Embracing Chaos

Amazon has a history of facilitating disruptive change.  First by selling books online, they demonstrated the advantages of a well-run online store.  Then with music, movies and just about everything else, they have shown that centralizing inventory and customer experience allows for reduced costs and an improved experience over a traditional distributed retail model.  Today, Amazon Web Services is starting to disrupt IT operations similarly by providing a higher quality service at lower cost than most companies can manage themselves.  They achieve these scale economies through centralization.  With Kindle Amazon is attempting another disruptive change, this time in the way people read books.  Lower distribution costs give electronic “e-books” an intrinsic advantage over physical books, hinting that e-books are inevitable.  But will Kindle be able to “cross the chasm” and become a mass-market device?  Amazon’s complementary assets, scale and technology all make it likely that Kindle will succeed.

Several startup companies have sold e-book readers in the past, but none successfully.  Sony is the only other large company to have tried.   Assurance that a risky new technology is backed by a company that won’t disappear is important for mass-market adoption, giving Sony and Amazon an advantage.  This is especially important for devices that consume media, as the device’s utility dwindles without new content.  Amazon is especially well positioned to offer media for Kindle through its complementary assets.

Amazon’s established relationships with book publishers are extremely valuable to Kindle.  Book publishers control e-book content.  Amazon’s history of selling physical books has earned them the trust of almost every publishing house, ensuring easy access to electronic versions of books. In addition to existing e-books, Amazon’s scale gives them leverage to encourage publishers to release electronic versions of books.

Beyond that, Amazon has rare technology to make electronic versions of books available with far less work on the publishers’ parts.  Amazon has spent years scanning physical books to enable a feature called “Search Inside This Book” on their website.  Along with Google, they have one of the only large archives of scanned physical books in the world.  This enables selling e-books for books that publishers don’t even have original electronic copies of, with rights negotiations as the only remaining barrier.

Innovators have been jibbing together their own e-book readers out of laptops and PDF files for years.  Early-adopters look for concrete advantages like the ability to search books.  Med-students give Kindle rave reviews for this capability.   The easy availability and portability of dozens of books appeal to the small segment of truly voracious readers.  Kindle seems to serve these early segments well.  To cross the chasm into the mass market of the early majority, Kindle must make the experience simple and reliable.  Kindle’s wireless data connection sets it apart from all previous e-book readers.  By leveraging Sprint’s nation-wide 3G cellular data network, Kindle can load content without the operator even owning a computer.  Thus Kindle dodges the inevitable complexity that arises anytime a PC is involved.  This, along with Amazon’s well-established customer service, promise to make Kindle much easier for the early majority to accept.

Kindle seems well positioned for acceptance by the mass market.  If successful, Amazon will need to balance publishers’ need for DRM against consumers’ desire for open content.  The music industry has exposed these issues but certainly not solved them.

[This is another recycled homework assignment.  Something to keep y'all entertained while I'm in New Zealand!]

[I wrote this for my excellent class on Open Innovation.  With mere weeks to go until I finish my MBA, I haven't found much time to write original stuff for this blog, so I'm recycling a bit.]

The music recording industry is in trouble.  Disruptive changes in music playback technology have seriously reduced demand for their mainstay business, physical CD sales.  CD sales comprise 80% of the industry’s total revenue, but have dropped sharply in recent years.  Last year sales dropped by 19%, and the channel is in danger of freefall as retailers start to re-allocate store space currently assigned to CDs.  The industry’s hopeful replacement revenue stream, digital downloads, looks like it will only replace a fraction of the loss.  What went wrong?  How did an entire industry fail to keep up with technological innovation?

The recording industry’s value in the economy comes from providing consumers access to great music.  The value chain includes discovering talent, developing the talent to create and record great music, and distribution of that music to consumers.  The early stages of the pipeline have remained about the same for decades.  But technology has permanently changed how music is distributed to consumers.  This fact was driven home to EMI management when a group of teenagers were invited to take as many free CDs as they wanted after participating in a focus group, and they didn’t take a single one!  The recording industry has acted as a manufacturer of physical goods.  But really their business is in licensing Intellectual Property (IP).  When it was inconvenient for consumers to reproduce high-quality recordings the distinction was unimportant.  But today physical distribution of recorded media provides a tiny fraction of the value in the music value chain.

