Kevin Kelly Counters Robert Gordon With Techno-Utopian Jiu Jitsu

Kevin Kelly is another deep mind countering economist Robert Gordon’s claim that information technology has had only a small impact on productivity, along with Krugman. HIs argument is that a/ we’ve only been at this 20 years, since the emergence of the web (he discounts Gordon’s start of the era of information technology back in the ’60s) and b/ Gordon’s obsession with productivity is dumb: we should be measuring the degree to which this wave of technology frees us to waste time. Kelly refers to this as the post-productive economy, a techno-utopian view with some sensible foundations.

Kevin Kelly, The Post-Productive Economy

It’s hard to shoehorn some of the most important things we do in life into the category of “being productive.” Generally any task that can be measured by the metrics of productivity — output per hour — is a task we want automation to do. In short, productivity is for robots.Long-term growth of that type that Robert Gordon studies is really weird if you think about it. As he notes, there wasn’t much of it in the world before 1750, before technological progress. Now several centuries later we have a thousand times as much wealth as before. Where does this extra good stuff come from? It is not moved from somewhere else, or borrowed. It is self-created. There’s a system which manufactures this wealth “out of nothing.” Much like life itself. There are certainly necessary conditions and ingredients, but it seems once you have those in place, the economy (the system) will self-generate this wealth.

A number of economists have wrestled with the origins of this self-generating wealth. Paul Romerand Brian Arthur both separately point to the recombining and re-mixing of existing ideas as the way economic growth occurs. This view focuses on knowledge as the prime motor in a self-renewing circle of increasing returns. Unlike say energy or matter, the more knowledge you spend, the more knowledge you earn, and the more breeds more in a never-ending virtuous spiral.

What is important is that this self-increasing cycle makes things that are new. New goods, new services, new dreams, new ambitions, even new needs. When things are new they are often not easy to measure, not easy to detect, nor easy to optimize. The 1st Industrial Revolution that introduced steam and railways also introduced new ideas about ownership, identity, privacy, and literacy. These ideas were not “productive” at first, but over time as they seeped into law, and culture, and became embedded into other existing technologies, they helped work to become more productive. For example ideas of ownership and capital became refined and unleashed new arrangements for funding large-scale projects in more efficient ways. In some cases these indirect ideas may have more long-term affect on growth than the immediate inventions of the time.

Likewise the grand shift our society is undergoing now, moving to a highly networked world in the third phase of industrialization, is producing many innovations that 1) are hard to perceive, 2) not really about optimizing labor, and 3) therefore hard to quantify in terms of productivity.

One has the sense that if we wait a while, the new things will trickled down and find places in the machinery of commerce where they can eventually boost the efficiency of work.

But it seems to me that there is second-order tilt in this shift to a networked world that says the real wealth in the long-term, or perhaps that should be the new wealth, will not be found merely in greater productivity, but in greater degrees of playing, creating, and exploring. We don’t have good metrics for new possibilities, for things that have never been seen before, because by definition, their boundaries, distinctions, and units are unknown. How does one measure “authenticity” or “hyperreality” or “stickiness”?

Productivity is the main accomplishment, and metric, of the two previous Industrial Revolutions. Productivity won’t go away; over the long term it will take fewer hours of human work to produce more of the goods and services those economies produce. Our system will do this primarily because most of this work will be done by bots.

The main accomplishment of this 3rd Industrialization, the networking of our brains, other brains and other things, is to add something onto the substrate of productivity. Call it consumptity, or generativity. By whatever name we settle on, this frontier expands the creative aspect of the whole system, increasing innovations, expanding possibilities, encouraging the inefficiencies of experiment and exploring, absorbing more of the qualities of play. We don’t have good measurements of these yet. Cynics will regard this as new age naiveté, or unadorned utopianism, or a blindness to the “realities” of real life of greedy corporations, or bad bosses, or the inevitable suffering of real work. It’s not.

The are two senses of growth: scale, that is, more, bigger, faster; and evolution. The linear progression of steam power, railways, electrification, and now computers and the internet is a type of the former; just more of the same, but only better. Therefore the productivity growth curve should continue up in a continuous linear fashion.

I suggest the growth of this 3rd regime is more like evolutionary growth, rather than developmental growth. The apparent stagnation we see in productivity, in real wages, in debt relief, is because we don’t reckon, and don’t perceive, the new directions of growth. It is not more of the same, but different.

This all reminds me of McLuhan’s claim —

Today in the electric age we feel as free to invent nonlineal logics as we do to make non-Euclidean geometries. Even the assembly line, as the method of analytic sequence for mechanizing every kind of making and production, is nowadays yielding to new forms.

