Freeform Thought Aggregator?! YES!!!

Freeform Thought Aggregator

 

My "techno-speak" label for feeds services like Twitter… Will elaborate on the rationale later, but you heard this buzz term here first! As far as I can see, no one is slinging this bit of BS yet J

Freeform Thought Aggregator?! YES!

Freeform Thought Aggregator

 

My "techno-speak" label for feeds services like Twitter… Will elaborate on the rationale later, but you heard this buzz term here first! As far as I can see, no one is slinging this bit of BS yet J

Kindle, Meet Nook

OK, lets set a baseline here.  The printed word is in trouble in many ways.  On the one hand, it is enjoying something of a renaissance as social networking democratizes publishing, but on the other hand, actually being a professional wordsmith who is compensated for your effort, is under siege.  Folks are still reading, although fewer of them are taking the time to read long form work, unfortunately, but they are increasingly looking for digital delivery of their content for the convenience and efficiency it offers.  To date, there have been two barriers in the digital delivery of the printed word.  The first is that a traditional, bound paper, book is a great form factor that provides an unmatched tactile experience.  The second is that the ecosystem around digital delivery has remained weak.  The industry has taken a run at the former for years now and Amazon, with the Kindle, finally seems to have gotten it almost right.  Unfortunately, as competitors seek to match their offering, the latter problem is likely to get much worse.

 

Barnes and Noble recently announced their Nook device.  It looks good. To be honest, the Sony eBook reader, the Kindle and the Nook all look pretty similar to me when it comes right down to it from a hardware perspective.  Of course these devices will never match some of the "soft" qualities of paper, but I think folks are willing to make that tradeoff for the incredible convenience they bring.  Classic corporate behavior, proven time and time again to be bad, seems set to create a mess for consumers as usual, unfortunately.

 

One would think that in an industry as in danger as "book selling", there would be a greater likelihood for some out of the box thinking and some unity.  Ridiculous idealism I know, but consider the landscape.  Barnes and Noble has something which still, somehow, has some value.  Call it nostalgia.  Call it the last remnants of the social aspect of the human condition, call it the addictive nature of Starbucks... Whatever it is, there is still value in the brick and mortar stores B&N runs.  They are cozy and warm.  People kind of like visiting them.  They don't like actually buying books, apparently, but they do like standing around in a B&N and reading them.

 

Now take Amazon.  Amazon is the ultimate expression of the internet efficiency machine.  Poster child of web commerce.  People like Amazon.  A lot.  But they like Amazon the way they like the train they commute to work in, their mailbox or a flu shot.  It's an efficient means to an end.  It gets you a product quickly and cheaply with very little hassle.  It doesn't make you warm and cozy and it isn't some place you visit just to be there.

 

The Kindle does well because a device reliant on digital delivery is a very good match for a retailer that has mastered digital delivery.  That said, Amazon started as a shot across the bow of the legacy book seller, evolved into so much more, but really never killed off any of the old brick and mortar guys.  So the Nook may just do well because folks do still come into that store for whatever reason.

 

The question I have is, why must we make this choice?  Here is what I want to see.  I want to see the publishing industry and its retail channel get together in a room and agree on some standards. A standard set of formats (preferrably without DRM, but realistically with it) and a set of standard fulfilment mechanisms.  Web services basically.

 

I want to be able to buy book reader from any vendor based on price and features and know that it will be able to consume content from any distribution channel.  If I go into a Borders or B&N, I want to be able to peruse the shelves and if I see something I like and want it digitally, scan the barcode with the camera built into my reader.  I want an ISBN lookup to let me know if the book is available digitally, and if I'm interested, be able to purchase and download it immediately.  If I am in a B&N and I own a Knook, then B&N owns the transaction.  If you are in a B&N and own a Kindle, and you do the exact same thing, Amazon pays B&N a small "cut" since they were the "point of sale".  Similarly, if I take my Knook and download a book from Amazon onto it, B&N pays Amazon a small cut.  If I have a 3rd party reader, I understand that prices will be a bit higher every time I buy a book because I must pay an "on ramp" charge for the ecosystem.  This should be made up by the fact that my reader should be cheaper.  If it isn't , then the third party needs to work on their value proposition.

