My Other Notes - The Future

Sesh Velamoor is a native of Hyderabad, India, but he now lives in the US. As a director of the Foundation for the Future, he oversees seminars and programmes aimed not at predicting the future, but at creating an arena for discussion about the future. The foundation holds yearly seminars, Humanity 3000, that are intended to go on until the year 3000, and to discuss the state of humanity. It also awards the Kistler Prize and the Kistler Book Prize for research the relates the genome to society. (Among the recipients are Steven Pinker and Richard Dawkins).

On the Foundation's website, the interested will find an enormous amount of material from both Humanity 3000-seminars and other interesting seminars touch on future issues. Kistler is also invoved in private space travel and really stands out as an engaged citizen when it comes to future studies.

I will try to write more about the FoF soon.

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Two days ago I had a nice meeting at the University of Washington Law Shool. I spoke with Signe Brunstad, who is the assistant director of their Center for Advanced Study on IPR (CASRIP) and it is clear that this center is one of the best in the US when it comes to research on patents. The relationship between economics and patents is regularily being explored, but there seem as if there is a lot still to do. One interesting conundrum is that the economic research on patents so far does not seem to have taken into account that patent systems and the effects they have must be viewed relatively to other systems. To argue that a patent system with the qualities q(1)...q(n) seems to have the impacts i(1)...i(n) on innovation is simply misleading. Patent systems do not evolve or work in isolation. The truly interesting question thus becomes what the impact of a certain system is given the other competing systems.

Much of the research on patents today needs to be bracketed with this as a prerequisite.

Anita Ramasastry is a well known columnist and legal scholar, andhere academic work she focuses on payments and payment mechanisms. The work she does is quite interesting, and she may easily be one of the most knowledgeable American scholars (and European) when it comes to the so-called e-money directive. In her columnist work she focuses on privacy issues, and all her columns are interesting and often thought-provoking.

She is one of the founders of the Center of Law, Commerce and Technology at the UoW, and she works with trying to make sure that ICT-issues are discussed horizontally in legal education. This is, sadly, rare today - in both the US and in the EU.

But the overall observation after meeting with a few different law schools in the US is even more interesting: here they train lawyers. We - at least in Sweden - train judges. This is a fundamental - yes - flaw in our system. We need more of the rhetoric and argument, and less of the make-believe reasonable balancing in our legal education.

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Professor David Levy's research borders on the kind of thing that will get materialistic people to sneer: one of his conferences was entitled ”Information, silence and sanctuary” and it became so popular that Levy spent time both on CNN and in the national as well as international press talking about what obviously touched a deep concern in many of us. But what, exactly, is this concern? The best way to answer that may be to point out that there are many different concerns that combine into an overarching suspicion that technology may be destroying something very important in our society. And this is not necessarily luddite intuition, either. It may have more to do with the fact that technology is designed differently than biological systems. A computer – to take a very simple fact – does not need to sleep. Biological systems do. Sleep recharges them and allows them to reorganize, heal and develop. But biological systems are not the template for designing technology – instead we seem to have defaulted to the idea of the machine as a universal model for society, organizations and our life.

Professor Levy has been a part of this process in different capacities for some time. He did his PhD at Stanford in artificial intelligence, but after this he went to London to learn calligraphy and bookbinding. He then went back to Palo Alto and worked within what might be one of the most important technological think tanks ever, Xerox Palo Alto Research Center – Xerox PARC. After two long periods at this institution (credited with such innovations as the laser printer, graphical user interfaces and the computer mouse) he came to Seattle. Here, at the Information School, he teaches something different, however – he teaches the need for leisure.

The course he is giving – on contemplation and technology – is a course that uses Josef Piepers ”Leisure as the basis of culture” (1947) as a starting point. Piepers essay, Levy explains, is fundamentally against all kinds of rush culture, arguing that those who are too preoccupied in fact accomplish nothing lasting. Overwork is nothing else than idleness – since it leads to nothing. What we need instead, Pieper claims, is leisure – time to contemplate, think and develop. (And no – professor Levy says – that does not mean golfing or working out in the gym).

Professor Levy recently finished a workshop – in the form of a retreat – where he developed the theme of silence and sanctuary further with an aikido sensei, a calligrapher and a zen abbott. Aikido – for those of you who do not know this – is a martial art focusing on harmony and peace. What on earth does this have to do with technology? Professor Levy answers calmly that it is obvious: these three arts are about mindfulness, and the theme for the workshop/retreat was mindfulness, work and technology.

Mindfulness has developed – under that name – as a stress management technique drawing heavily on buddhist meditation but devoid of any religious overtones. In books like ”Whereever you go there you are” researchers and philosophers have explored what it means to actually be present in the present, and how this affects you – mentally, neurolgically and spirtually. Mindful technology...that sounds nice – but is it possible to design mindful technologies? Are not all technologies efficient, productive and in a deep sense mechanizing? Perhaps, says Levy, but he rejects any idea of qualities as inherent in technology. It is, in the end, more about how we use technology, and how we allow it to use us.

*

The information society knows no luddites. This is, in itself, a fascinating fact. There are no groups that wish to destroy technology or wreck machines (excepting the occasional lust to do so when somebody answers their mobile phone the umpteenth time on your commute back home) any more. The original luddites and the original techno-sceptics were for abstaining from the use of technology. They wanted an option to drop out of the industrial society. There seems to be no, or few, examples of groups that think this possible today.

The counter-revolutions of the information society are actually adaptive strategies rather than opposing strategies. ”Life hacking” is one fascinating example of this. Life hackers mix heavily from several different sources and end up with a productivity-focused, anti-procrastinator and tool-happy movement that incarnates in blogs and seminars all over the country. Life hacker have assembled their particular adaptive strategies from three sources: they use and rely heavily on Dave Allens Getting Things Done – a system for task management that turns everything into an item an an inbox that then is handled with a simple algorithm. They also rely on technology of different kinds – tools and tricks – to increase their productivity. Some of them experiment with drugs, sleep deprivation and...mindfulness to create an environment where they can produce more. The life hackers refuse to become victims in the information society stress war, so they become collaborators instead. In a sense life hacking is about adapting to the machine's way of life – by sorting and searching through the inbox in an extremely mechanistic fashion.

Well, it works. It works splendidly for those that try, but there are of course...lapses. People do well for a while and then they return to the disorganised, messy life they led before they successfully started to imitate simple machines. They become biological systems again, and ”fail” in applying the different rigorous systems developed by productivity experts and computers.

Life hackers want it all: they want peace of mind and they want maximum productivity. You cannoy fault them for ambition, but what are the actual results? The believers will tell you, as believers are wont to do, that they succeed very well, thank you. But the truth is that they succeed only if they maim their fuzzy, blurry and disorganised biological nature.

The other adaptive movement is the slow movement. Slow food, slow reading, slow travelling, slow sex...All of this is celebrated as the modern individuals answer to ever more speed. If the Life hackers try to adapt fully, the slow movement at least resists one component in the information society – the speed, the rate of change. Against fast food and other atrocities, they suggest that we consume time more fully and do one thing at a time. Slowly. But how slow? And should it be uniformly slow? No – obviously not: even slowers – let us call them that – will move quickly when they need to, and their ”counter-revolution” is little else than a wish to signal that they need small remissions from the current rate of change. They ask not that development over all changes or slows down – they ask for slow...well, hobbies (if sex can be a hobby).

Resistance, the Borg are fond of noting, is futile. Well – the resistance to the information society is not only futile, it is half-hearted. Mellow. Cooly uninterested and collaborative.

*

Professor Levy, however, is not half-hearted in any sense of the word. He has just begun what might become one of the more interesting projects in the field of informatics: he is working on finding new technologies that are open to mindful use in different ways. One small thing, he notes, that could have large effects is if we could change the everyday working posture of people working on computers. Hunched over the keyboard, cramped, these people – you and I included – look as if they have been crippled and crooked and bent by a cruel master. Speech recognition, sensors, new displays may actually allow us to stand and straighten up, to actually acquire a proud posture while working.

