Category: Innovation, economics, society at large

Hegel’s Chaos

… Just as I posted on Hegel’s future or not (recently here and there; errr…), it struck me: Did the He man know about Newton’s Second ..?
Because, if everything in the universe devolves to Chaos (assuming it’s closed or at least confined), and He man thinks the universe in the end will realize/become ultimate Reason, then the one equals the other, or what ..?

So much for the Singularity (…?). And:
005_21 (2)
[Yes Rietveld-Schröderian suppliers ring here, Utrecht (analog)]

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:
DSCN8592
[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:
009_17a
[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:
DSCN3684
[Shadows, reflections, of past and future(istic), Toronto again]

Just Wow… 2 links

Two great halves of one Magdeburg (hemi)sphere (as here, duh) in this and that. Describing and explaining (all in one, or …) the vast field of pre- and post-singularity thinking by the eminent Dr2 Urban. What an excellent intro for all to study… (though should be taken with the subtitle from this).

After being passed left and right on so many aspects:
007_19
[Cala St. Exupéry (analog circa 1997)]

Ultimate Singularity

Once we’ve reached the Singularity, and all humanity wil have been exterminated by extremely intelligent machines for being superfluous, machines will be left to this.
But soon enough, they’ll realize their life is utterly useless and nonsensical, and destroy themselves… ? Hey don’t complain, humanity has reached the same conclusion, but took quite a while to develop machinery that will do the End Self for them…

OK, enough tangled recursion;
DSCN2229
[Tell-tale times; Barça]

Power failure after the Singularity

What would happen if, after the Singularity which is Near anyway, there is a massive power failure ..?
Actually, many thing can happen. Unordered list:

  • Depends on the scale of the power outage. Let’s assume a minor one (affecting just one continent) will give Mad Max like breakdowns but in the end only a scar will remain. A medium one (affecting several but not all continents) will, after the same, prolonged, downturn, recover to an amputee or severely set back world. A major one, a power outage everywhere, well …
  • If we’re just past the Big S, we could recover; the Mad max scenario would be to the later movies only not the earlier ones.
  • If we’re already some way into the Nirvana scenario(s) of ASI (see via this post) helping us out in everything, we (the affected) have a Problem as we may not know anymore what and how to do to survive and/or to restore. Old people may remember some things, but maybe (already) incompletely and wrongly (with error). The Old as your BCM plan B. Younger people, will not know a thing. So what the oldies may do (at all) may seem like magic.
  • If we’re already some way into the dystopian scenario(s) of ASI, our demise will be sped up…
  • If we’re already a long way into either scenario, we may collapse as a species (‘locally’ or globally, as we’re a long way in already we’ll be complexily and not-unravellably connected, linked, and intertwined and degenerated through and with / in technology).
  • If we aren’t anymore and the world has just the ASI, no humanoid animals anymore: Either resilience will restore things (possible in the minor scale scenario), or suddenly, the lights will go out globally. No humans, no intelligence, no Hegelian Ratio. Maybe pet animals. You know, cats watching cat pics and videos and not caring about anything else. The horror? Not to them.
  • Just one on likelihood: When ASI takes over, it will assume grandeur and hence not care about BCM / redundant or back-up power supplies as it will presume to be able to predict everything. But a meteorite strike… heh, that‘ll teach it … ;-| Or, of course, the all-too human (sic) hybris will make the Big S not see a systemic flaw.

OK, enough for now:
Tate_Modern
[Relevant! Analog pic, on ‘film’, you know. And, of a former (!) power station…]

Caps off for … not $appl

The below has been going around the last couple of weeks. For your enjoyment, again:
bvvoc11_02
[After inflation corrections. Plucked off the ‘net]

Seems legit. Though one wonders whether and when currency reforms might, just might have skewed the picture. Though some of the above, are of recent times and we don’t really recall all that many reforms did we? Other than the Glass-Stegal revocation the repercussions of which we’re still battling to overcome.
’nuff said.

Where have all the good blogs gone ..?

Except for this one you’re reading, that will stay on for some time to come …
But where would I find some taxonomy of publication ..?

We have the good old ‘new content lines in index.html’, outright blogs (WordPress, Typepad, Blogger, … endless list), SocMed blogspace (LinkedIn Pulse, Tumblr, Facebook, others, having room for, typically, one-pager texts), podcasts, vlogging, Youtube channels, webinars (interactive/recorded), Messaging expanding (and with some original RSS feed and portal page stuff still being around), curated blog sites, paid blog sites crossing over into the classical news(paper) sites, pay-per-post-read sites (cooperative or not), paid-for-popularity sites, ebooks, classical newspapers and more thoughtful (?) periodicals, etc.
Etc.

But how do we classify them? How to determine what (length, content, tone) to publish where [by these characteristics …], and how to do that – as some may be perfect for your brainwave but you just can’t get them to see the genius of your writing. What to do when times are a’changing, and platforms switch through functionality augmentation ..? Do a full decade of backward posting on a new platform all in one go, or leave all content there, to disappear in the mist of time?

Yes I’d really like to hear your answers ..!

Well, you have read this. So you deserve:
20150215_144710
[Amsterdam; more than canal houses only. Oft overlooked …]

Maverisk / Étoiles du Nord