In the broader scheme of things, Assange’s circumstances are a product of a structural transformation of social and state information systems generally, which he has chosen to accelerate.
The press (the 4th Estate) arose when technology for mass information distribution became “cheap” but not cheap enough to be “free”, and its stability and pseudo-independence in the face of state power was possible due to the mediating effect of its customers, that is, businesses wishing to advertise. The constant tensions between state, business and people, were sufficient to create something like a Lagrange point in which an objective and truth seeking press could develop and mature. And with the costs of publishing still being non-trivial, it was only possible for a limited number of narratives to be supported, creating potential for strong societal consensus(es).
The problem is this stable point no longer exists, thanks to the gradual lowering of costs for mass information distribution. Initially the audience and consensus fragmented as traditional media proliferated its channels to market - but an inflection point was achieved with global rollout of broadband - at that point broad information distribution truly did become “free”.
Now the social information system is a “many to many” network rather than a “few to many” network, and the business case for the objective 4th Estate press corp has disappeared.
It is into this vacuum that Wikileaks has plunged, distributing sensitive state and business data as did its 4th estate progenitors, but without the privilege of carefully cultivated and organically evolved patronage; not from the state, which in the past would sometimes support investigation of business, and not from business which would sometimes provide support for investigation of the state. And so far, not much support from the public either. But it does appear that as people digest what’s at stake that this is starting to change.
What is very clear however is that there is very little chance that a new steady state for social information systems will be achieved again in the near or even medium future.
Tuesday, December 14, 2010
Wednesday, December 08, 2010
Why entropy is a good thing.
entropy is a measure of the information you don’t have about a system
This is the most profoundly comprehensible definition for entropy that i have come across. If you think of it this way its so easy to visualize why that measure is useful.
It also invokes thoughts regarding the nature of knowledge - the implication is that the information you don't know is knowable to some degree. But the model system discussed is necessarily simplified, so that it ignores the fact that in reality there are discontinuities along the curve of increasing knowledge of systems. A simple example - a chamber of hydrogen particles acting as a gas is different from a chamber of uranium particles acting as a gas in fundamental and discrete ways.
We can generalize this to say that within each system for which we can measure knowability there also exists a potential for that system to at a deeper level contain unmeasurable unknowability.
This is the most profoundly comprehensible definition for entropy that i have come across. If you think of it this way its so easy to visualize why that measure is useful.
It also invokes thoughts regarding the nature of knowledge - the implication is that the information you don't know is knowable to some degree. But the model system discussed is necessarily simplified, so that it ignores the fact that in reality there are discontinuities along the curve of increasing knowledge of systems. A simple example - a chamber of hydrogen particles acting as a gas is different from a chamber of uranium particles acting as a gas in fundamental and discrete ways.
We can generalize this to say that within each system for which we can measure knowability there also exists a potential for that system to at a deeper level contain unmeasurable unknowability.
Monday, October 11, 2010
Rise and Fall - Why the West Rules
What always disappoints me in analyses like the one by Mr Morris is the apparently inevitable inclusion of a final "optimistic" assertion that for "us" things may be different because "we are so much more able to understand and counter the forces that threaten us—if we have the wit and purpose to do so."
Why do we assume that "our" wit and "our" wisdom is in anyway more fit to the task at hand than was that of the Romans to their task, or that of the good burghers of the Song Dynasty to theirs? This myopic assumption that we have somehow finally arrived at a final objective, level field of self awareness and self determination is not just a specious attempt to Pollyanna a happy ending for the precious contemporary reader, more seriously it actually contradicts and invalidates the main thrust of the argument of the author.
The reality is there are booms and busts even in the realm of ideas, and they operate at levels above and beyond the reach of our wit and our wisdom. We, the Romans and the Song are all "us" and statistically, inevitably, macroscopic events of overthrow and senescence will eventually overwhelm us too, just as it did them.
Comment originally posted to The Economist
Why do we assume that "our" wit and "our" wisdom is in anyway more fit to the task at hand than was that of the Romans to their task, or that of the good burghers of the Song Dynasty to theirs? This myopic assumption that we have somehow finally arrived at a final objective, level field of self awareness and self determination is not just a specious attempt to Pollyanna a happy ending for the precious contemporary reader, more seriously it actually contradicts and invalidates the main thrust of the argument of the author.