 

What the above would create is some "soft consolidation" in the book selling industry, which should make them all stronger.  B&N can adjust, over time, how they inventory their stores as more purchases shift to digital fulfilment.  The stores can start to become "showcase" locations for events of various kinds.  Book signings, "kids days", what have you.  Once a partnership is established, Amazon might even choose to partner with a brick and mortar store (GASP!) to leverage that direct consumer touch for something. 

 

The best part is the consumer would have more flexibility and choice while everyone (including the authors who are likely to sell more books) makes money.  Of course this model forces each corporation to accept that they aren't going to build an industry monopoly and, since "building a monopoly" seems to be the chief lesson taught at Ivy League business schools, don't expect to see the above vision of commerce utopia happening any time soon.

 

Joel Not on Cloud

I just read an article by Joel Spolsky dating back to May of 2008 in which he expresses extreme skepticism (putting it mindly) regarding Live Mesh and goes farther to apply the term "Architecture Astronaut" to, among others, Ray Ozzie.

 

Now I have a lot of respect for Joel and have enjoyed his writings for years.  I think he gets a lot of things (most things?) right most of the time, but on this one, I think he has possibly made the classic error of allowing a personal bias cloud (no pun, honest!) his judgement.  It worries me that he seems so eager to apply this pet term "Architecture Astronaut" to folks who the mainstream would typically call either "aspirational thinkers" or "visionaries"

 

On topic, though, Joel writes off Live Mesh as nothing more than "file sync" (something, he says, which no one needs more of) and adds that the aforementioned "Astronauts" are famous for pushing out architectures that no one has either asked for, or needs.

 

To be perfectly frank, I haven't checked to see if Joel has had a follow-up to this entry and has, perhaps, issued a "mea culpa".  If he has, kudos to Joel!  But either way, it's not really relevant to this entry because he is really just echoing an argument that comes up a lot - particularly around very forward looking topics.

 

There are two specifics here which require rebuttal.  The first is that Live Mesh is "just file sync".  It is fair to say that the first application on Live Mesh is "file sync" and that the proof of concept is "file sync", but this is hardly the ultimate intent of the platform.  I would also take issue with the notion that "no one needs" another file sync system, but more on that later.  Ozzie's vision with Mesh includes the notion of a central, cloud hosted, distribution engine for applications.

 

But lets take a step back from all of this. Live Mesh may turn out to be a dud, or it may transform into something else entirely.  What's more important, I think, is rebutting this notion that none of this is anything anyone "wants or needs".

 

Consider a very plausible scenario involving your average, gainfully employed, millenial.  Joe or Jane Millenial quite likely has a desktop computer at home, a laptop that they drag on the road either for personal or professional use, a smart phone of some kind, an MP3 player (I wonder which one? hmmmm), possibly a video game console and maybe even some sort of "smart TV" that is internet connected (a set top box, a Tivo, other DVR or the TV itself)

 

This is a very common setup for the average young person.  Not a techno super geek; just an average Joe or Jane.  Scattered amidst all of these screens, platforms and points of presence is an equally common mix of content; applications, music both DRM'd and in the clear, movies and television shows also DRM'd and in the clear, photos, personal documents, applications and application data.

 

Today, managing this blob of information is a nearly full time job.  There are a dozen incompatible standards and formats and an equal number of point solutions for synchronization and storage of content.  None of these are intelligent, few are cross platform and all require lots of user intervention.  They are also all premise bound unless you jump through some big hoops and learn more about technology than you might want to.

 

Call me an "Architecture Astronaut", but I think many folks would both want and need a single, unifying, web accessible console which allows them to "organize their digital life" (to coin a wretched marketing style cliche).  I imagine sitting down, launching a browser, connecting to some "cloud" and landing on my "stuff" page.  There I am presented with a friendly representative view of all of the information that is important to me and all of the entry points that I have subscribed - my PC, laptop, phone, Tivo, etc.  The capabilities of each of these devices (their platform, processing and storage limits, IO thresholds, etc) are known to the cloud intelligence and options are either presented or hidden based on that knowledge.

