Its all coming together Part Two
May 13, 2010
So in Part One I tried to persuade you that we are living in the transition between two scientific and technological epochs or to use Kuhn’s terms ‘scientific paradigms’. Epoch One lasted until 1930s when Turing published “On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem” in reply to Godels work on his incompleteness theorem and set in train the start of formal exploration of cybernetics and artificial intelligence and its counter-point; the examination of the human mind using physical and mathematical means.
At that point in time (well, that generation) there was also a crux in mathematics and physics as the mathematics of complexity and quantum physics started to come to the fore. A new paradigm was born either side of WWII and it had nothing to do with steam power or communication networks. It was a change in the fundamental endeavour of science from automating and enhancing things that our bodies do (higher, faster, more accurately, stronger, bigger, further) towards doing things that our minds do (smarter, with more empathy, more responsibly, more beautifully, happier).
In understanding this we can start to understand how the current changes in communication networks, democratic engagement and the changing role of journalism fit together with wider technical and societal changes.
For example, if we accept that the internet represents a vast and near universally accessible library of all fact and opinion (which is questionable right now, but we’re closer now than ever before) then the role of the journalist is equatable to the role of the academic librarian or research assistant. Send them to seek and sooner or later they will find. Sounds like something to automate, yes ? Absolutely ! In fact lets start a company, call it Google and make cash off the back of advertising through it as millions of folk send out their own librarians to find the information that they want. Dead easy. Also at its most basic its a simple piece of maths in the ‘causal’ vein, but Google is a bit smarter and uses users to provide relativistic data in its performance so that the next search is incrementally more probable to meet the next users requirements. Up the ladder of sophistication we go.
What Google can’t do is generate opinion to kick its performance up the ladder. That is a function of mind. That is you telling the librarian “No, that’s not quite the sort of data I want. Bring me books with more blue on the cover”. Google’s vast size allows it to ape mind function, but it still us that dictate page rank in the end.
So there are different approaches towards this automation of mind.
There is the world of computation, where patterns are sought in vast data sets and those patterns linked to probability functions which relate to success or failure. Computation assumes that all answers are available somewhere in the information universe and that calculations are maps to find the answers. Where uncertainty exists a set of the most likely answers can be gathered and presented a la Wolfram Alpha.
There is the Google way of hiding behind stolen opinions and making believe that intelligence exists.
And there is the human way of just having more minds available operating with access to data that has a higher level of sophistication (its called education).
We don’t yet have a functional model of consciousness. We’ve been working on it for 70 years give or take, but we’re not there yet and there are doubts whether we yet have the tools to get there. My own suspicion is that just as the electronic age required a new physics and maths to advance, the age of the mind will too. We need to really understand quantum computing and strange effects like entanglement to get anywhere close to having the brute computing power of the human brain.
So again how does this affect journalism and democracy. Well for all the cost efficiencies of news aggregators, the multiplicity of voices in the ether means that journalism has two very different routes.
The first is as computer engineer designing search algorithms to seek out the juiciest data and re-present it a la carte. Quite frankly that role will not last long as available compute power rises. It is also the least sophisticated solution. Its cause and effect. ‘The data is now there, so lets go and get it’.
The second route is to abandon objectivity as core to definition of journalism. This is the more sophisticated route to take. Actually take the time and make the effort to have a valid opinion. Use the mind to its greatest advantage. Embrace plurality as a mode of expression. BUT you have to educate everyone to make sure that they too may have access to the same raw data and be able to understand it, in order to be able to critically assess your opinion.
So bloggers are a potential future, so are twitterers or whatever comes next, but only if we are smart enough to understand what is being said and why.
That’s all for now. I’m having a break from thinking in order to earn some money.
The Virtual Revolution – An OK piece, sort of
February 1, 2010
The BBC’s Virtual Revolution season kicked off yesterday with the first in a four-part series The Great Levelling ? Its OK, a decent history of things WWW and some of the people behind the whole ‘social change through techno-libertarianism’ movement.
Its mostly wrong of course. The program’s premise that Tim Berners-Lee’s World Wide Web is somehow divorced from the infrastructure of the internet that it runs on is a stretch at best. To suggest that the web is non-hierarchical simply because you don’t have to ask to join in is falacious and the notion that just because addressing structures are not overtly government controlled, the traffic that they support isn’t subject to oversight is just plain wrong.
The presenter/writer starts from the wrong position. She takes the West Coast hippy route through the material casually disregarding the fact that the internet was designed as a command and control network. DARPANET and its progeny are/were all about hierarchy. Its in the DNA of the Internet Protocol. Domain Name Service is way to organise hierarchical lists of computers. The parasitic technology of TBL’s WWW cannot ignore this fact and at best disguises it through http addressing.
I just don’t see how you can paint over that core design philosophy with some vague San Franciscan musings that amount to a claim to have separated the physical infrastructure from the use of that infrastructure by power of the mind alone.
