How to be a Philosopher

One of the great values of philosophy is that it can be a helpful tool for thinking through any question of deeper puzzlement. Philosophy is needed now more than ever in a world that seems to be changing quickly, and the field could enjoy a renaissance in wider popular application. The practice of philosophy need not be confined to experts but is accessible to all. Here is a short-list of how anyone can be a philosopher:

Level 1 

• Study the ancient texts 
• Claim a new read on the old texts 
• Claim that no one understands what [old philosopher #1] really said/meant and explain it yourself

Level 2 

• Find basic concepts in philosophy that no one has really thought through yet such as performativity ("...really performativitie...") Examples: Heidegger’s being and metaphysics, Deleuze’s difference 
• Invent strange neologisms (really neo-spellisms) by spelling existing words in new ways that no one can understand, and use them brazenly without definition: “…this is to say not just Possibility Space, but really Possibilitie Space…” or "the conceptologie here..." Examples: Heidegger's existens and phenomenologie, Deleuze's differance and differenciation, Derrida's linguage
• Invent new compound word combinations: "...the singularity of the self-other and the plurality of the group-crowd..." Examples: Foucault’s power-knowledge, Heidegger’s standing-reserve 

Level 3

• Submit a paper to a philosophy conference with a title like: "Rethinking [ancient philospher]'s [important concept] in [modern philospher #1] and [modern philosopher #2]"
• Offer a critique of the history of Western philosophy and propose a new/real metaphysics (examples: Heidegger, Deleuze)

Top 10 Technology Tends for 2013

1. Big data ubiquity, along with machine learning algorithms, and information visualization
2. Video is the platform (example: individual YouTube channels with over 100,000 people making more than $10,000/year from ‘home video’ properties like My Drunk Kitchen, the ShayTards, and Right This Minute) 
3. Wearable computing and objective biometrics: Fitbit, myZeo, WiThings, smartwatch, smartring, wearable electronic patches and tattoos, Google’s Project Glass
4. Fracking
5. eHealth biohacking: Quantified Self-tracking, self-experimenting, group health collaboration, $99 personal genomics (23andMe), $99 personal microbiomics (American Gut Project), $5 home blood-test cards (Talking20) 
6. eLearning: Coursera, Udacity, edX, Class Central (MOOC aggregator)
7. Mobile is still the platform: worldwide smartphone adoption crosses 1 billion
8. Crowdsourced labor marketplaces: CrowdFlower, CrowdSource, oDesk, ClickWorker, Mechanical Turk, mobileworks, TopCoder, Elance, vWorker/Rent a Coder, Guru, 99designs, crowdSPRING, CloudCrowd, Soylent, microtask, LiveOps, Gigwalk
9. Computer security: increasing power of Internet-based activist hacking groups (e.g.; Anonymous)
10. New economic models (crowd-based): crowdfunding (Kickstarter, indiegogo, etc.), sustainable business, and crowdfunded debt forgiveness (from the Occupy movement’s financial arm: Rolling Jubilee)

Up and coming: Consumer EEG rigs wearable 24/7 (Axio, Interaxon) and attendant neural and biometric data privacy rights, ideally sans Faraday Cage 2.0

Still waiting for: nanotech, 3D printing, eHealth data commons with public longitudinal phenotypic data sets

Predictions for 2012, 2011, 2010, 2009 

The Mindfulness Meme

Mindfulness is increasingly arriving as an au courant meme to denote a deliberate, relaxed, and enlightened understanding when interacting with the self and others.

Despite occasional blips to the contrary, Steven Pinker (in The Better Angels of Our Nature) seems to be right in citing the overall decline in violence over the centuries of human existence. Even in the shorter term, this is visible in a Google Trends analysis of the keywords 'mindfulness' and 'assault weapons' appearing in news headlines (Figure 1).

 

Figure 1. Keywords in News Headlines 2005-2012: 

Mindfulness (blue) and Assault Weapons (red) Source: Google Trends

What is your SQ?

There was IQ, then EQ, and now, SQ! SQ – spiritual intelligence quotient – is now a criterion for successful leadership.

