The Technology Review posted the other day an article on the “10 Emerging Technologies of 2008“. Very promising technologies indeed, but the one that really caught my attention was the Probabilistic Chips currently studied by Krishna Palem.

The reason I find this particular research so interesting is, that

• it has the potential of extending current scaling laws - and particularly Moore’s Law
• it takes advantage of the principles of collective intelligence and the wisdom of crowds.

The theory of Probabilistic Chips

According to the article

Palem has developed a way for chips to use significantly less power in exchange for a small loss of precision. [...] chips could be designed to produce the correct answer sometimes, but only come close the rest of the time. Because the errors would be small, so would their effects: in essence, Palem believes that in computing, close enough is often good enough.

Current Scaling Laws

From the beginning of the twentieth century until today, a series of laws has emerged concerning the growth of computers and networks. They all negotiate the value of a network according to the technological leverage of the time.

• Sarnoff’s law, which was interested in the growth of radio and television networks (the value of the network is proportional to the number of actors)
• Metcalfe’s Law describing the value and the growth of small scale networks (the “value” or “power” of a network increases in proportion to the square of the number of nodes on the network).
• Reed’s Law describing the value of Group Forming Networks (the value of networks, that support the construction of communicating groups create value that scales exponentially with network size).
• Moore’s law handling the evolution and expansion of computer microchips (the number of transistors on a chip will double about every two years).

One can notice the evolution from Sarnoff’s Law to Reed’s Law.

While Sarnoff’s Law was suggesting, that the value of a broadcast station (television or radio) would increase proportionally to its audience it could not be applied to more complex networks, since the degree of interconnectivity was much higher.

So Metcalfe’s Law was an evolutionary step of Sarnoff’s Law, which better described the upcoming computer networks (ARPANET) in the 1960s. But Metcalfe’s Law could be easily be applied to small computer or telephone networks, but certainly not to huge networks like the Internet.

Reed’s Law emerged to describe the masive development of the web and more specifically of the social web.

Moore’s Law, on the other hand remains stable. Although it finds application on the expansion of computer microchip technology for more than 40 years, its validity is lately at stake. The reason is, that silicon transistors are becoming smaller and smaller and therefore less reliable.

But that’s where the probabilistic chips come in play, to keep the microprocessor technology rapidly evolving.

With probabilistic chips, tiny microprocessors may be designed in such way, that the individual parts might be imperfect, but collectively bring perfect results.

Collective Intelligence

The probabilistic chip technology actually takes advantage of the theory of collective intelligence.

As supported by the Condorcet Jury Theorem [pdf], the probability of a correct answer by a majority of the group increases toward 100% as the size of the group increases. The validity of the Theorem is based on the hypothesis, that the answers provided by each individual are not random - but instead there is a more than 50% probability to be correct.

The Condorcet Jury Theorem might be criticized when we are dealing with humans, but machines can be programmed to work in such a manner.

It seems to me, that this is how cultural revolutions emerge: combining disciplines, which at first seem irrelevant to bring forth innovative ideas and technologies.

Probabilistic chips, can change the scenery of energy consumption, mobile technologies and microprocessor development; and all that by applying an almost 200 old theory to a completely different research field.

Almost a week ago there was a great buzz about a relatively new wiki, called wikileaks. One of the reasons for this popularity burst was, that this wiki accepts submissions that are

classified, censored or otherwise restricted [...] of political, diplomatic or ethical significance. Wikileaks does not accept rumor, opinion or other kinds of first hand reporting or material that is already publicly available.

The emergence of a censorship issue about the content of wikileaks, boosted the wiki’s popularity even more. To summarize the story:

The case in San Francisco was brought by a Cayman Islands bank, Julius Baer Bank and Trust. In court papers, the bank said that “a disgruntled ex-employee who has engaged in a harassment and terror campaign” provided stolen documents to Wikileaks in violation of a confidentiality agreement and banking laws.
According to Wikileaks, “the documents allegedly reveal secret Julius Baer trust structures used for asset hiding, money laundering and tax evasion.” On Friday, Judge Jeffrey S. White of Federal District Court in San Francisco granted a permanent injunction ordering Dynadot, the site’s domain name registrar, to disable the Wikileaks.org domain name.

