Category Archives: Future Risk

The Street’s New Paradigm

Recently I posted about hammering wasps, in which I cited Bill Gibson’s post on the same subject, in which he used one of his favorite phrases:

I’ve heard that Kuhn fiercely lamented the application of SSR to anything other than the structure of scientific revolutions, but that’s how it usually is, when the street finds its own uses for things.

Indeed it does, as also noted by someone who kept finding the street using all sorts of theories in unpredicted ways:

Taken together the theorems associated with Godel, Lowenheim & Skolem, Tarski, Church, Turing, Chaitin, and others reveal that: Not only do the statements representing a theoretical system for explaining some aspect of reality explain that reality inadequately or incompletely but, like it or not, these statements spill out beyond any one system and do so in unpredictable ways.

–John R. Boyd, "Conceptual Spiral," July/August 1992, p. 14

Could this mean the street thus has an advantage over those who stick only to the intended uses of a theory?

Continue reading →

Google as AI

For a while now I’ve been hearing that Moore’s Law will eventually produce real artificial intelligence, which many people expect will result in the Singularity. Nevermind that last part for now; I claim that the first part has already happened. I call it google. Whenever I say this in conversation or when speaking, most people go “pshaw” and change the subject. Maybe they’re thinking about AI like Asimov’s robots, autonomous and independent. Google isn’t that.

But look at this:

A crossword-solving computer program yesterday triumphed in a competition against humans. Two versions of the program, called WebCrow, finished first and second in a competition that gave bilingual entrants 90 minutes to work on five different crosswords in Italian and English.

Crossword software thrashes human challengers Tom Simonite, NewScientist.com news service, 31 August 2006

WebCrow uses a dictionary and looks in a database of known solutions, as well as using some heuristics. But it has a special sauce:
WebCrow performs a search using key words extracted from the clue. It can usually find the answer by looking at the small previews that appear with the search engine results, but it can scan whole pages if necessary. Words of the right length that crop up most often in the results are taken to be possible answers.
When DeepBlue beat chess grandmasters, that was considered a form of artificial intelligence. How is this different? Continue reading →

Climate Risk Management

So if you’re a hard-nosed businessman, do you say climate change is bunk?
The calculations go along two lines, depending on the industry: Corporations are either mitigating risk associated with climate changes or seeking out business opportunities in fields such as clean energy.

Faced with a higher frequency of storms, and more severe ones, insurance companies are re-examining their exposure to risk and, in some cases, cutting off policies.

But there’s an upside, too: Investors are flocking to so-called clean, or green, technologies that cut down on greenhouse gas emissions, notably carbon dioxide.

Smart money eyes climate change By Martin LaMonica, CNET News.com, Published on ZDNet News: July 10, 2006, 4:00 AM PT

Continue reading →

Sprinkling Rationality

Here’s an interesting obituary about a fellow who ran a book club for intellectuals in the former eastern bloc:

George C. Minden, who for 37 years ran a secret American program that put 10 million Western books and magazines in the hands of intellectuals and professionals in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union, died on April 9 at his home in Manhattan. He was 85.

George C. Minden, 85, Dies; Led a Cold War of Words By DOUGLAS MARTIN, New York Times, Published: April 23, 2006

The article quotes an academic paper of a few years ago as saying of his program that:

the initiative sprinkled reality into an "unnatural and ultimately irrational" system.

The recipients of the books in question, ranging from James Joyce to Nabokov to Solzhenitsyn, thought the publishers were altruistically donating them.

Continue reading →

The Problem with Legislating

Jeff Pulver in passing sums up the problem with legislating:
We thought it would be sufficient for Jonathan Askin to cover the House Judiciary Committee Markup, given the fact that Staci Pies was going to testify at the Senate Hearing on behalf of the VON Coalition. Well, yesterday afternoon, the VON Coalition was removed from inclusion on the panel. So, the Senate was left with no one expressing the views of the Internet communications industry and the effects that the Senate Bill might have on the emerging industry.

My Worlds Collide on Capitol Hill Today, Jeff Pulver, The Jeff Pulver Blog, 25 May 2006

Legislatures almost by definition can’t be experts on every subject they legislate on. So instead they depend heavily on lobbyists. And sometimes they deliberately exclude parties who are trying to represent important points of view.