The reality is there are booms and busts even in the realm of ideas, and they operate at levels above and beyond the reach of our wit and our wisdom. We, the Romans and the Song are all "us" and statistically, inevitably, macroscopic events of overthrow and senescence will eventually overwhelm us too, just as it did them.
Comment originally posted to The Economist
Monday, August 23, 2010
Are We a Blog? oh the irony....
Oh the irony. I decided it was time to post another thought which has occurred to me for some time, and probably to many others, and was confronted with a deliciously ironic search result.
To start with - the thought in question is simply this:
Is it not possible that "we" (the reason for the "quotes" will become obvious very soon) are already in communication with alien intelligence?
When I say "we" what I mean is "we" as a planetary phenomenon - not just the human race using machines to search for messages and to send their own specific messages, but "we" as part of a biosphere, and "we" as including the machines we have deployed. And could not the entirety of the transmissions and emissions that our planet now produces constitute deliberate messages to other similar "beings"?
E.O.Wilson has argued strongly that ants are best understood as a superorganism - his point is that the behavior of individual ants is insufficient to describe the richness of the behavioral activities of ant colonies as a whole.
This argument could be applied to our 6.69 billion strong colony of humans, or to the five million trillion trillion bacteria thought to exist in and on earth, but for the purposes of my position the colony i am thinking of consists of a combination of the both, plus everything in between, plus our machines.
Of course to argue that the entire biosphere merits consideration as a single entity is not new, but to consider it as one capable of communication may be. In fact it's even more contentious than E.O.Wilson's position - he has spent decades peering at ants whereas I am lounging in my musty old philosophers' arm chair, fumbling down the back for loose change. But bear with me.
Consider for a moment our broadcasts as encoded information about a biosphere - not just about humans and their interests, but both directly and incidentally about the nature of the earth as whole - it includes data on gravitational strength, biological history, chemical composition and more. In short, the human oeuvre is a holographic representation of the planetary reality, deeply compressed and only just beginning to be transmitted as data.
But there is more data than just what we capture in our own messages - there is (undoubtedly) data in the patterns of interaction between all of the systems of our biosphere which are much more abstract. and perhaps all the parts of this earth system I am talking about come together to create a total much, much greater, one which is rich enough to in fact have a sentience capable of information processing and information creation at a level utterly unintelligible to us. The ebbs and flows of the ages, the seasons, the animal kingdoms, air traffic, and the TV schedule may all work in combination to process data and to think about things entirely alien to individual human consciousness. And it may want to make its opinions on these obscure matters known, and even to ask questions.
If this is the case, "we" may in fact already be replying to a message from alien intelligence. "We" may be part of an elaborate interstellar society. "We" may even be at war.
What is the irony of all this? Well, when I thought to write this down I thought it best to perhaps search for a SETI blog and see if the idea was already out there... and I found a blog called "Are We a Blog?"
I'm still not sure it what the people running that blog meant by their title, but whether it is or it isn't there intention to suggest we are the blog of a Gaia-like superintelligence, the fact that the idea can be discerned elsewhere in the biosphere, albeit in holographically transformed ways, does (ironically!) support my thesis!
To start with - the thought in question is simply this:
Is it not possible that "we" (the reason for the "quotes" will become obvious very soon) are already in communication with alien intelligence?
When I say "we" what I mean is "we" as a planetary phenomenon - not just the human race using machines to search for messages and to send their own specific messages, but "we" as part of a biosphere, and "we" as including the machines we have deployed. And could not the entirety of the transmissions and emissions that our planet now produces constitute deliberate messages to other similar "beings"?
E.O.Wilson has argued strongly that ants are best understood as a superorganism - his point is that the behavior of individual ants is insufficient to describe the richness of the behavioral activities of ant colonies as a whole.
This argument could be applied to our 6.69 billion strong colony of humans, or to the five million trillion trillion bacteria thought to exist in and on earth, but for the purposes of my position the colony i am thinking of consists of a combination of the both, plus everything in between, plus our machines.
