Here are the slides from his talk. My favorites are 3, 4, 8, 10, 15, 19, 21, 23, 26, 28, 29, 35, 37, 38, 53, 66, 68.

Related posts:

1. TED Talk: Chris Abani
2. Response to "Superorganism Considered Harmful"
3. My Favorite TED Talks of 2009

This was one of my favorites of the year.

Related posts:

1. TED Talk: Chris Abani
2. My Favorite TED Talks of 2009

I don’t know exactly what Cameron said because I can’t find a public video archive. This Guardian account indicates that he mostly hung platitudes on the scaffolding of giving people more choice and transparency.  Choice is a big part of small government, but I thought it would be worth outlining what I think is the non-politician’s version of the libertarian small government ideology. It’s far from ivory tower.  More like back alley.

It’s based on two observations: (1) local knowledge is important to good decision making and (2) concentration of power leads to abuses. I think few  students of  political history and organizational behavior would argue against these points, so I won’t detail them here.  However, if anyone honestly thinks they are in doubt, I’d be happy to cover them in a subsequent post.

So, any time society assigns a role to government, it incurs the costs of (1) and (2).  These costs tend to increase over time and as a situation departs from the ideal future path. So the expected net present value of these costs can be substantial. Libertarians therefore conclude that  the benefits that the government brings to a role should, as a general rule, be quite large before we even consider it as an option. Notice that this does not imply no government at all. Rather, it implies we should use government sparingly.

The repeated pattern observed by libertarians goes like this. A problem arises. Everyone (even libertarians) agree that it is problem. Progressives push through a government program to address it. Initially, the program somewhat ameliorates the problem. However, the problem turns out to be trickier than first believed, so the benefits are usually not as great as expected. Over time, the problem evolves and adapts, further eroding program benefits. The government program evolves and adapts too, but more to promulgate its own survival than address the problem.

So we are left with much lower benefits than forecast and significant unforeseen costs (in the form of an everliving, mostly useless program). Libertarians conclude that in many cases the “cure” is worse than the disease.  Not that it doesn’t suck having the disease. The irony of course is that the progressives then identify the results of an old government program as a new problem that requires… another government program (cough, cough, government intervention in financial markets, cough, cough).

Of course, some illnesses are actually bad enough that the (painful) cure is better than the disease.  In those cases, bring on the government program. But let’s be realistic about the long term benefits and costs.

Related posts:

1. Financial Crisis Act I: Government Meddling
2. U.S. Government is Open for Questions
3. Switching Government Service Providers

If you like the theme of “Social Entrepreneurship, Systems Thinking and Complexity” — and I know that you do because that’s what this blog talks about a lot of the time — then you may want to attend (or even submit a paper/talk abstract to) the eponymously named conference at Adelphi University in New York (April 30 – May 2, 2010).  Hope to see you there!

hat tip: Jerri Chou: @jchou

Related posts:

1. Social Entrepreneurship Tax Credit
2. The Quandaries of Quantifying Complexity
3. Economics Must Reflect Complexity

From The Chaos Point. Reproduced with permission from the author.

In a convergence of a different sort, many of these threads which all come together and interrelate in my own mind, came together in various conversations and talks within the last 15 hours.  And while it’s impossible to explain this all in details, it’s really exciting to find other people who are on the same wavelength and have thought a lot harder on each of the pieces than I have.  Just to give you a taste, here are the human players in this personal convergence and how they relate to the above themes:

Kevin Carpenter: Heard him first talk at LA Idea Project on the concept of Convergence and how it’s critically different than Kurzweilian Singularity and much more similar to Superorganism.  Ran into him again at a party last night and he was excited to have given more cogent shape to his thinking in this area.

Steve Omohundro: I went to check out the H+ Summit this morning and he was speaking matter-of-factly on so many areas of interest and dropping research-backed evidence to support all of this pontification.  While the details aren’t in this slide presentation, you should glance through it anyway, especially if you have been intrigued at all about things that I’ve written about.

Dan Miler: Spoke right after Omohundro on cellular automata and simulation, and the metaphor/paradigm of digital physics.  He highlighted several projects by other people which are shedding light on deep universal structure, including the work of Alex Lamb.  Lamb has built the first (as far as I know) cellular automata system based on irregular latices (i.e. arbitrary network structures).  Just like in Conway’s Game of Life — the most well-known cellular automaton — there emerge persistent dynamic patterns similar to gliders:

Click here to view the embedded video.

