Bill Gates: We Need Innovation, Not Insulation

With the launch of his new personal news site, The Gates Notes, Bill Gates has formally stepped into the popular blogging arena.  His first power post, which just hit the front page of Huffington Post, addresses the the world's propensity to address short-term problems, such as climate change, with bubble gum and tape in lieu of tackling long-term goals by fostering meaningful new innovation.

Gates: People often present two timeframes that we should have as goals for CO2 reduction -- 30% (off of some baseline) by 2025 and 80% by 2050.  I believe the key one to achieve is 80% by 2050. 

Gates' logic is consistent with a recurring dialogue I've encountered in technology and forecasting circles: why waste time with incremental advances when we should be innovating technologies an order of magnitude more powerful than the previous generation.

But as we enter the knee of some potent accelerating curves (technology, information, communication), it's become painfully obvious that the majority of national systems aren't offering their populations the right innovation incentives, despite the financial near-crisis we've just experienced.  For example, President Obama's stated goal of 3% GDP dedicated to innovation, relegated to the back seat as other issues occupy the attention of federal lawmakers more in tune with the election cycle than the larger national heartbeat and nervous system, remains a pipe dream.

So how will we catalyze the systemic will to innovate in leaps and bounds rather than incrementally?  Two possible answers come to mind.

A) CREATIVE DESTRUCTION: Generational theorists Strauss and Howe argue that it will require cyclical creative destruction, a Fourth Turning. 

B) CONVERGENT ACCELERATION: Acceleration theorists argue that convergence in technological, communication and information systems (among others) will usher in a new era of innovation fluiditiy that permits us to better research, quantify and solve problems.  The idea here is that the free market will permit the best innovations to emerge and evolve more quickly than before thanks to the fluidity enabled by the web.

Unfortunately, our ostensibly free market system is so riddled with holes that leak human generated capital that innovation has become massively underfunded.

Gates points out that "to make the 80% goal by 2050 we are going to have to reduce emissions from transportation and electrical production in participating countries down to zero".  The current U.S. system is incapable of meeting this goal.  For this to happen, nations like ours will need to develop better cognizance of innovation and re-innovate our decision-making system accordingly.

Gates: If CO2 reduction is important, we need to make it clear to people what really matters -- getting to zero. ... With that kind of clarity, people will understand the need to get to zero and begin to grasp the scope and scale of innovation that is needed.  ... However all the talk about renewable portfolios, efficiency, and cap and trade tends to obscure the specific things that need to be done.

To solve such problems we need to reinvent our collective approach to innovation.  Many bright entrepreneurs, scholars and policy thinkers are compelled to tackle this fundamental problem, yet the system continues to misidentify and underfund progressive efforts (poor health care, lack of start-up & research incentives, poor implementation of smarter systems, red tape that blocks grass-roots innovation of ALL sorts), much less provide an actionable framework for innovation behavior.

So will meaningful change in our innovation policy require creative destruction and socio-economic calamity as a big the kick in the ass?  Or will an explosion of bottom-up innovation catalyze the intelligence growth that's required?

The storyline of 2009 suggests the former option may be the more likely future, serving as a necessary a entropy clearing shake-out, allowing us to better align national resources with national priorities.  Barring the emergence of some highly effective social media structures capable of diffusing up through and reforming government, an offbeat but realistic scenario,  it seems we're destined for some speed bumps on the road to innovating up to Bill Gates' standards.

In the end, those challenges may prove critical to catalyzing acceleration in innovation and adaptation to a rapidly changing world economy.

As Plato once wisely pointed out, "Necessity is the mother of invention." 

Related link:
Can we outrace the fourth turning?

Is Facebook Graph a Counter to Google Wave Federation? Absolutely.

From Beta, to Alpha to Roadmaps - recent moves by Google, Facebook and Twitter demonstrate that platform release is accelerating.

Facebook and Google have me convinced that they're among the most foresighted of companies in the social media space.  Understanding the value and nature of prosumers, developers, structured content, open source, and broader tech-info convergence, the gargantuan yet speedy pair (+ quickly growing thirdborn Twitter) are jockeying to connect to more data, brains and meaningful partnerships.  The result is fierce, healthy competition that's accelerating the pace and manner of social software platform releases.


Yesterday, Facebook announced a set of smart maneuvers clearly spurred on by Google's aggressively open strategy, including one called Open Graph (you can tell just by the name that this is a Zuckerberg baby) that will allow website builders everywhere to build Facebook-style pages, complete with many of the platform's bells and whistles - a very logical follow up to Google Friend Connect.