This case is not only interesting as one more censorship issue of the cyberspace but also as an example of the power and growth of the web. The indirect points that are raised are:

1. The decentralized nature of the web manages to overcome obstacles.
2. It seems that wikis are slowly evolving in authoritative resources.

Decentralization

The wikileaks domain was shut down, not allowing any users to visit the site. In any centralized network, shutting down the front door of a node would be enough to bring him down.
But the web’s decentralized nature, easily manages to overcome this issue. The wikileaks domain could be accessed

• by mirror sites across Europe [Wikileaks.be],
• the secure site of the wiki [http://wikileaks.cx/wiki/Wikileaks]
• and even by the sites IP Adress [http://88.80.13.160/wiki/Wikileaks].

This proves the difficulty of local, real life laws to be applied in cyberspace. Internet has always been a self-organized place and efforts to control it haven’t brought any results until now.

Authority in Wikis

If we go back to December, we will find several discussions about the trustworthiness of wikis. The reason was Google’s announcement of their “unwiki” platform Knol.

The fact alone, that this wiki received such attention speaks for the role of wikis in knowledge and information.
If wikis were really not trustworthy sources, which provide unproved data then why did this Bank step up against wikileaks?

It seems to me, that this case shows the strength of wikis, the power of the collective intelligence and the decreased role of authority and authorship.

The result

Latest news say that wikileaks got its domain back. Not because the Julius Baer Bank found the wiki less trustworthy and decided to drop the case, but because of the hard work and engagement of several lawyers and institutions (Public Citizen, the California First Amendment Coalition, the American Civil Liberties Union, the Project on Government Oversight, and the Electronic Frontier Foundation).

It seemed to be a lost case anyway.

Two very simple games of experimental economics can decode the rules of the blogosphere and the web. They expose basic functions of the society - of any society - and consequently teach us how to be better bloggers, surfers, users, contributors.

The Ultimatum Game

A very interesting game in experimental economics is the Ultimatum Game. It takes place between two players, who play it only once.
An amount of money (lets say 100$) is to be shared between the players. A coin is flipped to determine which player will decide how the money will be split. The other player, the “responder” can either accept the deal and the money is split as the first player proposed or he can refuse the deal and neither player gets any money. The game is simple, but the results stand against any rational thinking:

• 2/3 of the experimental subjects offer between $40-$50.

• Only 4% offers less than $20 and

• more than the half of the responders reject offers smaller than 20% of the total.

The Public Goods Games

A development of the Ultimatum Game is the Public Goods Game.
In this game 4 participants have to decide how much to invest in a common pot. Each one has a starting amount of money and the option to keep what they don’t invest in the pot. The total amount invested (each decides without knowing how much the others invested), is multiplied and then divided equally among the players.
But this game is played in rounds and after each round the amount invested by each player is revealed.
Also in some of the games, players were allowed to spend part of their pool for the privilege of fining each other.
In other games, the players were rotated among different groups, so that individuals did not have the opportunity to encounter each other again.
The results of the game are intriguing:

• In the games, where fining was allowed participators made more generous contributions in the pot, but without the punishment collaboration collapsed.

• Even though there was no possibility for future interaction, very often players punished free riders and reported that they did it because they were angry at the cheaters.

The hidden rules of the games

Someone who knows and has studied the games can extract 3 simple rules in order to understand them.

1. People tend to be more generous than a strategy of rational self-interest predicts.
2. People will penalize cheaters, even at some expense to themselves.
3. These tendencies tend to influence individuals to behave in such ways that benefit the group.

But the reactions of the participants are not only to be seen in our ‘cultivated’ society. They seem to follow a universal pattern.