Here are more examples from the Jellyfish system.

What intrigues me most about this is that the brain is a nonregular lattice (by definition all networks are).  Neuronal firing patterns are (that is to say, cognition is) computationally isomorphic to cellular automata on nonregular lattices.  The jellyfish patterns seen in Lamb’s simulations are exactly what I would imagine to exist in the brain.  These would be the semi-autonomous interacting — sometimes cooperating, sometimes conflicting — agents that Omohundro refers to as being the basis of all cognition/intelligence.  It’s exactly what Minsky was referring to in Society of Mind, and what Palombo referred to in The Emergent Ego.  It’s also the basis of crowd wisdom or collective intelligence.

Which leads us back to Convergence.  As we learn more about the nature of cognition, intelligence and thought (both conscious and unconscious), I believe we will recognize ever more clearly how there is new sentience emerging, not alongside human beings (though that is surely happening as well), but rather at the level above human beings and their technological spawn.

Related posts:

1. Superfoo
2. Focusing on "Autonomy"
3. Response to "Superorganism Considered Harmful"

Michael Martin of Broken Symmetry with two incredibly insightful posts on Soros’ theory of reflexivity, distinction between social and physical sciences, and the ability of markets to regulate us as well as themselves.

1. “Are markets flawed? Or is it competition?“.  Martin’s response to Soros’ criticism of markets’ ability to self-regulate:
“Individuals spontaneously order into firms. What benefit is there to such integration if markets put less constraints on the same individuals? The function of markets is to synchronize buyers and sellers who cannot otherwise integrate their needs within a firm. Soros has it exactly backwards. It’s not that markets are suitable only for individual choices; it’s that individual choices are suitable only for markets.

In this context, Soros would do well to consider some of the New Institutional Economics and Organizational Theory literature, which provides theory on how and when institutional culture develops. I don’t disagree with his point that institutional rules are needed. Just his point that government institutions are necessary or sufficient to meet those needs.”

 The optimist in me believes that “artifical inteligence” akin to google type algorithms could be created to simulate our political choices/decisions to help squeeze out the middleman of politician and create a market/forum of political ideas.  Change.org is a start.  Does anyone know of any other examples?

2. “Reflexivity Goes Deeper than Soros Himself Seems to Realize“:
“The cycle is manifest in the activities of people. The mathematical world is revealed, step by step, through consensus among living and dead mathematicians. The mental world represents the model everybody has, including mathematicians, of what exists. Both of these are embedded in a physical world along with a Noah’s ark of other animals and a Garden of Eden of other living things.

We exercise control over our existence by formulating theories about what exists. There are plenty of things that exist that no person imagined to exist until a theory was developed that permitted for experiments, which in turn were consistent with other experiments, and so on. Nobody doubts anymore that we are made of atoms, quarks, and leptons. Yet none of us has seen any of these things. And if we were to stop looking for them, there is no doubt in my mind that we would eventually forget about them — leaving their existence as ghostly as it was a hundred years ago.

There is no dichotomy between social and natural science. Rather, social science should embrace these constraints that have been on all science for as long as we’ve been doing experiments.”

Related posts:

1. Peer-Review vs. Info Prizes and Markets
2. Stray Thought About the Singularity
3. Hive Mindstein

I just saw the most important talk I have seen in 300+ TED, Pop!Tech, etc talks that I’ve watched.  And at the risk of hyperbole, I will say that the worst case scenario is that Daniel Nocera simply wins a Nobel Prize (and yes, I’m willing to bet at even odds that it happens in under 10 years from today).  But if the system is able to scale through replication, it will be at least as important as penicillin in terms of ending human suffering and will have a bigger impact on the world as a whole.  Here’s why:

• Input: Water (clean, saltwater or dirty water)
• Outputs: Electricity + Pure drinkable water
• By products: nothing (other than what was in the water)
• Resources required to assemble: all abundant and most have substitutes
• Knowledge required to assemble: simple
• Cost to assemble: relatively cheap

Essentially what Nocera has done is reverse engineered and re-created a super-simplified photosynthesis process.  It’s a closed loop (i.e. autocatalytic) so it’s actually more efficient to run his reactor on a fixed amount of pure water.  But if you want you can use a flow of new water (say, parasite infested water) and as a side effect you get clean water out; all you have to do is have a way to dispose of the impurities that get separated.  You could do that manually if necessary, but once you have energy, that becomes easier and may be automated.