Who knows what could happen in the future if we would work as free men and not crippled slaves...

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(Notes from seminar at Univ of Washington 25/4)

The moderator started with a provocative question: ”Why do you think you deserve any privacy?” Answers varied, but most people pointed to the law:
”The US Supreme Court has interpreted the constitution to bestow some measure of privacy.”
”It's the law.”
He then went on to say that he had no feeling of privacy himself at all, and analysed today's situation as one where we have no privacy because the databases needed to destroy our privacy are readily available. But we accept this, because we buy convenience with loss of privacy.We buy security with loss of privacy.

(The question, of course, should be why the state deserves to know about me. But we never ask this.)

Computer image recognition and pattern matching is growing quickly, he then told us. He also noted that these developments are being pushed by unusual research areas – such as oceanography – where the need for image recognition is great. RFID was identified as another new technology that forces us to do a cost/benefit-analysis in privacy issues.

The thought that privacy is a balance you strike between convenience, security and trust and the private sphere is becoming more and more popular, but is it true? Can we have ”some” prvacy – or is it far more digital than that? If privacy comes in degrees, it seems reasonable to suspect that we could estimate the level of privacy we have today – but how could we do this? How do we retain ”some” privacy? Is there such a thing as a little privacy? It is easy to map someone with many small pieces of data – and the erosion of privacy is accumulative.

The speakers included lawyers, the chief information security officer of the university of Washington, a prosecutor, a marketing firm and a computer security analyst.

Kirk Bailey – CISO of the University of Washington

Bailey recommended a website called www.privacyrights.org that catalogues data breaches, and said that he found it hard to understand the apathy of people who seem not to care very much about protecting privacy (as opposed to caring about privacy as such). He then went on to criticize different data brokers, listing what they actually sell – and noted that they even sell DNA-identification! He also retold the ChoicePoint fiasco, where 143 000 Americans saw their data sold to criminals. But ChoicePoint is still not liable for the use and identity theft resulting from this deal, since there is no such liability in American law – yet.

The website, privacyrights.org, includes more than a 160 instances resulting in letters to more than 55 million Americans. 200 000 personal records are exposed twice a week, and this never makes the news.

Bailey also discussed what the solution to the privacy problem should be. He told the audience that he asked the NY Times to map him, and they did – legally for $100 dollars – and they got an enormous amount of information, birth records and performance audits from previous jobs and a lot of other materials. When it was printed in the New York Times it was revealed – from the birth cerificate – that his mother had a C-section, and this really made her angry. ”I didn't eat well at my mothers house for quite some time.” He asked what can be done to prevent this and noted that there seem to be few options.

Leaving the decision about privacy to the marketplace is a very bad choice, he said. We need more legislation – technology, he finished, will not solve this problem.

Ivan Orten, Senior Deputy Proesecuting Attorney, fraud division. Is it not strange, he said, that we call the most natural mode of accessing the Internet for the web? That is, as far as science understands, a trap, where you are poisoned and eaten. Quite appropriate, he noted.

Orten noted that data can be created, disseminated, by you, others, collected and linked or acquired by unauthorized persons. Then it is used for criminal purposes. We control – for ourselves – only creation and dissemination – but we are liable for it all! You should not bear the inconvenience costs for that which you do not creat nor disseminate? The costs are not allocated this way, he said, and this must be wrong. A fair allocation of the costs must by stopped by some barrier? Why?

And then he basically recommended the liability model tried by the European data protection directive. He also recommended that there be a liability for those that accept data – wrongly – to create identification.

Why is this not happening? There is no organized lobby, Orten said. And this makes it possible for credit card companies to open application online in five minutes. A free market, he said, would assign liabilities for this. The onus for fraud and identity theft should rest squarely on those accepting false data as a basis for different identification procedures.

Why are we not seeing class actions on privacy? Because the costs are basically individual, and it is hard to do, Orten explained. This also leads to a sort of tragedy of the commons – people do not care about the costs that are inflicted on the individual who has to clean up the aftermath of identity theft.

IT Lawyer John Christiansen, the next speaker, focused on the history of privacy and information protection standards of care. (Computational power of Apollo 11 is now available in a Furby, he also noted). Technology has become cute – he noted – with examples of ruberduck-USB-memories, and this is in itself something that has numbed us. 1999 the US had the Privacy Act and HIPAA – two small patches for protection of privacy, nothing else. The patchwork continued with EU safe harbors, Gramm-Leach, E-commerce Consumer Protection cases, State notification laws on identity theft, SOX and now class actions and Common law cases are coming. This is a patchwork, he said, and not a good one at that.

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Alexander Rose, the executive director of the Long Now foundation, looks tired when he arrives for our meeting in Fort Mason, in the docks. The reason is simple: he has just finished a demo of some of the aspects of the ten thousand year clock the foundation is planning to build. Rose has been engaged in the foundation for some time now, and he tells the captivating story of how what was known as the clock project or clock/library project became a foundation. Now, with popular seminars and several other interesting projects (like longbets.org) the foundation is a fascinating new force in long-term thinking.

I have written an article about this meeting and long futures in general that will feature in the next issue of Neo.

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The EFF is located in downtown San Francisco in nice and cosy rooms filled with stickers ("MP3 is not a crime") and books. The organizations does great work in protecting civil liberties on the Internet, but it is worried about the developments in Europe. The reason is simple. Legislation in the EU is affecting the situation in the US and vice versa. And the one-time representative of EFF in the EU, Cory Doctorow of Boingboing.net, is no concentrating on writing and on a fulbright scholarship which brings him to the US.

Meanwhile, copyright fights and privacy issues become more and more complex in the EU and the existing EFF-affiliated organizations (EFF does no franchising so anyone is free to start their own EFF - Italy has four!) seem sometimes to be to weak to actually offer the qualified and legal resistance the is so badly needed to suggestions that will inhibit and destroy civili liberties on the Net. What is needed is more legal activism, the EFF thinks, and less discussion lists.

This is probably true. We will have to look at this again soon.

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Yesterday we visited with Intel and discussed security, privacy and future technology. Intel is an interesting company, being as they are an absolute pre-requisite for the information society. But for how long can this continue? Can we continue to see increasing price/performance in the future? Will Moore's law hold over time?Gene Meieran, the second Intel fellow ever and a (again!) the stuff of legend (considering the time he has spent at the company, 33 years, and the total time he has spent in the industry, 43 years, he is one of the institutional memories still around and he is still very active) thinks that it will certainly continue to hold for the coming 10-15 years, and he sees no reason to suspect that it will cease to hold after that either. In a sense we've never had som many different new computational technology bases to migrate to, and this in itself is promising. Consider the alternatives being developed right now: chemnical transistors, photonics, DNA-based computing, quantum dots...The number of alternatives is growing quickly and there seems to be no danger that we will be forced to give up on Moore's law.

Meieran also had the kindness to show us around the Museum at Intel, showing us how wafer production has developed and how new fabs are being constructed. The display there is fabulous, and also celebrates one of the founders of Intel, Robert Noyce. One qoute from Noyce is replicated at several different places in the building (and the building also bears his name). The quote is: ”Don't be encumbered by history. Go off and do something wonderful”. A great thought.

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Dr David Friedman is one of the world's most interesting legal thinkers. His work in law and economics is both pedagogical and groundbreaking, and his work in non-orthodox areas of legal philosophy is unique. Friedman has taught a course on legal issues of the 21st century, where he discusses copyright, privacy and other fascinating issues that technology will force us to face in the next few decades. The work is now – hopefully – being assembled and edited for publication, but the interested reader should really download the draft, freely available from Dr Friedman's website.

