Innovation (technologicallly driven) – Page 46

Seamless complacency, rise of the crackers

Yes, seamless integration as, e.g., pursued by the likes of Appl, may polish some edges of the roughness of the world. OMG! I have to turn this plug over to make it fit! The horror! Why didn’t someone fix this!?
Such, to be shipped to the battlefields of the Middle East and Africa, traumatised at the bus ride already.

And, the consumerism, the ultimate ideal of marketeers and Silicon Valley alike, will bring both down crashing. Because the ideal of consumerism everywhere, will also, does already also, pervade education, leaving (achieving its goal at) numb drone consumers – that have no means of income as they’re too mediocre at far too low a level to have any differentiating value (of potential (work)); a vicious circle – that will not be able to see value in services offered but moreover are incapable of building the Next Thing of even maintaining the old.

That will be left to
a. The ever shrinking (!) money(sic)-mostupper class. Not true class!
b. Crackers.
a. This of course, till the exponentially spiraling competition of the money hierarchy will result in < 1 slot, in the end.
b. This of course, since there will be renegades, outcasts, that go their own way. And will be legion. As they drop out, are brute- nuclear-force pushed out of the consumerist lowest classes. Suddenly, have to be resourceful – and (t)hence go after the resources… Only outcasts will see the porous base of the systems stack and hack their way into it. Cultural abandonment leading to … this, you know.

Ah, lessons …? Don’t Be Evil, and Be Prepared. To abandon. ..?
Whatever, there’s still:

[~~Metropolis~~… La Défense, many years back]

Total priv’stalking

Errrm, would anyone have pointers to literature (of the serious kind, not the NSFW kind you only understand) regarding comparison of real physical-world stalking versus on-line total data collection ..?
No, not as some rant against TLAs but rather against commercial enterprise than not only collects, but actively circles around you, wherever you go. Giving you the creeps.

Because the psychological first response is so similar, can it be that the secondary behavioural response / adaptation is similar, in self-censorship and distortion of actual free movement around … the web and free choice of information ..?

And also, whether current anti-stalking laws of the physical world, would actually work, or need strengthening anyway, and/or would/could work or need translation/extension, to cover liberty of movement and privacy-as-being-the-right-to-be-left-alone i.e., privacy as the right to not be tracked, privacy as the right to anonymity everywhere but the very very select very place- and time(!!)-restricted cases one’s personal info is actually required. Privacy as in: companies might have the right to have their own information but not the right to collect information of or on me (on Being or Behavioural) as that is in the end always information produced by me, through being or behaving. The (European) principle still is that copyright can be granted, transferred, shared out in common parlance by payment for use (or getting paid for transferring the right to collect such payments) i.e., economically, but not legally; the actual ownership of the copyright remains with the author!

See why I excluded the TLAs ..? They may collect all they would want but not use unless on suspicion after normal-legal specific a priori proof; that’s their job. No officially (…) they may not step outside their confined remit box, but they do have a box to work within.
Now, back to the question: Please reply with other than the purely legal mumbo-jumbo that not even peers could truly understand but just babble along with.

In return, in advance:

[Foggy (eyes), since in the olden days, probably never to be seen again; Bélem]

Non-Dunbarian compliance

Just a note that the world is in great need for more on Dunbar’s numbers in antidote to totalitarian-bureaucratic compliance efforts.

Nah, wanted to, but have more urgent issues to discuss. E.g., tomorrow. See you then!

The beauty of variance

Oh why did we think that mere straightforward compliance with one definitive set of rules (however principled, or detailed) would achieve anything worthwhile ..?

Why didn’t we consider the inherent, innate beauty of variance and variation, beyond mere secondary usefulness in resilience/robustness ..?

Because reasons. The perennial one being Fear, probably. Fear of uncertainty. As there’s downside risk in that. Where all the risk management still focuses on. Yes, no, no denying that; all models still have any ‘impact’ of any ‘event’ as a single negative number. If (in the every-part-but-when sense) we would inculde positive, good possibilities and outcomes to count as well, wouldn’t we end up with zero average impacts in many places ..? Like the great many places where non-compliance is conscious just because the enterpreneur wants to achieve something worthwhile hence other than compliance ..?