In the wake of scientific support for meditation and other mindfulness practices, and as businesses in the social capital movement transitioned to triple bottom lines (adding social and environmental outcomes to the profit motive), so too now the paradigm for successful leadership is changing. Empathy-devoid environments are no longer acceptable.

There is a claim that the successful contemporary leader in any field has the triumvirate of intellectual intelligence, emotional intelligence, and spiritual intelligence. Part of 'Spirituality 2.0' is the act of transferring quality-of-life attributes from spiritual practice to mainstream application.

The high-SQ leader has self-mastery and behaves with wisdom and compassion while maintaining inner and outer peace, being present in an embodied way, and connecting with others both intellectually and emotionally.

Top 10 traits of high-SQ leaders:

1. Calm and centered 
2. Compassionate 
3. Courageous
4. Passionately committed 
5. Forgiving 
6. Authentic, walks-the-talk 
7. Humble 
8. Wise 
9. Peaceful, nonviolent 
10. Service-oriented

Application of Complexity Theory: Away from Reductionist Phase Transitions

Reductionism persists as a useful node in the possibility space of understanding and managing the world around us. However the possibility space is now expanding to higher levels of resolution such as a focus on complex systems. Learning and tools are ratcheting in lock-step.

Some of the key complexity-related concepts in understanding collective behavior in real-life physical systems like the burning of a forest fire include:

• Organization and Self-Organization: Self-orchestration into order in both living and non-living systems, for example: salt crystals, graphene, protein molecules, schools of fish, flocks of birds, bee hives, intelligence and the brain, social structures 
• Order and Stability of Systems: Measurements of order, stability, and dynamical break-down in systems such as entropy, symmetry (and symmetry-breaking), critical point, phase transition, boundaries, and fractals (101 primer)
• Tunable Parameters: An element or parameter which doesn’t control the system, but can be tuned to influence the performance of the system (for example, temperature is a tunable parameter in the complex system of water becoming ice) 
• Perturbation and Reset: How and how quickly systems reset after being perturbed is another interesting aspect of complex systems 

 

Complexity science is not new as a field. What is new is first, a more congruous conceptual application of complexity thought in the sense of appreciating overall continuum of systems phenomena, not trying to grasp for the specific moment of a phase transition. Exemplar of this more comprehensive systems level thinking is Marcelo Gleiser’s reframe of the Grand Unified Theory problem and Sara Walker’s reframe of the Origins of Life problem. The other aspect that is new is the idea of working in an applied manner with complex systems, particularly with tools that are straightforward to implement like the math tools of non-linear dynamics, networks, chaos, fractals, and power laws (many inspired by the work of Stan Strogatz), and Software Tools like NetLogo, a multi-agent programmable modeling environment and ChucK, a digital audio programming language.

 

Broadcasting Preference in the Intention Economy

One key dimension of the future is the presence of multiple currencies. A multicurrency society is already starting to develop where traditional monetary-related currencies are being supplemented with other currencies like reputation, attention, intention, ideas, affinity, preference, health, and resource access.

A book published in May 2012, Intention Economy: When Customers Take Charge, suggests mechanisms to make intent as a currency more explicit, monetized, and implementable. The book extends the author’s previous ideas about vendor relationship management (VRM), which is how consumers might more effectively manage their relationship with vendors.

The issue is that corporations and other entities spend $1.5 trillion per year on marketing to create ‘a bad model of you’ and your purchasing intent (‘50% of marketing dollars are wasted but we don’t know which 50%’). On the other hand, you as a consumer may have trouble defining your demand, and finding and tailoring products and services in the midst of fending off unwanted publicity and inaccurate personalized advertising.

One potential solution for decreasing friction in the narrowband way that vendors and consumers currently interact is having consumers directly communicate their interests and intent. Intent communication could be accomplished through fourth party exchanges, websites like EmanciPay, where consumers may escrow their intention to buy with a down payment of funds to the site (fourth parties are truly independent intermediaries and advocates for the consumer as opposed to current third parties which are more of an accessory to second parties (e.g.; vendors)). Short of making a financial pledge, many other fourth party sites could accommodate less-defined customer specifications for desired products and services.

