they will harbor these “redistributions” as a personal choice within an ocean of planetary convergence. When everyone has access to all technologies (and all the same technologies), no one will have time to use or load them all. Then the only course will be to carry or “distribute” your personal slice of the technium. In this way while the planetary culture slides toward convergence of technologies, billions of technology users will diverge in their personal choices as they edge toward using smaller and more eccentric selections of available stuff. Your identity will be displayed by what you don’t use.
The Ycademy January 2009 Seminar will (amongst others) explain and implement the YORGOO Blaster strategy. Participants will learn how exactly to evolve from peanuts to an income stream using YORGOO Blaster.
The Ycademy January 2009 Seminar will (amongst others) explain and implement the YORGOO Blaster strategy. Participants will learn how exactly to evolve from peanuts to an income stream using YORGOO Blaster.
