The dynamic of a Wayfinding - an Unfolding Mapping

The problem with complexity is that everything is interconnected. While history is fundamental in shaping complex systems, explaining the unfolding evolution and future of a system is not like explaining the past behavior of a system. As they say, 20/20 hindsight doesn’t translate into accurate foresight. But hindsight can so easily seduce us to thinking we can create maps of changing conditions.

Compounding an understanding of complex situations (as a precursor to trying to explain them) is knowing where to begin. It’s like trying to decide what came first – the egg or the chicken; or the one or the many. Still, any explanation or journey has to begin somewhere. Yet, often the beginning seems like an arbitrary choice. Even when we do choose a place to begin, the next steps are just as difficult – which of the interconnected aspects of the situation, will we decide to follow next? It’s not just a problem of connecting the dots – it’s a problem explaining how they all work together to create the whole, that in turn, makes them more than a sum of parts.

Explaining reality and change can seem like simply exercising common sense because we are imbued with a narrative sensibility. We assemble fact, events, dots, into a picture, pattern, story or narrative. We have learned to reason by developing an argument as a linear set of propositions, that aim at an ‘inevitable’ conclusion – much like a story leads us to its climax. 

As humans we seek to find a pattern that makes situations intelligible. Another way that helps us to create an intelligible world is, as Marshall McLuhan has noted, because we tend to move into the future looking into the rear view mirror. This is deeply entrenched in our management metrics which involves, creating as rich a picture of past performance as possible, and extrapolating this performance forward.

These issues combine to make the challenge of talking about the future, very difficult. For example, a typical environmental scan discusses key trends and drivers of change within distinct categories, such economic, technological, demographic, social values, environmental, political and governance. It’s not as if a deep analysis of the each trend is not useful – trend analysis is essential and does help to deepen understanding.

The problem is that each advance or change in one domain can easily become compounded (positively or negatively) in every other domain (interconnectedness). It is as if each step forward can accelerate change i

n the very environment in which we are exploring – like observing changes what is being observed. It is for this reason that foresight continues to develop methodologies to imagine the future – such as the development of scenarios as a means of integrating all of the trends and drivers within narratives of a range of plausible futures.

Scenarios help participants to formulate plausible maps of plausible futures. But that too can hide a profound difficulty. Maps as we all know are not the territory – just as menu are not the meal. But maps can give us the illusion that we can navigate the terrain. And that’s the problem.

Navigation is only possible when we have a framework of trusted coordinates. Navigation is about getting from point A to point B, or travelling through a series of landmarks. This is fine when the landmarks are stable/trusted – when they reflect past experiences.

But when maps are not possible because the very landscape is changing, then we are forced to ‘wayfind’ –  figuring out the territory as we explore it. What makes wayfinding even more difficult, is if the territory is itself changing as we are exploring, and/or because of our explorations.

In this blog I will put forward a series of efforts, to wayfind the future of the digital environment – how we will work, how we will create value, how we will develop new institutions, and more. Eventually, I hope to assemble these wayfinding efforts into some form of integrated knowledge product.

Since this is inevitably an unfolding journey, without any form of definitive end, a traditional table of contents outlining the landmarks of this journey is impossible. Worse yet, even when an integrated knowledge product can emerge, it will not be able to provide a linear narrative.

What I think can be most useful is an ongoing map of contents that can help to visualize where we've been and where the possible next landmarks on the horizon are – a history of the map of the changing map. The concept map below represents a current moment of my blog posting here and elsewhere. I will be re-posting reformulated thoughts I've presented in other blogs, and developing the concepts further. What I hope the concept map can do – is enable a non-linear, more complex form of narrative exploration.

With each blog post, the concept map  included, can present dynamic interconnected mapping of wayfinding.

Map of the Wealth of People - Potential Future Contents

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When Moore Becomes Different: How to Learn to Love Accelerating Change in the Conditions of Change

Everyone has experience a sense of accelerating change. But no one knows how things are going to turn out. What can we expect our social-cultures, our political-economies and our institutions to look like in 10-20 years (or more)? We are all vulnerable to an intuitively linear imagination of the unfolding future and worse we also tend to imagine future technology overlaid on existing social, organizational and institutional frameworks. It is natural to imagine that we will still go shopping at the mall only we’ll use crypto-currency instead of our credit & debit cards. However, it is much harder to imagine the disappearance or transformation of the mall and the activities of shopping.

We look at the present through a rear-view mirror. We march backwards into the future.

Marshall McLuhan

 The most difficult challenge of foresight is that everything is interdependent –everything influences the way everything else changes. The important point is that change occurs simultaneously through many different processes, in many different ways and on many different time scales. This makes it difficult find a natural place to begin writing and thinking about the future. The reality of complexity means that long term control and prediction are impossible and uncertainty looms. If we don’t want to be marching into the future with our focus primarily in the rear view mirror must exercise more than traditional scientific rigor – we must embrace a creative imagination.

For this reason I’ve defined foresight in the following way:

Foresight is not about predicting what will happen. 