Music IP is legally controlled by copyright.  Digital Rights Management (DRM) technology has been used to enforce licensing agreements on digital recordings files.  Until 2007, the recording industry only sold digital music with DRM, in an attempt to control copyright violations.  The great irony of DRM that has prevented its acceptance by consumers is that by restricting the use of the legally distributed digital music, DRM makes the legal product lower quality than the illegal product.  The lack of consumer incentive to use a lower quality product, combined with the impracticality of enforcing copyright agreements on individual consumers makes the appropriability regime in the distribution of music to consumers very weak.

We can think of innovation in this content space as the creation of compelling new music.  A hot young band with a new album or style of music has an innovation they want to commercialize.  As discussed earlier, the appropriability regime with consumers is quite weak.  The value of the labels’ distribution assets are waning, putting the band in the position of the attacker’s advantage according to Gans’ and Sterns’ innovation framework.  The band should go it alone and seek novel distribution techniques, ignoring the incumbent labels.  The appropriability regime is less clear with respect to incumbent labels – the album itself is well protected by copyright law since the legal recourse is straightforward against a large recording company, but a novel style of music is unprotectable.  So a promising band considering partnering with an incumbent label should consider how easily the value of their art could be expropriated.

The recording industry has focused too long on a part of the value chain that is no longer economically relevant.  They should look to other industries for inspiration as to how to create value in an environment where content and innovation are created more openly.

I just got back from foo camp, a small unconference-style event held on the Sebastopol campus of O’Reilly.  FOO stands for Friends Of O‘Reilly.  (The name came out of a joke about having a "foo bar" at a conference.  This bar served me too much wine over the course of the weekend.)  Tim O’Reilly likes the conference because it helps him spot upcoming
trends early, which is an important part of O’Reilly’s business both as
a publisher of technology books, and as an organizer of large public
conferences.

The conference is small and invitation only, and pretty much everybody there was happy to be invited to spend a weekend with such a carefully chosen group of thought-leaders.  I was personally quite honored and surprised to be invited back this year because last year it was made quite clear that we shouldn’t expect to be invited back since keeping fresh opinions around is important for the function of the event.

This year I met far more people than last year, and felt much more comfortable striking up a conversation with whomever happened to be standing next to me.  Part of that is of course my own attitude, but based on others’ comments it sounded like a lot of people had similar experiences.  Several people remarked publicly at how uncharacteristically social they felt.

I suspect that a big contributor to this effect was a comment that Tim made on the first day during introductions.  Tim said to not just talk to your existing friends, and that we were all more likely to get invited back if we were more social with strangers.  He said that we were all invited for a reason, and so we all had interesting ideas to share.  This concept helped me break down shyness and intimidation barriers.  Later Tim made an analogy to making new synapses in the global brain.  (I rather like the idea of being a neuron in some huge hive mind.  I’m excited to read Toby Segaran’s upcoming book on collective intelligence, and really enjoyed meeting him this weekend.)

If the causal relationship I’m hypothesizing here is real, I see it as a great example of the economic principal that incentives effect behavior, and more specifically how small incentives can shift social dynamics.  I didn’t get a chance to ask Tim how deliberate or off-hand that comment was, but I’ll encourage him to repeat it next year.

A little while ago I heard an interesting story on NPR about collaborative music software.  They described a series of websites that empower geographically separated musicians to create music collaboratively.  Using sites like ejamming, Musicians can find additional band members, share tracks and mix your own tracks with those of your partners across the net.  They even hint at being able to practice with each other live, although I’ve never tried it.

All this reminds me of the story behind the fabulous first album by The Postal Service, Give Up.  For those who don’t know the story, this fabulous album was created by two musicians living in different cities who sent tapes back and forth by mail to create the music. 

Now sites like JamGlue and SpliceMusic make this kind of collaboration possible for anybody musically inclined.  It’ll be fun to hear the first big successes from this new kind of band.  You might even call them a transhuman bands since they’ll using modern technology to overcome human geographic limitations to creating music.

My old pal Stephen Hawking has been in the news a lot today for going on a vomet-comet ride.  (Okay, we’re not really old pals, but we’ve chatted a couple of times, notably at my grandpa’s memorial service where he gave a really touching eulogy.)  At a press conference before his flight, Stephen said:

"Life on Earth is at an ever-increasing risk of being wiped
out by a disaster such as sudden global warming, nuclear war, a
genetically engineered virus or other dangers."