In some organisms and some human societies, individuals have been so willing to cooperate that they apparently act against their own self-interest in order to provide benefit to others. Why do antelope hunters in Tanzania and turtle fishermen off Australia expend their energy providing game for tribal feasts, even at the expense of their own families? Biologists think the answer is something called “costly signaling”: The hunters are letting others know that they are good citizens and good providers and therefore food husband and partner material.

Very often the hunters are sharing their catch at the expense of their time and their shares in order to send this “costly signal”. The others, who perceive this signal, tend to trust it because of the cost the hunters paid to signal it.
In the end this evolves to a reputation contest.

To biologists Pollock and Dugatkin, reputation evolved as a measure of an individual’s willingness to reciprocate, thereby raising the probability that the individual will be chosen as a partner in reciprocally cooperative activities like food-sharing, mating and hunting together.

So, a fourth rule emerges: reputation is the secret ingredient in cooperation.

The Cyberspace

It seems, that the way we react, when being part of a community is something coded in our DNA.
But is it really so?
The web is a place, where the conventions of identity, rules, society, space and time are very flexible. If these fundamental rules of collaborative societies would have value in the cyberspace, then we - the cyberspace inhabitants - could learn a great deal about our interactions in this non-world.

If we were to see cyberspace under the perspective of rational self interest strategies, then bloggers and users would:

• link only their friends or people who linked them first

• they would submit someones content only if he/she submitted their own

• never participated in any open source or free project

• they would never post in forums

Is there penalization in the web?
I can easily have multiple accounts in any community. I can promote my content tenfold, I can leave annoying comments on other blogs, I can delete wiki submissions and with a simple change of my IP address, remain unpunished. The only punishment is not even in the realms of the cyberspace; it incorporates the real world.

If the group behaves generously and penalizing, then this tendency will influence the individuals to be also generous. But if there is no penalty for any misbehavior, then - the game rules say - users have no reason to be generous. Instead, they act according to their self-interest.
Luckily, that’s where the stabilizing factor comes along: Reputation.

Maybe the punishment laws of the cyberspace are loose, but it works so well due to reputation.

Users with high reputation are highly acknowledged and trusted by other users. If a user has low reputation he is not trusted by many users, but it is a trust he/she can built with generosity. Similarly, when a trusted, popular user ‘misbehaves’ may not be directly penalized, but he/she will lose his/her popularity.

The lesson

If you have reached reading so far, then the lesson is pretty self-explanatory. Consider your goals when being online. Why do you participate in all these communities? Why do you blog?
To reach your goals, you have to first give something to the community. You must start building on your reputation. It is a slow process, because web users are very cautious (remember they can’t really punish you), but it is worth. In the end you will get back what you gave. Your generosity will be repaid. If you want:
…more traffic to your blog, then start by sending traffic to other blogs. Help other users start their blog, participate in their discussions.
…your submissions to reach the front page, vote other submissions first.
…better software, help the community develop better software. Send your feedback, the bugs you find,your code.

To succeed your goals in cyberspace you must be generous and patient.

They don’t know it but the comments of Terry and Paul inspired me for this post.

Howard Rheingold’s book “Smart Mobs” has been a valuable resource.

The World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland is over and surely left very good impressions to everyone. The subjects discussed varied from the future of mobile technology to water shortage and even a new kind of collaborative leadership and a new form of capitalism. All very interesting and intriguing points for the improvement of the world. This year, as most of you remember, the davos question was also hosted in youtube.

Davos on YouTube

The davos youtube channel reached 1,593 subscribers and 349,617 viewers, getting the 3rd place of the most subscribed channel this month. The purpose of the davos youtube channel was to get the voice of the public out to the economic leaders. In fact the concept of the channel got so popular, that attracted celebrities and leaders (from Bono to Tony Blair) to submit their own proposals. So google’s idea of this channel worked out pretty well.