Foresight is about understanding evolving conditions in order to imagine what they can enable.

Foresight needs Rigor and Imagination.

Essentially we have to imagine what affordances we can discover within the ongoing currents of change as well as imagine how people can creatively act and respond. We must engage our imagination in order to wayfind through a changing landscape where each step changes the environmental conditions of the next step – and the next step may not just be ‘one more’ – it may initiate a ‘difference in type’.

The key points to this definition are:

• Understanding trajectories of change;
• Imagining what can be enabled within these conditions

The title to this initial series of postings is meant to evoke the challenge to our imagination – when more become different. The title is a play on words alluding to Moore’s Law of exponential change. The now very common phrase “more is different” was the title of a paper written in 1972 by Philip Anderson (Nobel Laureate in Physics) refers to a point where an increase in quantity creates a qualitative, discontinuous change – sort of like a phase transition.

One more challenge to our imagination is posed by a famous quote from Einstein that states: “We can't solve problems by using the same kind of thinking we used when we created them.” In this series, we want to imagine that accelerating change won’t just be Moore, but different, and we imagine that this difference will involve not just developing new forms of thinking – but new types of thinkers arising in new types of societies. This requires more than just better creative thinking but a disposition that believes that problems can be solved and this means a fundamentally positive disposition.

A great place to begin is with a recent blog post by Kevin Kelly, where he asks a great question. It’s a question about the need for more positive visions of the future. Not utopias, but positive visions – “On the chance that desirable futures ARE possible, we need to imagine them.” The challenge of any foresight effort is to not be seduced into prediction. I’ve previously said that foresight is an effort to understand evolving conditions to imagine what they can enable. However, most foresight efforts are aimed at specific questions and horizons that are less than 40 years away.

It seems intuitively natural that entrepreneurs inherently have a positive vision of the future – but perhaps we should explore this assumption a little. Certainly an entrepreneur must have a naturally optimistic temperament. They must be able to not only see possibilities that are the basis of their endeavour, but also have the creative confidence to believe they can make their venture real.

However, the focus that is the entrepreneur’s strength may also be their weakness. The entrepreneur has to become very focused on the direct work necessary to implement their vision. This can force their creative imagination become bounded to the narrower domain and near-term timeline of their venture. The search for opportunities easily becomes constrained to the affordances in the more immediate environment – low hanging fruit that are ripe for consumption.

Entrepreneurs will often see the future of a world changed by their ventures. However, it is much harder imagine what the new innovations will be enabled by their ventures. It is even more difficult to imagine the new social institutions that disruptive innovations will enable.

The generation of innovators, scientists, engineers, and hackers that have been influenced by the positive depiction of a future portrayed by Star Trek has been well discussed – not just by William Shatner. But in the decades since Star Trek the popular future seems to be filled with looming catastrophe and science fiction has mostly focused on depictions of inevitable dystopias. In response to this, Neal Stephenson began the “Hieroglyph Project to convince sci-fi writers to stop worrying and learn to love the future,” in 2012. What science fiction can do is create a larger and more coherent vision of the future – one that imagines a whole integrated society, economy, political system and more.

This is why Kelly’s blog points at something so important. The call to imagine a future worth living in is more than a place we want to live – but is also a call to create visions of how individual innovations can contribute in the shaping of this sort of positive future.

What entrepreneurs need to be both individually successful and meaningfully successful in making the world a place worth living in, is not a single vision but rather the means, and support for a larger and more coherent visioning of their innovations and the ecologies their innovations will enable.

Before I begin to explore how the digital environment will provide a fundamentally new ‘ground’ (as in figure-ground) for life in the 21^st Century. I want to begin by laying out a foundation for understanding how things change, and how change creates change in conditions of change (is this a Rumfeldism?). I will begin with some important types of causality, then look at some fundamental types of distribution and then discuss a few basic processes of change – but always with an eye on visioning what can be enabled by the emerging digital environment. Later I will explore the implications for how we construct individuality.

References:

Kelly, Kevin. 2014. A Desirable-Future Haiku: The coming hundred years, in one hundred words. https://medium.com/message/a-desirable-future-haiku-ff01d63c93c6

SMITHSONIAN MAGAZINE –  APRIL 2012. Dear Science Fiction Writers: Stop Being So Pessimistic! Neal Stephenson created the Hieroglyph Project to convince sci-fi writers to stop worrying and learn to love the future. http://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/dear-science-fiction-writers-stop-being-so-pessimistic-127226686/

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Affordance, Things and the Seizing of Enablement - A ground of Formal Cause?

In my last post, I asked/posed a question, derived from Kaufman's concept of 'Enablement'. 

How does an 'enablement' become seizable? That is how does a 'possibility' become visible?  I'd like to try to answer this today. 

I've recently read a wonderful piece by Tim Ingold - an anthropologist. What Ingold explores is the question of how do we actually get 'things' done, how does knowledge arise through our engagement with the world. For him this is a creative process of co-evolving with our aims and the mater that serves as the medium.

