Scott VanDenPlas

2 months ago, I wrote about Intel’s counteractive response to the One Laptop Per Child program. In the face of the negative press around their actions, and more likely the positive press around the AMD 50 x 15 program (and in turn Negroponte’s project), Intel has taken a step toward collaborating on the OLPC project rather than trying to sink it.

The question is… why? The XO machine runs an AMD Geode processor and is in direct competition to the Intel Classmate. Intel has attempted to subvert the low cost laptop market by offering machines below cost. They have distributed anti-OLPC marketing rhetoric to Negroponte’s target countries. There has been a war of words between the chip maker and the OLPC project founders for at least 12 months.

Intel does support educational programs. They have put nearly a billion of their own dollars into educational initiatives around the world, and it makes them look completely asinine to oppose an innovative approach like OLPC. It is expected of them to support a program like this.

More importantly, Intel has lost this battle, but they do not want to lose the war. The XO is flat out better than the classmate. It has a stronger program, solves the correct problem in an efficient manner, and has a wide base of community support. The market for a cheap laptop is huge, but the profit margins on that market are very thin. The current XO machine and OLPC program only address a small fraction of that market, and evidence suggests that if this program is successful, a laptop made for older students could be in the near future. The XO has a predetermined expiration in a student’s educational lifetime. It is not made for teenagers and adults.

The success of a program like OLPC creates another market for them to expand into. OLPC is sowing the seeds of technology supported educational programs early on in a child’s life and will prove successful with it. What happens when that child goes on to more advanced education without that infrastructure? They are once again put in a compromised educational environment, ripe to be augmented with another cheap laptop solution. If Intel wants to capture this market, a feasibly larger market than the children’s machine market, then they certainly cannot be at odds with the OLPC program.

Intel is making a wise investment in their own future.

Intel graffiti picture by Brooke Novak.

About 2 months ago, I started pondering the application questions for Bruce Mau. I have come up with a couple of drafts for the questions, and posted them as I had time. I’d love the opportunity to talk with Bruce Mau Design about working with his team, it seems like a fantastic opportunity to be a big part in the future of Chicago.

Here are the answer’s I’ve come up with for the questions:

In the future, how will we communicate?

Part 1.
Part 2.
Part 3.
Part 4.
Part 5.

Will we shift from the service of war to the service of life?

How will we eradicate poverty?

It has really been a lot of fun thinking through these questions. My cousin, and one of my best friends, Tom is being deployed to the middle east in a few weeks. We’ve been getting together for the last couple of months every Monday night for philosophy night at Happy Village. Lately, we have been using the Bruce Mau questions as conversation fodder, mainly for fun but also to keep the conversation from always steering toward his departure to active duty.

So even if I don’t get the job, or an interview, I have gotten a lot of value from these incredibly amusing questions. It has also given me a lot of great memories of Tom for the next year that he spends in the Middle East. I hope you all enjoy reading my answers as much as I enjoyed coming up with them. Wish me luck with the application. Here’s a picture of Tom eating fruit off the jungle floor in Costa Rica.

When I first approached this question, I was not sure of the exact its exact nature, nor how to tackle it. I did know that it was the only question of the three to be tackled head on in Massive Change, so I went out, bought the book, and read it. I believe the limited, and intentional, focus on the economics of war and the war machine is too restricted, and offered an insufficient examination of the causes and future of warfare. I do agree that there is a profit motive in war, and that there have been mutually beneficial innovations from the defense sector and the private sector, but I don’t believe that all war is fought for economic reasons nor that they have entirely economic outcomes. Not only are there ideological and irrational reasons and outcomes to warfare, but there is also a fundamental philosophical question of war. What if the natural state of humanity is warfare? What if war is a consequence of free will? What if the service of life is fueled, motivated, and accelerated by the service of war?

Rousseau’s view of warfare has become stale. War can be fought over natural resources and monetary gains, but it can also be fought over ideological disputes that can be deep seeded and difficult to contain. Ideological disputes are viral, erupting larger the longer the dissension. They can be decentralized with few traditional military targets. What property is extremism fighting for? What economic result are they wishing to attain? We have seen this repeatedly through the 20th century, and now into the 21st, with the capitalist western world fighting the occidental extreme. It is far too simplistic to assume that human beings are purely greedy, and it is also far too easy to lump ideological stances as “assets.”

