open-ended processes

the rise of human technology, watch the TEDxtalk on the site

a brilliant thought in the future of education, Sugata Mitra won TED prize this month

Maajid Nawaz, a former Islamist extremist, and today a promoter of decomacracy in Pakistan, asks important, critical questions on global political processes and brings an insider view into the fight among extremism of all types and democratic activism and culture. Important.

Causal Inference

a brilliant glimpse into the growing non-linearity of cause-effect in complex and overly connected systems.

a module from Boston University, School of Public Health, on causal inference and webs of causation; Prof WW LaMorte.

"Since a determination that a relationship is causal is a judgment, there is often disagreement, particularly since causality often implies some degree of responsibility for the outcome, and this often has legal and financial consequences. Many would agree that incomplete evidence or a lack of agreement about causality, should not always prevent appropriate actions to protect the public's health. Nevertheless, the question of whether a relationship is causal sometimes has important consequences for a vast number of people, as we will see in this module..

Today, improvements in cognitive pharmaceuticals, genetic engineering and high-tech prostheses inspire some to dream of a future of accelerating species enhancement, reaching a point where we will have become — what? Übermenschen? Cyborgs? Post-humans? Or just better versions of ourselves?

In Emily Sargent’s artfully curated exhibition, Superhuman, at the Wellcome Trust in London this summer, sci-fi visions of future improvements were presented side-by-side with artifacts from the history of human enhancement.4

‘I’m mystified by the resistance that human enhancement faces,’ Harris writes in the Superhuman exhibition catalogue. ‘I think many people have a horror of playing God, but if they reflected on how bad a job God was doing most of the time, they would lose that horror.’

But the most revealingly naive prediction was this, scheduled to come true a mere 18 years from now: ‘The ability to control the genetics of humans, animals, and agricultural plants will greatly benefit human welfare; widespread consensus about ethical, legal, and moral issues will be built in the process.’

This is truly a marvellous apogee of technocratic utopianism. Global agreement on ‘ethical, legal, and moral’ issues has been out of reach for all of recorded human civilisation, at least through the traditional means of reasoning and persuasion. Just because we might become as gods with regard to the molecular building blocks of life doesn’t mean we won’t continue to bicker and squabble. After all, that’s just what communities of gods spend most of their time doing in polytheistic mythologies. Or perhaps we are meant to read this future consensus as one propagated by morally improving chemistry.

Critical systems can be defined as systems that are close to a critical point, generally identified as the boundary of an order-disorder phase transition. Many complex systems far from equilibrium and composed of a large number of interacting elements have been successfully modeled as critical: notable examples range from gene-interaction networks to financial markets. At criticality, these systems can avoid being trapped in one of two extreme cases: a disordered state (when interactions are too weak and the system is dominated by noise) or a globally ordered state in which all elements are locked (when interactions are too strong and the system is completely static). Neither state supports the dualism essential for a complex system like the brain to function: it must maintain some order to ensure coherent functioning (i.e., generate a reproducible behavior in response to a certain stimulus) while allowing for a certain degree of disorder to enable flexibility (i.e., adapt to varying external conditions). Such dualism is instead possible at criticality.

Brilliant and important talk, if you did not see it take the time...

Beautiful maps of each country according to population densities. quite enlightening perspective

An interesting talk on how the architecture of knowledge was influenced along 2500 years by the media of paper, more than we could dear to imagine, and how the hyper linked structure of  internet has transformed all that. Skulls don't scale, networks do, knowledge does.

"We used to know how to know. Get some experts, maybe a methodology, add some criteria and credentials, publish the results, and you get knowledge we can all rely on. But as knowledge is absorbed by our new digital medium, it's becoming clear that the fundamentals of knowledge are not properties of knowledge but of its old paper medium. Skulls don't scale. But the Net does. Now networked knowledge is taking on the properties of its new medium: never being settled, including disagreement within itself, and becoming not a set of stopping points but a web of temptations. Networked knowledge, for all its strengths, has its own set of problems. But, in knowledge's new nature there is perhaps a hint about why the Net has such surprising transformative power.

Stigmergy is neither competitive nor traditionally collaborative.

With stigmergy, an initial idea is freely given, and the project is driven by the idea, not by a personality or group of personalities. No individual needs permission (competitive) or consensus (cooperative) to propose an idea or initiate a project. There is no need to discuss or vote on the idea, if an idea is exciting or necessary it will attract interest. The interest attracted will be from people actively involved in the system and willing to put effort into carrying the project further, not empty votes from people with little interest or involvement. Since the project is supported or rejected based on contributed effort, not empty votes, input from people with more commitment to the idea will have greater weight. Stigmergy also puts individuals in control over their own work.

Rather than the traditional corporate model of endless acquisition and expansion, stigmergy encourages splintering into different nodes. Because each individual is responsible only for their own work, and no one can direct a group of workers, expansion means more work for the individual, a self limiting prospect. As a system grows, the additional work requires either additional resources or splintering; as communication is easier and there is more autonomy in smaller groups, splintering is the more likely outcome of growth.

A new system of governance or collaboration that does not follow a competitive hierarchical model will need to employ stigmergy in most of its action based systems. It is neither reasonable nor desirable for individual thought and action to be subjugated to group consensus in matters which do not affect the group, and it is frankly impossible to accomplish complex tasks if every decision must be presented for approval; that is the biggest weakness of the hierarchical model. The incredible success of so many internet projects are the result of stigmergy, not cooperation, and it is stigmergy that will help us build quickly, efficiently and produce results far better than any of us can foresee at the outset.