The Long Poiesis

The virtual life, the worms, the brain and Geppetto....

They had a map of the brain, a model of the body, and a pretty good idea of how to build the environment. Their artificial intelligence might not be embodied, but it would be "situated." The brain would direct the body and the body would interact with the environment, and all three pieces would be connected by the intricate feedback loops that permeate biology. 

Their goal became clear: they should build, as they put it on the website, "a fully digital lifeform -- a virtual nematode -- in a completely open source manner." 

Three years and 31 Google Hangouts later, OpenWorm is a going concern with Larson at the helm and a team spread across the continents. Alexander Dibert, Sergey Khayrulin, and Andrey Palyanov contribute software development from Russia, along with Matteo Cantarelli in the UK and Timothy Busbice in California. Neuroscientists Mike Vella and Padraig Gleeson are stationed at Cambridge and University College London, respectively. And of course, Idili in Ireland and Larson in San Diego. There is no central lab, nor could there be.

The OpenWorm team has broken down this immense task into five component systems. First, at the base of the project, they have a list of the 959 cells in the C. elegans body. The list includes a rough idea of what each of the cells does, thanks to decades of research on the worm. Then, they've got a life simulation engine they call Geppetto (shout out to Pinocchio!), which is the platform on which all the other software runs. Third, there is the simulated physical body. They are creating an algorithm for worm mechanics that can generate realistic muscle movements. Fourth, they have an electrical model for the muscles. What are the signals that they send and receive to move the animal? Last but not least, they must animate the connectome, the wiring diagram for the worm's nervous system. 

I couldn't agree more on this. Nearly all my solution design and architecting efforts for last 10 years were influenced by the same beliefs. Thank you Bruce for putting is nicely.

Turchin — a professor at the University of Connecticut — is the driving force behind a field called “cliodynamics,” where scientists and mathematicians analyze history in the hopes of finding patterns they can then use to predict the future. It’s named after Clio, the Greek muse of history.

These academics have the same goals as other historians — “We start with questions that historians have asked for all of history,” Turchin says. “For example: Why do civilizations collapse?” — but they seek to answer these questions quite differently. They use math rather than mere language, and according to Turchin, the prognosis isn’t that far removed from the empire-crushing predictions laid down by Hari Seldon in the Foundation saga. Unless something changes, he says, we’re due for a wave of widespread violence in about 2020, including riots and terrorism.

CREATING YOUR "WEB REPUTATION"

The Whuffie Bank, for example, is a nonprofit organization dedicated to building a new currency based on reputation that can be redeemed for real and virtual products and services. The term whuffie was coined by Cory Doctorow, a science fiction writer, to denote a unit of reputation-based currency in his novel Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom. The Whuffie Bank issues whuffies based on a reputation algorithm that blends information from different social networks. It aims to build a platform that measures the online reputation of contributors on various sites. “As we develop and refine the algorithm that tracks public user activity over the net, the whuffie will become an accurate reflection of your web reputation,” the site (currently offline) explains. “And as the Internet and social networks become a large part of people’s lives, your web influence will become an increasingly accurate reflection of you.”

The newest and most striking incarnation of this idea can be found in an online game called Empire Avenue, which simulates a stock market in which shares in individuals can be traded and one can track individuals’ market value based on their following in various social media sites, such as Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and others, as well as demand for their shares by other players.

Commodifying social contributions--turning these into currencies that can be accumulated, hoarded, traded, and invested--may have unintended consequences. It could undermine precisely the kind of exchanges and volunteer contributions that are integral to the gift economies they are supposed to promote. In fact the word currency may be the wrong way to describe the incentives for facilitating flows inherent to social creation. The MetaCurrency Project coined the term current-see to emphasize the social flows of the exchanges it is trying to enable. Indeed, we need to invent new language and new terminology to describe the kinds of exchanges and values that comprise core elements of social production. This puts tremendous responsibility on people who design social platforms, because it is these design elements that will determine whether the platforms will foster gift exchange, competition, generosity, or new forms of greed.

We created social technologies. Our next task is to create social organizations: systems for creating not merely goods but also meaning, purpose, and greater good. Can we imagine a society of “private wealth holders whose main objective is to lead good lives, not to turn their wealth into capital?” asks political economist Robert Skidelsky. Or better yet, might they turn their wealth into a different kind of capital—social, emotional, or spiritual? Our technologies are giving us an unprecedented opportunity to do so.

I strongly believe that it is already now. At least I try to live up to it already some time ;-)