I prefer to think of the internet and www as a child growing up.
Born into a military family, DARPA laid out its morals, made sure that it ate its greens so that it had strong bones in later life. The de-militarising of the internet was the system going to school and meeting kids from the other side of town. Different folks but still recognisable, still ‘us’. The last 20 years have been it playing high-school football, getting to 2nd base with your best girl behind the bleachers, taking a part-time job to pay for a parts for a clunker to trick out. (I don’t know what any of that means by the way. I’m British. We have cricket. Its not the same)
The recent move to allow non-latin script in website addressing is the kid going to college, meeting radically new people and getting into all sorts of high jinx, maybe getting in trouble with the law over a misunderstanding. In parallel to that is the kid starting to take an interest in travel. Spreading to Africa, seeing poverty at first hand will change it, but still at its core is the Internet Protocol and the design philosophy of Cerf & co. This is where we are now.
Still to come the kid takes a trip around the whole world and graduates from college. Current WWW penetration is around 25% global population, so until over 50% of world population has access World Wide Web is not even an accurate name. That will happen soon enough and the East African Fibre Optic cable will help that process along.
At some point after the internet has reached everyone and everyone has had a chance to define their own space, exert their own influence, only then will we find out what is possible with this tool. The child will have grown up.
But unless a new infrastructure is put in place to run the traffic over, it will still be Vint Cerf and DARPA’s little nuclear resistant command and control network at heart. The values that it grew up with will not change.
The Openness Bug
June 11, 2009
I’ll admit it, I have a thing about openness. Whether it be personal or professional I strongly prefer ‘open’ communication. It can be coded if you like, to save blushes where social norms preclude a frank discussion, but if you can’t be honest then there is something in what you are doing or saying that doesn’t sit well somewhere along the line.
I’ve advocated quantifying veracity as a way to pry apart the doors of truth and I am 100% with Tim Berners-Lee when he asks for access to previously closed databases. So it is really heartening to see that, firstly I’m not the only nutter out there, but secondly that even the US administration is taking this topic seriously. Take a look at the US Chief Information Officer’s (Vivek Kundra) Blog and see what you think.
The US has always been miles ahead of the UK in terms of accountability and a big part of that is because the raw data is available. Until relatively recently this didn’t really help that much because all data was compartmentalised in its originating department. Things are changing.
Check out Data.gov. Its not perfect and I don’t have a clue whether it is ALL the available data (the fact that they are asking what other datasets we would like to see suggests that it isn’t), but its a step in the right direction.
We need the UK and the EU to do the same and more.
Politics and Journalism – Journalism and Politics
June 5, 2009
Are we seeing journalism and politics undergoing, what amounts to the same issue – changing models of accountability to their funders ?
Journalism, for the most part, has been funded by the sale of advertising space accompanying the content. As advertisers move their business to the internet, the drop in revenues has brought the newspaper industry to its knees in the US. In other words advertisers are no longer confident that they will benefit from funding journalism.
Is there a parallel in the crisis in UK politics ? The customers (voters) have lost confidence that Parliament will provide the government that they pay for. Putting it in cruelly economic terms – the meta-activity of politics is supported by the real activity of government, just as the meta-activity of journalism is supported by the real activity of advertising. The difference being that there is no current alternative to Parliament, where advertisers can readily jump ship to a ‘better’ ie cheaper solution.
We could argue about cause and effect, since the internet came before the crash in advertising revenues, whereas the crisis of confidence in British politics has gathered pace, arguably, as a result of several exogenous factors. But where journalism is struggling to find a new paradigm, British politicians are still in the throws of a fit of peek at the collapse of their glamour of invulnerability. The endless talk of parliamentary reform over the last few decades has not borne fruit. The scary thing about that is that now that ‘The Crunch’ is upon us, bad ideas hove into view. Parliamentary reform should not be crisis management.
Politics is useful. Journalism is useful. The models of accountability to their respective funders are both changing.
Restructuring Parliament – MPs without portfolio
May 30, 2009
The UK’s political parties are all a-quiver about parliamentary reform so I’m going to suggest MPs without portfolio. We’ve had ministers without portfolio, why not MPs to represent those with little by way of interest in local issues but lots to say on the bigger picture or who have cross-boundary issues.
You’d have a limited number of elected seats that are not geographically tied in order to represent people who live online, those who can’t get to MPs surgeries, those whose problems are not to do with local issues (for example online privacy) and those who generally don’t have much to say on local constituency issues.
If you want reform why not reform along the lines that society is working. My life isn’t limited to a 40 square mile block with 30,000 people. Is yours ?
Update – try as I might I cannot find anyone to suggest this to. No 10 doesn’t have a suggestions box (for obvious reasons), my local MP is a LibDem (so already has an agenda set on this), the parliamentary reform commitee doesn’t even have an e-mail address. How the hell do I actually get the suggestion into the system ? Answers on a post card please.
