Deki, ctrl-C, email, bandwidth, brains, commons, carbon, Gaia

[joerasmussen]

Sunday morning rant from Australia:

I was chatting with Dominic Engels at MindTouch and someone at his end overheard our conversation and yelled: 'If copy and paste didn't suck there would be no Deki.' The more you think about this one, the deeper it gets.

Make an email with an attachment and send it to five people. Now there are six copies of the attachment. Three recipients make amendments and they 'reply all'. Now there are 24 copies of the attachment. Arrgh!

Have you noticed that there's only one computer in the world? I did a full audit, and here's the count: ONE. Ten or fifteen years ago there were hundreds of millions, now there's one. Once you get that, it becomes obvious that the computer doesn't need 24 (or 24,000) copies of the same file. The only reason we make copies is bandwidth. But bandwidth is coming.

Processors plus links equals a brain. The processors are neurons and the links are axons. That's what a brain is. That's all a brain is. More bandwidth equals faster links. At some point the brain will go critical and we'll all see that the web is alive. Alive and very, very smart. And conscious. I'm part of it and I have a model of the whole of it - that's consciousness. (It does not matter that the model is rough and imperfect).

OK, I'm an economist by training, and my economic antennae prick up at this point. The problem with the environment is fundamentally a 'tragedy of the commons'. When I drive my car I get all the benefit, but only one six-billionth of the carbon cost. So I drive my car too much. The resource allocation mechanism is (severely) sub-optimal.

But if there's only one brain on the planet, then that brain does not have a 'tragedy of the commons' problem. For a single, planet-scale entity, there's nowhere to hide from the costs of the resource allocation. The key question then is whether (if? when?) the brain gets enough control over its cells to coax them into being a little bit less destructive.

The bright news is that we are nicely pre-adapted to do this. Our 'community' instinct has been solving tragedies of the commons for tens of thousands of years. Have you noticed how well behaved we all are when we work in a Deki community, or in Wikipedia? Sure, there's vandalism, but the overwhelming impression is of cooperation on projects that become incredibly complex and beautiful.

My thinking went: This is a bit like James Lovelock's 'Gaia' hypothesis. But then Tim Flannery came along and bent my thinking a bit and I now see that this is the Gaia hypothesis. We fall into the trap of thinking that humans are not part of the natural world (and computers even more so,) but that's garbage - if you can measure it, it's natural. If it's running the planet, it's Gaia.

So: All power to you, MindTouch - you're helping to build the solution. (Let's hope we've got enough time!)

[SteveB]

That's, uhh, an interesting post... So, just curious, when did the party end the night before? :D You hop through 8 or so concepts with an almost invisible thread to follow and the conclusion is a bit a cliffhanger. Maybe a follow-up post is due? ;)

[joerasmussen]

Well I could bang on for 30 pages, but no-one would read it. :rolleyes:

[openmind]

Like he said....coming from Australia...no more explanation needed :D (....dont' worry he'll bang out that 30pager soon...beer delivery guy's rarely on time....)

[SteveB]

A follow-up post to unravel some of the threads would be great!

[joerasmussen]

Can I reach you by phone or email? I've had a couple of chats with Dominic Engels. If I rang him could he forward me to you?

I've got an idea I'd like to put to you. Perhaps the true philosophy would be to post it here, now, but it's still a baby and I feel it needs a bit of gestation before it is released onto the wide, wide, wide ...


... you never know who might be stomping around out there! What was I saying about good behavior in wiki communities?:)

[joerasmussen]

Paragraph 1 links to Para2 because email is an example of copy and paste, providing you accept the idea that there's only one computer - P3. Copy and paste sucks partly because you lose version control as soon as you make a copy.

Also, if you have enough bandwidth, P3, you can save massively on space. The word 'space' brings to mind the saving on disc, the 24,000 copies of the file. Equally important; almost certainly more important, is the economies of brain power when you hyperlink. So many of the posts in this forum are links to answers. The answer might be long and complex - but the post might be five words. Follow the link if you need to, read on if you don't.

You don't even need to explicitly hyperlink. When I use terms like 'axons', P4, 'tragedy of the commons', P5-6, 'Tim Flannery' and 'Gaia' P8, effectively, they are hyperlinks - anyone can drop the terms into Google or Wikipedia and have more information at their fingertips in seconds. So I don't have to bang on for 30 pages.

What's my page count, openmind?