Here’s why I’m really excited.  The system is so simple that it can be built and maintained locally by the bottom billion, for the bottom billion, without the need for an electricity grid.  Sounds like a micro-franchise model that could be taught at places like Barefoot College and could simultaneously create economic development and solve the world’s biggest humanitarian problem, both as a side effect.

And it can be purchased for home use by the rest of us taking our homes off the grid, paying for itself and becoming cash flow positive at some point.  Same for businesses.  What about portable energy, like for cars?  Well, if you have a surplus of energy and water, you can charge hydrogen fuel cells.  Or you can spin up flywheels, store electricity in lithium ion batteries, etc.

The biggest risks I can see are twofold:

1. There crops up some collateral effects of running the system indefinitely that emerge over time and at great scale (e.g. some trace byproducts which were too subtle to notice get concentrated to the point of becoming toxic).
2. The patent on the invention creates a roadblock to replicating the system across the globe.

The reason I’m willing to wager on the Nobel Prize is that I don’t think these risks would sink that ship.  I think it’s worthy of a Nobel in one of the sciences already.  While those can take decades to be awarded, I am comfortable about the 10 year mark because as we all know, the Nobel Peace Prize is winnable in 10 months.

Are others as excited about this as I am yet?  Here’s a clue: when the president of MIT learned about Nocera’s invention she called just one person to bring it to the world, someone she thought could understand just how big it is and someone who could properly shepherd it and nurture it.  He’s a venture capitalist who at one point had been a world-changing inventor himself.  His name is Bob Metcalf, and he invented ethernet, the communication transport mechanism of the Internet.

Related posts:

1. Providing Global Energy Needs
2. How Many Calories for a Dollar?
3. A Theory of Scalability

In thinking about this I am reminded about a duet of innovators who spoke at the Pop!Tech conference last year about scaling.  Both Bunker Roy and Paul Polack have some profound lessons to teach us about scalability.  You will learn these lessons by watching Roy talk about Barefoot College and by watching Polack talk about his Out of Poverty approach (also see BarefootCollege.org and PaulPolack.com).  But despite all of the incredible wisdom to be gleaned from observing how Roy and Polack achieve scale, I’ve been wondering about how their success can be translated to other realms.

Replicators

In creating a general theory of scalability, I think there is a key conceptual anchor from Susan Backmore’s TED talk on the third replicator.  Now, I have to pause here because as simple and great as the universal Darwinism principle is, I know from conversations that many people have a really hard viewing evolution in non-biological systems as anything more than a good metaphor.  It’s hard for most people to see that “true evolution” — the kind that Darwin was talking about — is actually what is happening in these non-biological systems.  I will address this in detail in a later post, but ask that you indulge me for the time being so that we can talk about replicators.

When we talk about scaling sociotechnical systems, really we’re talking about one of two things: either growing the original system to handle “more”, or replicating the original system (or enabling it to replicate itself) with appropriate variation for the new context.  Growth models are the more familiar and comforting to governments and policy makers for reasons that should be obvious to anyone who has noticed how scared these types get when faced with systems that scale via replicators.  Formal organizations (corporations, non-profits, governments, anything with a legal structure or formal set of rules) are growers; networks of cooperating agents (open source software, social change movements, revolutionaries, anything that is formed in a grass-roots / bottom-up manner) are replicators.

I am not here to argue that either type of system is dispensable, indeed they are both essential.  I will leave it as an unproven conjecture that we are at a point in history wherein the ecology of sociotechnical systems is dominated by growers that are straining and stretching to the edges of their dynamic range.  Societal edifices are crumbling under their own weight, and are thus vulnerable to subversion by an algal bloom of replicators in their midst.  For those that want the argument and evidence, go read The Chaos Point by the grandfather of complex systems theory, Ervin László.