But what if we turn risk management into the brushing off of the rough edges of beautiful sculpturing that enterpreneurs and true managers do ..? Chiseling away grey/gray unusable material to keep the beuatiful statue that was in the stone already to be released ..?

Those that want nothing to bloom may await nothing but their ignomous and insignificant death. In the mean time, don’t bother the one sthat want to achieve something, please.

After which I remind you: That’s all secondary talk. Primarily, seek the beauty of variation for its own richness. Hence:

[The view from my field office, once. Y2K was a party on St. Lucia…]

Modelling innovation

Just a note: Why do we see so many sites, posts, models, templates how to organise innovation ..?
Wasn’t Innovation about not being squeezed into models or templates ..?
Or are the ones actually innovating, not interested and the ones that are, not innovating ..?
I’ll come back to this later, if needed. For now:

[Ideals, at Cologne]

Tip: Morozov’s Click Here

Ah, maybe I’m the one not having paid attention, but I see so little response (which would be: digesting and repeat) of the ideas of the great Morozov in his To Save Everything, Click Here, as e.g., here (to be clicked).

Which is quite a contrast with his content, having a major discussion area in itself, about every other paragraph throughout. Yes, that makes it just a little bit harder to retain the main plot (?) line and the ‘details’ as well; it seems a bit like the asymmetry in information security where the defence will have to fight (? debate, rather) on all sides when attackers (the ones with the blindingly large blinds/blinkers on, headless chickens) can move their individual spearhead attacks forward anywhere – but in this Morozov case, one can count on the defense having the much more and more importantly, much better, arguments on its side. One should not count arguments, but weigh them (Cicero).

“Huh, no content of the book here …” Indeed not. Get it and read! I’m off now to finish reading, leaving you with:

[Ah, the one little part where The Hague is somewhat like a big Milanish / Parisian city; unedited hence the off light conditions]

Positive: Singular Golden Age

In the Utopian versus Dystopian post-Singularity discussion, two additions.

One; some folks said that once humanity would figure out how the world turns, one/some deity/deities would immediately replace the world with an infinite more complex one. Some claim this has happened already. [Dunno how many times, can’t tell.]
Would it be possible that this happened during the Age of Aquarius (yes), with its Egyptian sphinx riddles, and/or the phase shifts of the Greek Golden Age (et al.) mythology, as here ..?

Two; Clark’s Third Law: Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. How far on this path are we, with our Singularity thinking ..? And, there’s talk about talking to gods here.

Three (for logic); can we mix the two ..? What are the third-dimensional discussion directions ..?
It seems to become ever more a mer à boire …

Hence:

[Feels relevant; London 2007 – shiny, no crisis in sight]

Middle secretaries

Two points to make:
* Middle management will be.
* Secretaries should be.

The discussion regarding middle managers being superfluous or not had a slight uptick the past couple of months. With the latter voice having been a bit too quiet. Yes, middle management is under threat. It has always been; only the (history-)ignorant will have missed that. And Yes, all the Disruption things and similar empty barrel half-baked air by a lot of folks who have hands-on experience in the slim to none bin with (real) management altogether let alone this kind, have predicted over and over again that the disruption by Server-with-algorithm-app-that-schedules-day-laborers will make middle management redundant, as the believed task was only that.

Quod non. And as if just an algorithm will capture the full complexity (and incoherence, inconsistency, internally and externally contradictory ..!) of the requirements and work of the middle manager.
OK, we’re not discussing the drone administrative clerk that has Manager on his card (huh?) and sits in an office passing top-down orders and bottom-up reports back and forth. We’re talking the real, 24/7 problem firefighter here. The coordinator of chaos. The translator of lofty (other would say, ‘airhead’) ‘governance’ (quod non) mumbo jumbo into actual work structure and tasks, and translatereporting back. That survives and in doing so, shows great performance. The other ones, will be weeded out anyway, every time there’s an economic cycle downturn. [If the right ones would be kept, and the wrong ones ‘given growth opportunities elsewhere’. Seldomly the case; offing is by the fte numbers, and the wrong ones have being glued to their seats as their core competence, through sucking up or otherwise.]
So, the middle manager stays for a long time to come as (s)he does the kind of non-predictable work that will remain longest. If start-ups don’t have them, see them grow: They will.