Ingold begins his paper by speaking of Paul Klee: In his notebooks the painter Paul Klee repeatedly insisted, and demonstrated by example, that the processes of genesis and growth that give rise to forms in the world we inhabit are more important than the forms themselves. ‘Form is the end, death’, he wrote. ‘Form-giving is movement, action. Form-giving is life’.  Ingold continues: ‘Art does not reproduce the visible but makes visible’ (Klee 1961: 76). It does not, in other words, seek to replicate finished forms that are already settled, whether as images in the mind or as objects in the world. It seeks, rather, to join with those very forces that bring form into being. 

From Klee, Ingold goes to the position of Deleuze and Guattari that the essential relation, in a world of life, is not between matter and form, or between substance and attributes, but between materials and forces (Deleuze and Guattari 2004: 377). It is about the way in which materials of all sorts, with various and variable properties, and enlivened by the forces of the Cosmos, mix and meld with one another in the generation of things.

A key insight Ingold gave me was in his discussion about the difference between 'Objects' and 'Things'. 

An 'object' is an already closed self-evident fait accompli, that presents a 'congealed' set of surfaces for a pre-determined or accepted use and inspection. We generally experience this in our familiar habits of regarding the contents of our homes and other familiar places - the chair is a chair, the pot is a pot, etc. 

A 'thing' on the other hand, is a 'going on' or the entwinement of several 'goings on' - he quotes Heidegger, it is a 'thing thinging in a worlding world'. More than this a thing is also an invitation to participate in the thinging and worlding. Ingold states: "Thus conceived, the thing has the character not of an externally bounded entity, set over and against the world, but of a knot whose constituent threads, far from being contained within it, trail beyond, only to become caught with other threads in other knots. Or in a word, things leak, forever discharging through the surfaces that form temporarily around them."

Even if we pick up a stone can only call it an 'object' because we perceptually extricate it from the ongoing processes (erosion, deposition, etc.) that gave it is place, size and shape in by picking it up we participate in those processes. 


Even a building is not fixed and final but something that is never finished for it demands never-ending efforts to maintain it against the forces of its context and its inhabitants. As Ingold notes: Our most fundamental architectural experiences, ... are verbal rather than nominal in form. They consist not of encounters with objects – the façade, door-frame, window and fireplace – but of acts of approaching and entering, looking in or out, and soaking up the warmth of the hearth (Pallasmaa 1996: 45). As inhabitants, we experience the house not as an object but as a thing.



Extending Ingold's observations, what things enable in the way the 'leak' could be called 'affordances'. An affordance (enablement) can only become visible through an interaction within a context and orientation. Another example, if I'm walking through a landscape populated with scattered stones of all sizes. I will generally see these as annoyances that impede my easy passage. But then I get tired and want to rest for a bit - a stone of the right size and shape might then suggest to me - might afford - a perfect 'thing' to sit on, letting me avoid having to get my body all the way down on the ground (and the necessary effort to get up again). The context of being tired, and the orientation of view enabled the stone to serve as a chair - or another way, enabled an interaction between myself and the stone that saved me energy. 

If we understand that affordances only arise with context, orientation and interaction it is impossible to determine all the possible affordances that a thing could enable. Thus we could argue that 'things' are imbued with a field of affordances - like a superposition of possibilities - the collapse of this field into a particular affordance depends on 'observation' (as orientation, context and interaction). Because the 'field of affordances' can't be enumerated (of course with some thought 'some' affordances can always be imagined) the idea of algorithmizing them or attempting to incorporate notions of probability aren't feasible.

A key implication of this line of thinking is that we must be careful in applying the language of logic and mathematics to the world. What logic and mathematics tends to do is make 'things' into 'objects' - P is P and Not Q. There are no 'affordances' acceptable to the use of P in an argument shaped by syllogistic logic or mathematical equation. Affordance may enable a 'thing' to embody contradiction (which in logic is an accepted indication of error - only one thing can be right). Think of the classic drawing that enables a viewer to see both an old woman and a young woman, depending on the perceptual orientation. The drawing affords two opposite renderings of the very same 'thing'.

Of course that doesn't mean logic and math are not necessary tools for human progress - they are absolutely necessary. They have and will continue to be powerful in shaping our reasoning and in descriptions of the world. However, they are not sufficient for understanding how evolution of complex and living systems unfold. 

The epistemology imbued in a physics world view doesn't make room for things imbued with affordance fields - yet does afford the realization of quantum mechanics, superpositions, entanglement, etc. between 'objects' and forces. 

What emerges in living systems are the new domains of affordance fields, of meanings that are only revealed through interaction, context, and orientation and mirror the fact that matter is always matter in movement, in flux, in variation, in webs of interdependence. The domains of affordance fields may be pertinent to the more basic domains of matter and force and may enable a better grasp of what McLuhan describes as Formal Cause.


I highly recommend people reading Tim Ingolds article.