Of course to argue that the entire biosphere merits consideration as a single entity is not new, but to consider it as one capable of communication may be. In fact it's even more contentious than E.O.Wilson's position - he has spent decades peering at ants whereas I am lounging in my musty old philosophers' arm chair, fumbling down the back for loose change. But bear with me.
Consider for a moment our broadcasts as encoded information about a biosphere - not just about humans and their interests, but both directly and incidentally about the nature of the earth as whole - it includes data on gravitational strength, biological history, chemical composition and more. In short, the human oeuvre is a holographic representation of the planetary reality, deeply compressed and only just beginning to be transmitted as data.
But there is more data than just what we capture in our own messages - there is (undoubtedly) data in the patterns of interaction between all of the systems of our biosphere which are much more abstract. and perhaps all the parts of this earth system I am talking about come together to create a total much, much greater, one which is rich enough to in fact have a sentience capable of information processing and information creation at a level utterly unintelligible to us. The ebbs and flows of the ages, the seasons, the animal kingdoms, air traffic, and the TV schedule may all work in combination to process data and to think about things entirely alien to individual human consciousness. And it may want to make its opinions on these obscure matters known, and even to ask questions.
If this is the case, "we" may in fact already be replying to a message from alien intelligence. "We" may be part of an elaborate interstellar society. "We" may even be at war.
What is the irony of all this? Well, when I thought to write this down I thought it best to perhaps search for a SETI blog and see if the idea was already out there... and I found a blog called "Are We a Blog?"
I'm still not sure it what the people running that blog meant by their title, but whether it is or it isn't there intention to suggest we are the blog of a Gaia-like superintelligence, the fact that the idea can be discerned elsewhere in the biosphere, albeit in holographically transformed ways, does (ironically!) support my thesis!
Tuesday, March 02, 2010
Where to start a program for right sizing humanity - with flight of course!
How to right-size humanity? How to create a trajectory and momentum towards smaller human body forms with smaller energetic profiles?
Computation is one of the key costs of being human - but the transition from biological computation systems to inorganic is already very well discussed.
In this post I will concentrate on the physical and social aspects.
Firstly - motivation is the key - the offer must be obviously, demonstrably, persuasively better than current existence. This can be achieved negatively via deterioration of the real world environment to a point where lower quality simulations, or even cessation, becomes attractive (e.g. Chinese WoW Gold Farmers, Japanese suicide cults).
However to be optimistic about the future, we must attempt to construct positive pathways to the same goal, using the technology we have now. And I believe that we are very close to this point. Consider this:
The convergence of prosthetics technology and robotics is accelerating rapidly. The need to have biological limbs to function in richer urban societies is fading. In some cases it could even be said that limbs may even no longer be a prerequisite for a pleasurable existence (a good life).
Consider also that humans have always dreamed of flight, and that we naturally understand that weight is a key issue in achieving flight.
What better motivation is there than the dream of flight? If a smaller body is required for a human to be able to fly on a day to day basis as part of normal life, is it a price worth paying? For many people I think the answer is unequivocally "You bet!"
But to make sense, the cost of flight (in energy) must be lower than the cost of traditional human limbs.
Insect muscle is the most active tissue known to man, and therefore a great candidate for a meta-biological flying platform. With organ printing technology, fabrication of a pseudo-muscle may be possible using insect stem cells combined with more traditional substrates (plastics, metals.)
One interesting fact that may be worth bearing in mind is that insect muscle runs on Trehalose, a sugar which is also implicated in the biological mechanism of anhydrobiosis - the ability of plants and animals to withstand prolonged periods of desiccation. This means that artificial, detachable wings/muscle systems could potentially be stored for long periods and shipped cheaply.
These factors make possible a single-use unit approach (rather than a rechargeable unit approach)- and this reduces the complexity of an artificial wing/muscle system design by some orders of magnitude, and reduces time to market. And while single use may seem contradictory to the aim of reducing energetics footprints, the fact that the product can be entirely biodegradable is undoubtedly an important consideration.
So the target needs to be - what is the minimum size that a human body can be revised to, and still be viable, and what is the largest size an artificially created insect muscle/wing system can be constructed?