Secretaries deserve a come-back. In similar vein as above, the vast majority of ~~managers~~ office clerks (from the shop floor (even if of knowledge workers…) all the way to near the top) these days have to do their own typing, scheduling, and setting up socializing things. Whereas before, economies of scale were many, and there were additional benefits because the good (sic, again) secretaries would e.g., know the best, unrenown restaurants all around and could get you a table even when they would be fully booked, and they would manage (massage away) some internal friction as well, often very discreetly and efficiently. Now, vastly more expensive (by hourly rate, productivity (think switching costs in the managers minds …, and utilisation), cost of ineffectiveness (sic again) and opportunity costs re their actual objectives (if these would be achieved; good/bad manager discussion again)) managers must manage their way around. An impoverished world it is indeed.

To bring back some joy:

[Some colour, but it’s down there… Zuid-As]

Sing-Singularity, and/or Shannon

Though we know Shannon for his contributions to ‘computer science’ (Don’t we!? If not, go study. And wash your mouth with green soap or so) – the field would hardly exist without his groundbraking concepts, on par or lower (sic) than Turing maybe – and we all do remember log2 measurements as minimum to reconstruct a signal don’t we? – I rediscovered this piece and wondered … how well you’d know it, and how fundamental to even the IoT now springing up, and … most importantly, what would the ramifications be for all of the discussions regarding the Singularity, pre-, midst of and post- ..? I mean, the discussions will tilt once the profundity of the Work is taken to heart.
I think. Now will go and study. Hard. And:

[Old analog (log2!) Zuid-As indeed]

Cyclexpo or Expocicle ..?

Tinkering with the hype-like hyping of exponential -everything- versus the Been There Done That ‘history’ prophets (?), trying to integrate their ideas:
Do we have enough history of macro- or micro-‘economic’ data to be able to establish whether in the really long run, the things that count (which, indeed, are not countable) are on a sinus wave pattern OR on an exponential growth pattern ..?

Contra which I’d pose another hypothesis: Both at the same time. And even another: None.

A lot of pundits of course make the mistake (I think it is) of believing the graphs that have shown a very, very slowly increasing (though already exponential) curve that, These Days or Tomorrow, suddenly shoots up extremely. As if the exponens has suddenly grown immensely. This has no proof and wouldn’t need one even to make the point. All ‘smooth’ exponential curves (i.e., with constant exponens) have these tipping points where from Quasi-Linear Under The Radar they suddenly shoot through the roof – and, as often forgotten but giving rise to the up-dent fallacy, they already have the (log) property where zooming in gives the same picture all over again; almost ‘fractalian’.

Other pundits make the mistake (I think it is) of assuming that there’s no news under the sun, ever. All is cyclical, all is under the Nietszchian spell of eternal return. All developments one can graph, have sinus wave functions through time (be it that it might take ages, aeons for the pattern to neat out). Which may be true, in part, when ‘inflation’ in all sorts of (qualitative …!?) areas is applied. But which also may not be true as there may (unfalsified hypothesis) be human(ity) Progress after all.

But then, what about sinus waves on top of exponential long-term developments ..? That would give almost-erratic, almost-earthquakelike-unsettling graph trend breaks, either up or down. (Next to more mundane settling-downs, obfuscating things.)
Or, exponential blips on top of longest-term sinus waves, of course. Also not looking too regular…
Or, there is nothing to extrapolate as all developments, once viewed primarily linearly, now also (sic) exponentially, are accidental short-term fits with the Very Long Term being random. Even Moore’s Law is an accident: Given (the approach of) endless numbers of hypotheses, some will be true, by chance.

We just don’t know until we’ve checked. Which may take eternity.

Just DON’T assume your expo-upkick is news, or is, per se.
And, maybe the Singularity will change things as Everything will be mental, abstract ideas instead of necessarily being possibly physics-bound in some way or another.

OK, enough now. This:

[Shadows, reflections, of past and future(istic), Toronto again]