Arts and Minds

One Person, One Ballot, One Envelope

National Public Radio, that great national radio university, announced that voters in some states were unable to vote because some polling places ran short of ballots and envelopes. Voters waited outside polling places in freezing weather for their moment in the voting booth. Many waited patently while many were too cold and could wait no more. But worse still, many were stopped at the door after waiting for hours because ballots and ballot envelopes had run out. Why do we allow this?

Every mailbox in this nation is stuffed with junk mail every day. Nearly all of that goes directly into the trash. We accept or tolerate that situation.

We also tolerate denying voting rights to eager voters because we are afraid to waste a little more paper. We have to expect the waste of some paper ballots in order to preserve our votes. The assurance that every voter can vote is worth the cost of additional trash, and is a worthwhile and manageable risk. Our failure to print one ballot and provide one envelope for every registered voter in the nation is a silly false economy.

We should require federal law to mandate every state, district and county to protect the right of every voter by providing enough voting ‘stationary’ for everyone. We should assume and expect that some ballots and envelopes will remain to be recycled. No person or agency should be permitted to estimate or guess future voter turn-out based upon previous election figures.

Compared to the annual gross national paper junk-mail waste-stream, two additional sheets of paper per possible voter per election-year (recycled at that) is more than a fair trade and expense for the guarantee of our individual voting rights. This change would also put an end to one form of voter manipulation that is no less than a sub-rosa form of gerrymandering. This should become our next, or first, electoral reform. If this voter fairness requires government subsidy, so be it, no matter how poor, we all can afford to add it to our income tax. A penny for your thoughts.

Peer-Reviewed Publication, Weblogs and Technorati Ratings of Original Thought

This posting is another in what I now realize will be a longer series on the life-cycle and utility of communication channels. The first, posted on December 14, 2003 is entitled: Six Stages In The Life Cycle Of Communication Channels.Six Stages In The Life Cycle Of Communcation Channels Now in this current paper I will consider the special case of information propagation and dissemination for original, disruptive, or counterintuitive intellectual content.

The peer-review process filters undesirable qualities from publications within scientific and academic communities. It is generally intolerant of innovations, disruptive observations, and contributors whose work is nearly entirely original (with the exception of mathematics), yet these qualities are essential to a healthy intellectual environment.

Original workers take great risks, often remain isolated from their peers, and are typically shunned and disrespected by potential employers. They are lonely thinkers that crave colleagues and dialogue.

The web-log, or blog, is now the most accessible as well as the most rapid route to publication for these original minds, and it does offer some dialogue. But the blogosphere is a generally a chaotic and unreliable marketplace for information. It is more often used for agglomerating news, publishing news and commentary or accessing news, either personal or news of interest to the greater community, than as a portal for serious intellectual publication.

Publishing original material on a blog is risky because the contribution is automatically branded unreliable because the writers become known by the company that they keep, and that company is far too often intellectually messy and unreliable.

Is Intelligence A Property of All Life?

Is intelligence is a basic feature of life? What do we mean when we speak or write about intelligence? There are at least a few working definitions, one is humans know it when they encounter it, as in the Turing test. Another is that human intelligence marks the top of a scale of animal intelligence. Casual language about intelligence usually confuses it with smartness, and is a competitive notion.

I wonder if intelligence is not a more profound aspect of all life, present in every living organism and at every scale. We may find a more useful idea of intelligence if we give intelligence some wiggle-room. I also wonder if intelligence is a fundamental property of life. Could any organism function without some level of intelligent or orderly information transfer and exchange within it's boundaries? Isn't information transfer and exchange a basic operation within intelligence? Perhaps an organelle or a virus does not aspire to the label highly intelligent, but it gets it's own job done.

Artificial Intelligence Requires Emotional Mediation

Artificial intelligence will never be intelligent in the human sense until we find a way of organizing machine process, storage and retrieval that is mediated by an emotion-emulating algorithm.

Information moving about within our brains, even what we believe to be pure logical thought and fact is attached to emotional preferences and dislikes (intellectual passions if you like), and these emotional tags or neurological links assist us in making efficient and meaningful use of the primary sensory chaos present in the unprocessed perceived environment. Emotion plus other data equals meaning, and meaning is everything in both thought and emotion, and in action or communication.