We operate in a milieu of massive parallelism. In P4 I make the reasonably outrageous claim that this massively parallel organism is alive, conscious, and very, very smart. Make of that what you will. But it's definitely alive, I can feel one of it's pulses in my own neck.

So now I'm going more outrageous: When I say there's only one computer on the planet, I mean only one, and I mean in the proper sense of a computer as an information processing machine. Not just me, you and our PCs. But also my pet dog, your lymphatic system, the microculture and ecosystem in SteveB's back yard, and the control mechanisms that keep the atmosphere a nice comfy temperature.

An earlier position of mine, observing the growth in connectedness, was that the computer might be clever enough to pilot the beast that Lovelock calls 'Spaceship Earth'. In Lovelock's spaceship earth scenario, Gaia dies, and humanity is left at the controls of the planet, flying though space. In other words the natural control mechanism dies and is replaced by an artificial one - a nightmare scenario for Lovelock. But Flannery is more positive. He suggests that the 'artificial' pilot is in fact part of Gaia. In fact there's no way to not be part of Gaia, just as there's no way to not be part of the natural world.

Gotta wrap my way back to the 'tragedy of the commons' argument, P6, but first a bit more on the one-brain stuff:

Maybe the brain really is knitting together into a single entity that can act as one entity. This has happened before in natural history. The prime examples are 1) when single-celled organisms knitted together to make multi-celled organisms, and 2) even further back, when organelles, (or maybe autocatlytic sets - name check: Stuart Kauffman, hyperlink, hyperlink) knitted together to form the first cells. Note that entities give up reproduction (the most important thing of all!) in order to be part of teams. (That are even better at reproduction)

But we also have examples of some rather looser teams, that lead on to the next bit of the argument. There is the team that forms when animals use sexual reproduction (so much more complicated than asexual reproduction - and you only get to put half your genes into the next generation). Then there are more complex versions of sexual reproduction - bees, ants etc. (name check: E.O. Wilson, also Douglas Hofstadter, book: Godel, Escher, Bach)

And then even looser communities like villages, and finally back to the tragedy of the commons, P6. If you look at actual English commons through history, most of them were not all that tragic most of the time. Near-complete information, plus habit, convention and accountability almost always kept disaster at bay. Commons were run by small communities where everyone knew everyone else, everyone could see everyone else's contributions and the outcomes of those contributions. Everyone was bound by, and contributed to the development of, common law.

Sound familiar? The English village with a common was a wiki, P7. I'm going to say that again: The English village with a common was a wiki.

Now here's the problem: Those kind of communities never worked for numbers much above 150 people. They never work for our cousins the chimpanzees for above 150 troop members (or perhaps a bit lower). Our interactions with fellow humans at levels above these communities consist of village warfare for 2 million years. Our instincts are 'community' for insiders and 'warfare' for outsiders. Our social monitoring technology breaks down for communities bigger than 150, and individual ambition gets the better of community. But technology can change.

In the last 10,000 years we've found ways to make ever bigger teams. We call it government. There's some degree of consensus that it's rubbish. The teams are basically too big to manage, but a combination of coercion and propaganda has proven reasonably effective (Name check: Douglass North). We need ways of telling 'insiders' from 'outsiders'. If you sign up for 'nationhood' and a set of national symbols you are a chance of knowing whether to switch on 'community' or 'warfare'. In the thread above, openmind throws my Australian-ness at me AS A SLUR. He's saying, you're not on my team: SWITCH ON WARFARE.

But here's the thing. I can go back and look at every post openmind has made (I did!). Is he always a bastard, or was he just having a bad day? 100% accountability. Now that's technology. And Robert Axelrod's experiments suggest that a healthy community needs a few bastards around anyway.

So I want to contrast government in our traditional communities with governance in wiki communities. I know as much or more about openmind as I do about my own Prime Minister. My Prime Minister's job is to bring to the fore everything that is good about himself, and to bury everything that is bad. The fact that he is Prime Minister shows that he's very good at it.

The Wikipedia community is huge - orders of magnitude bigger than 150 people, but there's nowhere to hide. It manages to be both massively tolerant of misbehavior, and also nearly immune to its effects. It's gorgeous governance architechture.

Three steps to the end of P8. 1) I've installed a Deki wiki at my workplace, and increasingly it's full of procedures, published emails, links to useful info and places for people to collaborate - at what point would you say that the Deki is running the company? 2) OK if the Australian government decides to use Deki to manage collaboration between the bureaucrats, law, executive and the rest of us, at what point is the Deki running the country? 3) If wiki architecture becomes the model for our social interaction with the planetary community, at what point is this entity piloting spaceship earth?