This morning, it's rumored that Google will announce the opening of their Wave servers for federation later in the day.  Much like the release of Wave itself, the move, initially promised when Google announced Wave at I/O on May 28, comes very early in the Wave life cycle and allows any skilled-enough third party developers to use build custom websites, apps and back-ends using the platform.

What will they build?  Based on my experience with Wave (Team Whizzlr took 6th place at a Wave Campout in August for our real-time massively multiplayer quiz game) I can say that Wave will be a remarkable tool for a fairly narrow set of uses, at least initially.  It rocks as a platfrom for complex communication in a single place, real-time or longitudinal, making it ideal for 1) functional tasks like document collaboration (Google Docs +), focus grouping, surveying, invitation management, reddit-in-email (Kudos to the GTUG team that designed Blip Appeal - in-stream up/down voting for Wave Blips), dynamic web commenting that takes place simultaneously wherever Wave extensions are placed, new forms of blogging, etc, and also 2) fun activities like PMOGs, massive real-time quiz competitions, Fantasy Football clones run inside tyour email but also on another site, and other casual apps that currently sit atop the Facebook or iPhone platforms.

Put another way, the Wave platform uses HTML 5 cacheing to allow developers to shrink different web applications that we're accustomed to experiencing discretely, combine them in a single location, replicate Wave functionality WHEREVER they choose (thanks to Wave federation), and to mix and mingle all of these Wavelets.  From a systems standpoint this looks like a clear path to MetaSystem Transition (MST)in the browser-enabled web app world:

Wikipedia - A metasystem transition is the emergence, through evolution, of a higher level of organization or control. Prime examples are the origin of life, the transition from unicellular to multicellular organisms, and the emergence of symbolic thought. A metasystem is formed by the integration of a number of initially independent components, such as molecules, cells or individiduals, and the emergence of a system steering or controlling their interactions. As such, the collective of components becomes a new, goal-directed individual, capable of acting in a coordinated way. This metasystem is more complex, more intelligent, and more flexible in its actions than the initial component systems.

This, I believe, is the way the Google Brass and Wave Team regard this new platform.  It is their confidence in this model, mixed with excitement from a certain class of clammoring developers that recognize this long-term potential, plus their successful experiences with open-sourcing code (Android, Chrome, App Engine) that spurred them to announce the unpolished product in Mat and release Wave in Alpha this past summer.  -- They certainyl got a lot of flack for it.

Whether or not this play bears fruit (I've been a believer from the start, mostly because I love what it could mean for the web), social media thinkers like Zuckerberg and Facebook's strategic team clearly must view Wave as an assault into their niche and future niches they'd like to dominate, not to mention a big play to convert developers to Google App Engine disciples. They have to take the possibility of a Wave Tsunami seriously, even if the likelihood is moderatley low.

So, is it a coincidence that Facebook has announced Open Graph and a slew of developer-focused goodies on the day prior to the Google Wave Federation?  Probably not.

Is it a Open Graph a necessary (defensive + offensive) response to Google's maneuvering in the Wave space?  Absolutely.

(That said, this emerging battle is at the same time component of a larger war between the two.  How I would love to speak candidly with their strategists/futurists...)


Earlier this year I was openly wondering about Facebook's prosumer strategy.  Since then I've seen Facebook make some truly brilliant moves, mostly in response to the growing Google and Twitter threat, that reveal just how much they do realize the fundamental importance of prosumers and developers (the two are very narrowly separated).

Thus, we've seen these companies move from launching products in Beta (Google is the pbvious trailblazer here), to Alpha and now to laying out 6-month roadmpas for developers and users (Facebook yesterday announced this), in just a few short years.

Make no mistake about it, fueled by Moore's Law, Zuckerberg's Second Law, and Exponential Data Proliferation, this behavior is a manifestation of convergent accelerating change.  As such, expect other industries to follow suit (especially those dominated by massive players) as their operations are increasingly virtualized and they too can act in a more fluid manner.  Newspapers, film studios, gaming companies, health care providers, and so forth, are all on the queue.

In the meantime, players like Google, Facebook and Twitter that strategize according to these theoretical acceleration and systems principles have a serious advantage.  Do not underestimate the power of such simulations and nerds.

Google Navigation = I'm Getting a Droid

I've been sitting on the iPhone:Android fence for a while now, but no longer.  The impending release of Google's100% free, absolutely rocking Navigation System has tipped me in the direction of the Motorola Droid.