The current semester, however, finds Dr Friedman teaching a course on legal systems very different from ours. In this course he discusses Cherokee indians, Gipsies and other legal systems (such as the Icelandic which he knows better than perhaps any other American scholar) and the interesting thing, he explains, is that these legal systems often contain irrationalities that reveal the irrationalities of our own system. It should not be forgotten that our system of law is far from rid of it's stranger qualities. In the common law system, for example, it is still possible to forfeit an item that was involved in a crime, even if you had nothing to do with that crime at all: in one horrendous case that Dr Friedman mentions, a woman was deprived of her half of the family car, because the husband had used it to pick up a prostitute. The car – being instrumental to the crime – was seized and proclaimed forfeit.

On the issues facing the information society Dr Friedman has a lot of interesting points to make. When I ask him about David Brins vision of a transparent society, he immediately points out that Brin – in sketching a society in which all citizens are transparent to the state and vice versa – has missed the fundamental fact that the power-relationship between the state and a single citizen is assymetrical. Well, this is true – and Brin lacks a good motivation for this as far as I can see – but it is also true that there is some substance left to Brins argument even after ceding this: Brins is not trying to abolish privacy, he merely assumes that the battle for privacy is lost, and that we had better figure out how to construct rights in a post-privacy society. Brins suggestion, then, is that we create rights of access to data, where all citizens have the right to know everything about everybody else. Again, Dr Friedman points out that what we can actually do with that knowledge varies according to our position in society. The state can, for example, use the data to force citizens to act a certain way, but the citizens lack the means to do the same thing to the state. Again a good point. But still, the question seems to be, I maintain, if this is not already the case today? The state has more power than the citizen, and more access rights to the data collected. Would increasing the citizens access rights not actually be an improvement over today's situation – all other things being equal? Dr Friedman agrees that this may be the case (he is in no way convinced), but says that the only real important issue in privacy is where it will be strongest: in virtual worlds or in the real world. His answer is that it will evidently be stronger in the virtual world, which creates a clear incentive for all the suspicious things – legal and illegal – that people engage in to move to the virtual realm. The issue of privacy now becomes an issue of how to protect ones virtual identity. We thus end up in a situation that closely monitors the one in Vernor Vinges famous novel True Names – where power equals knowing an avatars troe name, since that enables you to coerce him or her by the use of physical force.

Our discussion jumps into the exciting and growing world of virtual worlds, and to the game World of Warcraft. Dr Friedman is an avid player – with three characters – and he is quite enthusiastic about the game from both a personal (all his family members play) and professional point of view. Professionally he notes that social scientists now, finally, have been given the laboratory they so badly need.

By creating a hundred characters and examining how one and the same behaviour is treated, social scientists can now test out basic rules of social science in a virtual laboratory. It is not even necessary to change parameters in the game by contacting the publisher or programmers – it is quite possible to do good social science all on your own by experimenting with different characters in a similiar environment.

And these environments also seem interesting places for the development of legal systems, or rather, systems of norms (that are indeed enforceable in some sense). Future legal sociology might be happening in a massive multiplayer online roleplaying game next to you...

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The front page of this issue of Fortune: "How to make money of the new net boom". The bubble is forgotten. It took 4-5 years. Where are the doomsters now?

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Today I walked to Fishermans Wharf. Even if I have lived near SF for more than a year and a half, I have never been here before. It is...nice, but tourist-intensive. I am currently sitting in Barnes & Noble and it is raining outside. A few pictures from my walk yesterday in Palo Alto/Menlo Park and from today's adventure in SF are available here.

Wrote a Swedish text today about my meeting with professor John McCarthy. WIll put that up later.

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The Long Now Foundation held a seminar yesterday, down at Fort Mason. Jimmy Wales, founder of Wikia.com and WIkipedia's "father" lectured on the future of the project, on social innovations and the future of the encyclopedia. It was - of course - a truly fascinating session (with lots of good questions to).

Wikipedia is growing quickly, and the recent brouhaha about there being an error pointing out a certain individual as complicit in murdering president Kennedy has simply strengthened the project. When CNN called me up to yell at me Wikipedia really grew, noted Wales.

But the perhaps most interesting part of the lecture was on what Wikipedia actually is. There are two different views of the true nature of Wikipedia. The first is that it is a collective hive-mind that basically uses pseudo-darwinistic mechanisms and creates a kind of collaborative selective pressure to weed out bad articles and canonize good ones. This view is, Wales submits, clearly wrong.

Wikipedia is, he states, a community. The individuals matter. Yes, there are a lot of contributors and, yes there are more than a million pages in the English version, but the encyclopedia depends on a core group of wikipedians that number, perhaps, 200-300.

This is a radically different view of Wikipedia from the view that is sometimes pushed in libertarian circles of Wikipedia as a new and spontaneous order, he thinks. Well, perhaps. But even in a spontaneous order you would not necessarily expect to find contributions evenly distributed. Knowing what we know about scale-free networks we would probably expect the contributions to be heavily unevenly distributed - not unlike those between seeders/leechers in file-sharing networks.

It is in fact pretty simple to see the synthesis of the two views presented above if one thinks about the network of wikipedians as a scale-free network. The mistake I think Wales does is that he thinks that darwinian systemic order is something like brownian gas order. Darwinian order may instead be the result of a scale-free network of selection where certain elements in the network have stronger selective qualities than others.

But the really interesting issue is if this will scale. Wales thinks - as do I - that it will. And interestingly his view of why it will scale is that the community will have to subdivide into several smaller communities. This is consistenet with the views on social networks today - where there seems to be a limit to how large a certain social network with a certain cohesion factor can actually be, see for example the so-called Dunbar-number.

But there is another distinction, where Wales is right. He says that WIkipedia is not, in any way, a technical innovation. All the technology needed to do Wikipedia was around in 1995. Instead, he states, it is a social innovation, drawing on the fact that people will cooperate if they are given the chance. We must design for cooperation.

This is a point that seems to resonate with the findings of Robert Axelrod on "tit for that" and the evolution of cooperation. And it is a point that Wales makes well. He asked us to think about restaurant design, and went through the steps: we want to offer steak, so we must have steak knives. But wait! If we have steak knives people will be able to stab each other! So, we must put all the people eating steaks in cages...Right? Uh, no...

This is, as Wales notes, not the dominant design paradigm in restaurant design. It is, however, the dominant design in software design. Everyone tries to design out the opportunities to do evil. But when they do this, they also eliminate the possible growth of trust. Wikipedia is designed not with liability in mind, but with accountability. And the basic idea is that accountability always requires social innovation, and that it cannot be design into the architecture.

In a sense Wales is the Anti-lessig. He is working to keep the rules out of the code, out of the architecture.

Wales is also redefining copyright. Surprisingly he notes that WIkipedia would not be possible to print, because of liabilities in copyright issues. The notice-and-take down regime of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act actually protects Wikipedia, and makes it possible for it to exist in the current, repressive copyright regime.

This is a paradox: the DMCA as an enabler of Wikipedia? Well, it is true to a certain extent. The real truth - and Wales realizes this since he is a member of the Creative Commons board - is of course that our current copyright rules were not built to handled collaborative creative work like Wikipedia. And it will have to change to enable even more social networks generated content. Soon.

Wales is now exploring the technologies of Wikipedia in a semi-new company. Wikia. They are recruiting. What are you waiting for? His motto alone makes you want to work for the guy: make [[Wikilove]], not [[war]].

Posted by Nicklas at 06:43 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (3)

Stig Hagström worked at Xerox Parc for more than fifteen years. He is now the director of the Stanford Center for Innovations in Learning, Wallenberg Hall, Stanford. The center was financed by Swedish financial giants Wallenberg, who have really found an interesting area to work with (and one that happily reflects very well on Sweden). The Center works with the question of how technology can be used to create better learning environments. Not - Hagström points out - with any type of overconfidence in technological solutions: teaching and learning will always first and foremost be human endeavours. But the Center is interested in trying to find solutions that will augment that endeavour and create new forms of learning.