— which I interpret to mean that as information technology advances over the next 100 years, it will push people increasingly into the role of artists, and out of the factories. An evolution of society, not just a speeding up.

Of course, the trick isn’t just convincing everyone that idleness should still come with a paycheck. The big hitch is managing to survive all the messes we’ve created in the name of global productivity and growth at all costs. There might be a techno-utopia in the out years, but in the meantime we have to learn to weather the postnormal, first.

One of Kelly’s paragraphs jumps out as perhaps the most challenging for those with the deepest identification with modern business ideology:

Civilization is not just about saving labor but also about “wasting” labor to make art, to make beautiful things, to “waste” time playing, like sports. Nobody ever suggested that Picasso should spend fewer hours painting per picture in order to boost his wealth or improve the economy. The value he added to the economy could not be optimized for productivity. It’s hard to shoehorn some of the most important things we do in life into the category of “being productive.” Generally any task that can be measured by the metrics of productivity — output per hour — is a task we want automation to do. In short, productivity is for robots. Humans excel at wasting time, experimenting, playing, creating, and exploring. None of these fare well under the scrutiny of productivity. That is why science and art are so hard to fund. But they are also the foundation of long-term growth. Yet our notions of jobs, of work, of the economy don’t include a lot of space for wasting time, experimenting, playing, creating, and exploring.

8 January 2013 7 Permalink

Social Scenes: The Invisible Calculus Of Culture

Today, in New York, I heard Clay Shirky talk two times — midday at the Betaworks monthly Brown Bag Lunch, and this evening at the New York Tech Meetup — on the same topic. He is extrapolating in very interesting ways from the research of social scientists Nicholas Christakis and James Fowler on the social dimension buried in the data of the Framingham Heart Study.

In a nutshell, it turns out that the activities of the ‘third neighborhood’ influence you in ways you may be completely unaware of.  These are people that you do not know, but are (dis)connected to you by two removes: the friends of your friends’ friends. Christakis and Fowler found that obesity, smoking, and many other medical factors strongly correlated with the prevalence of corresponding activities in these large social scenes:

- Clive Thompson, Are Your Friends Making You Fat?

Christakis knew about the Framingham Heart Study and arranged a visit to the town to learn more. The study seemed promising: he knew it had been underway for more than 50 years and had followed more than 15,000 people, spanning three generations, so in theory, at least, it could offer a crucial moving picture. But how to track social connections? During his visit, Christakis asked one of the coordinators of the study how she and her colleagues were able to stay in contact with so many people for so long. What happened if a family moved away? The woman reached under her desk and pulled out a green sheet. It was a form that staff members used to collect information from every participant each time they came in to be examined — and it asked them to list all their family and at least one of their friends. “They asked you, ‘Who is your spouse, who are your children, who are your parents, who are your siblings, where do they live, who is your doctor, where do you work, where do you live, who is a close friend who would know where to find you in four years if we can’t find you?” Christakis said. “And they were writing all this stuff down.” He felt a jolt of excitement: he and Fowler could use these thousands of green forms to manually reconstruct the social ties of Framingham — who knew whom, going back decades.

Over the next few years, Christakis and Fowler managed a team that painstakingly sifted through the records. When they were done, they had a map of how 5,124 subjects were connected, tracing a web of 53,228 ties between friends and family and work colleagues. Next they analyzed the data, beginning with tracking patterns of how and when Framingham residents became obese. Soon they had created an animated diagram of the entire social network, with each resident represented on their computer screens as a dot that grew bigger or smaller as he or she gained or lost weight over 32 years, from 1971 to 2003. When they ran the animation, they could see that obesity broke out in clusters. People weren’t just getting fatter randomly. Groups of people would become obese together, while other groupings would remain slender or even lose weight.

And the social effect appeared to be quite powerful. When a Framingham resident became obese, his or her friends were 57 percent more likely to become obese, too. Even more astonishing to Christakis and Fowler was the fact that the effect didn’t stop there. In fact, it appeared to skip links. A Framingham resident was roughly 20 percent more likely to become obese if the friend of a friend became obese — even if the connecting friend didn’t put on a single pound. Indeed, a person’s risk of obesity went up about 10 percent even if a friend of a friend of a friend gained weight.

“People are connected, and so their health is connected,” Christakis and Fowler concluded when they summarized their findings in a July 2007 article in The New England Journal of Medicine, the first time the prestigious journal published a study of how social networks affect health. Or as Christakis and Fowler put it in “Connected,” their coming book on their findings: “You may not know him personally, but your friend’s husband’s co-worker can make you fat. And your sister’s friend’s boyfriend can make you thin.