The new service is an awesome demonstration of the potent products that can spring from Google's rich, structured data core.  Could the company monetize this directly?  Absolutely.  But they won't because it's even more important for Google to 1) encourage Android phone purchases by offering this amazing feature (expect this to last a short while then migrate to iPhone as well), 2) popularize a new platform that sucks in structured data (much like the free and similarly sweet 1-800-GOOG-411) and 3) generate good will toward the G-Brand.

Expect increasingly more babies from Google's fertile data womb in the near future. 

Facebook Keeping Pace With Google's Open Platform Maneuvers

Not content to simply rely on its explosive growth curve (as MySpace did under NewsCorp prior to the shakeup), Facebook yesterday made three big announcements aimed at wooing more high-end and low-end developers:

•  Facebook Platform: A rich and well-thought out suite of developer-facing support code, information and services including a heretofore unprecedented 6-month developer roadmap and a major focus on simplicity (similar to Google's maneuvers).
  

• Open Graph: Part of Facebook platform, a vague announcement about a new API that will allow website builders everywhere to build Facebook-style pages, complete with many of the platform's bells and whistles.  A logical follow up to Google Friend Connect, this lines up with Mark Zuckerberg's January comments on the decentralization of the platform and follows Google's strategic open API lead, reinforcing that walled graden large scale social media is on its way out.
  

• Developer Access to User Email Addresses: A minor move with major impications.  This will allow Facebook app developers the ability to reach out to users directly, massively increasing the value proposition for certain apps, especially those hooked into big companies looking for more marketing value via FB.
  

The moves reinforce the trend of increasing openness of large-scale social platforms.  Google and Twitter have been trailblazing.  Now Facebook has made up serious ground. 

MySpace is refocused on music and, based on a possible deal with Facebook, seems to be moving in the right direction. 

Microsoft and Yahoo, though they're seriously focused on developers are working to grock the seriousness of the prosumer game and Mandate of Kevin. But rest assured, they'll be announcing similar changes shortly because there will be no other option.  This will require a shift in internal culture that may result in deeper level shakeups at these not quite fast-follower entities.

Viva los prosumer!

Carving Up the Social Graph Turkey

After much deal-making and jockeying in the previous quarters, Facebook, Twitter, Microsoft and Google at last revealed their near-term Social Search plays at today's Web 2.0 Summit.

• Facebook announced the impending launch of its own social search platform + a deal with minority investor Microsoft that brings FB status updates to Bing.  

• Google announced a new Social Search capability that pulls friend-relevant data from most core social networks with the notable exception of Facebook + a deal with Twitter to bring real-time tweets to the search engine.

• Microsoft announced the Facebook/Bing deal + a Twitter deal virtually identical to Google's.

• Twitter stuck to its open-expansion-uber-alles strategy, announcing it's willing to play nice with anyone who will help it fend off Facebook from its niche.
  

The moves clearly demonstrate the increasing value of structured social data (aka the emerging social graph) to search services and should silence skeptics that have complained about the valuation of large social networks.

They also demonstrate one form of massive disruption to search markets: an all-out race to subsume new pools of structured data.  It's obvious that Facebook and Microsoft, who recently unveiled a deal to subsume computational search engine Wolfram Alpha, see this as one of the more effective strategies for countering Google's seach dominance. 

Prediction: Once these big deals are wrapped up I expect that we'll witness a slew of search-access deals with companies that control pools of unique search-relevant data  (e.g. IBM,Technorati, Second Life, stallite mapping services), perhaps eventually resulting in granular opt-in controls (similar to Google AdSense) for smaller niche federations looking to monetize their proprietary data.

Just think of search engines as big brains competing to integrate modules of novel, search-relevant structured data.

Viewing search from this perspective brings much necessary context to Google's long-term search growth plan, explaining why seemingly disparate initiatives like Maps, Earth, Google 411, books, etc are actually part of a cohesive strategy that will consistently add value to the company's core search offering over the coming years.  It is this deliberately planned integration that Google appears poised to retain its dominance.  Thus, minus an Earth-shattering search AI breakthrough, direct competitors like Microsoft, Yahoo and Facebook must acquire or grow their own pools of unique, relevant and integratable structured data if they are to keep pace.

At the same time, expect new entrants in regions such as Russia, China and India to either license their data to the hungry big boys or focus on the expansion of their native search efforts.  All that's required is some magic translation pixie dust.  Oh snap, Google appears to have that technology marketed cornered.

