Godel was quite at home with the idea that as logic and mathematics progress, machines would increasingly take over the “Yes-No” part of the enterprise. Any notion that Godel would have embraced an argument by analogy from the undecidability of FOL to the perpetual intractability of the k-symbol provability problem is utterly misguided: He writes: “[I]t would obviously mean that in spite of the undecidability of the Entscheidungsproblem, the mental work of a mathematician concerning Yes-or-No questions could be completely replaced by a machine.”

From Bringsjord, “An Argument for P=NP”

11:59 AM Steve: if applying for job with Obama Admin:
(10) Writings: Please list and, if readily available, provide a copy of each book, article, column or publication (including but not limited to any posts or comments on blogs or other websites) you have authored, individually or with others. Please list all aliases or “handles” you have used to communicate on the Internet.
They want all comments you posted on the intertubes - that’s insane!
12:00 PM me: um
you dont understand what they are doing
they are going to make government open source, user generated, wiki-enabled and open to commenting
12:01 PM govt 2.0

On Jay Leve, the guy behind SurveyUSA

All these polls were being conducted in a bedroom-sized chamber just outside Leve’s door called “the vault,” in recognition of its actual use back when a rare-coins dealer owned the space. Leve led me inside, and pointed to a corner. “We even kept one of his safes,” he said with a smile. Leve doesn’t use the old steel safe, but the vault is still an apt name because it currently guards the workhorses of Leve’s business: a set of black IBM calling machines, each about the size of a stereo tuner and stacked horizontally in a pair of large metal cabinets. Each machine is capable of having as many as 288 phone lines plugged into its back, creating a messy tangle of multicolored wires running from the machines up into the ceiling. On a busy day, Leve explained, his machines might place a few hundred thousand calls for 30 different polls. (For this election, he is polling in 28 states.) Since Leve began conducting surveys in 1992, his machines have completed 24 million interviews.

Leve, for his part, can be withering about the establishment that rejects him. He bridles at the commonly used term “robo-calling” as a label for what he does. “It could not be a more offensive term,” he says. “It literally is like using the N-word.”

… and when they have observ’d, that the principal disturbance in society arises from those goods, which we call external, and from their looseness and easy transition from one person to another; they must seek for a remedy by putting these goods, as far as possible, on the same footing with the fix’d and constant advantages of the mind and body.

- Hume, Treatise

If one of the fundamental problems of the technological world is the explosion of information, then it seems to me that the task of ’sensemaking’ is a burden that must be taken up by both humans and machines. This is where the real power of human-machine collaboration lies: machines are not just tools to be used by humans, but are fellow sensemakers confronting a VUCA world alongside us. Cognitive enhancements, memory and attention drugs, and so on, look like pissing in the wind compared to the overwhelming amounts of information produced by the collective. At best, it seems that these enhancements help the individual mind focus on the information relevant to the goals and projects of the individual mind, and to mask off the unimportant or uninteresting information. Perhaps this leads to a certain amount of individual empowerment, but it still leaves mountains of (possibly relevant) data untouched, and therefore doesn’t solve the problem.

Perhaps I am using the term ’sensemaking’ to be more or less synonymous with terms like ‘interpreting’ or ‘understanding’, and maybe this isn’t exactly what you mean. But my idea is that our machines themselves will play a role in helping to determine what is important or interesting. This is why I said that Google is itself a sensemaker, because it has the goal of sorting out what is relevant and what is irrelevant. As you rightly point out, Google isn’t terribly good at the task, and the user must use their own judgment in how to make use of the results Google makes available. But Google is already good enough that even the unenhanced individual doesn’t have too much trouble, with a moderate amount of training, to make a decent judgment call. The upshot is that with the collaboration of sensemakers like Google, we have rendered that apparently insurmountable flood of information manageable.

You responded that sensemaking isn’t just the raw interpretation of data, but is also doing something with that information. I found this troubling, and somewhat antithetical to the general idea of human-machine collaboration. The implications seemed to be:

1) Machines aren’t doing anything with the information that collect.

- I don’t think you want to admit this (it is exactly what the idea of blogjects/spimes deny), although I admit that most of the interesting examples you gave during the talk are examples of people doing interesting things with information.

2) Only humans can be sensemakers, because only humans have projects (goals, commitments) that require them to act.

- This is a standard move against artificial intelligence, but I would argue that the very idea of human-machine collaboration is to argue that machines share our projects. Maybe machines do not have projects of their own (though I think they do), but their actions and behaviors are completely intertwined with our commitments.

3) Human individuals are the theoretical center and driving force of technological advancement.

- This is the most worrying implication, since it implies that humans on their own are responsible for coping with the technological environment. But if machines are developing us, as you say, then humans aren’t the driving force!

We have, ultimately a collection of humans and machines working together, each contributing to the overall project of sensemaking.

The eventual theoretical foundation of Internet Studies ™ combines the collapse of ontology with an integrated and consistent set of nudges and an active and self-sustaining community of spimes. Let’s call these the Three Pillars of the Internet Age. These pillars are bound together by what I will call a participatory framework. Internet studies differ from other “studies” disciplines (media studies, gender studies, etc) in that the protocols which govern the interactions between entities within a participatory framework are well-defined, and in most cases are explicit and formal (for instance, IP describes (at some level of analysis) the communication between all networked objects). Exchanges between entities within the framework are interactive, interoperable, and cooperative, and hence they are participatory. Internet studies is also far more interested with the possibilities made available by the infrastructure that supports the participatory framework, than in any particularly realization of those possibilities. For instance, Internet Studies is interested in the question, “what is a blog?”, and what kinds of communication, social organization, and information distribution possibilities that this kind of resource makes available, and is less interested in a question like “How has DKos changed the political climate in 2008?” which in some sense is merely a specific application of the more general social protocol.

I’ll talk just a bit more about the three pillars below.

Read the rest of this entry »

This is really old in internet time, but I just watched it now and it is definitely worth it. David Weinberger is a philosopher by training, and tells basically the same Aristotle to Heidegger story I tell in my own class.

See also: Ontology is Overrated and Information R/Evolution.

Coming up: The Three Pillars of the Internet Age.