On this point I completely agree with him.  This idea was a key point I made in my recent Ignite talk on Transhuman Morality.  We’re going to wipe ourselves out.  But as far as what we should do about it, Stephen and I disagree.  He sees space travel as the route to salvation.  This planet is getting burned up, so we’d better find a new one, so the logic goes.  I think this line of reasoning is unrealistic and even reckless.  The idea that we can stop worrying about saving this planet is the reckless part.  Having an out like this encourages people to act irresponsibly.

The reason why it’s unrealistic is more subtle.  I said at Ignite that we won’t be flying around in space ships visiting other planets like in Star Trek, and people hassled me about it.  I know this is a little heretical for a futurist to say, but I believe it.  I should clarify a bit: I think it’s likely we’ll visit the other planets in our solar system — there’s plenty of useful matter here that we can mine and put to good use.  But a physical conscious entity leaving this solar system is tantamount to suicide as far as any relationship that entity could hope to maintain with the culture here is concerned.  The recent discovery of an earth-like planet only 20 years away puts this idea into perspective.  Even if we could make a trip at an average speed of half light speed, (a reasonably aggressive goal considering the need to accelerate and decelerate) a round-trip would take 80 years.  80 years ago the world saw the first telephone trans-atlantic telephone call.  In another 80 years, many believe we will have hit the information singularity meaning who knows what will be here.  Return would be nearly impossible, and almost certainly pointless since the world one would return to would be completely alien.  Leaving to colonize?  Possible I suppose, but good luck.  And at that point I really don’t think there would be any motivation.

My main point is that by the time we have sufficient technology for interstellar travel, we won’t have physical bodies any more.  The robot revolution will be complete.  As a society we will be much more concerned with creating faster computers in which to store our consciousnesses than with whatever we think we’d achieve by leaving the solar system.  Colonization might take the form of transmitting executable programs that represent our personalities into deep space with the hopes that some society will pick them up and try to execute them on whatever hardware they have.  Or perhaps sending out a nano-seed that knows how to build a receiver to pick up such a signal.  But it’s hard to imagine sending a physical copy of the data that represent our personalities in a format that’s compressed enough that it could be executable, while including the plans for making a more powerful computer to run on.  If we were at this stage, the only reason to do so would be because we had converted all the physical matter in our solar system to become information processing machinery and we needed more raw material with which to represent our thoughts.  That day may come, but it will not be soon.

So I agree we should continue to pursue space exploration, because it helps advance technology.  But it is not a way out of our pressing environmental concerns.  The world needs geeks to transcend beyond biological bodies.  But geeks need hippies to keep the world around for long enough to get there.

[Vomet comet picture courtesy of Kevin Boydston.]

The house where my nameserver lives lost power today.  I’ve moved DNS service to a professional hosting service to avoid similar problems in the future, thus continuing the trend of moving services into the server cloud.  It’s probably best since the server closet at that house is also the laundry room.  When we set up that house we understood something few MIS folks do — computers really love warm damp environments.</sarcasm>

Anyway, sorry for the inconvenience.  Everything should be back to normal in a few hours.  (If you’re reading this, it almost certainly is.)

Charles Stross’s book Accelerando has a hilarious scene where a highly-augmented human loses his glasses which are his primary interface to the computer systems which support his thinking.  The character is so used to relying on these external systems for support that his immediate response is "Who am I?"  In first aid, we learn to rank somebody’s level of alertness and orientation by asking them if they know their name, where they are, what time it is and what happened, getting additional points for each successively harder question.  Without his glasses, this human was unable to answer even the easiest question, and would be medically classified as verbally responsive, but neither alert nor oriented.

When I was on vacation recently I realized I was close to being put into a similar situation.  When traveling abroad, I’m always keenly aware of what happens to me if my stuff gets stolen or otherwise lost.  I always follow a best practice of keeping my passport, plane tickets home and cash very close to my body in a place that’s not easily accessible.  On this last trip I realized that if I were left with just these things I would likely have no way to contact my friends and family back home.  Where we were, there wasn’t much internet.  Just about the only phone numbers I have memorized were those of my traveling companions.  Mom?  Dad?  Best friends?  Nope.  They’re in the phone.  And the phone could easily get lost or disabled.  (I should be so lucky as to have to replace that piece of junk.)