One simple thing that Stanford has found is that small, seminar-like, learning is superior to all other forms. So they decided to have only that form. (Yes!). Large lectures became exceptions and the university decided to develop this as a model. The costs, of course, would be extreme. But the university started a fund-raising drive, and succeeded in raising enough money to shift to this model. An extremely impressive feat.

Hagström shows me the facilities at SCIL and the architecture - newly renovated - nicely complements the atmosphere of research and exeperiment that permeates the whole Center. There is even an artist in residence and her work is beautiful.

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John McCarthy is a living legend. Yes, this is a tired cliché and it makes you sigh and think ”oh no, not another one...” But in this case it happens to be true. Let's review the facts:

1) McCarthy coined the term ”Artifical Intelligence”. There. Ok? No?
2) McCarthy invented LISP. Now?
3) McCarthy has been a leading researcher in AI for more than 50 years. Get the picture?
4) McCarthy has, as a side project, started one of the most passionate and useful collections of arguments to prove that material progress is sustainable.

You know, we could go on. But lets drop the clasifications for a while. When I knew I was going to Stanford, one of my aims of course quickly became to meet with Professor McCarthy. He kindly assented and I had the privilege to spend two hours with him discussing the future of AI, sustainable material progress and science fiction. At almost 80 he is as mentally agile as ever, and is still working on research in AI, he has also recently started his first science fiction novel.

The future of AI

Professor McCarthy is confident that AI will continue to develop. Or, as he notes: ”There was a hundred years from Mendels discoveries until we charted the genome – we still have time.” This does not mean that he downplays the problems with AI, however. Brute force, speed, for example will not be enough. We definitely need something more than mere speed, he says. But exactly what that is, is not certain.

Now, mind: we have come far. Computers routinely beat great chess players. They create swarm-like intelligences in computer games. They create the vast majority of non-player characters in virtual worlds. AI helps with everything from word processing to traffic planning. The applications are out there and they continue to develop. But there are still things that we cannot do. One of the things that remains hard is to allow a computer program to fram context. Look at another, more complicated game, like the Japanese game of go (or Chinese game, depending on your historical views). Computer programs play very poor go, and the reason, professor McCarthy thinks, is that go forces the players to think about the board in regions and to subdivide and find reasonable regions to compete in. What regions are reasonable, however, seems to be a hard problem to solve.

Sure, in chess we have kingside and queenside regions – players subdivide the field into these regions – but it turns out that this division is unnecessary for a computer. A computer does not need to think about these regions at all because of the speed with which it can explore the tree of possible moves. Not so in go.

One of the current research projects that McCarthy works on is related to this problem. McCarthy is trying to develop a logic of contexts and approximate concepts. How do we work with these as human beings? How do we develop concenpts that are in a basic sense vague? We seem to be able to handled vague concepts with ease, and this increases our intelligence.

When I suggest that this seems like thinking from the later Wittgenstein, especially when Wittgenstein speaks about the use of concepts such as ”game”, McCarthy seems uneasy. He really does not like Wittgenstein (even accuses him, if half jokingly, of setting back the field of philosophy anout fifty years, singlehandedly). You know, he says, he even led Bertrand Russell astray. That is quite some achievement.

McCarthy has a strong belief in logics, and in a sense he is a purist. He does not believe that we need new forms of logic – like modal logic – or probabilities. McCarthy thinks that these areas have their uses, of course, but to him they are far less important than pure logic. This is also reflected in his recommendation to people wanting to study AI: he recommends them to study mathematical logic, and to read analytical philosophy (i.e. Russell before he was corrupted by Wittgenstein...)

This strong belief in logic also forms the basis of McCarthy's rejection of the different critiques of AI that have emerged over the years. He mentions Dreyfus, Penrose and others and when I ask him if he believes their critique has relevance for the field, and if there are things that human minds can do that are not translatable to algorithms he simple says ”no”. And there is an incredibly strong point here: the burden of evidence should, of course, be shifted to the person arguing that there are things the human mind can do that are not algorithmic. Becase what are they then? Penroses answer – that quantum-level qualities of the human mind makes it unique – simply sound to ridiculous, and it is not even clear how such an hypothesis could be empircally verified.

But the question of AI could still be obsolete. There are many other possibilities. One simple possibility would be this: before we have computer programs that achieve human level intelligence, the clear bordeline between human and other intelligence will have been blurred and it will no longer be relevant to speak about artificial intrelligenve. Rather, we will speak about symbiotic intelligence, connoting all kinds of intelligence networks that can develop. One simple such symbiotic intelligence – between humans – is Wikipedia. Now, Wikipedians depend in a high degree on Google so they use the advanced page-ranking mechanisms in Google to enhance their editorial capabilities. The end result is a mesh intelligence where the artifical and ”natural” components interact seamlessly.

Perhaps we will not discuss AI separately, and perhaps we will give up the idea of trying to acsertain the intelligence of computer programs. The question of AI may well be a category mistake: asking if a computer program is intelligent, may be lika asking if a human organ is intelligent. It is the networks resulting from interactions between different components – artifical or not – that is the relevant unit of intelligence.

McCarthy is reluctant to think so. He thinks that before the line between human and artifical intelligence blurs we will have developed some sort of artifical intelligence. He even thinks that there could very well be a graduate student out there today, who has solved the basic problems that still riddle the field. But we don't know yet. He defintely seems to think that AI will become a reality, and that we will have to deal with programs that are as intelligent as – or much more intelligen than – we are. This is a truly fascinating future...

The future of material progress

The second subject of our discussions are the pages that professor McCarthy has set up on sustainable material progress. McCarthy, who describes himself as an extreme optimist (one who thinks that things will work out well even if people do not heed his advice), has spent a tremendous amount if time with these pages, and the most populat of them have recieved a lot of traffic. The pages are the perhaps biggest collection of reasons to be upbeat about the future of the world that exist on the Internet. (Why does he do it? "The usual mixture of public spirit and ego").

I ask professor McCarthy why he is so optimistic. What made him do this? His answer is very interesting. He simple states: "I never stopped".

Then he explains that in the 50s everybody was this upbeat about the future, and as far as he is concerned there are no reaons not to be. McCarthy – in this sense – is a relic from another, much more positive, era when it comes to the view of the future. He thinks that human kind will continue to develop, populate the galaxy and expand it's powers indefintely to the borders set down by the first and second principles of thermodynamics. This is almost dizzying for someone like myself, whoi grew up in the shadow of the cold war, with imminent threats of global waming, comets and other prophesies of doom. But it is also liberating.

McCarthy supports his argument with facts, sources and a lot of data. But when I ask him if he has recieved a lot of criticism, he says ”No, sadly not.” He thinks that this is because his thinking is so deviant from the current thinking of the day that he safely can be ignored. This is probably true, but this speaks against not him, but more against our current zeitgeist.

Take one simple example. McCarthy is a strong proponent for nuclear power. He thinks that nuclear power and hydrogen will constitute a stable energy system that can sustain material progress for a long, long time. (Until the sun goes cold at least, and we will have to have come up with something else to live on by then). In his unbridled support for nuclear energy he is almost alone. Even those that argue in favor of nuclear energy today, do so from an argument of necessity. Peter Schwartz recently did this in a seminar held by the Long Now foundation – and his argument was that if we rely on oil we will have geopolitical tensions that will end in global war. So in a situation where the alternative is global war, nuclear energy could be ok.

McCarthy notes that this issue has become enormously ideologized. And the ideology is tainting the rational assessment of the technology, and this really makes him irritated. He cites numerous examples where nuclear energy is almost eliminated from discussions of future energy, just because it is controversial.

In this, and in the overall pessimism of the future, McCarthy finds no other explanation than the radical movement of 1968. The movement created a ”the-end-is-near”-mindset that has turned out to be incredibly hard to break – in part because the 68-generation now is in power in most media outlets, companies, public sector agencies and other places. The optimistic generation of the 1950s is, like McCarthy a generation emeritus.