BRINGING THINGS TO LIFE: CREATIVE ENTANGLEMENTS IN A WORLD OF MATERIALS

http://www.socialsciences.manchester.ac.uk/realities/publications/workingpapers/15-2010-07-realities-bringing-things-to-life.pdf

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Difference, Pattern, Change, Continuity and Formal Cause

This year Stuart Kauffman et al wrote a fundamental paper "No entailing law, but enablement in the evolution of the biosphere" (you can see him speak about this here http://necsi.edu/video/kauffman.html 

This was a great revelation to me and I think provides a deep appreciation of the constraints of a physics 'worldview' for understanding living systems. Kauffman has spoken about the 'adjacent possible' in his other writings - but here he made more concrete for me. 

To be brief - Kauffman points out that evolutionary systems cannot be positioned within a 'pre-stateable phase space' that is it is impossible to pre-state all 'adjacent possibles' of a given situation. Another way of saying this is that it is only after the fact that 'Darwinian pre-adaptations' or potential affordances become visible. Kauffman give the example of the impossibility of prestating all the possible uses that a screw-driver can be put to. 

In the physics worldview we posit a prestated phase space within which we can conduct a calculus of possible trajectories within that space. This is the basis of Maxwell's Demon - the imagination of an intelligence that can be aware of all the current bits (and their states) with the consequence that the future could then be simply foreseen as the inevitable computation of trajectories of the existing bits. Kauffman gives another example of evolution selecting a fish with a swim bladder. This process fits well with developments in the physics pre-stated space as the causal webs that shape the evolving fish-with-swim-bladder-in-environment event. However, when a micro-organism inhabits the swim-bladder turning it into a 'niche' - this was not prestateable, it was a-causal in the swim-bladder was not 'selected' for to be a niche. However, once existant - becoming a niche was an 'adjacent possible' that enabled a micro-organism to actualize an affordance (as adjacent possible).  Kauffman says that these sorts of processes cannot be algorithmized. There is no way to develop an 'entailing law' to predict the emergence of affordances, or actualizations of adjacent possibles or make visible pre-adaptations to future contexts. 

This also has salience to the difference between information (especially in relation to Shannon) versus knowledge - as embodied in socially-based minds. What Shannon was able to formulate was how to ensure a transmission of a pattern of differences (e.g. information - as difference that makes a difference) - through various transformations relevant to particular mediums through which transmissions occur, with fidelity. For example I can ensure that the ink-blot I create on a paper, scan with a scanner, attach to an email, - is received via email and printed out will be exactly like the ink-blot that I sent. Where knowledge comes is that I can't assure that the meaning I see in the ink-blot (a spider) is the meaning that the receiver sees in the ink-blot (butterfly). Shannon admitted the the theory of information did not address the 'meaning' of the 'signal'. This is what makes knowledge 'transfer' much more like translation where it is inevitable that 'information' (as meaning) is gained and lost that is outside of the control of the sender of the signal. 

Thus as Kauffman notes - life creates the conditions of its own becoming. Each step in a complex living system changes the conditions (potential adjacent possibles, affordances, pre-adaptations) of the next step. 

What makes 'knowledge' possible is that a tacit collective knowledge arise through the complex social transactions of synchronization - as Bateson claimed - the fundamental of mammalian communication is the harmonization of nervous systems - which I would now understand as an environment of the social minds that constitute living systems. 

The puzzle is, How does an 'enablement' become seizable? For example, did the micro-organism accidentally get swallowed into the swim-bladder - a random act, and despite this random act somehow survived, found protection and learned to replicate in this new environment (producing excrement thus enabling other 'niche opportunities'). Is it possible to derive a probability for this random act before it happened? Kauffman say no. So the micro-organism doesn't receive a signal (I'm in a new niche) but rather perceives a meaning I think this is like a niche?

It is for all of the reasons above, modern economics (built on the concepts and mathematics of 19th century physics) requires a 'rational actor' - a predictable particle - rather than a meaning-making, affordance-realizing consciousness.

It is also for the above reasons that a multi-disciplinary effort is needed to continually iterate simulations related to living systems to make imaginatively useful - even if they may never create viable predictions beyond a relatively short horizon.

It has been noted that Nature/Reality is not a theory. While I wholeheartedly agree that nature is not a theory - I also agree with Einstein and vast debate in philosophy that essentially supports him - Whether you can observe a thing or not depends on the theory which you use. It is the theory which decides what can be observed.

Like Khun noted, anomalies only become evident because they challenge inadequate theory. Thus we are unable to perceive an 'unfiltered' world a world free of theory (conscious or not). Our only choice is choosing/creating theory, I think observation (in a scientific sense) is impossible without theory.

It is true that Kauffman's adjacent possibles is abstract, and very difficult to 'grasp' - attributing reality to something that is ultimately intangible - becoming tangible only after a field of potential collapses on a single possible. This surely can seem like magical or divine spontaneous creation. 

Turning back to nature enables us to search more closely for those anomalies and perhaps find a better pattern that we can describe through mathematical and other types of metaphors. 