Computation is one of the key costs of being human - but the transition from biological computation systems to inorganic is already very well discussed.
In this post I will concentrate on the physical and social aspects.
Firstly - motivation is the key - the offer must be obviously, demonstrably, persuasively better than current existence. This can be achieved negatively via deterioration of the real world environment to a point where lower quality simulations, or even cessation, becomes attractive (e.g. Chinese WoW Gold Farmers, Japanese suicide cults).
However to be optimistic about the future, we must attempt to construct positive pathways to the same goal, using the technology we have now. And I believe that we are very close to this point. Consider this:
The convergence of prosthetics technology and robotics is accelerating rapidly. The need to have biological limbs to function in richer urban societies is fading. In some cases it could even be said that limbs may even no longer be a prerequisite for a pleasurable existence (a good life).
Consider also that humans have always dreamed of flight, and that we naturally understand that weight is a key issue in achieving flight.
What better motivation is there than the dream of flight? If a smaller body is required for a human to be able to fly on a day to day basis as part of normal life, is it a price worth paying? For many people I think the answer is unequivocally "You bet!"
But to make sense, the cost of flight (in energy) must be lower than the cost of traditional human limbs.
Insect muscle is the most active tissue known to man, and therefore a great candidate for a meta-biological flying platform. With organ printing technology, fabrication of a pseudo-muscle may be possible using insect stem cells combined with more traditional substrates (plastics, metals.)
One interesting fact that may be worth bearing in mind is that insect muscle runs on Trehalose, a sugar which is also implicated in the biological mechanism of anhydrobiosis - the ability of plants and animals to withstand prolonged periods of desiccation. This means that artificial, detachable wings/muscle systems could potentially be stored for long periods and shipped cheaply.
These factors make possible a single-use unit approach (rather than a rechargeable unit approach)- and this reduces the complexity of an artificial wing/muscle system design by some orders of magnitude, and reduces time to market. And while single use may seem contradictory to the aim of reducing energetics footprints, the fact that the product can be entirely biodegradable is undoubtedly an important consideration.
So the target needs to be - what is the minimum size that a human body can be revised to, and still be viable, and what is the largest size an artificially created insect muscle/wing system can be constructed?
Sunday, November 22, 2009
A Modest Proposal - Right Sizing Humanity for a smaller footprint
It is tautologically uncontroversial that closed systems have limits. It is also relatively well understood that from a practical perspective the biosphere is and will be for the foreseeable future, a closed system.
Self awareness is the phenomenon which has punctured the limits of this closed system - and is now disrupting the system itself with the side effects of non-biological chemical synthesis and energetics.
At the same time the primary agents of that change - humans - remain firmly a part of their greater biological context. They proceed with the same motivation and desire for resources and procreation that is manifested by the less conscious elements of the bioshpere.
In short, they love their children.
How to solve the problem that lies therein? By successfully subverting the biosphere to our own advantages we have willed into being many billions of us - the vast majority of whom wish to will into being their own children to love. But the closed system has limits and those limits are finite.
We are now at the critical point where our own self-awareness tells us that to create children is to not love them. However our biological impulses are incapable of accepting this anti-biological reality, and instinct holds the trump card.
Bearing these 2 points in mind I have a modest proposal;- understanding that humanity is more numerous than is feasible, and understanding that humans will continue to desire to procreate, is not the logical solution to reduce the size of those offspring?
Island or Insular dwarfism is a somewhat uncontroversial theory which explains evolutionary reduction in body size of species in constrained ecological environments.
With our unprecedented capabilities of biological manipulation, and our urgent ecological issues, I believe it is now the time to investigate making humans smaller.
There will be many many issues associated with this proposal - technological, social, ethical, political, and biological (parents want their kids to grow up big and strong after all).
But from a philosophical perspective I can see nothing wrong with the idea. Can you?
Self awareness is the phenomenon which has punctured the limits of this closed system - and is now disrupting the system itself with the side effects of non-biological chemical synthesis and energetics.
At the same time the primary agents of that change - humans - remain firmly a part of their greater biological context. They proceed with the same motivation and desire for resources and procreation that is manifested by the less conscious elements of the bioshpere.