Comprehending what meaning means aught to be our main target as we pursue the grail of artificial intelligence. We can eventually understand and build an operational concept of meaning, but it will be difficult (or maybe impossible) if we only stick to the computer science worldview. The difficulty will be somewhat eased if computer scientists go to lunch with psychotherapists who teach and use psychodynamic theory.

In a simple mind experiment, think of an idea or a theory, perhaps some fact or strong belief you have been working with. Are you fond of it? Do you defend this belief or theory when colleagues challenge it’s validity in meetings? Your defense is not purely logical. It is also strongly emotional.

We are motivated by emotion first, logic second. We store away and remember our observations and scientific ideas with ‘tags’ that connect emotion to logical thought.

If computation is ever to be deeply companionable with humans, we must build computers that process data the way humans feel and think, this is not improbable. Because they exist together within the brain, emotions, logically, must be merely another quality or kind of information in the brain in the same way as are logical propositions.

Emotion is not a halo of irrational spiritual vapor hovering outside our brains. It is more likely central to the brain’s own deep logic. Perhaps emotion is a faster pathway to learning and remembering in animals, including humans, and will eventually provide the same functions within computer systems and their application programs.

Perhaps, if we keep our minds open this avenue of investigation may also lead to a better understanding of the mysterious process of human thought and emotion.

Time Is Our Event Horizon

We stand at the edge of time, onlookers and participants in a swirling cosmos that we have neither understood or imagined. It is our illusion that we look ahead at tomorrow or next year. This moment is our event horizon. We cannot see beyond it. We cannot anticipate if our passage in this solar system will either continue or end. We do not know if what we view is a beginning or an ending. Because all moments mark the end of now, all moments are finite singular end points. Restricted to such a foreshortened view, what business do we have causing destruction? All we can achieve in this mode is to restrict and narrow the course of the future, essentially contributing only to entropy, not to life.

Cryptospontaneous Generation

I don’t believe in evil or in daemons, yet as we have been reminded, the accidental accumulation of little daemons lies in the details. As errors combine and their details accumulate, there is increased potential that at some critical moment the heap will slide and all the little errors, once un-noticed, will identify themselves by cascading, contributing to some sort of entangled disaster. Most errors are born the way my grandmother believed house-flies were born—by cryptospontaneous generation. She was wrong about house-flies and cockroaches but would have been somewhat right about data-bugs and data-corruption involving media age and cosmic rays. These accidents during birth and senescence cause little evil data-daemons. Heisenberg and the cosmos are about as spontaneous as we can get in a deterministic universe. Mix lots of details, accidents, and bugs over time and what do you get? Flies.

Information Sausages

Imagine that the worldwide network is in fact only a information sausage exchange and sausage packing plant . If we poke a peephole in the roof and look down at the operations below, we see crowds of people, millions really, trying to stuff their own information into some sausage and send it off, or pick-up a delivery of sausage with their name on it. Each person arrives with some idea or question to stuff into the sausage-making machines below. We see that the production line winds around like an airport check-in area—unrelated people are located in front of and behind each other, each in their turn stuffing their information into funnels, filling each of the sausage-skins in sequence with discontinuous, unrelated packages of information.

The information-sausages move along the line, each filled with it’s bits, and are cut off from the endless supply at the end of the line where a packing station counts lengths of just-so-many-sausages to be randomly tossed into boxes and shipped out the back door. From our perch on the roof we see outside the building that the boxes are carried away and distributed through the distribution network.

At millions of endpoints and nodes in this network, like the one you are on right now, humans get to sample the sausage and digest it’s contents. But the overall impression we get from looking down through our peephole is that of too many people trying to jam too much stuff into too many small packages and tossing them unsorted, into an endless queue of trucks. We are looking at a traffic jam stretching from input to destination of ideas, words, bits, identities, locations, and workers, each speaking different languages, without understanding of meaning. It is Babel, even for those who speak the same language. The hum is deafening, the noise out-shouts the signal. This signal to noise imbalance is most difficult when nasty selfish folks attempt to fill millions of sausage links with viruses causing endless trouble. While the sum of all this effort is greater than the sausages themselves, it is not as great as it should be. We have a thoughtless network because information does not conform to semantic structures. We need a thoughtful one structured in the terms of human language. We need Twine (developed by Radar Networks Inc.) to tie our packages together in personalized 'giftwrap'.