I remember reading Gregory Bateson in the mid 80s. He went on at length about information being a difference that made a difference, etc. and at one point he spoke of this as a sort of difference that makes a difference - a pattern. He spoke about two types of epistemology (how we know we know), an epistemology of energy (which is the foundation of physics - the billiard balls on a pool table descriptions of the universe) and an epistemology of pattern. This later type of epistemology is the foundation of the phenomena we could call 'meaning'. He spoke about how pattern is essentially not just intangible but has literally no substance. For example the telephone call not received (nothing) 'causes' consequences. In essence where does 'difference' actually live?

It is only in the last five years, have I come to really understand this, as I was thinking through the problem of the difference between information and knowledge. What made it clear for me was thinking about Shannon's ideas of information using Bateson's metaphor of a blind man walking with a cane. 

The  side walk has discernible changes (pattern), using a cane and tapping the blind man is able to note important changes (pattern) in the side walk by tapping - which provides a way to transform the changes in the side walk into feeling and sound. The feeling (vibrations through the cane) and the sound (vibration of the cane-side-walk interaction through the air) are transformed again in the neural structure to produce a 'picture' that is a pattern of the side walk (I exert poetic license just to keep it simple). 

Another example is how we think of something to say, that pattern of thought is transformed into a pattern of sounds (according to the structure of language), those sounds are transformed into a pattern of electro-magnetic waves to transmit via a digital medium-phone/text, then the pattern of digital differences is transformed into a pattern of language-sounds (voice), which is then transformed into a pattern of meanings (which may entail iterated exchanges to negotiate concurrence on that meaning). 

In both of these examples a material medium is absolutely necessary to 'embody' the pattern, but it is only because the 'pattern' itself is not material that it is possible for the patterns to 'embody' various media through appropriate transformations for corresponding material media. 

In this way differences that make a difference (pattern) is non-material, non-energetic but can only be perceived via a substantive form of media. 

It could be that pattern (information) is the source of 'Formal Causation' which would be why effects as 'embodiments' would precede their cause (unknowable prior to its effects). If this has any truth it would then make certain dimensions of reality unobservable other than because we can formulate theories concerning prior effects to un-instantiated formal causes. 

Part of what has got me thinking about this was a comments by a colleague related to the physics of continuity and topology. 

In one of my first philosophy classes my professor was an ancient (Leslie Armour) who had been teaching for 50 years - it was like Kant and Hegel were his neighbours. :) The class was Infinity, Ethics and Society (or something like that). I forget the discussion - but I asked him about the issue of change and continuity - how could I, an obviously different person than I was when I was five - still be the 'same' person? His answer was that we probably constructed our identity through some form of narrative continuity - continuity of pattern. 

This is the core of the difference between 'mere' :) physics-based systems and complex or living systems. Complex/living systems exist 'far-from-equilibrium'. Their 'integrity' or construction is maintained via a 'strange attractor' for complex systems and via a mechanism of homeostasis in living systems. One could argue that the 'identity' of a living system is the complex, dynamic set of values that homeostasis uses to regulate the system's state of 'far-from-equilibrium'. That means that unlike equilibrium (which is a sort-of path of least resistance), homeostasis is a dynamic ongoing 'regulatory-intervention' requiring energy (and enabling the generation of energy to keep the system going). 

So a complex and/or living system is definitely dependant on physics - but it's identity (as continuity of pattern) may not be 'apprehendable' from a strictly physics foundation. 

Another example. Human brains all have language processing structures. But there is no 'english' gene. Nor could we determine which language is being spoken only by a strict analysis of neuronal-chemical events. A particular language (patterns) arises as an emergent via complex social interactions - and once language emerges it has the capability to interate influences upon the bio-neuro-chemical substrate that is its 'medium'. 

It may be that pattern (like the adjacent possibles) is an intangible non-material norenergetic domain/dimension of reality (Formal Cause), that requires material media to exist and act but whose laws can't be reduced to those laws of the particular tangible reality (medium) that embody the pattern at any particular moment.

This would not be a mysticism or a divine source of being - but a domain of reality that may require a different type of language than what mathematics currently offer. 

This line of thought is an engagement that is similar to how people from different culture have to construct a third language in order to make bridges to their native foundations. :)

Maybe the challenge of a 21st century mathematics and logic is one that will seem initially to be a development of a more abstract theory - maybe to an extreme. 

In my foresight work, I've often used the experience of Xerox as a metaphor - Xerox funded Xerox PARC (Palo-Alto Research Centre) where their brilliant scientist developed the desktop computer, with a GUI interface and a mouse. When executive looked at the result - they pondered then asked what that had to do with photocopies? The rest is history - the scientist showed their work to Steve Jobs and Bill Gates. 