If I make the assumption that humanity’s natural state is to be at war, it begs the question, what if the service of war _fuels_ the service of life? The slash and burn nature of humanity prepares the fertile soil of future growth. When societies crumble, they either die or return stronger. Warfare has been an essential tool of human growth for thousands, if not millions, of years. Warfare can serve as a healthy check on society and government. An out of control governing body can be destroyed and replaced through warfare. So not only does war fuel the service of life through economic growth and innovation, but it also can act as a societal reset button. It wipes the slate perhaps not totally clean, but in the least cleaner, and leaves the residue of past lessons learned to help guide us and form newer and better systems. I do not want to make the mistake of presenting warfare as the solution to all of our problems, or to imply that the results are always positive. I simply want to make the point that the results are also not always negative.

Now I want to ignore all of that. I want to assume that it is possible to shift from the service of war to the service of life. What would we need to do in order to achieve that? Well, I think the obvious answer would be to reduce the incentive for warfare to a negligible or controllable amount. We would have to, as a whole, abandon large amounts of doctrine, religious and philosophical. We would have to provide political and legal infrastructures based on democratic principals and representative governments. We would have to provide socialized food, education,health care , shelter, clothing, and other necessities to reduce inequality on a very basic level. We need to agree on human rights. We need to agree on sustainable government and sustainable living. In essence, we have to remove the motives for war.

It is difficult to imagine a world where these incentives do not exist because we are just so far away from that point. We live in a world where religious doctrine trumps scientific reason and where might often does make right. We have seen countries like China fail to provide a communist infrastructure, only to transform large swaths of their society into a libertarian’s wet dream. We are troubled from being so close to the current reality that it is difficult to visualize the the history of humanity into scientifically meaningful periods. We suffer from the immediacy of warfare for the same reason. Destruction is now, rebirth is ensuing and evolving… it requires perspective that is not easily conjured.

So what if these cannot be removed? What if ideological extremism only grows stronger and our rejection of the scientific world escalates? If we cannot reduce the fuel for the service of war, then we need to increase the fuel for the service of life so that it out paces and outweighs the value of the service of war.

I’m also not really sure that I believe a god damned word of this. To my earlier question, what if war is a consequence of free will? Well, if this is the case, then the end is certainly nearer than it is far.

Thanks to Rastafabi and Nukeit1 for the images.

A few weeks ago, my good friend Harper got his hands on an OLPC XO-1. Its a great little machine, and I think very well designed and engineered. On the tech side of things, I like the simplicity and focus of the machine, but I am most interested in the networking capabilities. I think the project is really poorly named though, they really need to ditch the idea that these machines are laptops. They are a learning tool that happens to resemble a laptop, and that word is poisonous to the overall goal of the project.

I think the politics and policy behind the program are much more interesting than the hardware and software of the machines themselves. As with any good design, that should be invisible to the user (and hopefully eventually to the designer). I have a feeling that the program is headed the way of the Segway right now though.

Don’t get me wrong, I love the idea behind the Segway. To the user, it is an incredibly simple tool. It solves an interesting problem… it is stupid for me to drive my car to go get a cup of coffee. Dan Sturges points out that it is absolutely insane for me to take my car, that weighs 50 times what I weigh, for such a short distance. It makes much more sense for me to take a Segway, that weighs half my weight, to run on short trips. Dean Kamen is not trying to build a competitor to cars. Just as a car doesn’t compete with a plane, the Segway doesn’t compete with the car. It doesn’t make a lot of sense for me to drive from NYC to LA, and it doesn’t make a lot of sense for me to drive from my house 2 miles down the road spending 20 minutes in my massive car waiting in traffic.

The problems for the Segway started with the hype. I remember a lot of big names saying how it would change the world, and cities would be planned around it. I remember hearing it would be hydrogen powered, or it was some sort of flying machine. Then when it came out, it was a self balancing electric scooter. A slow, kind of dorky looking, overpriced scooter that I couldn’t legally ride anywhere. It came across as one of the most over hyped products in my recent memory, and suffered a tremendous loss from this tarnished image. My bike goes faster, never needing a charge, and I only sort of look like a tool riding it. Oh yeah, and it was a tenth of the cost.

I fear that the OLPC program is coming up on a similar moment in history. The hype is enormous, but I am not entirely sure there is anyway the program can live up to it. I don’t see anyway to avoid these machines being sold into a blackmarket to serve more immediate needs of the people they are trying to help, like food, clean water, and shelter. It is an incredibly smart design, but the fault is not in the machine, it is in the supporting systems around it.