After The Fast Last Mile are The Slow Last Inches

After the ‘last mile’ is completed, when the last high bandwidth cable has been connected, and computers are predictably faster than they are, information will still have to travel the last few inches from the screen and be formed into meaning and memory within the mind. These inches are your own nerve fiber, not copper or optical fiber, and they place the ultimate limits upon our efforts to push or pull information from providers to consumers. Outwitting our own brains will be the next big thing. In order to make these last inches more receptive to what the information network provides to their computer screens, the network must pre-digest the information it serves to users. The most powerful digestive juices we can employ come by way of Twine via Radar Networks Inc.. Twine, like the human brain, does a lot of it's work associatively. It is the first really syncretic system to be developed for computation. Using Twine, my computer finds something for me, something important that I did not know and was not seeking. It is a bit of a shock. This is new territory. My computer suddenly seems smart.

While Moore’s Law optimizes the possibilities for many aspects of computation, the pace of nerve fiber information transmission will ever remain constant. Eventually, (a long time from now) a computer may demonstrate the processing and intelligence equivalent of brain-power. But we will still always have to read, organize and consider the sentences as we read them.

Then follows the complex brain-work of deriving and ascribing context and meaning to what we have read. This will always happen at the nice human speed of brain and nerve. There is human pleasure in this process and pace, like taking a walk, or a swim, we live within and enjoy our human scale speed limits. Someday Moore’s Law will become unimportant to most hands-on uses of computers because our brains will be so much slower (and more expensive).

Associative Decision-Making: A Challenging Paradox for Management

The Syncretic Process and The Value Of Associative Thinking In A World Of Linear Decision-Making

The products and services—the creative intellectual capital upon which most business are founded—were born in an associative thought process. Paradoxically, later decisions in those same organizations are frequently initiated, managed, and concluded almost entirely within a framework of linear-logical thinking. Syncretic thinking is a mental process that makes non-linear, and therefore unexpected, but nonetheless logical associative connections among seemingly divergent phenomena or data on the basis of subtle qualities they may have in common. This process, present during the conception of a new venture, should not be abandoned or overwhelmed by linearity.

By understanding and resolving this paradox between the creative syncretic process that characterizes the founding stage culture of an organization, and the conservative linear processes that characterize later stages we can generate a new mix of creative thinking that effectively includes and optimizes both elements. These two divergent modes highlight several differences between the mind-sets that typify the young and innovative start up phase of a business, and that same business when later it is more mature and settled into it’s niche. Associative and inventive thinking that generated a novel product or service and founded an organization or industry usually, at maturity, will have yielded to a more rigorous calculus and competitive strategic analysis. In this later phase of organization, rewards linear thinking frameworks that conserve capital and that advance incrementally within a defined and established niche. The creative productive early associative process is discouraged, and linearity, alone, is widely believed to support long-term survival. Neither framework by itself is likely to encourage the growth of new ideas that may form the future re-creations of the organization in a changing market and technical environment.

Bird Flu Virus H5N1 Planning

The problem of bird flu virus H5N1 is brewing, quite literally, in a biological soup in Asia and now on the European continent. It is a time-bomb. We will all be fortunate if it ticks for a few more years before detonating everywhere at the same time (within a week). Isolationist plans are worthless. Post-crisis-planning, as in Katrina, is worse than useless, it is inexcusable. Incompetence and ignorance of science an public health techniques round out a lethal combination for probably many millions worldwide. None of us has any familiarity with calamities of this sort. The death rate from infections of this flu epidemics in humans is around 50%, some predict worse outcome. Those who are not killed would be so ill as to be unable to care for each other. Downstream and later, the effects of this great human trauma would be felt for a century. It horrifies me to personalize this, but should the pandemic occur, about half of us, family, freinds, and strangers might die, at home, together.