 

From here, I can categorize blocks of my content as applicable to certain devices or not, push applications and their data where I need them (and perhaps subcomponents of those applications - Halo 4 on XBox 360 and provisionable to the PC, but a Halo 4 messenger client for chatting with friends who are online in the game pushed to the phone and laptop) and consume new applications and services that are surfaced entirely within the cloud.  For the finale, I can choose to have some or all of this content also live within that cloud and be made available (in part or whole) from any web browser.  So if I want to watch the latest episode of Heroes from my Tivo via a web browser at a friends house, I can do that.

 

Writing off all of this "cloud stuff" as simply architecture for its own sake and the solution to a non-existant problem really misses the needs of the millenial generation, if you ask me.  It almost reminds me of the mainframe guys waving off this "useless PC" that was starting to creep up.  And if by some bizarre and unlikely twist of fate Joel is reading, please think about this topic again (if you haven't already), this time leaving Ozzie out of the equation! 

 

ADDENDUM - A friend just informed me that I was remiss in letting Joel off the hook on the whole "Hailstorm" rant (Microsoft Passport, as it is known today).  After recovering from the shock that someone actually read this, I acknowledged that this was a glaring oversight indeed.  In my defense, it was really late and I tend to run out of steam on this things as they wear on (especially since I work under the assumption that no one is reading!).  So on the topic of Hailstorm... Joel wrote this off as an attempt to corral all of the worlds data which failed, in the end, because "no one wanted that or trusts Microsoft".  I would argue that Hailstorm was simply well ahead of its time and possibly not even fully understood, in terms of its place and potential, by the folks who launched it.  Ask anyone who architects network services of any kind and they will tell you that sitting right there in the room of any design session, just waiting to be heard, is a big giant identity management problem.  As services and applications shift to public/semi-public and interconnected private clouds, this problem will intensify.  It is likely that the ultimate solution will be found in SAML and claims based authentication as a means of federating with minimal impact.  The complexity of such a scenario is greatly reduced if the 80/20 rule is applied and the vast majority of user identities are contained within a few large security domains.  Passport, is an attempt to provide one such uber domain.  If every Microsoft property relies upon a single directory for authentication and access control, a pretty large segment of users is addressed.  As far as trust goes, I would argue that people are trusting Google today with the keys to their kingdom and nearly begging them to take more.  And Google hasnt exactly been a great steward of this privilege to date.  So any trust issues Microsoft has really go directly to either branding and image, or general ignorance of the problem domain.  Either way, it isn't a technical issue.  From a technical standpoint, Passport makes no less sense than a Google id and Google encouraging partners to plug in to the Google identity management backend.  Last I checked, no one is really complaining about that because the need for it is now readily apparent.

 

Ghost in the Machine

So IBM recently made an extremely significant breakthrough in AI research in that they were able to algorithmically simulate the brain functions of a cat.  It's amazing how ignored a story like this is by the mainstream press and how badly the average person underestimates its importance.  If artificial sentience is one day achieved, historians will look back and point to this IBM accomplishment as a vital first milestone on the path.

 

The whole thing got me thinking on the ramifications of continued breakthroughs in this field.  What questions would potentially be answered about the nature of sentience?  What new ones would be raised?  Would achieving machine sentience disprove the possibility of some aspect of existence and intelligence beyond the physical or would it actually do the opposite and provide the evidence that had always eluded scientists and philosophers both?

 

Human experience has yet to quantify what "existence" and "sentience" really mean.  Religions attempt to provide an answer by way of a largely emotion based and abstract view including the notion of a "soul" and persistence of that soul beyond physical death.  Science obviously takes a purely rational approach, even in speculation, and has yet to draw any conclusions beyond thought being the outcome of a complex series of electro-chemical reactions in the brain.

 

It is ironic that ultimately, the answers may lie not in biology or philiosophy, but rather in computer science and a tangentially related field - theoretical quantum physics.  For anyone not versed, theoretical physics deals with the study of the composition of the universe beyond what we believe we have quantified.  These days, it is widely accepted that the universe is composed of at least 10 dimensions (or 11, depending on which unifying theory you subscribe to).  It is also accepted that you cannot have perspective up.  What does this mean?  The easiest way to understand is to imagine a hypothetical 2D life form.  So imagine, if you would, that Bart Simpson were alive.  One day, while lying flat as always, a lovely oak tree somehow lands in Bart's two dimensional field of vision.  What does Bart see?