When I realized this, I copied down some key phone numbers onto a piece of paper in my money belt.  Not a big deal, but an interesting realization about how much of my working set has been externalized.

Tomorrow morning at 7:00 AM I’m flying to Mexico to enjoy spring break.  And tonight, according to congress, Daylight Savings Time begins, which means the clocks should move ahead an hour.  The real question is if the computers which are running the clocks are going to listen to congress or not.

Normally I preach that network time is so much more reliable than manual, independent clocks that drift.  But today is totally different.  I’m trying to figure out what alarm I can set to wake up in time to get to the airport.

I can’t trust my "smart" cell phone.  No way that thing’s gonna get the time change right.  It’ll probably start spewing smoke at 2am tonight, based on its crappy behavior at the last DST switch.

I can’t trust the alarm in my Sonos, which usually wakes me up to KUOW.

I spent a while racking my brain to figure out which of my alarm systems was actually disconnected from the net.  It took me a while to remember, but my good old clock radio is disconnected.  As we approach the singularity and the world slowly wakes up, this problem is just going to get more pronounced.  Which is why we need to move to central configuration for things like this that can be changed by policy.

My advice: don’t trust any reminders coming from devices running on network time for the next 3 weeks.  If punctuality matters to you, double check everything against your wrist watch.  Unless you got one that runs windows.  (Sucker.)

In this essay, I’m going to explore the question "If the human brain is Turing complete, what does that imply about the existence of free will?"  And moreover, what does that mean about the ability to upload our consciousness into computers?

First, a little computer science background.  Turing completeness is the idea that a computing system has the same capabilities as a universal Turing machine.  This theoretical machine moves along a long tape which has various symbols on it that the machine can read and write.  The machine itself is always in one internal state, but will change to different states based on its programming and input.  It is programmed by a huge state transition table which says "if you’re in state X, and you’re reading symbol Y, then write symbol Z, move left n spaces, and switch to state W" for all possible states and symbols.  It turns out that with a long enough tape and enough states this device can do just about anything you think of a computer being able to do.  In fact, computer scientists have shown that every modern computer system is functionally equivalent to a Turing machine.  That is to say all modern computers are Turing complete.  It’s useful because it’s simple enough to prove theorems about.  Some important things we know about Turing machines and anything which is functionally equivalent to one:

• Turing machines are deterministic — given a set of inputs they’ll always reach the same output.
• It’s impossible to reliably predict whether or not a program on a Turing machine will ever finish.

I see two ways to interpret the question of whether or not a human brain is Turing complete.  The first one is "Can a human brain perform the same functions as a Turing machine?"  I think that given a pen, paper, and enough patience the answer is clearly yes.  But that’s not the question that interests me.

As a transhumanist, the interesting question for me is "Can a Turing-complete computer perform the same functions as a human brain?"  This question is important to me because if the answer is yes, then it is possible for a computer to simulate a human personality.  That is to say uploading of a human consciousness into a computer is possible.  I’m going to dodge the detailed analysis of this question today, and get back to it in a later article.  For now, let’s assume the answer is "Yes" and see what that implies about free will.

Remember that theorem that says Turing machines are deterministic?  That is, once you start it going with a given set of inputs, that it’s always going to reach the same answer?  If this were true for us as humans, then we would have no free will — our actions would be entirely determined by our current state and our surroundings.  We might think we are making choices, but in fact a fast computer could run the same calculation and tell us what our answer would be before we thought we had decided.  So by this logic if uploading is possible, then humans have no free will.  Troubling, eh?

Fortunately, I think the above analysis has a flaw.  Let’s dive down a little deeper into neurochemistry.  Neurons fire as a result of electro-chemical processes.  Basic chemistry tells us that the rates of chemical reactions are deterministic based on concentrations of the relevant input chemicals.  But if you took stat-mech then you learned that these predicted rates are actually just statistical averages and that they’re only accurate if the brazillions of molecules involved happen to collide with each other at a constant frequency as they randomly bounce around in solution.  And quantum mechanics tells us that this apparently random bouncing around is in fact, to Einstein’s chagrin, truly random — god does play dice with the universe.  (I’m not sure I completely buy this, but I’ll have to save that for another article too.  Yes, I know that the Bell inequalities were experimentally observed in the 1980’s but it still sits funny with me.  Sorry grandpa.  More on this later.)  Because of this randomness, the instantaneous rate of any chemical reaction will vary randomly, while still averaging around the classically predicted rate.  So the upshot is that neurons don’t behave completely deterministically, but that the exact timing of neurons firing has a truly (quantum) random component to it.