If the OLPC program succeeds, it will not be in the third world first. The program needs to leverage the attention of the first world, flood the United States with the XO’s and develop out an incredibly strong infrastructure with a minimized threat of corruption and a black market. Then export that program to the third world.

I would like to see the Google and the City of Chicago team up on the laptop program. Chicago is still in the RFP process of building out their public wifi network. Google is busting heads in wireless spectrum auctions and is clearly looking to expand its networks. The OLPC program has ramped up to the 3 million machine mark to roll out the program full time.

Why wouldn’t the City of Chicago grant Google the wireless contract for the city in return for subsidizing the OLPC program? I think it is a fair question to ask.

Whatever the method, tool, or medium… it will be shockingly simply with remarkably complex results

We have a tendency to focus on the communications of speech, but speech is often a poor representation of thought. Communication through action and idea are also evolving. We will continue to see a consolidation of infrastructure to one extremely flexible medium. The telephone system as we know it will be gone within 10 years. Television will be gone in 15. Mobile technologies will continue to expand. Cities will offer network access as a utility. Network access will become a human and societal right. Communication devices will continue to become more powerful, integrated, and also easier to use. Massive fiber optic back bone infrastructures will be stressed and strained. The smart edge will grow.

The way we will use the network will also continue to change. Collaboration is king. There are real, tangible results to that collaboration even today. In that spirit, we will see the regulatory environment around intellectual property at first constrict further in resistance, but eventually, the rules and barriers in front of collaboration will be slowly taken apart. We will see organizations opting into the collaborative environment and sharing some access to their own resources, while in return looking for a better designed product from the community.

This collaboration will breed new levels of personal meta data about us and our relationships with others. This meta information will help us to communicate better to those around us. It will also help large organizations establish a more personal relationship with their constituents.

These relationships will continue to expand, and new definitions of communication methods will be possible. Right now, as users we are ignorant of the communication system. When we pick up the telephone, we don’t care how it works, we care about the message we are communicating to the person at the other end. As the system gets more complex, it will become more modularized so we can manage it. Eventually, we will tell the system the results that we seek and let the system itself decide the method to reach it. At that point, as designers, we are ignorant of the method of communication.

Over engineered solutions have a tendency to fail. As it turns out, we are fairly poor predictors of what we want and need. With that in mind, we will continue to act in a semi-random but directional design sense toward communication. Ultimately, through trial and error, invention and defeat, we will develop incredibly simple communication tools for general use, that can be implemented and rearranged for complex results. Human beings are problem solvers and will always insist on solving their own problems in their own specific manner. The solutions that will survive the evolution of design will be the ones that allow the most human modification within an intelligent framework.

Decoupling of services from technology will continue to evolve into communication

As the results of our communications are becoming more complex, there is a necessity to simplify the building blocks of the system into modular pieces to be reassembled in flexible and complex manners. Service Oriented Architecture is an extensible design methodology that reduces our complex organizations into manageable pieces, and it also happens to be an horribly defined buzzword. The piece of SOA that is interesting in this context is the communication possibility between the service modules, and also the methods that they use to communicate, specifically in the area of Business Process Management.

Process management is a technology solution to handle communications of human to human, human to machine, machine to machine, and machine to human. Process management systems aid in the design, execution and management of a specific set of interactions and rules. The most interesting nature of this technology is that it allows us insight into how we design communication systems. We manage communication between machines in the same manner that we manage communications between humans. We do not allow systems to define their own communications parameters to each other, not because they are not capable of doing so, but because we may fail to understand how or why they do it. It is entirely possible that we will allow machines to make the decision on how to communicate to each other and allow that communication to be different than how machines communicate to us. We can be willfully ignorant of the method, but fully informed of the result.

When two devices communicate on a network, they already do a low level of communication negotiation. The two devices initiate a conversation, decide on the parameters of the conversation, and then manage the flow of information from one to the other. They do this now within the confines of human rules, we tell them what their options are and allow them to make the best choice from those options. When we decouple services, the available options to a service are tremendous but still well defined. I imagine that at some point, we will need only to define the results we seek and not the method used to seek those results. We can leave the method up to the devices or services communicating to each other. At this point, not only is the the communication system used invisible to the end user, but the method of communication is now invisible to the communications designer.