 

 

Well... The accepted theory is, "not much".  Bart, as a 2D life form, would only be able to see the aspect of the 3D object (the tree) that touches 2D space.  In other words, he'd probably see something that looks like a bark colored line the width of an oak.  It's tough being 2D in a 3D universe!  Now try being 3D in a 10 or 11D universe!  That's a state we're all pretty familiar with, even if we can't perceive it.

 

"Time" is often referred to as the "fourth" dimension.  Not a spatial, dimension (at least in the traditional way that we, from our 3D myopia, define "spatial") but a dimension nontheless.   An objects "position in time" is as fundamental as its physical characteristics.  This relationship between time and space is the core principal of Einstein's relativity theories.

 

If you've followed along this far without nodding off, reward yourself with a refreshing beverage because from here forward, we are about to diverge into some wild flights of speculative fancy!  Well maybe not so wild in the generally accepted social sense, but wild as far as geek chat goes.

 

Let's make the assumption that the idea of relative perspective and upward perception limit is accurate (Bart can't see the tree for what it really is) and that time is, in fact, dimension number four.  This would mean that time is a limiting factor on our ability to perceive the universe.  And this seems correct.  We are linear beings who are bound by time.  It is difficult for us to even speculate on concepts that are non-linear, much less be able to "move" outside the boundaries of time. 

 

In order to "work", however, theoretical physics models all require the existance of dimensions beyond the fourth mathematically (again, 10 or even 11) depending on the model.  We have theorized, and now even directly observed, that particles are the building blocks of reality.  Quarks become protons and neutrons.  Protons and neutrons combine and attract electrons and together they form atoms which combine to form molecules and so on until you have a bouncing baby human.  This all sounds fantastic and we could all live happily ever after (for as long as our linear existence allows) except for a few small problems.  Chief among them is that particles occasionally misbehave.  They do strange things like "entangle" (Google it!) which seem to violate relativity.   Other minor challenges include the fact that there appears to be "missing mass" in the universe, the elusive nature of gravity and the difficulty of rationalizing quantum mechanics with relativity. 

 

Investigation into these formidable quandries has resulted in a number of emerging theoretical models.  One of them in particular, string theory, is of relevance to this discussion.  Dumbed way, way down, string theory posits that the particles that serve as the building blocks of our universe are, in fact, points at the end of a line which oscillates its way through space time.  So what would a photon, for example, really look like if what we observe is really just the view of it allowed by the perspective lock imposed by our third dimensional vantage point?  Well something like this possibly:

 

 

Pretty crazy.  But much like Bart looking at the tree, its quite difficult to "visualize" an Nth dimensional structure from a three dimensional vantage point!

 

So what does all of this have to do with sentience, AI, the nature of existence and the price of tea in China?  Well who knows!  But seriously, if we accept that we are genuinely the sum of our parts and that everything which occurs at a quantum level has some measurable effect at a physical level (and this is directly observable in many cases, one example being how quantum mechanics has influenced biologists' understanding of smell receptors), then it stands to reason that in theorizing on the nature of sentience and thought, we allow for the possibilities afforded by emerging quantum mechanics theories.

 

And this brings us to the most critically important emerging theory when it comes to formulating an understanding of what we are; the theory of phyiscal information.  The concept of physical information allows for the possibility that information exists as a physical entity.  This theory is tremendously important in quantum computing and may actually be directly observable when we measure the actions of those pesky entangled particles mentioned earlier (did you Google it?)

 

So if five hundred years from now, IBM (yes, they'll still be around innovating despite what some people say!) builds a quantum computer which simulates the human brain (or surpasses it) and gains sentience, will they have disproved the possibility of a soul?  Or will they have simply demonstrated exactly how a "soul" is created?  In all likelihood, it will depend on how we choose to define the term.  Perhaps a "soul" is merely the emergence of a pattern of information cohesive enough that it forms an autonomous entity.  It might stand to reason that this entity spans the N dimensions of space time at a quantum level.  Perhaps the universe might even choose to persist this information beyond the physical reaction that lead to its emergence (be it biological or mechanical).   Could it be that an afterlife awaits as an algorithm rattling around in the eternal computer that is the multiverse?  One day I suppose we all get to find out and, some time long after that if you're reading this, science may prove and observe it.