And I will leave alone in this theory of scalability the entire grower side of the equation.  It’s been systematized and refined since at least the days of Machiavelli;  we know it today as management science.  Instead I want to suggest that there is lacking an entire half of the formalization project for a unified theory of scale, and that’s a formal model for scaling via replication.  The reason this formalism has eluded us for so long is the same reason Darwinian evolution is so hotly contested: it requires a fundamentally different way of thinking than the Western analytic tradition is based on.  That’s not to say that the complex systems paradigm is not scientific, just that the scientific method as it exists today has not yet incorporated the bottom-up, emergent calculus required to be complete.

The first question we must ask is what exactly is being replicated, and only then we can ask how that replication is achieved.  Blackmore names three classes of replicators which I would like to refine by pointing out (as she does) that these are really self-replicators.  In her TED talk she observes that biological self-replicators exist (i.e. what we normally refer to as “life”), that mental self-replicators do indeed exist (though most people don’t take this notion seriously enough yet), and that technological self-replicators are in the process of being born.  If we think about it though, it is easy to see that certain forms of this third replicator already exist: computer viruses, bot nets (e.g. as are used in DDoS attacks), digital agents in artificial life simulations and genetic algorithm systems, and others.  What Blackmore was hinting at with the her more restrictive definition of technological self-replicator is one in which the artifact being replicated has a physical form (as opposed to digital information form).

I must digress here for a moment to point out that it is a red herring to try to neatly circumscribe the system being replicated (the “artifact” or agent) from its environment.  In reality there is no such thing as a true self-replicator; there are always some resources or information that is outside the self-replicator that is required for replication to occur.  Neither the chicken nor the egg can recreate itself.  And if you (rightly) view the chicken/egg system as the thing self-replicating, you only need observe that food is also essential (as are many other things) for replication to occur.  Given this truth in the realm of biology, is it really so far fetched to view digital cameras self-replicating technological agents, that is replicators of the third kind?  Sure they require humans, manufacturing processes and other technology from their environment to replicate, but I’ll reiterate that there are no biological life forms either that are entirely self-replicating.  (This blog post puts an even finer point on it all, if you are still not convinced).

Principles

The scaling brilliance of Bunker Roy and Paul Polack was hard-won, after many years of solving specific problems at the bottom.  It was only after gaining a deep understanding all of the interacting subsystems was it possible for each of them to engineer an overall system that was scalable via replication.  Looking at various attempts to scale sociotechnical systems, both successful and unsuccessful, a pattern starts to emerge of the key principles and dynamics.  Here are a few:

• Counterintuitive: Brilliant solutions are only obvious in retrospect.  Crazy. Crazy. Crazy. Obvious.
• Self-Replicators: It is important to identify the parts of the system that are — or that can be made to be — self-replicating.
• Fecundity: Digital information replicators are more easily replicable than mental constructs (i.e. memes), which are in turn more easily replicable than organizations of humans.
• Mutation: The more fecund the replicator, the easier it is to co-opt for ulterior motives, and the more likely it is that random variation will throw the overall system off course.
• Environment: It is easy to mistakenly believe that a prospective environment is suitable for replication when it’s not.
• Side-effects: With any complex dynamic process there are always side-effects. If ignored, this usually leads to collateral damage, but on the flip side there is usually an opportunity to accomplish other goals and turn side-effects into new benefits.

In thinking about how to engineer a system to bring solar electric installations to rural villages around the world, it is counterintuitive to think that poor, illiterate grandmothers (with no formal education and very little social standing in their village) could learn to be solar engineers.  To further think that they could be taught by illiterate trainers (who don’t speak the same language) is crazy.  Until Bunker Roy proved it was possible.

Microcredit was crazy too, until Muhammad Yunus proved that it wasn’t, and then it was obvious.  So obvious in fact that it became a viral meme and has spread all over the world.  The concept of microcredit is a very fecund self-replicator.  Unfortunately, the practice of microcredit in many places has ignored the nuances of different environmental contexts and unintended side-effects.  Add to that a high mutation rate: the model being tweaked to confer greater benefit to lenders (at the expense of borrowers); the introduction of middlemen who screw up the incentive structure and unwritten social contracts; etc.  The net effect has been that in some areas microcredit has been a net negative to the economy, and especially negative to the borrowers, whom the model was originally designed to help most.