More meta data means more targeted communications

Our words are like actions, they define us. As I contribute to our new information economy, I am leaving a traceable history of words, thoughts, and actions that are being mined to determine the type of person that I am. When I use a search engine, not only are results returned to me based on a community ranking algorithm, but I am marketed to directly using the term that I am searching for. When I rent movies from Netflix, I come back after watching them and tell the world what I think. In sharing my rating, I am participating in a filtering system. This filter allows automated assumptions of how other people, with similar likes and dislikes, also organized their preferences. I am then told about other movies I have not encountered before that I may enjoy, increasing my exposure to media in an extremely directed manner. The more I consume and contribute, the better the suggestions become.

The power of meta data has an impact outside of personal preference analysis and has recently showed incredible promise in crossing language boundaries. Recently, Google demonstrated their incredibly powerful and natural translation tools using statistical machine translation. The premise of this method calculates the probability that a string of words in one language is the translation of a string of words in another language. The method that Google demonstrated was nothing new, and in fact, has been used many times before. Where Google’s approach differed was the size of the data set that they used. The probabilities are far easier to calculate, and much more accurate, because amount of data is outrageously massive. The data was simply more descriptive, and so the existing process was made better.

We are becoming less afraid of exposure and more in tune with opening our lives to inspection. Advanced algorithms analyze how we communicate to the world and decide what message to deliver back to us. At the same time, there is a human process that is expanding rapidly. Emerging tools in relationship management are helping organizations communicate better to their clients and constituents by delivering a summary of who that person is and their previous communications to that organization. Through these relationship management tools, a more personalized experience can be delivered to the constituent and creates a stronger connection.

The volume increase in meta data helps us over come the paradox of choice. There is no such thing as a fully informed decision, we are prisoners of our history and circumstances and usually will make a choice based on what we know, not all of our available options. When presented with a massively diverse set of options, our choices become less clear and we are more prone to making a bad decision. The paradox of choice is that when we are presented with a large set of options, we are prone toward paralysis rather than freedom. When we finally, if ever, do make a choice, we respond with a certain level of cognitive dissonance to justify that choice in the face of overwhelming option. As our communication network grows and progresses, we have a huge pool of choices to make. We will have to rely upon analysis of our communications meta data to assist us in not only making choice, but in communicating to our peers in a reasonable fashion.

Communications trends have 2 primary fluid variables: collaboration and scale.

The most interesting activity inside of the realm of communication is the actual vector of change and the variables that decide that vector. Human beings are prone to nurture communications technology that offers them the greatest advantage, and we decide that advantage using two primary variables that effect one bottom line. Both collaboration and scale have the largest effect on communications efficiency. More efficient communication offers us a more accurate message, delivered to an increasingly interested audience, with less work by a dominant individual. As we scale up, our ability to reach our audience is growing as more people are connected to each other in more ways than previously possible. Our ability to find an interested audience is also growing, the fastest growing company in the world over the last 10 years has built an empire on targeted marketing. The data that we are offering is also getting better with less centralization. We are standing on the forefront of the collaborative economy, supported by vastly scalable collaborative systems allowing us to take a smaller piece of a much bigger pie.

The variable of communication with the most remodeling throughout history is scale. One to one communication evolves to the town hall meeting. The meeting becomes acquainted with the masses via written press, radio, and television. The masses evolve to become the new publishers of content via technology. The scale quickly escalates. If I have something to say, that people want to have said to them, I can now reach an audience of millions in a matter of minutes if not seconds. In one sense, there is a limit to scale. It is possible that every single human being on the planet will be connected via one globally unified communications network. At that point, scale cannot simple function by reaching more people but will go through a metamorphosis. Universal connectivity will become the new standard, and the focus will become pure network efficiency. After all, the basis of universal connectivity is to delivery an efficient message, and if you cannot reach your audience, it certainly is not efficient. We will continue to scale the content and the form of the message rather than the omnipresence of the network.

We already have made headway into scaling the content through the second variable of change, collaboration. In a collaborative environment, the end product is decentralized with many authors. As I explained with the democratization of the edge of the communication structure, the nature of the data is also pushing towards democratization. The fuel for this is twofold. First, we have seen a new type of economy shifting from value of goods and services toward value of information. Second, we have produced a steadily growing network with a deep reach into our own lives. We have fostered an environment where this new information is accessible and valued. A consequence of the pervasiveness of this network is new forms of social contribution. We are able to coordinate and produce new information within a contemporary infrastructure. Efforts to increase the accuracy and depth of information are the beginning of the next level of scale in communications, and collaboration is the tool we are using to arrive there.