P9 is one of the most important. It's the 'I love you' paragraph. If I'm a neuron and my links are axons, then I only fire if my exciter signals are stronger than my suppressor signals. I got an exciter signal from SteveB and a suppressor from openmind. (I drifted into casting aspersions on openmind's good character - much more than I would like. These things tend to escalate. But he provided me with such good material! I couldn't have created a better sockpuppet.) SteveB's exciter signal won out and I fired again. But if I want feedback I have to send off a few exciters of my own.

It's a brain, baby! Alive, conscious, and very, very smart.

[openmind]

I'll have to read this again at home jazzed up to Loueke or Ognenovski. (I'll have to reformat to give proper pagecount..)
Where do I send the beer? (tryin' to kill that suppressor vibe before it reaches me :D )

[SteveB]

Wow, joerasmussen. I re-read your post after openmind indirectly signaled me by posting a follow-up (my activation function is directly linked to forum activity... yes, I read almost every post... that's why my post count is so exceedingly high :) ).

I can't add to the thought experiment as I must first digest it. The question that intrigued me the most is about the balance of power between "information" and "actors." While the first reaction would be to say that actors are always in control, the reality is that they act upon information. So, by transitivity, it's the information "membrane" that is really in control. Although, by itself, the membrane is not alive and doesn't run anything actively. I can see how this point can be made and the interplay of viruses and cells certainly reinforces it. However, for the "membrane" to be in control, it must act to some degree on what it lets in and what it doesn't let in. If it lets in everything, then it's useless--just as a person who always agrees with you, that's why we need dissenters like openmind. On the other hand, if it blocks everything, it essential kills the world as perceived by the actor, which will in all likelihood kill the actor itself.

Yet, it occurs to me, there is another role the membrane can play. Deki is a completely transparent membrane. It does filter out information. However, it's not useless as per the statement above, because it "augments" information with meta-information. It turns chronological events into a precise historical record. A record that can be recalled and acted upon by the actors based on new stimuli that made it through the membrane. Hence Deki must be neither actor nor membrane. Then what is it?

[maphew]

For anyone who wants to explore some more of the "there is only one computer" idea, see Kevin Kelly's "We Are the Web (http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/13.08/tech_pr.html)". An excerpt:

"The real transformation under way is more akin to what Sun's John Gage had in mind in 1988 when he famously said, "The network is the computer." He was talking about the company's vision of the thin-client desktop, but his phrase neatly sums up the destiny of the Web: As the OS for a megacomputer that encompasses the Internet, all its services, all peripheral chips and affiliated devices from scanners to satellites, and the billions of human minds entangled in this global network. This gargantuan Machine already exists in a primitive form. In the coming decade, it will evolve into an integral extension not only of our senses and bodies but our minds. Today, the Machine acts like a very large computer with top-level functions that operate at approximately the clock speed of an early PC. It processes 1 million emails each second, which essentially means network email runs at 1megahertz. Same with Web searches. Instant messaging runs at 100kilohertz, SMS at 1kilohertz. The Machine's total external RAM is about 200 terabytes. In any one second, 10 terabits can be coursing through its backbone, and each year it generates nearly 20 exabytes of data. Its distributed "chip" spans 1 billion active PCs, which is approximately the number of transistors in one PC.

This planet-sized computer is comparable in complexity to a human brain. Both the brain and the Web have hundreds of billions of neurons (or Web pages). Each biological neuron sprouts synaptic links to thousands of other neurons, while each Web page branches into dozens of hyperlinks. That adds up to a trillion "synapses" between the static pages on the Web. The human brain has about 100 times that number - but brains are not doubling in size every few years. The Machine is."



Thanks for starting the thread joerasmussen. I enjoy the ideas and associations it brings to mind. It reminds me of looking at the stars on a clear nights, or the panaroamic view from a mountain top, or trying to imagine, really imagine, how many little semi-autonomous beings we call cells there are in a single human body. There is a certain presence of awe, limitless space. An awareness of how small and puny we are in the context of things, yet somehow that smallness does not translate to powerlessness or insignificance.