But had the executives of Xerox, taken a moment and abstracted what business Xerox was really in (its identity), they could have realized that the ultimate business of Xerox was 'information processing' and that would have enabled (in Kauffman's sense of the word) to see a different (but continuous) future (identity) of Xerox. In pondering the lessons not learned by Xerox - I think what comes after the Post-modern age is the era of the 'Meta-real' - where we must all struggle to 'abstract' a higher order sense of identity (continuity of narrative) in order to grasp the opportunities that a culturally-based evolution enables.

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Truth, Trust, and Reputation in the Flows of Uncertainty and Paradox

"Logic will get you from A to B. Imagination will take you everywhere”. 

Albert Einstein

The last couple of weeks have been taken up with finally finishing a creative wood working project and a pumpkin madness that descends on me during the last week of every October - see pictures here 

This post is a sort of harvest of fibers from the self-weaving fabric of the matrix that is the Internet stream. Maybe I'm curating some of the thinking I've come across, perhaps it would be more accurate to say - that this is simply material that I'm fermenting in the space where I park my mind. :)

Clay Shirky has written another ‘must read’ piece. This article is very complementary to David Weinberger’s new book “Too Big To Know”. I don't believe that the digital environment causes a fragmentation of the truth. But it does confront our notions that we can contain what is knowable and in this way, it simply reveals the true plurality of what we think and shatters our illusions of a society that has a general consensus on what truth is.

ClayShirky: ‘We are indeed less willing to agree on what constitutes truth’

Here are the first few paragraphs:

Here’s what the “post-fact” literature has right: the Internet allows us to see what other people actually think. This has turned out to be a huge disappointment. When anyone can say anything they like, we can’t even pretend most of us agree on the truth of most assertions any more.

The post-fact literature is built in part on nostalgia for the world before people like Bigfoot showed up in the public sphere, for the days when Newsweek reflected moderately liberal consensus without also providing a platform for orthographically-challenged wingnuts to rant about the President. People who want those days back tell themselves (and anyone else who will listen) that they don’t want to impose their views on anybody. They just want agreement on the facts.

But what would that look like, an America where there was broad agreement on the facts? It would look like public discussion was limited to the beliefs held by straight, white, Christian men. If the views of the public at large didn’t hew to the views of that group, the result wouldn’t be agreement. It would be argument.

Argument, of course, is the human condition, but public argument is not. Indeed, in most places for most of history, publicly available statements have been either made or vetted by the ruling class, with the right of reply rendered impractical or illegal or both. Expansion of public speech, for both participants and topics, is generally won only after considerable struggle, and of course any such victory pollutes the sense of what constitutes truth from the previous era, a story that runs from Martin Luther through Ida Tarbell to Mario Savio, the drag queens outside Stonewall, and Julian Assange.....

These next two articles should be read as one article. Although I think they are also ‘must reads’ but they shouldn’t be seen as 'new' news. The accelerating pace of technology, of social change, makes 'future shock' more real than ever and the future present is a looming Zeitgeist. There is no doubt that 'more' 'digital disruption is coming, and it will tear down and rebuild every product, in every industry.'

DigitalDisruption Is Harder to Face Than You Think

The first few paragraphs:

We've all heard the word disruption. Most of us think we know what that is. And we've all heard the word digital. Most of us think we know what that is, too. But put them together -- digital disruption -- and they add up to much more than the mere sum of their parts. Digital disruption, when properly understood, should terrify you.

In short, you should think of digital disruption not just as disruption magnified or even disruption squared. Think of it as disruption accelerated at several orders of magnitude. Three sources of digital power -- the prevalence of free tools and services that enable disruptors to rapidly build products and services, the rise of digital platforms that are easily exploited by aspiring competitors from all directions, and the burgeoning class of digital consumers ready to experiment with new services -- have combined to unleash a disruptive force that will completely alter every business on the planet.....

DigitalDisruption: Don't Get Left Out

Is your company's customer experience changing as fast as say, smartphones are progressing? Forrester shares advice from digital disruptors.

Today's rush to reach customers on their smartphones and tablets is just a sign of things to come, thanks to the explosion of software-fueled digital touchpoints. In this rush, it's easy to overlook the more important and fundamental shift taking place that will define the next decade.

Software-fueled digital touchpoints empower your customers, your employees, people, and society. Mainstream media has picked up on this shift--look no further than CNN's recent report "How Smartphones Make Us Superhuman." But have you picked up on it, too?

The Executive's Challenge

Your customers, your employees, and society overall continue to internalize technology. Smartphones, tablets, e-readers, games, smart TVs--and even goggles--fueled by software provide people with access to computing power that exceeded our imaginations 10 years ago. They also empower people to connect, engage, and share with each other at a pace most firms cannot easily keep pace with.

Today's disruptors are people and companies using digital capabilities to remove traditional barriers to entry, produce better products and services, and build great digital relationships with your customers. They do so better, faster, and stronger than you can today by taking advantage of your legacy. And they have your executives rethinking competitive strategy, and your product strategists scrambling for ideas on how to use digital and software capabilities to deliver new products, or complement existing ones.....