Conclusion: The social graph turkey is but a single, albeit core, item on the long table of search.  Expect many more scrumptious, exotic foods to emerge from the data kitchen.  Google does and has been adjusting its digestive technologies accordingly.

Control Over Perceived Environment (COPE)

What is intelligence?

"Intelligence" is a pervasive and useful, yet problematic term with no true measure, despite the fact that psychologists and other cognitive scholars having been working on this non-stop for roughly 150 years.  It's a readily understood, good-enough meme that helps us put labels on brains and to organize them, yet remains a crude, dull operating tool that leads to much confusion, miscommunication and errant simulation among its bipedal, meme-hoarding user junkies.

The highly elastic meaning of the word is especially irksome in technical discussions.  Note how difficult it is to ascribe definitions of intelligence to various systems: 

• individuals - are we talking about g, social intelligence or Gardner's multiple intelligences?
• groups - is the group stifling individual excellence? how can one effectively measure crowd wisdom? are cultures more or less intelligent in different environments?
• AI - when does an AI truly become intelligent? how do we accurately compare AI to human intelligence? is the Turing Test representative of human intelligence or just humans' ability to estimate intelligence? is Google slowly becoming more intelligent? (Different researchers will provide vastly different answers to these questions.)
  
• biological systems - how do you measure the intelligence of a Mycelium network or a field mouse? where do systems boudaries stop? what are the criteria for higher intelligence? can punctuated equilibrium and species death actually generate more intelligence? 
• or the planet - how smart and resilient is our planet? is technology making our entire planet smarter? to what extent do different species and sytems interact and cooprerate? weak Gaiia? strong Gaiia?
  
• or even the universe - is the universe performing computation? does intelligence emerge from simple parts? is local intelligence a manifestation of universal intelligence? is the universe a simulation?  if so, then what does that mean for the broader context of intelligence?
  

These diverging views of "intelligence" can make it a chore to achieve consensus when communicating about capability, complexity, computation systems growth and, of course, "intelligence" itself.  Nevertheless, the meme is vague enough and useful enough in different situations to continue replicating from brain to brain.  Like other widely adopted cultural memes, it is resilient!

So where does that leave us memesters in our search for consensus on "intelligence"?  Rather than simply pointing out that it's an inefficient meme, I believe we need to discover/generate beneficial  new memes to outcompete/augment the outdated terminology and occupy its space in our mental simulations. In other words, you replace a broken meme, you don't fix the old one that's loaded with confusion.

To date, my forays into the space have netted two general models of "intelligence" that jive most harmoniously with my personal take on the subject:

• First, James Flynn's assesment that environment and genes conspire to generate humans with superior abstraction abilities tuned to the problem sets that society encourages them to interface with.  I see this approach, encapsulated in the Dickens-Flynn model, as a recent big step toward Evo Devo compatibility.  It also allows for the the software-like behavior of memes, which Flynn calls abstractions (see Piaget's relevant work on abstractions).  Flynn's observations line up nicely with both the concept of memes & temes advanced by Dawkins and Blackmore, as well as philosopher Terence McKenna's theory that culture is in fact an operating system.  This means the abstract thought frameworks that we drill into our children during critical periods, including math, science, biology, maps, businesses, social networks, new language, etc, are in fact a form of software that affects our IQ and ability to navigate the world.   (Note that Flynn is also the discoverer of the documeted steady rise of IQ now commonly referred to as the Flynn Effect.)

• Second, Harvard thought-guru Steven Pinker's comprehensive body of findings that support his assessment that brains are essentially computers that operate using easy-to-understand conceptual metaphors, which correspnd nicely with Flynn's notion of abstractions.  Pinker is also inherently very Evo Devo in his approach and offers up appropriate props to memeticians.
  

Both models are very compatible with broader systems thinking and a still relevant systems-first model I scribbled circa 2004 while trying to make sense of concepts like technology, information and knowledge (each useful but vague in their own right).  I like to call it COPE.

COPE stands for Control Over Perceived Environment and is designed to overarch definitions/theories of
human, social, cognitive, software, biological, planetary, univeral, cosmological "intelligence".  Rooted in the belief that intelligence is an emergent property of complex adaptive (CAD) or living systems, the idea is simple:

1. Draw an arbitrary boundary (to the best of your ability) around any chunk of any system - this becomes your subject/entity.
2. Determine (to the best of your ability) what is required for this system to survive, expand, replicate, evolve, develop.
3. Measure (to the best of your ability) how this system uses space, time, energy, matter (STEM), information, and compexity to increase #2 - the likelihood of survival, expansion, replication, evolution, development.
   