The Intention Economy then, is where consumers intentcast (e.g.; broadcast their intent) for products and services, even and especially at inchoate and automated levels, so that vendors can be responsive and continue their expertise in constructing solutions that anticipate consumer demand. Some companies are getting onto this bandwagon, like IBM with their "Chief Executive Customer" program, but like any important change and successful implementation, mindset shifts may be required, and tools must be extremely easy to use – where is Twitter for VRM?!

Crowd Models Become Pervasive Across Society

Crowd-based models are becoming so pervasive that almost no major segment of modern life is left untouched by them. The concept of digital crowd models refers to the coordination of large numbers of individuals (the crowd) through an open call on the Internet in the conduct of some sort of activity.

Not only are crowd models an efficient at-scale alternative to former methods that the Internet now affords, but at another level, crowd models are also a node of progress for humanity, both individually and en masse. An inherent property of crowd models is greater autonomy, decision-making, and action-taking by the individual. This means greater individual agency whilst simultaneously enabling group collaboration projects at previously unimaginable scales, for example, possibly ultimately coordinating and employing the cognitive power of millions of human agents.  

Crowd Models by Sector

• In economics, there are crowdsourced labor marketplaces where simple tasks and professional services requests can be posted and fulfilled, crowdfunding websites for financing projects, and group purchasing mechanisms. 
• In politics, crowd models mean the use of big data and social media to organize opinion and action, conduct direct marketing, and affect change. 
• In the social venue, blogs, social networks, and online dating sites are examples of crowd models. 
• In entertainment, there are massively multiplayer online games and virtual worlds. In education, vast eLearning networks are populating the landscape. 
• In health, there are health social networks, digital health collaboration and experimentation communities, crowdscience competitions, and new movements such as the quantified self. 
• In the legal venue, digital public goods have arisen through crowd contributions such as the Wikipedia, online health databanks, and other data commons resources.

Supercomputing Increments Towards the Exaflop Era

The November 2012 biannual list of the world’s fastest supercomputers shows the winner incrementally improving over the last measure. The Titan (a Cray XK7, Opteron 6274 16C 2.200GHz, Cray Gemini interconnect, NVIDIA K20x) is leading with 17.6 petaflops per second of maximum processing power. This was only an 8% increase in maximum processing speed as compared to other recent increases of 30-60%, but a continued step forward in computing power.

Supercomputers are used for a variety of complicated modeling problems where simultaneous processing is helpful such as weather modeling, quantum physics, and predicting degradation in nuclear weapons arsenals.

Figure 1. World's Fastest Supercomputers. (Source)

Increasingly, supercomputing is being seen as just one category of big data computing along with cloud-based server farms running simple algorithms over large data corpuses (for example Google’s cat image recognition project), crowd-based distributed computing networks (e.g.; protein Folding@home with 5 petaflops of computing power, and crowdsourced labor networks (e.g.; Mechanical Turk, oDesk, CrowdFlower - theoretically comprising 7 billion Turing test-passing online agents).
 

IOT Appliances Blur the Distinction between Matter and Man

The growing wireless Internet of Things (Sensor Mania!) could bring a ‘Cambrian explosion’ in wearable computing and the number and types of Internet-connected sensors, devices, hardware platforms, software programs, and end-user applications.

There could be an adjustment period as humans adapt to an Internet of Things (IOT) landscape with more kinds of data and different mindsets, activities, behaviors, and perspectives when interacting with these data.

Whole fields of study previously limited to self-reported information such as psychology could be radically supplemented and transformed with objective metrics obtained from the IOT.

The IOT is in the early stages of modulating data onto the world of existing artifacts.

Increasingly objects may be able to collect their own data and act on it autonomously with pre-set limits and degrees-of-freedom algorithms.

Eventually, the IOT label could become a redundant demarcation as all human-manufactured matter in the future could have integrated sensors and microprocessors.

A next generation of sensors and microprocessors is already being developmentally fashioned from organic, inorganic, and hybridized material, using cutting-edge technologies for manipulating organic and inorganic matter such as synthetic biology and molecular nanoelectronics.

Distinctions between man and machine, and subject and object could blur further as IOT appliances eventually create a layer of exosenses to greatly extend current human capabilities and the ability to integrate with the outside world.