[maphew]

Here some real data on the posited global brain, and unlike KK's slice given above, it has nothing to do with technology other than the sensors used to record it: http://noosphere.princeton.edu/

"The Global Consciousness Project, also called the EGG Project, is an international, multidisciplinary collaboration of scientists, engineers, artists and others. We collect data continuously from a global network of physical random number generators located in 65 host sites around the world. The archive contains more than 10 years of random data in parallel sequences of synchronized 200-bit trials every second. Our purpose is to examine subtle correlations that may reflect the presence and activity of consciousness in the world. We predict structure in what should be random data, associated with major global events. When millions of us share intentions and emotions the GCP/EGG network shows small but meaningful differences from expectation. This suggests that large scale group consciousness has effects in the physical world. We need to know about this, and learn to use our full capacities for creative movement toward a conscious future."

[sniggy]

great post and discussion :) fits the project we're working on. nice

[joerasmussen]

Whoohoopa-phreeeeoor! A place for HUGE ideas.

This thread slept for three months, and I stopped looking - but it's back with a vengeance. So many new jump-off points I don't know where to start - many thanks to all, and I take it all back. Seriously don't know where to start - maybe I'd better sleep on it - except perhaps to say:

I've got my second baby coming any time this week. I want this planet fixed. I want it fixed NOW, and I want you guys on it.

[joerasmussen]

Hey, Maphew I love the links to the 'world is one computer' stuff - many thanks.

But I want to pick up on Steve's post about actors and membrane:


for the "membrane" to be in control, it must act to some degree on what it lets in and what it doesn't let in. If it lets in everything, then it's useless--just as a person who always agrees with you, that's why we need dissenters like openmind. On the other hand, if it blocks everything, it essential kills the world as perceived by the actor, which will in all likelihood kill the actor itself.

Yet, it occurs to me, there is another role the membrane can play. Deki is a completely transparent membrane. It does filter out information. However, it's not useless as per the statement above, because it "augments" information with meta-information. It turns chronological events into a precise historical record. A record that can be recalled and acted upon by the actors based on new stimuli that made it through the membrane. Hence Deki must be neither actor nor membrane. Then what is it?

... not entirely sure I've got full grip of what you're saying but here goes:

Seems to me we've become more conscious of the power of voting. This can be at a simple level like trying to work collaboratively on a t-shirt slogan (http://forums.developer.mindtouch.com/showthread.php?t=849). But it's also the engine of growth for successful organisms like Deki. Effectively, the world is voting for Deki (like crazy!) and Twitter, and Mozilla, and Linux, and Wikipedia and so on.

The argument for market economies (as opposed to planned) runs a similar way. Say you buy a plastic trinket for $1.50. The trinket came to your continent from a different continent in a shipping container. The ship runs on a type of oil called 'bunker'. Far away on another continent, a bloke has an administrative role in the company that buys and sells bunker. This guy likes bananas - not in any excessive way, but when they are in season, he and his family would usually buy a bunch per week. The bananas are grown on a fourth continent by a farmer named Aaron.

When you buy the trinket for $1.50, you VOTE that Aaron should grow bananas and not paw paw. The weighting of your vote is 20-25 orders of magnitude less than the $1.50, but Aaron gets dekillions of similar votes, and so, for the moment, he's sticking with bananas.

Actor or membrane? The decisions about the farm are made by the actor, Aaron - but the membrane, with its purchases of $1.50 trinkets, is steering him in all sorts of subtle ways. The beautiful thing about this in terms of governance is that it does not have to feel fascist to Aaron. He can grow paw paw if he wants. If he wants, he can neglect the farm and spend his time doodling around in the middle of the night on collaboration websites.

I'm interested in the capacity of the membrane to pull governance off governments. In Wikipedia there's a piece of common law called Beans (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Don%27t_stuff_beans_up_your_nose). Beans expresses a deep wisdom - one of the many things that a collaborative encyclopedia needs to run smoothly. Sure, the concept had it's origins with an individual actor (Xiong (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Xiong)), but it gets it's current status because the community voted for it.

And now, if you try to write a wikipedia article on how to build a nuclear weapon, the membrane will approach you and say, 'Hey, you know - gentle reminder: Beans (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Don%27t_stuff_beans_up_your_nose)'.

I'm in love with this kind of law. Human, funny, wise, succinct, not written in legalese, policed by the community and POWERFUL without being fascist.

So I think it's all membrane (the good bits, anyway) actors are an illusion. Neurons think they are actors, but we can see the web they're tangled up in.

[joerasmussen]

Hi All,

I'm building a cloud site based on the ideas in this thread. http://aliveconsciousandverysmart.cloud.mindtouch.com/. Contributors wanted!

[maphew]

thanks Joe. I'm in :)

[crb]

No, it's quite out of date, as is the MindTouch article.