But McCarthy has great faith in the future (though I sure that he would scoff at that description – it is not for him about ”faith”). He thinks that we will continue to develop and that the future will out. The risks – that a public ideology of doom creates a negative selective pressure on innovations, science and investments – are there, but they will be overcome.

Extreme optimism, anyone?

Posted by Nicklas at 06:33 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

John LeGates has a tremendous experience in working with ICT-policy issues, as well as with policy analysis. When I meet him I want to discuss the future, but he starts off with issuing a caveat: he does not know how to predict the future, and it is clear that he does not think that anyone else does either. His grounds for this belief are simple: look back ten years and see who actually managed to predict the future.

He is his own counter-example, however. Back in 1980 LeGates wrote a paper that reduced the entire media industry to panic. He tried to sketch the plausible implications of information technology on the media world, and when I ask him now what he thought he got wrong, what he would change, he thinks for quite some time, and then answers, serioiusly, that he probably wouldn't change anything except for the timing. In a sense he thought that what is happening now (see the earlier post on a crisis in American media) would happen sooner, but it is happening now.

Well, what about the media then? LeGates predicts a two-tiered development (or rather: observes today that news industries are dividing into two distinct markets: the global/national and the local. Local news will always be needed, but global/national news may become commodities. This is not a novel idea, there are others who think the same. And on the commodity market of global and national news we could easily imagine that we will see a market for analysis and refined commentary emerge. The blogs are early entrants in this market, though LeGates thinks that they lack editorial quality (but that this might be changing). Personally, I think that editorial objectivity may have a niche market, but lessons from early American media seem to indicate that partisan, vile and propagandistic media can succeed quite well.

And the media is, of course, not the only sector of society that is being disrupted by the new technologies that develop. The natural question to ask is of course if the future will continue like this. John LeGates thinks it will not – he thinks we will see even more instability and an increased rate of change. While he is reluctant to predict the future, he notes that there are things happening now: forces, actors, trends – that can be used to understand the present, and often this is as useful as you could expect. One of the strongest and most persistent trends is that price/performance is increasing continually. And this in turn will lead to evermore instability and innovation. Often disruptive innovation, at that.

LeGates mentioned Moore's law as an example. I ask him whether he thinks that there are bounds to the development of price/performance and Moore's law. He smiles and says that there has always been such limits. And funnily, he notes, these bounds will always be reached in eight years or so. With regular intervals a paper is published that states that things cannot continue to evolve like they have sofar – but during the 40 years LeGates has been working with technology policy, well, they have continued to develop quickly breaking through all bounds.

The bounds, he explains, are there. But they are functions of the tools we have today. So when somebody say's that Moore's law will only hold true another 8 years, well they are correct: but only if we assume that nothing happens in eight years. And this never happens. During the eight years advances, changing technology bases and other trends eliminate the bounds. Progress knows bounds, but it keeps pushing them ahead.

This is really interesting. There should be a word for this phenomenon, and it is reminiscent of the worry horizons I tried to explore in a previous post. This boundary horizon is where our current tools will become worthless and fail to accelerate change. Over time it would be reasonable to guess that the boundary horizon has become shorter and shorter, and of course, on could formulate the singularity as the point where our tools become worthless the moment they are invented. The relationship between the tools of progress and progress is not well explored, and the tool horizon/boundary horizon may well be a useful concept to introduce in futures studies.

What slows this down then? Well, one thing, we agree – is regulation.John LeGates explains that all technologies go through phases and that during it's development at technology ”acquires the usually stakeholder accretions”. That is, the technology becomes politicized. This phenomenon might even be accelerating. As our society becomes more and more technology focused we seem to think that technology needs to be analysed and assessed from a societal standpoint earlier than before.

LeGates says that when he discusses this with large corporations, a worrying pattern is emerging. Many large companies note that they get more back from a dollar spent in the regulatory/legal department than in R&D. This is, of course, an extremely short-sighted view, but it seems to hold true. This encourages lawsuits over patents and copyrights, lobbying for retaining different regulatory perks (especially for large telcos) and other legal/regulatory strategies over basic research and development.

It seems as if R&D is perhaps best conducted, not within old firms, but in new entrants. Overall it may well be true that it is cheaper to buy these entrants than to finance research of your own. This would lead, in the long run, to an innovation system where large companies invest little or nothing in research. But the big question is if this is rational: if a dollar invested in research in a large company typically, over a time of ten years, returns two dollars, and if that same money could be used to by innovative firms the problem becomes two-fold: what are the costs for acquiring capital for these small innovative firms and what are the losses the large company suffers (or the gains) when it is continually forced to merge with smaller, more innovative companies? The equation looks quite complicated.

John LeGates finishes with an interesting observation: he notes that there is so much happening today that we tend to miss, and that there is no need to try to predict the future. The only thing we have to do is look around us and identify where we are today. That in itself is a very hard task. What is the state of the art in computer science, nano-technology and biotech? Who knows?

Maybe this is already the future.

Posted by Nicklas at 05:57 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

The Berkman Center of Internet and Society is an interesting institution connected with the Harvard Law School. They offer what is called a "clinical" education in cyberlaw. This means that they allow students to actually handle and work with real cases: they challenge patents, give advice to companies and help organizations in developing advocacy positions. The education is headed by five senior attorneys that help to secure the quality of the advice given, as well as work as advisors to the students.

This is of course a perfect way to introduce students to trial work as well as cyberlaw issues. Why don't we do this in Sweden?

(The center also has a number of interesting research projects.More about the later.)

Posted by Nicklas at 02:20 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

This morning I met with Victor Mayer-Schönberger at the JFK School of Government. We discussed governance issues and the Internet. Mayer-Schönberger is just finishing an article on the World Summit oin the Information Society (WSIS). During this summit the EU suggested that Internet governance issues be handled by a sui generis international institution. This institution would then be governmed by a basic charter of "rights" or qualities that Internet governance has to adhere to: openness, end-to-end...

The proposal was shot down by the US who felt that it was a bad idea, for reasons that are not clear. Mayer-Schönberger pointed out that if this had become international law, the result would have been that WSIS could have created a way to hold China and other dictatorships in check. They could then not design networks with heavy filtering, without violating the basic charter of Internet governance.

According to Mayer-Schönberger, then, the WSIS had within it's reach the possibility to restrain Chinese repression of the Internet, and they stopped it. Why? The formal reason might have been that the US was afraid that the Internet would come under the purvey of the ITU - connected to the UN. This would have been understandable. In the ITU we find a lot of countries that completely lack democratic legitimacy, and to allow them to govern the Internet is a horrible idea. But this was not the idea put forward by the EU - they did not want to choose between ICANN and ITU - they wanted to created a third alternative. But they were stopped - for what reason?

Mayer-Schönberger thinks that the interests of the Chinese government actually coincides with those of the large telecommunication companies in the US: they do not want to see end-to-end as a permanent quality of the Internet. They want to be able to control the networks, to prioritize traffic and de-commoditize connectivity.

We discussed at length the idea of end-to-end networks and the qualities the embody. Now, Mayer-Schönberger is not an unreserved fan of this design principle. He states that it seems clear that the end-to-end structure, the scale-free networks as well, seem adpated to incremental innovation - but not radical innovation. A strong believer in Stephen Jay Goulds model of punctuated equilibrium, Mayer-Schönberger believes that human innovation moves in large steps, and then remains in place. We should design our networks to accomodate this kind of innovation. But how? That is a hard question, but it seems as if we need new topologies to be able to strengthen this kind of innovation.

But how will these new networks look? One plausible idea that Mayer-Schöneberger works with is the idea of decentralised Napster-like networks where the computing resources are shared amongst a large number of different actors. Mayer-Schönberger has studied Second Life and other MMORPG to discern the architectural direction these gaming infrastructures are moving in. These games may well, in the future, allow for decentralised, radical innovation.