Now this implies quite firmly that our brains cannot be simulated by a Turing machine since Turing machines can’t act randomly, and thus wouldn’t be able to properly simulate the randomness of neurons firing.  But if we modify a Turing machine slightly so that a spot on its tape read a different random symbol each time you check, I think we’re good.  Given this, it seems reasonable that a modern computer that has a source of truly random data could simulate a brain.  Some have argued that we need quantum computers to simulate consciousness, but I don’t think so.  (Again, more on this later.)

Computers are pretty good at generating psuedo-random data internally, and by listening to the outside world (hard drive vibration, microphones, etc) can generate what is probably actually random data.  If true randomness is really important, we can build small accessory cards that sample thermal noise on
a resistor and produce large volumes of truly (quantum) random data.  Some advanced cryptographic systems do this today.  So it’s totally possible today to build this modified Turing machine that also incorporates random input.

Now our transhuman dilemma is solved.  The essence of free will lies in the quantum randomness of electro-chemical processes in our brain.  Moreover, it will be possible to upload our personalities into computers, complete with our free wills in tact, by incorporating random processes into the hardware that simulates our brains.  If the computers we upload into are only psuedo-random (as almost all software is today), we will appear to have free will, in fact we will believe that we have it, but we will in fact be total robots.  Now, who can come up with a Turing test for free will?

[[Thanks to Barry Brummit.  This article is a rehash of a couple good conversations we had over New Year's and this morning after yoga practice.]]

I’m sure by now most of you have heard that last summer congress legislated a new start to Daylight Savings Time this year.  Instead of the first Sunday in April it’s going to start on the second Sunday in March from now on — March 11 instead of April 1 this year.  Overall I think this is a good change — I’d prefer daylight savings time year ’round, except for that part where kids get run over going to school in the dark.

But it is of course playing havoc with computer systems everywhere which have the DST rules built into hardware and software everywhere.  (As somebody[ref?] pointed out don’t trust your meeting reminders for those couple of weeks!)  A DBA I work with described the problem as "worse than Y2K" which I can totally believe since this change comes with just 7 months warning, whereas I started writing code to be Y2K aware in the mid-80’s and others started well before that.

I don’t write to this blog often enough for it to be worth anybody’s time for me to re-report news.  There’s plenty of bloggers who do that already — you don’t need me to filter what’s interesting for you.  So I always try to add some personal value in whatever I’m talking about.  The question I’ve been wrestling with here is: How can we avoid this kind of problem in the future?

"Always use network time" is one obvious answer, and for some things that’s all you need.  I don’t trust clocks that are set internally and can drift.  Cell phones, computer clocks (on well-run computers), the clock on my desk phone — all these are set from a reliable central source and I believe them.  But this answer isn’t good enough for any software that has to plan things in advance. Any kind of scheduling or calendaring software needs to know when time changes are going to occur in advance.  So just having the central network clock tell you that the time has changed unexpectedly doesn’t solve your problems.

As I said, many systems have the rules for time changes hard-coded.  To avoid this kind of problem in the future, these rules need to be configurable.  This is basic Software Engineering — don’t hard code things that change.    I don’t know how often this kind of change happens in the world, but I’m guessing it’s not infrequent especially if you take a global view of things.  I expect some countries change their timezone rules about as often as they change dictators.  (If I was a ruthless dictator I’d probably set my country 15 minutes off from my neighbors just to mess with everybody!)

Then the right answer is to move time change and timezone configuration to a central place on the net.  Any place will do, so long as it’s reliable.  It should be highly available and distributed and secure and of course have some well-structured XML format.  None of this is hard — we know how to do all these things.  The consuming systems would only need to ping this service every week or month to see if any thing had changed.  The hardest part of doing this would be avoiding getting stuck in standards body bureaucracy and subsequent scope creep.  Actually doing it would not be that hard.