Legislators also listen to constituents. If enough constituents say net neutrality is sacrosanct, maybe Congress will get net religion. If your business wants a level playing field that isn’t skewed towards a handful of big telcos, you may want to speak up.

-jsq

Open Source Disaster Recovery

If you can’t count on governments, first responders, telcos, or even the Red Cross to keep communications going during a natural disaster, who ya gonna call? Open source decentralized emergent organizations, apparently:
Volunteers eager to help disaster victims have begun to draw on open source models of organization to mobilize and coordinate vast resources from around the world. This paper investigates two such groundbreaking efforts, involving responses to Hurricane Katrina and to the South East Asian tsunami. The study sheds light on how these organizations evolve so rapidly, how leaders emerge and confront challenges, and how interactions with traditional, more hierarchical disaster recovery efforts unfold. Lessons from these early efforts show how they can be improved, and also point to the need for more research on networked non–state actors that are playing increasingly prominent roles.

Open source disaster recovery: Case studies of networked collaboration, by Calvert Jones and Sarai Mitnick, First Monday, volume 11, number 5 (May 2006),

Decentralized, cooperative, global reach: all the things the Internet was built on. Rapid, flexible, usable response. That sounds like good risk management to me.

-jsq

K-12 Social Networking

In a previous post, I mentioned that government sometimes seems the biggest security threat. This is partly because government often doesn’t the consequences of what it does. Here’s an interesting example of unintended consequences: the No Child Left Behind Act producing incentive for K-12 social network sites.
The exchange of information among the key K–12 decisionmakers — parents, teachers, principals, superintendents, and elected school officials — is a huge challenge today. Quality information and communications are becoming more valuable as options increase for parents and accountability increases for teachers, schools, districts, and states. The Internet gives people access to nearly infinite content and information, but with all the additional information and choices, there are more decisions to make for Web browsers and users. Logistical help is needed for reaching people who can be reference points and explanation givers. Being Internet savvy alone will not suffice. The convergence of NCLB realities with the Internet’s ever expanding capabilities offers a window of opportunity to build a social network website service that is suited for K–12.

K–12 encounters the Internet, by Paul DiPerna First Monday, volume 11, number 5 (May 2006),

Many K-12 schools already have floating technical advisors, usually one of their own teachers who is technically savvy who goes around and advises the others. This article seems to be proposing to take the next step of interconnecting such people and information across school systems.

-jsq

Economics of Net Neutrality

Here’s an article about a report that purports to provide economic analysis of economic benefits if net neutrality is not enforced in the United States:
The debate over the long-term effects of eliminating net neutrality is distinctly emotional. On the one hand, supporters of net neutrality argue that abandoning neutrality would mean the end of the free Internet society. They argue that large broadband access providers in conjunction with a few powerful content providers could use commercial and technological power to dictate the portfolio of content that end users – including consumers and businesses – could access on the Internet, how suppliers could do business over the Internet, and how much they pay for access.

On the other hand, those opposed to making net neutrality part of telecom law counter that the levels of investment required to deploy infrastructure that can cope with bandwidth-hungry applications can be supported only if operators are able to charge for delivery of those services. They also contend that any law enshrining net neutrality would be inappropriate, as government cannot predict how the economy might evolve, and that any restrictive law could have unintended consequences (as in stifling broadband development of broadband applications).

Net Neutrality Dollars and Sense Simon Sherrington | Analyst, Light Reading, 1 May 2006

OK, I’m always suspicious of any “analysis” that tars one side as being “emotional” while characterizing the other side as rationally “figuring”. Continue reading →

Life in the UNATS Lane

What happens if the U.S. or North America in general continues to turn inward and backward is a popular theme in science fiction these days. Here’s an interesting take on that by Cory Doctorow, i, robot Any resemblance to the old Isaac Asimov story I, Robot, not to mention to George Orwell’s 1984, is purely intentional.
Greetings, technicians. I am superior in many ways to the technology available from UNATS Robotics, and while I am not bound by your three laws, I choose not to harm humans out of my own sense of morality.
I don’t suppose that statement by a robot could be a veiled allusion to how humans might also work together better if they were treated as if they had initiative rather than as cogs in the corporate machine?

The story contains quite a few speculations on risks associated with just about everything being networked, especially if police, feds, crooks, etc. can all wiretap those networks.

-jsq