Posted by Nicklas at 02:02 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (3)

Garfinkel mentioned another interesting thing. He is, apparently, working on a book about randomness. He has found, he claims, that there are three kinds of randomness:

1) Quantum randomness - thermal noise, atomic degeneration represents a certain kind of randomness often referred to as true randomness. This randomness is fascinating in that we think that it is ontological, a physical quality.
2) Pseudo-randomness - where we can deduce what seems random as long as we have the seed. This is the kind of randomness found in random number generators.
3) Computational randomness - the easiest way to describe this is to say that a string is random if and only iff the shortest program that generates the string is as long as or longer than the string (no, that is sloppy, I will have to correct this later).

The really interesting thing is of course that we lack ways of figuring out what kind of randomness we are actually facing. What if quantum randomness is in fact pseudo-randomness? That would confirm Einsteins old comment that God does not play with dice...

Things about computational randomness and algorithmic complexity can be found here:

Posted by Nicklas at 09:09 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

”The main difference between the European and American view of privacy is that in the US you have a responsibility as a data subject to actually watch over your personal data. If you disclose it you loose the expectation of privacy that you would otherwise have enjoyed. In the EU the responsibility is focussed on the collecting party, not the data subject”, explains Dr Garfinkel when we discuss privacy issues. He is a nestor in this field, with several books, papers and projects that testify to his deep knowledge of the issues. His observation is interesting, even though it can be challenged. The EU is after all focusing not only on the data collector, but rather on the personal data as such. Anyone that handles personal data – much like people who handle explosives – have rights and duties that follow from the legislation in place. But Garfinkel has a point - and his unique perspective on privacy is a strength in the on-going debate about the future of the private sphere.

But isn't privacy dead? This was after all the argument made by the provocative book The Transparent Society, by physicist David Brin. Brin argued that privacy was dead (and had the audacity to add a ”good riddance” to that observation), and that we had now better focus on issues of access to personal data, rather than try to preserve the already fictional privacy of individuals. Brins argument is met with vehement anger from Garfinkel and other privacy activists. The find it ”childish”, ”extremely shallow” and call Brin a blatant: ”technological determinist”. And the perhaps most interesting thing is this: they do not agree with him. Garfinkel in fact thinks that this time in our history will be remembered as the ”wild west of privacy”, when we had no clear regulations in place and faltered in our belief in this democratic core value. Things will, he thinks, become much better.

Maybe. It depends on many different factors, one of which is technology. Here Garfinkel is involved in one of the perhaps most interesting technological development projacts that the privacy scene has seen for some while. Classical privacy enhancing technologies fail because they add to much perceived cost to the user: noone has patience with configuring P3P-options or encrypting e-mails, and the idea of privacy brokers as it was launched by John Hagel III has never succeeded commercially. Early companies, like Privada, have returned to other, more security software oriented markets. But what if we could find a small, simple function that could, if modified only slightly, help privacy to develop in a much more positive way than today? If so, we could enhance privacy in a way that would be transparent to users and still very positive.

Garfinkel has found one such simple function: the delete and format commands in most common operating systems. Windows, for example, does not delete files that are deleted. It simply forgets where it put the file – but the file is still there, on the hard drive for anyone with the computer forensics skills to find. Garfinkel has already managed to get Apple to fix this in their operating system: there is now a secure way to empty the trash can, so that when it is emptied, the files are actually overwritten with random data seven times.

Why seven? Garfinkel sighs, puts his head in his hands and murmurs something inaudible. It turns out that there is no need to overwrite old data more than once, perhaps twice, but companies compete with the number of times the overwrite old data – as if this would in fact increase the level of deletion. In modern hard drives this is quite impossible to prove. Instead, it turns out, this is only a grotesque waste of computing capacity and speed.

”7 times are 6 times too many.” Garfinkel notes, and it slows the system 6 times more than necessary. But the perception of security seems to lie in magic numbers, still.

Garfinkel has in fact developed technologies for erasing and deleting data more completely, and he thinks that these technologies should be mandatory. In fact, he has even had the law changed by his one-man-privacy-lobbying-campaign. Companies that their own used hard drives have an obligation to erase them securely before they do so, he tells us. But resellers do not, and this is something tha Garfinkel wants to change.

Together with a German company he is currently buying used harddrives on Ebay – he has around a hundred different harddrives in his office, perhaps more – and he looks for personal data on these, to try to ascertain how many users actually delete their data before selling a harddrive, or if they do erase them if they erase them securely, not only using the substandard deletion commands in their operating systems.

His project has shown that second-hand harddrives that are not securely formatted may actually represent a huge risk to privacy for unsuspecting individuals.

Garfinkel hopes that Microsoft will include a secure deletion command in Vista, the upcoming version of Windows, and he says that he has at least gotten a verbal promise that this will be the case.

In his crusade against privacy infringing technologies, Garfinkel has also testified about computer forensics in court. In one case he succeeded in showing that the log files used to accuse a man in a case, where an ISP had suffered an intrusion attack in their systems that cost them a third of their customers, hade spelling errors and typos. Log files never have typing errors, he stated and showed the court the typos.

The prosecutor's side then had to admit that yes, they had edited the log files in a word processor – which of course amounts to tampering with evidence – something that weakened their case enormously. Garfinkel then could show that the timestamps on the log files – formulated as the number of days since 1/1 1970 – actually showed that the logs were written several weeks after they were printed. The timestamp mismatch clearly showed that the logs were fabricated and the accused was acquitted.

Computer forensics is a new field, but it will grow in importance as more and more court cases actually have to deal with digital evidence of different kinds. It will be interesting to see how Garfinkel changes this field as well...

Posted by Nicklas at 08:04 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (4)

This morning I visited the CSAIL at MIT and had the pleasure to discuss the future of the Internet with Dr David Clark and Dr William Lehr. Both are engaged in the interesting Communications Futures Policy project. The subject of the day was the future of the Internet and the conversation keyed in closely with the conversation I hade just a few days ago with Dr Parulkar.

What technological and social trends will drive the change for the Internet?

Both Dr Clarke and Dr Lehr agree that the Internet will change because of new technologies and networks that connect to it. Sensor networks and embedded computing are things that will become more and more important. But it is important, notes Clark, to think about this question in two steps: one is how the Internet will change and the other how it should change. The truly hard question is not how we will make the Internet better – we can envision ways to do this, as can industry – but rather how we can create the infrastructure we will need in the future. This is also the good thing with the GENI-project, according to Dr Clarke. The facility is a palpable result of the project but it is only one part, the actual research in the FIND-project (Future INternet Design) is much more important (a facility without projects to run would make no sense).

We have a peculiar problem when it comes to this. The Internet has been so hugely successful that it tends to blot out the need for not only incremental, but rather disruptive, innovation. It is hardly surprising that the majority of Internet researchers work with a better net, instead of a completely different net, since the net works so well right now. But what should the Internet look like in five to ten years time? That should be the question and we should bracket all issues of transition to this new platform, and concentrate on re-inventing a global communication platform as we would envision it not knowing of the Internet of today.

A hard task indeed.

Is the security situation degrading or improving or is it stable?

Both Dr Lehr and Dr Clarke think that the security situation is degrading and that the Internet is becoming less secure. Security, in fact, is the primary reason and motivation behind the FIND-project, Dr Clarke says. Phishing, new security holes and other systemic risks become more and more obvious, and where credit card companies could traditionally internalize risks by becoming their own insurance companies they have a hard time doing that today because of the systemic component of Internet risk: a disruptive technology could very well destroy the entire security systems of the existing commerce infrastructure.

Dr Clarke also thinks that in the next ten years information security will transform into risk management, the ambition to achieve total security or to use encryption will wane and be replaced by a reasoned attitude towards risk.