The illusion of interaction

I have an objection here, an objection supported when the davos channel was first launched. The whole concept was to promote the views and ideas of the public; to get the word out to the economic leaders, who probably do not have much connection with the greater public.
I followed the daily davos blog with the hope of finding a single mention of a youtube video from a ‘normal’ user. I didn’t find any.
Did you? Were all submissions in the davos channel so crappy, is the public so stupid?
I find it hard to believe.
The only attempt for interaction was made by Robert Scoble, who streamed live video to his readers and asked the questions that came directly to his mobile phone (I suppose via twitter; the single reason to stay on twitter).

I’m expressing my skepticism here not generally against the Davos question, but specifically against the effort of the davos youtube channel. I get the impression, that it was just a PR move.

What do you think? How did you find the development of the davos discussion and its interactive perspective?

A post in the ReadWriteWeb a couple of days ago, guided me to a very interesting document. A summary of Project10X’s Semantic Wave 2008 Report (available here).
I just finished reading the report, which provides some very insightful information about web 3.0. The semantic web will transform the web from an information-centric to a knowledge-centric system, by developing 4 fundamental attributes:

1. Knowledge

The web is a fragmented place. Knowledge is scattered in all its corners, sometimes locked in operating systems and complex algorithms. The semantic web, will pursue to change this. It will facilitate technologies, which will extract knowledge and

will enable communities to create, curate, and share knowledge in human readable and machine executable forms.

2. Transparency

Information will evolve in knowledge, through its encoding in a semantic form, which will be transparent and accessible at any time to any machine. Knowledge was previously stored either in human readable or in machine readable form. In the semantic web, it will be stored transparently, so that users and machines will be able to read the same piece of data. In that way, it will be possible for data to be used, validated and combined with other data. This will allow

a system to “learn” to do things that the system designer did not anticipate.

3. Connectivity

To overcome the limitations and restrictions of OS platforms, the semantic web will encourage a real time usage of automated and semi-automated methods, of interaction between man and machine:

Web-tops; platforms spanning multiple OSs connected over the internet
Mash-ups; two or more data sources or works combined to become a new data source or work
Context-aware mobility; dynamic composition and personalization of services across devices, networks, locations, and user circumstances and
Semantic service oriented architectures; using machine-interpretable descriptions of policies and services o automate discovery, negotiation, adaptation, composition invocation, and monitoring of web services.

4. Technology

The key of the sematic web is the usage of technologies, which represent meanings and knowledge seperately from content, in order to be interpretable from humans and machines. Such representations will range from pattern recognition, analogy and reasoning with uncertains to deep linguistics and causality.

The integration of social Web and semantic technologies in Web 3.0 allows new synergy that lowers the cost of data and knowledge creation, and raises the computational value of gathering.

The semantic technologies, which will power Web 3.0 will concentrate on:

• Semantic user experience (how the user comprehends things)

• Semantic social computing (how users communicate and collaborate)

• Semantic applications and things (how products and behaviors can be seen empirically and objectively)

• Semantic infrastructure (interobjective network-centric systems and ecosystems)

• Semantic development (how meanings and systems can share what they know)

Epilogue

The report refers also to semantic technology markets and other interesting points. It explains the the information I shortly mentioned above very well and I definetely suggest you to read it.

The 4 attributes I listed above gave me the impression, that they are the key traits, which will revolutionize the online experience. Where, the emergent behavior of the whole system will bring user interaction in new levels. I believe, that the development of services such as data portability and openID are steps to this direction. But, to a certain degree, it is a personal preference.

I’m interested to see, which attributes of the semantic web do you find most revolutionary.

Alex Iskold wrote a very interesting article called “the danger of free“. He arguments, that the openness of the online society may have much worse results than we think or expect. He bases his thoughts on 4 reasons:

1. Free doesn’t make sense.

In the brave new world, subscription fees are gone and the salespeople are replaced by CPM advertising engines. The problem is, things are just not that simple. When the economy is bad (think 2008), then advertising is the first to be cut….The traditional subscriber base, which helps companies navigate through the economic downturns, is just not there, because it is no longer cool to charge people for the service.