This next piece should be equally familiar to anyone who studies organization. In many ways this suggests that a lot of the reactions of most of the media industry is a hysterical reaction to the 'loss of control'. The effort to increase the strength of intellectual property seems to me very similar to the hysteria of over-control that this article describes as the management reaction to increasing uncertainty and complexity. I have to thank my friend Amanda who shared this link with me. The need to control has a personal consequence for people experiencing the imposition of controls - a sense of not being trusted. So how do we trust ourselves and others in a context of complexity, uncertainty and plurality of views – where the application of command & control may be more illusion than reality and may in fact push the system to paralysis or chaos?

The Paradox of Project Control

This paper explores the hypothesis that, within complex matrix organisations, the ‘zone’ between the strategic vision set by senior management and the projects created to fulfil it, is a highly complex and dynamic organism. Stimulus to the organism may, or may not produce change. The change may be slight or catastrophic, beneficial or detrimental, and cannot be predicted. Succeeding in this environment needs a different management paradigm from that developed for management in traditional project industries.

The paradigm shift in management thinking needed to succeed in managing projects across the ‘zone’ is acceptance that the outcome from any management input to the ‘zone’ is unpredictable. To succeed, managers need to combine vigilance and flexibility; to identify and capitalise on unexpected gains and deal with unexpected problems. Communication networks and more flexible management of relationships are keys to resolving problems and creating success in the dynamic ever-changing environment of the ‘zone’.....

If we accept Clay Shirky's (and David Weingerger and many others) ideas about the disruption that the digital environment has wrought on our illusions that general consensual truths – and if we accept Forrester Research that Digital disruption is coming, and it will tear down and rebuild every product, in every industry – then we had better find new ways to establish trust and reputation will become even more important.

The problem of truth that Shirky discusses inevitably leads to issues also related to trust and reputation. Many approaches to this problems are being explored and developed in the digital environment – From Amazon’s reader reviews and ratings to eBay’s ratings of sellers, to Dragon Kill points in World of Warcraft (see below). This is especially relevant when considering the many implications of Big Data, the unimaginable new forms of measures that Big Data can enable and the consequences for the emergence of new institutions. The key insight for me is that there is a very plausible potential for the development of new forms of reputation that becomes a type of social currency.

The next few articles are interesting discussions and provide links to many other discussions/examples of reputation measures.

Welcome to the new reputation economy

Imagine a world where banks take into account your online reputation alongside traditional credit ratings to determine your loan; where headhunters hire you based on the expertise you've demonstrated on online forums such as Quora; where your status from renting a house through Airbnb helps you become a trusted car renter on WhipCar; where your feedback on eBay can be used to get a head-start selling on Etsy; where traditional business cards are replaced by profiles of your digital trustworthiness, updated in real-time. Where reputation data becomes the window into how we behave, what motivates us, how our peers view us and ultimately whether we can or can't be trusted.

Welcome to the reputation economy, where your online history becomes more powerful than your credit history. …..

  

Buildingreputation and finding trust

Without transparency there can be no trust. Don't believe me? When is the last time you got a job without a background check? When is the last time you dated someone without Googling them? Do you purchase things online without first researching the company and their sales ratings? When you leave this article you will click my profile to see if I know what I am talking about. If you are not doing any or all of these things, how has that been working out for you? ….

And here’s an example of a reputation organization.

TheRespect Trust Framework

More evidence about the potential for institutions of social currency is how players self-organize (given the informational tools game developers provide) to and create methods of reputation-based exchange. Here's a Wikipedia article on how players in the massive multiplayer online games such as World of Warcraft have created a type of exchange currency based on reputation related contributions to the achievement of groups quests.

Dragonkill points

Dragon kill points or DKP are a semi-formal score-keeping system (loot system) used byguilds in massively multiplayer online games. Players in these games are faced with large scale challenges, or raids, which may only be surmounted through the concerted effort of dozens of players at a time. While many players may be involved in defeating a boss, the boss will reward the group with only a small number of items desired by the players. Faced with this scarcity, some system of fairly distributing the items must be established. Used originally in the massively multiplayer online role-playing game Everquest, dragon kill points are points that are awarded to players for defeating bosses and redeemed for items that those bosses would 'drop'. At the time most of the bosses faced by the players were dragons, hence the name.

While not transferable outside of a particular guild, DKP are often treated in a manner similar to currency by guilds. They are paid out at a specified rate and redeemed in modified first orsecond price auctions, although these are not the only methods by which DKP may be redeemed or awarded. However, Dragon kill points are distinct from the virtual currencies in each game world which are designed by the game developers—DKP systems vary from guild to guild and the points themselves only have value in regards to the dispersal of boss 'loot'. The systems of points themselves have important social dimensions and may represent an intersection between Pierre Bourdieu's conception of cultural capital and material capital......

This is another viewpoint related to trust and reputation, but this time applied to how we determine the truth. Can we trust social computing to determine truth and if we contribute to a social computing effort how can this become a form of currency? It strikes me that Dragon Kill Points as an emergent method of attributing reputation and credit to the contributions of successful 'quests' is not so far remove from the similar problems arising from new approaches to science. This next article is another great example of how social computing is changing the nature of science – how it’s done and who does it.