But what does it actually mean to say that the Internet is becoming less secure. Would it for example be reasonable to assume that information security breach related costs (ISB-costs) have increased as a percentage of the net economic worth of the Internet? Well, this is a much harder question to answer, says Dr Lehr. We do know that information security related costs are increasing, but the again, the total economic value of the Internet is almost immeasurable today and still growing (yes, that does sound strange, but it is huge anyway). It may well be that ISB-costs actually are becoming relatively smaller since the economic potential of the Internet is growing so quickly.

What about end-to-end architectures?

Much as Dr Parulkar Dr Clarke is not comfortable with the question of whether or not we will keep certain aspects of the existing network architecture, such as the end-to-end design. He does believe that a central component dealing that enables parties to freely consent on the use of different applications must be retained in order to ensure innovation at the edges of the network, but he also acknowledges that this is a blunt description.

"We need a new language to describe the richness of what is happening with networks today", he says.

And this new language is something he is trying to figure out in his ”non-existent spare time”. This does not mean, however, that he condones the idea of legislating for network neutrality. The idea or thinking behind network neutrality is that a infrastructure owner should not be able to prioritize his or her own traffic while sub-optimizing that of other, virtual operators of different kinds. Large companies dependent on the network, but unwilling to pay for it such as virtual VoIP-providers, search engines and others have been pushing for legislation that would make it impossible for network providers to discriminate against service providers.

The temptation for these companies to do so, however, must be great. To be able to sell prioritization would be to transform connectivity from a commodity to a differentiated product and would probably lead to enormous profits when media companies, service providers and others had to buy prioritized traffic (or simply traffic of with a certain QoS).

The problem that Dr Lehr and Dr Clarke have with this idea is not that they are against the legislation per se but rather that they think that this is a very dangerous area for the legislator to move in. The slightest mistake may lead to very adverse effects, and they both state that they have a hard time figuring out how this legislation would even look. All current examples the reject outright as not well thought.through.

"I am extremely nervous about our ability to write laws that cleanly excise the bad behaviours", Dr Clarke says.

And what would immediately happen if this was allowed is of course that basic Internet access would get a baseline quality that would be far below today's levels.

In summary

Both Dr David Clarke and Dr William Lehr have a wealth of experience in the Internet field, and their priority right now is to find the next Internet, beyond the current incremental improvements. What really strikes me about the discussion we had is how hard this will be, how extremely challenging it will be to bracket the Internet, it's current successes and the huge societal impact it has had.

And how necessary it is to do just this in order to come up with something truly deserving of the epithet ”the next” big thing.

Posted by Nicklas at 08:01 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Is American media in a crisis? Well, it isn't hard to argue that this is indeed the case: journalists that fake information, extort celebrities and make up stories, advertising revenues bleeding and those eternally vigilant bloggers everywhere. It doesn't seem too good. And in a sense the crisis is deeper than is usually realized. It is probably also much more interesting than we think, from a historical perspective.

Judith and Jason and Jaded Transparency

Judith Miller and Jason Blair are often cited as examples of a crisis not in American media, but perhaps more in American journalism. And the still unravelling affair of mr Stern , where a sting operation uncovered a protection scheme for celebrities that is nothing short of bizarre (for $100 000 a local billionaire was ensured immunity from the scandal monger, and there were even different packages: if the celebrity so chose he could feed Stern with gossip on other celebrities instead to insure his own immunity to the prying of the press) is really not something that inspires trust in an already somewhat tarnished craft.

But is this all bad? Anne Gordon, managing editor of the Philadelphia Inquirer, thinks that it may well be the start of a rebirth of the classical values of journalism. The press is now developing new practices of transparency and correction that are designed to meet the requirements even of those pesky bloggers. Gordon rightly points out that the press is reacting to the criticism being levelled at it. This happens very rarely if at all in other cases: the government, businesses and other societal actors seem content to continue as before after a few obligatory mea culpas in press releases and perhaps an emotional TV-interview.

What does not kill me, makes me stronger, Nietzsche would note. This is a true point, but how is this working out? What is this transparency actually accomplishing? With longer and longer corrections in the news and more vigilance on the behalf of the blogging public the press is probably loosing more of its credibility and forced to adjust its self-image as underdogs and truthseekers to accomodate this change in the public perception. The result of transparency practices may in fact be a further, in some cases well-deserved, erosion of the confidence in the press.

It gets worse before it gets better.

Future Shock

As if these issues were not enough to deal with, the media landscape is going through it's most tumultous phase of change in at least a hundred years. The basic business and revenue models of the media industry are both exploding and imploding at the same time. Technology is remaking the entire field of publishing.

Ad revenues are axploding into other channels: the Internet, mobile, TV, radio, podcasting and even computer games are emerging as new channels for advertising. Many of them low-cost alternatives that offer supreme cost/contact-ratios and interesting novel branding opportunities. And while the revenues from traditional advertising dissipate into new forms made available by emerging technologies, classical classifieds are being swallowed by new business models like eBay. Sure, some newspapers have succeeded in creating their own alternatives, and they have actually leveraged their local brand value to migrate into the new channels – but they now have to compete in an environment where the lock-in costs for consumers are almost zero. Network economics will help those that started first, and create feedback loops that strengthen those that were first to market, but that in no way offers any long-term guarantee that these models will continue to work.

This explosion of revenues is accompanied by a curious implosion of the basic business model offered by newspapers: selling subscriptions and copies to the public. News has been become a commodity in less than ten years, and only a few niched newsoutlets have succeeded in getting paid for news. In the cases where this succeeds it is often because the news in question has an evident economic worth, so the perhaps most successful actors are of course business magazines like Wall Street Journal and Financial Times.

Young people turn primarily to the web for news and ignore the classical paper version. This is evident in the studies published by, for example, the Pew Internet and American Life project. Dr Brad Horrigan says that this may not be extremely bad – since it only signals a change of medium not a change of the interest in news as such. The problem, however, seems to be that there is no business model for the new medium handy that can carry the cost structures generated by the old medium. Paper-based cost structures are collapse if they have to rely on digital revenues.

Things that go Blog in the night

Add to this those horrible, citizen, grassroot-journalists that everybody talks about, those, those...bloggers. They read the news and they read them with the most critical pair of glasses in circulation since Old Nick perused the Holy Writ. They are said to be bad for almost everything, those bloggers: they polarize the country, they know little of politics and less of analysis...But the problem is that they keep growing. Dr Brad Horrigan at the Pew Internet and American Life Project shows in recent data that 11% of adult internet users blog and a whopping 25% of adult internet users read blogs (yes, there are more readers than writers, contrary to the popular conception of blogs written by and for other bloggers, if for anyone...)

And bloggers seem better informed than the average citizen about what the opposing side actually thinks. This is no guarantee against polarization, mind. As Dr Horrigan points out when we meet, mr Rush Limbaugh probably has a pretty good idea about what the democrats want to do. This does not, however, stop him from being a fairly polarizing force in American society.

Bloggers find scandal and exploit it. They force angry retorts and tear through politicians reputations like a samurai on speed thorugh a rice-paper wall. They create a new public sphere, even. In a recent court case it was found that a person has less reasonable expectation of privacy if he or she has been the object of bloggers' investigations.

In a sense there is only one thing the bloggers remind us of. And that is early American journalists. In his funny and revealing book Infamous Scribblers Eric Burns shows these early journalists and some of the earliest American papers to be little more than scandal peddling, controversial and divisive outlets of partisan anger and hate. The aim for the jugular in American media was born early, and the bloggers merely adhere to an old tradition when they seek sordid rumours and exploit them.

James Callendar, for example, publisher of the rumours about Alexander Hamiltons affair with Marya Reynolds secured for himself many advantages by extorting Jefferson. Even the now-notorius Stern is merely walking in the footsteps of his predcessors in the American media.

If anything the bloggers have a connection with the original American press. The unbearably politically correct newspapers have ossified into giants without heart and spite – much to their own detriment, it seems.