4. Cross-reference these STEM, info and complexity scores with other systems to interpolate salient data points that help refine actionable abstractions.
   

For example, rather than measuring IQ according to a paper-based test, which can net some useful data, a COPE-inspired test would allow humans access to info, tech, other people and the broader system during the exam.  (Akin to on-the-job analysis that more serious companies perform before hiring someone.)  Such tests might measure for the total efficiency of a given operation according to how little STEM and $ the subject requires to perform it, thus establishing a more robust estimation of problem solving ability.

The counter-argument to performing such a test is inefficiency.  To date, it's been to costly or impossible to measure individual performance in such a comprehensive manner.  In this context, IQ test have been remarkably successful at netting complex results, that have then helped refine our concept of intelligence,via a relatively simple low-cost process.

Enter accelerating growth in technology, partnered with similarly explosive growth in data proliferation and communication.

The Quantification Principle (STEM Compression Correlates with Increased Quantification Ability): Thanks to constantly evolving technologies like the web, telephone, money, video, brain scanning, we are able to more efficiently (more quickly, at lower material cost, lower energy cost) MEASURE systems and/or systems slices.  The accelerating growth in these systems correlates with accelerating growth in our systems quantifications and analysis abilities (eg, IBM, Johnson Controls, Total Information Awareness, Google Search, Web as Databse).  (Interestingly, it also correlates with the Flynn Effect (steadily rising IQs), and, more importantly, our collective ability to maintain/expand COPE.)

By expanding the scope and complexity of that which we can measure, and by using analysis and science to better our understanding of what we're testing for, it's clear that we can more robustly analyze the behavioral efficiency, aka COPE ability, of various systems, including brains, thus expanding on the notion of the IQ test itself. 

Furthermore, I contend that this is an Evo Devo inevitability, that if better measurment of behavior/intelligence proves beneficial to systems agents (eg, humans), that they will devote resources to attain this advantage.

In other words - if it can be counted, it will be counted.  Which means that, barring disruption, we are destined to get better at generating and cross-referencing COPE scores.

The Incompleteness Problem: Nevertheless, no matter how efficient we get at measuring COPE, we still run into the problem of System Closure. According to Godel, system closure is a mathematical impossibility.  Systems overlap with other systems. Different systems of varying scale and complexity constantly interact with and impact different systems of varying scale and complexity.  So, technically, there can be no true measure of any system, unless the entire system is measured perfectly (a feat that seems unlikely prior to a universal convergence, pervasive unified consciousness, or some mind-blowing external intervention).

At the same time, it appears we are destined to inexorably expand and refine our simulation of the system in which we reside, using abstractions like COPE as powerful tool gradually expand and refine our concepts of intelligence, consciousness, information, knowledge, wisdom, capability, life, etc.

From this perspective, better, more robust measuring abilities and conventions appear to be inevitable and critical tools for progress in science and our broader COPE ability.  (Very chicken-or-the-egg like.)

Moving forward, as we continue to improve our models of multi-threaded convergence, including "intelligence" growth, it's clear that a central and catalytic part of the dynamic will be the regular updating of our fundamental definition of and measures for the elusive property currently known as intelligence.

By figuring out what we really mean by smart, we will get smarter... which will hopefully result in more quickly established meme-consensus and more productive discussions of these sorts of topics in the near-future, thus making room for a new class of memes chock full of their own inefficiencies.

Big shout-out to Lisa Tansey who challenged my thinking and encouraged me to write this piece at Fusion 2009.

Finland: Connectivity is a Human Right

Following in the footsteps of the French, Finland's Ministry of Transport and Communications has decreed that as of July 2010 every Finnish citizen will have"the right to a one-megabit broadband connection" as an intermediary step toward 100 Mb/person in 2015.

If one views brains as supercomputer-equivalents critical to the convergent growth of technology, information, communication and human capabilities, as I do, it becomes obvious that such national policies are beneficial and necessary -- and maddening that we've not made more progress on these issues here in the United States.

Connectivity is not just a stabilizing social force, as Thomas Barnett has pointed out, it is a glue that's critical to convergent growth.  It's now high time for more nations to get hip to the idea that their full network of brains makes possible regular value creation and should be optimized for higher use.  Hopefully emerging models of individual/social "intelligence" and multi-threaded systems growth will diffuse quickly enough for other countries, large and small, to quickly follow suit.