In short, they love their children.
How to solve the problem that lies therein? By successfully subverting the biosphere to our own advantages we have willed into being many billions of us - the vast majority of whom wish to will into being their own children to love. But the closed system has limits and those limits are finite.
We are now at the critical point where our own self-awareness tells us that to create children is to not love them. However our biological impulses are incapable of accepting this anti-biological reality, and instinct holds the trump card.
Bearing these 2 points in mind I have a modest proposal;- understanding that humanity is more numerous than is feasible, and understanding that humans will continue to desire to procreate, is not the logical solution to reduce the size of those offspring?
Island or Insular dwarfism is a somewhat uncontroversial theory which explains evolutionary reduction in body size of species in constrained ecological environments.
With our unprecedented capabilities of biological manipulation, and our urgent ecological issues, I believe it is now the time to investigate making humans smaller.
There will be many many issues associated with this proposal - technological, social, ethical, political, and biological (parents want their kids to grow up big and strong after all).
But from a philosophical perspective I can see nothing wrong with the idea. Can you?
Wednesday, October 21, 2009
The mechanics of a metal ecosystem
We are living through the next great evolution of ecosystem complexity and it is the era in which metallic and mineral materials become incorporated as structural and electrical components of biological systems.
Until very recently carbon compounds (keratin, chitin, cellulose) have been the main structural substrates in known biological systems. With the rise of humans and human technology (the anthropocene period) has come increasing utilization of metals for structural purposes, and as time progresses the incorporation of metals into biological systems will become more and more intrinsic.
Of course the anthropocene period has also seen the rapid decline in viability for a large number of living species constituted from traditional materials. However even with catastrophic collapse of the global biome we can anticipate that the majority of information accumulated in the planetary genome will survive - the level of redundancy of information retained in DNA will ensure this, and the tiny but rapidly growing amount of this data encoded into artificial computer systems will play its part also.
As the trend continues we will see deeper application of biological concepts to information processing and robotics systems, and increasing amounts of incorporation of metal technology into biological systems.
At some point the the two trends will converge, and metals fabrication and manipulation will become encoded and embedded into the biological system or new proto-biological systems.
Use of metal in structural contexts delivers extreme advantages - this is the reason we name the some of the ages of human civilization after metals.
But metal purification requires high energy processes (heat or chemical) and reductive environments - both of which are currently inimical to most life and to computing (biological or otherwise).
The critical step as the ecosystem transforms into a metal utilizing one will be the development of powerful computation systems which can operate at very high temperatures and in hostile chemical environments.
If this sounds unlikely (yet familiar)it might be because it is analogous to an earlier transition; the one which occurred when life moved from the sea to the land.
Until very recently carbon compounds (keratin, chitin, cellulose) have been the main structural substrates in known biological systems. With the rise of humans and human technology (the anthropocene period) has come increasing utilization of metals for structural purposes, and as time progresses the incorporation of metals into biological systems will become more and more intrinsic.
Of course the anthropocene period has also seen the rapid decline in viability for a large number of living species constituted from traditional materials. However even with catastrophic collapse of the global biome we can anticipate that the majority of information accumulated in the planetary genome will survive - the level of redundancy of information retained in DNA will ensure this, and the tiny but rapidly growing amount of this data encoded into artificial computer systems will play its part also.
As the trend continues we will see deeper application of biological concepts to information processing and robotics systems, and increasing amounts of incorporation of metal technology into biological systems.
At some point the the two trends will converge, and metals fabrication and manipulation will become encoded and embedded into the biological system or new proto-biological systems.
Use of metal in structural contexts delivers extreme advantages - this is the reason we name the some of the ages of human civilization after metals.
But metal purification requires high energy processes (heat or chemical) and reductive environments - both of which are currently inimical to most life and to computing (biological or otherwise).
The critical step as the ecosystem transforms into a metal utilizing one will be the development of powerful computation systems which can operate at very high temperatures and in hostile chemical environments.
If this sounds unlikely (yet familiar)it might be because it is analogous to an earlier transition; the one which occurred when life moved from the sea to the land.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)