”Infamous Scribblers” is actually a quote from Washington, but it fits very nicely as a description of the bloggers. And remember, then, that from the infamous scribblers were born one of the world's perhaps most impressive newsindustries.

Creative destruction, rebirth and re-innovation. Those are really not signs of weakness.

What's next?

So – where is American media headed? Is it in a crisis? Not at all. American media is reinventing itself bottom up. Newspapers are being sold, much as Anne Gordons Philadelphia Inquirer, and the sector is undoubtely being consolidated. But there is something else, interesting, happening at the same time.

The large telecommunication and cable companies are developing vertically, ensuring that they can provide interesting content to their users. Some buy baseball teams, others do movies, betting that video is the next big competetive advantage. But it is not unreasonable to hope that news and analysis as well as commentary may become important new elements in the offering of these vertically integrated communication giants.

Sure, in economic theory this would never happen. Andrew Odlyzko was quite right when he stated that content is not king. In a competitive situation telecommunications would try to differentiate their business models by becoming better at their core business. True, there might be some interesting opportunities for horizontal or vertical integration, but it is doubtful if this would hold for the deals now being crafted in the situation rooms at Comcast, Verizon and other similiar companies. Those deals make sense only in a situation where competition is limited, and where consolidation and vertical integration then become attractive alternatives.

And it is important to debunk one of the myths about the current crisis in the media: people do want qualified content. They seek analysis and commentary as well as in-depth articles. I listened to Steven Weisman of the New York Times at a seminar recently and he told the attending crowd that he had actually checked the statistics at the New York Times: the analytical content, the commentary and background articles were among the most popular articles that the newspapers website offer to it's readers. So the demand for good journalism is as strong as ever, perhaps stronger. It combines with a demand for scandal, that has been fairly constant during the lifetime of the American press, but this is nothing new, nothing to be alarmed by.

The future hinges on the newsindustry re-inventing itself, or being re-invented by another industry. Look at the music industry. In it's current sclerotic mode it would have sued the next generation of customers to death if Apple had not come along and saved them.

It all boils down to this: who will be the iTunes of the American newsmedia?

Posted by Nicklas at 11:57 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (1)

Today I had the opportunity to go to the movies for the first time in a while. I saw - and I know I am the last person in the Universe to see this movie, thank you - V is for Vendetta. The basic theme of the movie is resistance against a totalitarian government, and what methods are actually legitimate to use in that resistance. As for example Johan Norberg has pointed out the picture glosses over this important question in a very unsatisfactory way, and this is a pity - beacuse it would probably have added a lot if V was portrayed more as a psychotic fighter, than as a hero in classical Hollywood mode.

The action scenes are all you could reasonable ask for, with flying knives, guns, impeccable martial arts techniques and the right set ups (as in the scene where V notes that, yes, he only has knives, but they (the totalitarian police) only have bullets - and when they are out of those they have to reload. They had thus better get him before they need to reload , because he will not leave them time to do so. And, no, they don't have time to do that before V has turned them into totalitarian collaborator sushi).

An interesting detail is that V is intratextually very dense: it is filled with intricate plotting and references as well as symboils intertwined with eachother. Several times the existence of coincidences is questioned by many of the different characters in the movie. This new, sometimes paranoid hermeneutic is, I think, deeply significant as a daignostic of post-9/11 society and culture. We now seek meaning and connections in the world to find some kind of basic safety: the need for clear enemies, convoluted plots and intricate webs of symbols is born from a fear that the world is as meaningless as it seemed when the terrorists crashed into the WTC.

The DaVinci Code, The Rule of Four and other works of fiction work with the same basic methodology: revealing a layer of deep meaning under the veneer of triviality and accident. This need for plot and consistency is the same need that gives birth to a multitude of conspiracy theories around the war on terrorism, 9/11, the Iraq war and other current affairs. It is, I think we could say, a need for a Weberian re-enchantment of the world, the return to a state of existence where there are no coincidences, nothing is contingent, everything happens out of necessity and according to a greater scheme.

Conspiracy theorist researchers speak about the loss of a shared Weltbild, and the loss of a common epistemology, even. This loss then creates uncertainty and a sense of abandonment, which art then tries to remedy. Mimesis becomes unimportant, and semiosis - the creation of meaning in closed systems of signs - becomes the predominant method in creative arts.

It is really not strange, I think.

What is, after all, more scary than to think that our lives, our fates are based on nothing but a series of fortunate or unfortunate coincidences? To deny coincidence (as the characters do in V is for Vendetta) is to believe in meaning and narrative, to crave plot and thus individual worth.

It takes a certain kind of courage to embrace the idea that we are accidental and not essential. And I am not even sure that it is humanely possible to fully accept the ultranihilistic perspective. (Meaning might very well be a Kantian category. It doesn't matter if our lives have or lack meaning - we have no choice but to see them as meaningful.)

This also explains the many references to religion in the movie, I think. Johan - amongst others - was upset about this since the original character in the comic book was an atheist, but I think that "God is in the rain" is a key phrase that promises meaning and provides a backdrop for the born-again baptism of Eve, for example, as well as for V:s subsequent sacrifice. Religion fits in nicely with the new mode of art since it contains the most complete meaning-generating sign systems humanity has formed. The basic assumption behind religion is the same hermeneutic that is embodied in the kind of art V, The DaVinci Code and other works represent - that there are no coincidences. "God is in the rain" is merely another way of stating that there are no coincidences.

All in all, then, a nice way to spend an afternoon.

Posted by Nicklas at 12:13 AM | Permalink | Comments (3) | TrackBacks (0)

Today I met with Dr Guru Parulkar with the National Science Foundation on the Global Environment for Network Innovations (GENI). The project has a staggeringly difficult task: to reinvent the Internet bottom up. The theory behind this is actually quite simple: the current Internet architecture has powered more than thirty years of innovation, commerce and communication, but it is now in need of a review and there are obvious difficulties with security, address space limitations and basic networking functions. New innovations, like sensor networks and mobile clients, require a different structure and a new form of networking architecture.

Why a new Internet?

There is a great risk that the current Internet infrastructure actually creates a negative selection pressure on innovations in that it limits what can be done, for example in the sensor network space. To avoid this Dr Parulkar and the National Science Foundation founded GENI. The idea being to connect existing research on what the next generation Internet would look like and to develop a research facility for experiments that require a different, more versatile network design.

Sensor networking - where sensors with limited computing and communication power may be widely deployed at a cheap cost - will revolutionize much of what we know about science, communication and the net today. These many little sensors will be embedded, Dr Parulkar believes, in everything that costs more than ten dollars - starting a cambrian explosion of connectivity where the species of connected devices will explode in to multiplicity and result in a much more diverse network than today. This also requires new thinking on the part of the network designers, he notes.

Sensor networks are also interesting because they bring senses to the web. Hitherto the net has been numb, deaf, blind, without sense of smell or touch. With sensor networks - and some are already being tried out in military applications - all this will change. We will have a sensing network, a special kind of entity that will be able to monitor everything from pollutants in the air to the kind of perfume you are using (now, let's not get started on the privacy issues in a sensor network with DNA-sampling ability...).

The GENI facility - Dr Parulkar is careful to point out that it is not a testbed since a testbed is dedicated to one single idea - will be started in the year 2008 and be ready in five years. In a way it resembles a particle accelerator, but for network research: it is general facility with certain limitations that can be used by researchers to try out designed experiments in a controlled environment. The operating time of the testbed is presumed to be ten years.

Societal impact studies

When Dr Parulkar describes the project I ask him if they have decided to take into account societal impact issues as well, and he says that they plan to do so. It is, he explains, an integral part of the project. I admit that this really does not surprise me, but I still want to know why, so I asked him directly: why would you care about the societal impact? The guys who invented the Internet never did - they invented a then-superior form of networking system, that was all. They had no intention, capability or reason to discuss societal impact (and had they done so they would probably not have expected wh