This trend in communications has an effect outside of the technology and the message itself. There are impacts in economics, human development, politics, and a nearly infinite number of other areas. We have also seen a change in the hierarchy that I mentioned before, a new form of the structure based on collaborative contribution. This meritocracy is based not on economic position, but on personal knowledge contribution. It is a self organizing organic structure that is the result of any one individual or group’s intellectual donation, a direct measure of the value added to a community.

I’ve broken down my thoughts on this question into five distinct parts, this is the first of those five.

The foundation of communication is hierarchical and will continue to be so in the short term.

The human process of communication is easy to generalize: we either speak to one or to many and listen to one or to many. I can disseminate a message to one person or to an entire group of people and they can do the same back to me. An artist can speak to generations to come through one piece. A philosopher can endure for thousands of years on an ideological masterpiece. The speaker may change, but the message can be passed down through a communication legacy. The hierarchy of human communication is essentially the broadcasting of the message, through a human network.

The technological aspect of communications is harder to generalize, but easier to actually spell out in specific. There are finite sets of rules around modern mass communications. We have built enormous industries around marketing, networking, communication, and the offshoots of each. Our communications systems have suffered evolution of technology and perception. The magic of our system today is the invisibility of the inner-workings and the visibility of the message. They work fairly seamlessly, and the only time we are aware of the system as users is when it fails.

In the past, there have been enormous changes in the hierarchy of human communications, but the largest shifts have been accompanied by a corresponding step forward in the enabling technology. Telephone, radio, television, movies, and now the converged network of the Internet have all shifted how we as both individuals and a society communicate. They have changed the scale on which we can communicate, as well as the style in which we do so. The infamous Kennedy versus Nixon debate, simulcast on both television and radio is an excellent example of a shift in style. By all accounts from the audience listening on the radio, Nixon soundly won the debate. Those who saw the virile young Kennedy on television contrasted by the sickly looking Nixon received a different message. The verbal content was identical on either, but vast difference in physical appearance of the candidates delivered a more powerful message of its own. Technological advancements not only change the reachable scale of the hierarchy, but the manner in which we contact it.

Van Jacobson, an engineer responsible for many of the base tools used in networking and communications today, is a subscriber to an interesting theory of networking. I agree with his characterization of where communications has come from, as well as the probable next step. Circuit switched data is the foundation of the vanilla telephone system. There is quite literally a physical line connecting point A to point B, and the message is carried across that line. As the phone system scaled larger, congestion was controlled by even larger switches. There was a paradigm shift in the 1960’s that lead us to the foundation of network communications. This shift was toward breaking data up into smaller pieces called packets, and then addressing those packets for a destination, but letting the intermediary destinations make the decision as to how the packet arrived. The packet approach introduced a new type of hierarchy into communication based off of a standardized network stack. Information is encapsulated as it travels down this network stack into raw signals, those signals are sent to the next step in the network, analyzed for addressing data, and then forwarded on to the next hop towards the destination. Each individual node of the network doesn’t actually care where the destination is, it only cares about the next step toward that destination.

This approach has given a much more immensely scalable network with indifference to content. I can just as easily send video, text, voice, and many other sorts of information across one network, but it comes with some of its own problems. Network congestion and bottlenecks are an increasing concern. We have alleviated some of these problems with smart caching and proxies, but these are stop gap measures on a much larger problem. There is another emerging standard, the next evolutionary jump in communications. The data itself will become smarter. The next level of networking communications will disseminate content using a distributed network of users and devices all hosting authoritative content. We are seeing the beginnings of this type of system with distributed downloaders such as BitTorrent, a program that allows a distributed network of users with a centralized tracking server to simultaneously upload and download content from each other. Eventually, this sort of system will have to be pervasive in order to be effective, and will have to be written into the communications protocol.

This distributed authoritative system will, however, allow us to builder smarter mesh networks, at first at the boundaries of the system hierarchy, and then eventually supplanting some of the functions of the core. If, for instance, I would like to make a phone call to my neighbor who is within range of my network or a network close to mine, there is no reason for my communication to move across the core. We should be able, with smart enough devices and smart enough data, to speak directly to each other. First we saw the physical circuit switched network, then the metaphysical packet switched network, and the next generation of network hierarchy will be the data switched network. We will see, in the immediate future, a continued trend toward consolidation of services, continued hierarchical growth at the core, and increased congestion problems. This will, in turn, give more momentum to the data switched movement. The core will remain as a hierarchy, but the democratization of the edge has begun. The smart edge will grow, and mesh networks will flourish.