I agree, that a good subscriber’s base could help a company get out of a bad situation. Being free doesn’t necessarily change that.

Openness hasn’t enabled only free services or products, it has also developed an increasing social sense of the public. Donations are not an alien practice anymore. Many bloggers have this cute ‘buy me a coffee’ button and wikipedia receives great amounts through donations.
If a company isn’t getting well, due to an economical recession, I trust its subscribers would donate to keep it working.

2. When free is dirty

While it is not clear that a lot of businesses in an economy can be supported only by advertising, we already know that free can be a powerful weapon in the hands of big companies.

Alex uses the example of IBM, which provided free services and opened the doors to sell the most expensive products and in the end created a monopoly, which led to a lack of innovation in software tools.
I don’t understand how a free tool can improve sales of another product, if these products are not combined or embedded. The Internet Explorer story is an example, yes. Microsoft embedded the online experience with its software. The IBM isn’t. As Brent posted in the comments (22nd comment):

…how can any IDE, open source or not, improve sales of commodity blade servers? It can’t.

I also don’t find it wrong, when an open source tool is so good, that there is no necessity for development. I’m not an expert, but isn’t the apache server doing this in the market too?

3. From free to an empire

In its endless quest to organize the world’s information, Google is also looking to kill off its archrival Microsoft. Just like Microsoft is going after search, Google is after one of Microsoft’s juiciest markets – Office.

A little competition never hurt anyone (almost anyone) and especially not the market and the consumers.

The point is that Google can afford to give away everything for free because of its success with search. This is being done openly now and it is just plain wrong. It is a dangerous poker game, where Google can raise stakes because it has a huge pile of cash.

And Microsoft can’t afford to give away?

4. Generation free

We are raising a generation of kids who do not want to pay monthly subscriptions for anything. Give me stuff for free and stick some advertising on it.

There I agree. It seems immoral or sold-out, to accept free stuff and accept being the ‘lab rat’ of marketing.
But I see a great difference between free products and free software. This is another field of discussion. We can’t compare hard working people buying material goods and web surfers using software. I find Friedrich Kittler’s text “There is no software” an interesting insight on the subject. (I actually suggest taking a look to more of his texts)

Conclusion

I suppose Alex’s post had on purpose a controversial structure. When the largest part of the online community advocates for openness, Alex’s post came as a big debate.

• I’m also one of the advocates of openness (not only in software). Probably, because I trust people will give something in return – and I don’t mean money. I also believe in balance. Do something good and it will come back to you. I believe in the wisdom of the crowd.
• The web has enabled the development of countless niches. Chris Anderson’s Long Tail explains perfectly, that each niche regardless how far in the tail it stands, receives attention. Openness has enabled users to develop more interests and to discover new possibilities.

But that’s where Alex’s thoughts are mostly intriguing. Is openness always used for a good cause?

Howard Rheingold, an authoritative figure on the study of social, political and cultural implications of technologies, launched a videoblog.

As written in Smart Mobs:

I’ve launched a video blog at http://vlog.rheingold.com and plan/hope to update it weekly. Spread the word! It all started when I started thinking about updating A Slice of Life in My Virtual Community, which I wrote twenty years ago. It didn’t take long to realize that a description of how I spend my time online these days would be conveyed more effectively via video/screencast than plain text. Once I got rolling, I realized that it would take more than one episode to show how and why I spend time reading RSS, scanning blogs, blogging, gardening wikis, posting in virtual communities, Twittering, teaching, etc. So the first month or so will feature episodes of A (re)Slice of Life Online. However, once I started including my indoor and outdoor offices in the videos, it occurred to me that I ought to explain something about the parts of my life that haven’t been so visible to my readers — the painting, gardening, sculpting that are as important to me as the publishing activities that are most visible to others.

Howard Rheingold summarizes in 4.31 minutes the development of digital media and introduces the concept of participatory media and their 3 distinct characteristics:

• many to many distribution
• evolution in social media
• development of social networks

Stay tuned for more video podcasts of the author, where “he reslices his life online.”