Armchairastronomers find planet in four-star system

A joint effort of citizen scientists and professional astronomers has led to the first reported case of a planet orbiting twin suns that in turn is orbited by a second distant pair of stars.

Aided by volunteers using the Planethunters.org website, a Yale-led international team of astronomers identified and confirmed discovery of the phenomenon, called a circumbinary planet in a four-star system.

Only six planets are known to orbit two stars, according to researchers, and none of these are orbited by distant stellar companions.....

The issue of trust, reputation is also challenging radical innovations in education, how we get educated/education, who accredits what we receive and how, and so many more problems. How can we integrate all our learnings/experience into a reputational framework appropriate to what we 'can' contribute to. The changing educational paradigm.

HarvardXmarks the spot

University launches two online courses, and more than 100,000 sign up worldwide

Harvard University’s first two courses on the new digital education platform edX launched this week, as more than 100,000 learners worldwide began taking dynamic online versions of CS50, the College’s popular introductory computer science class, and PH207, a Harvard School of Public Health course in epidemiology and biostatistics.

For Marcello Pagano, a professor of statistical computing who is co-teaching PH207x, the potential to teach so many students at once is amazing.

“I figure I’d have to teach another 200 years to reach that many students in person,” he said.

In May, Harvard and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) announced the launch of the not-for-profit educational enterprise edX, which features learning designed specifically for interactive study via the Web. Since then, Harvard has established HarvardX, the University-based organization that supports Harvard faculty as they develop content for the edX platform. In the past six months, a leadership team has formed, faculty and research committees have launched, and courses have been developed......

All sorts of work will be affected by automation – will technological unemployment affect even the professional class or will it enhance human capability enabling humans to engage in meaning making and creative work? Perhaps Watson will enable doctors to spend more time with patients? Can we trust the augmented doctor more or less? Can everyone have access to Dr. Watson to be a smarter patient/person making more informed choices? Can Watson invoke the placebo effect that reputation and the trappings of professionalism enable?

PagingDr. Watson: Artificial Intelligence As a Prescription for Health Care

Everyone agrees health care in the United States is a colossal mess, and IBM is betting that artificially intelligent supercomputers are just what the doctor ordered. But some health professionals say robodoctors are just flashy toys.

Such are the deep questions raised by the medical incarnation of Watson, the language-processing, information-hunting AI that debuted in 2011 on the quiz show Jeopardy!,annihilating the best human player ever and inspiring geek dreams of where its awesome computational power might be focused next.

IBM has promised a Watson that will in microseconds trawl the world’s medical knowledge and advise doctors. It sounds great in principle, but the project hasn’t yet produced peer-reviewed clinical results, and the journey from laboratory to bedside is long. Still, some doctors say Watson will be fantastically useful.

“It’s not humanly possible to practice the best possible medicine. We need machines,” said Herbert Chase, a professor of clinical medicine at Columbia University and member of IBM’s Watson Healthcare Advisory Board. “A machine like that, with massively parallel processing, is like 500,000 of me sitting at Google and Pubmed, trying to find the right information.” ….

Speaking of the medical world where biology is now an information science  with an ultimate aim of domesticating DNA. It’s not here yet, but… Can we trust new life forms? Can we trust ourselves to engage in the evolution of evolution? I think it was Einstein (if it wasn't him it was someone just as smart) that said that the type of thinking that created the problem was inadequate to solve the problem. This made me think about our problems in a different way. Can the species that created the problem solve the problem? Is the solution to the complexities the human species finds itself in be solved by the current 'instantiations' of a lifeform. 

I don't think we can 'go back' to simpler ways of living because unless we change ourselves primordially we will likely just recreate the problem. The issue of being a sentient being is being a sentient ecology. The phrase of 'doctor heal thyself' can be metaphorically turned to species change thyself. Trust in the face of uncertainty - can't be simply attained by a reactive fall-back to imposed control. Evolution is eternal adaptations to the consequences of its own adaptations - life must create the conditions of its own becoming.

CraigVenter Imagines a World with Printable Life Forms

NEW YORK CITY — Craig Venter imagines a future where you can download software, print a vaccine, inject it, and presto! Contagion averted.

“It’s a 3-D printer for DNA, a 3-D printer for life,” Venter said here today at the inaugural Wired Health Conference in New York City.

The geneticist and his team of scientists are already testing out a version of his digital biological converter, or “teleporter.”

Why should you care? Well, because the machine has “really good anti-viral software,” he quipped….

Closing the gaps in our understanding of ‘natural selection’ – the quotes are meant to highlight that evolution itself is evolving to be driven by human intentions.

Evolutionof new genes captured

....Like job-seekers searching for a new position, living things sometimes have to pick up a new skill if they are going to succeed. Researchers from the University of California, Davis, and Uppsala University, Sweden, have shown for the first time how living organisms do this. …

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