More information: "Sensor Mania! The Internet of Things, Wearable Computing, Objective Metrics, and the Quantified Self 2.0"

Crowdsourced Labor, Digital Marketplaces, and the Future of Self-Actualized eWork

The third annual CrowdConf on changing the future of work through Internet-based crowdsourcing labor models was held in San Francisco on October 23, 2012. The field is much larger compared to prior years (2011 and 2010), both practically and intellectually, as a range of industry vendors and other ecosystem members (e.g.; research organizations, foundations, financial community) attended the conference. Participation in crowd-based models has been increasing this year. Crowdfunding (raising money to back projects through an open call on the Internet) platforms like Kickstarter and indiegogo have been used to raise millions of dollars for projects (although both of these sites have announced that they will not be launching a new development, equity crowdfunding). Crowdsourced labor marketplaces too have been growing significantly.

What is Crowdsourced Labor? 
Crowdsourced labor is sourcing human workers via the Internet for any variety of tasks or work product, with or without remuneration, usually including an online system for bidding, quality tracking, and reputation feedback. There are digital labor marketplaces for general tasks, both short activities (e.g.; to recognize images, validate information, create electronic forms, read handwriting, classify data, tag images, transcribe audio, translate languages, and verify business listings) and professional services engagements at sites like CrowdFlower, CrowdSource, oDesk, ClickWorker, Mechanical Turk (from Amazon)) mobileworks (including real-time task-routing to the best candidate online right now), and vocational specialties such as software programming (TopCoder, Elance, vWorker (was Rent a Coder) and Guru), graphic design (99designs, crowdSPRING), writing, editing and proofreading (CloudCrowd, Soylent), document processing (microtask), and customer relationship management (LiveOps). Mobile phone-based task completion is an important category of crowdsourced labor with projects making use of time-cycles while on the go, and sites like Gigwalk ('hire your smartphone army') offering location-specific tasks.

Figure 1. Real-Time Barometer of CrowdFlower's Digital Labor Market (source: CrowdFlower)

Crowdsourced labor also includes uncompensated work in the volunteer, gift, and reputation economies in examples like Twitter’s localization service, the Wendy Schmidt Oil Cleanup X Challenge (a $1.4 m X Prize for solutions to accelerate oil spill cleanup), and crowdscience games and competitions for protein folding prediction, and genetic and other science data analysis at sites like foldit, EteRNA, Phylo, and Kaggle.

The digital marketplace concept extends more generally to that of resource allocation, allowing supply and demand to meet in real-time on the Internet in other models such as a labor markets for physical-world tasks (e.g.; TaskRabbit and Zaarly), and resource allocation (e.g.; AirBNB (apartment rental) and Uber (private driver ride service on-demand)).

Microtask Design 
Crowdsourced labor is starting to be seen as a general resource that any individual or business can tap on demand. To do so, it is helpful to know how to design a microtasking project, which can be done either independently or through third-party vendors like CrowdFlower and CrowdSource. At the conference, YP (Yellow Pages) shared best practices from a photo moderation project: they used Mechanical Turk’s Master’s Pool of photo reviewers (96% accuracy vs. 80% for unqualified task-completers), had a batch size of 40 photos (more produced worse quality), 8 buckets of keep-suppress gradations for evaluation, and a price of $0.04 per batch (1/6 the price quoted by a third-party vendor).

The Future of Work 
The conference considered more broadly the future directions of work, labor, and organizations. One analogy is that similar to the cash register being a decisive node that allowed business to explode from small family-owned, trust-based activity to large-scale enterprise, crowdsourced labor could be a similarly explosive node. Productive enterprise is no longer confined to physically-based organization-internal corporate structures. Management has been a technology, and crowdsourcing and algorithms are disrupting it. The new challenge becomes how to build and structure work for large-scale crowdsourcing, for many kinds of productive enterprise. There are new capital streams (e.g.; social, political, intellectual, and affective) available to be directed for productive construction on a global, flexible, fungible, and accountable basis. Workers and more generally humans can be put together in new ways, likely in increasingly automated ways to direct individuals to projects in areas of personal interest, for example rated on a self-actualization and contribution scale.