Polack’s franchise model (an indeed all franchise models) are inherently replicators.  They are also good self-replicators because customers and other locals get exposure to the idea of becoming an entrepreneur themselves. And some of them end up as franchisees.  That is replication.  But to move from solving one problem (e.g. clean drinking water) to solving a very different one (e.g. locally available energy), new technologies that are also “radically affordable” have to be created on a regular basis.  And this type of innovation does not self-replicate.  So Polack created an entirely separate institution, the non-profit R&D lab, specifically to tackle the problem of replicating franchises (i.e. going from an electrochlorinator franchise to a solar concentrator franchise).

Applications

With this nascent framework in mind, I’d like to invite you to evaluate some of the social ventures that I encountered at The Feast (and a few of my favorites from Pop!Tech last year) and see if you can predict how scalable their model will be based on the replicator principles above.  And in cases where they have achieved some amount of scale (like charity: water and frontlineSMS), can you explain their success using the theory?

• SHE (Feast talk Session #3 starting 0:46:30)
• charity: water (Feast talk Session #4 starting 0:01:30)
• frontlineSMS (Feast talk Session #3 starting 0:25:45)
• Yellow Brick Road (Feast talk Session #1 0:31:37)
• 9th Ward Field of Dreams (Feast talk Session #4 starting 0:59:20)
• Change.org (Kitchen)
• International Transparency Solutions (Kitchen)
• Madecasse (Kitchen)
• Parent Earth (Kitchen)
• Srina (Kitchen)
• TrustArt (Kitchen)
• VotaVox (Kitchen)
• Global Citizen Year (Pop!Tech)
• Vittana (Pop!Tech)

I would love to hear your thoughts, both on the specifics of these ventures, and on the theory of scaling through replication.

Related posts:

1. Alfred Hubler on Stabilizing CAS
2. Autocatalytic Systems
3. Daniel Nocera’s Gift

A theme that ran through was how the security and utility of the internet is threatened by the complete lack of built-in trust mechanisms.  How do you know you can trust who you are dealing with online?  How do you know what information to believe that you read online?  How do you know your online accounts are not completely compromised by hackers right now, and that your bank account isn’t being drained as you read this?

Many people rightly fear that legislating or enforcing new internet protocols to address these issues would lead us down a slippery slope, trample our basic rights of free speech and freedom of assembly, and would ultimately toss us out of the frying pan, into the fire.  I agree.

But that’s not to say that we are doomed to having a virus-infested, yellow journalism-promoting, predator-harboring wild west (if you will allow that we’re not quite there yet already).  Rather, the solution is an organically expanding and heterogeneous set of discretionary (as in opt-in) technologies that sits on top of the existing infrastructure and gives us assurances that we can trust people and sources of information.   Once all well-intending individuals rely upon these for most of their online interactions, the nefarious remainder will stick out like so many sore thumbs and can easily be avoided.

What am I talking about?  Consider for example what happens when someone wants to connect with you on Facebook.  First you must accept their request which says that you trust them to a certain degree already (whether you know them or not).  If you don’t know them, Facebook provides you with various clues as to their trustworthiness, such as telling them how many Friends you have in common and who exactly those people are.  If you have any doubts about someone you can ask your Mutual Friends to vouch for them before you let them into your circle of trust.  One of the main reasons (I would argue) that Facebook trounced MySpace was that they required users to list their real name instead of a screen name.  While it is possible to lie about your real name just as easily as with a screen name, the fact that a real name should correspond to an offline identity — a known or at least knowable quantity — leads people to lie very infrequently; they know that once they are found out for a fraud they will be ostracized and have to start over to build any sort of trust with the cohort they are trying to engage.

Facebook is just one minor example of the technologies that sit on top of the “naked” internet that help bring us out of the wild west scenario.  It’s discretionary in that you don’t have to be on Facebook.  But at this point wouldn’t you be suspicious of someone who told you they weren’t on Facebook?  Maybe they don’t intend you any harm, but if not then at the very least you know they are a complete n00b, not to be trusted with your email address.  (If you don’t believe me, see how long it takes before they send you a Snopes-debunked urban legend while revealing the identities and emails of all 150 of their online acquaintances in the CC: field).

One of the NPR segments addressed the issue that everyone depends on Google to locate information but that Google does nothing to help you discern the trustworthiness of the information contained on the pages it returns in its searches.  This leads to a situation where it’s fairly easy to destroy someone’s hard-earned reputation with whole-cloth fiction and half-truths, but impossible to defend yourself it it happens to you.

I have proposed one type of technological addition to the “trust ecology” called Truth Markets.  Basically it’s a financial market where instead of trading shares of a company or commodities like gold,  you trade in the “truthiness” of public statements (such as web pages) and trustworthiness of the people who make them.  One could imagine a set of Truth Markets for every website (or at least ones that get a threshold amount of traffic), and a trustworthiness rating for every individual that contributes to the site in some way.

But Google could in fact obviate the need for such heavy lifting if it wanted to.  The key is their all-powerful algorithm, PageRank, which is what allows them to serve up such relevant results in response to the keywords you type in.  PageRank was designed to suss out relevance, but this is simply a variable that can be swapped out for other values, such as humor, aesthetics, and yes, truthiness.  So imagine that when you type in a job candidate’s name into Google to do some research on them you not only get all of the web pages that match sorted by relevance, but you also have the option to sort by truth value.  Then, just because a salacious piece of gossip pops up on the front page of a search result doesn’t mean that it will show up on the front page if you sort by truth.

And imagine if Google were to decide to change their default search results so that they are based on a blend of RageRank and “TruthRank”.  Wouldn’t this be better than learning that Ann Coulter’s puppy mills actually supplied Michael Vick with his best fighting dogs?  (It’s true, I swear!)

Related posts:

1. Alfred Hubler on Stabilizing CAS
2. Too Big to Fail = Too Big to Exist?
3. Crowdsourcing Truthiness

You can donate here (I gave them $500), but make sure to write “For the Fisher Madagascar Project” in the “Comments” field.  Otherwise, you’ll be paying for the building lights.  Go ahead and leave the “Allocation” field at the default, “Campaign for a New Academy”. Update: Forgot to mention that if you donate $2,000 they’ll name a new species after you or whomever you designate.

It’s hard to do justice to what I saw last night in a blog post, but here goes…

First, you may be wondering what an ant taxonomist is doing saving the Madacascar rainforest.  Well, it turns out that ant species are incredibly specialized to their local environment. (They are the prototypical superorganism after all.)  So the density of ant species should be a major component of any good proxy for overall ecological diversity. Thus Brian and his team needed to visit the remaining rainforest to  catalog the ants (and other insects).  To accomplish this task, he’s become a combination of McGyver and Steve Wozniak: part super handyman and part super technologist.

The deforestation of Magacascar occurred over thousands of years as colonists from Asia pursued unsustaintable rice farming techniques.  So the only rainforests left, are the ones that are hard for humans to get to and work on.  He’s had to figure out everything from how to cross rivers  in an SUV (lashing plastic containers to the bottom) to how to collect specimens from forest canopies in mountains (going up in a mini-dirigible).

Then he’s had to figure out how to catalog all the specimens and sort out the thousands species. He’s helped develop composite imaging techniques that give you a full view of specimens (check out AntWeb for some unbelievable pictures). He’s had to convince Google to change the Google Earth interface so you can see layers of information at the same location (making it possible for the rest of us to see multiple photos taken at the same spot, BTW). He’s had to improve DNA sequencing and comparison techniques. He seems to have adopted the Internet/Open Source model for much of his innovations so they have a lot of positive knock-on effects.

However, I think the coolest thing about Brian is his commitment to helping Madagascarans help themselves.  He gets grants for the science and expeditions behind the species cataloging.  But that doesn’t solve the preservation problem.  So he’s helping create a local community of preservationists.  He’s helped them create their own Madagascar Biodiversity Center.  He’s bringing local scientists to the US to train and then return to increase the pace of work. He’s working with the government to finalize their countrywide preservation plan.  For that, he needs our help.

(BTW, did you know that ants sleep and queens even dream?  And each species of leafcutter ants has a corresponding unique fungus species that they “farm” as a “crop”? queens carry away a sample of the fungus as well as a dozen or so supporting microbe species in specialized pouches as a “starter kit” for new colonies.  Wild and wacky stuff.)

Related posts:

1. Alfred Hubler on Stabilizing CAS
2. Focusing on "Autonomy"
3. Response to "Superorganism Considered Harmful"