Obesity was only the beginning. Over the next year, the sociologist and the political scientist continued to analyze the Framingham data, finding more and more examples of contagious behavior. Smoking, they discovered, also appeared to spread socially — in fact, a friend taking up smoking increased your chance of lighting up by 36 percent, and if you had a three-degrees-removed friend who started smoking, you were 11 percent more likely to do the same. Drinking spread socially, as did happiness and even loneliness. And in each case one’s individual influence stretched out three degrees before it faded out. They termed this the “three degrees of influence” rule about human behavior: We are tied not just to those around us, but to others in a web that stretches farther than we know.

This research brings to mind the obsrvation of Blaise Pascal, “The heart has its reasons that the mind knows not.” It appears that negative behaviors like overeating and smoking are in some hidden way transmitted through our social networks, even when we are not in contact with those others who are influencing us. Likewise, it turns out that happiness is spread in a similarly diffuse and oblique fashion.

Getting back to Clay: he wonders what this means for the way that modern social tools work, like Twitter, for example.

In social tools, we are each the center of our own universe, and we are connected to our friends (who are each the center of their own universes, too). We are aware that our friends have friends we don’t know (or are aware of in the most insubstantial of ways). And these friends of friends likewise have friends, which are unknown to us as well.

But despite their anonymity and distance from us, they are influencing us, as Christakis and Fowler showed. But out tools, like Twitter, don’t allow us to deal with this mass of people — which is likely to be on the order of a million people, plus or minus — in any way at all. It is not addressible, or searchable, or filterable. I can’t find out what TV my social scene is watching, or what music they like, or how they voted in the last election.

Shirky points out that it is easy to find out what my friends are doing, or what the world as a whole is doing, but what the world is doing is fairly ‘bland’ as he puts it. The world’s combined interests lead to the dropping out of all the odd and eclectic, and you are left with Lady Gaga and Obama. BIg surprise.

But my social scene — the group that actually influences my thinking, moods, and buying behavior — in completely untapped and untappable by out tools today.

However, its clear that it could be tapped: just as in the Framingham Heart Study. It’s possible (and not even very technically challening) to create the swirling, dynamic, and ever-changing opinions and activities of your one million closest ‘friends’, only a few hundred that you know well and perhaps a few thousand that you ‘know of’. We are all surrounded by ‘dark matter’, the next ring in the social cosmology out past those you know and the friends of those you know: a million people exerting an invisible influence on those that influence those that influence you. If that group is down on smoking, you will be getting social cues to not smoke. If they are crazy about Korean food, you will be served kim chi at dinner parties. If they are into country and western music, you will find yourself shopping for cowboy boots with your cousin.

Shirky clearly states that he doesn’t know where this will lead, even if he is right. But I think that it is obvious that we would like to explicit see and measure the influences in our unverse (each in their own overlapping universes), so on a personal level this may be a tremendous adjunct to the filtering, amplifying, and serendipity that we all want social tools to help us with. And perhaps just as much as a possible driver of technical experimentation in this sector, companies would like to know how influence is channeled and how it impacts individuals. The underbelly of this is exactly that: that marketers would like to tap into this social juju, and influence us through social ties that we can’t even touch directly.

But it is always the brightest light that casts the darkest shadow.

It comes as no surprise that there is value — and power — in identifying the wellspring of our desires and the foundation of our apsirations. Social scenes may turn out to be the crux of this transitive and reflexive influence that we exchange in ten thousand ways, every day. If it turns out that our place in the world — our position in an invisble sphere of one million almost friends of ours — defines strongly who we are, what we love, and who we hate, would we be surprised? Not me.

This may be just the face of tribalism, proven through scientific observation. I am choosing to use the term ‘social scene’ though, because tribalism has so many connotations and associations that could take us off the track. Also, it was Brian Eno that coined the term ‘scenius’ to represent the positive side of a social scene:

via Kevin Kelly, quoting Brian Eno

Scenius stands for the intelligence and the intuition of a whole cultural scene. It is the communal form of the concept of the genius.

We are a result of the accumulated sum of influences that are being tallied behind our backs, and behind the backs of all those that we know. Apparently, we are impacted by a hidden calculus in which we are the integral of the specturm of influences on all those we hold dear.

The Bantu people have a saying “Through people we become human,” and ever aspect of our identity and psychology is shaped by the cultural milieu in which we are part. I have said for years, “I am made greater by the sum of my connections, and so are my connections,’ alluding in a recursive way to these hidden network dynamics. And of course we want better tools to bring these indistinct and indirect forces into high relief. Clay is right about that.

2 February 2010 1 Permalink

Technotranscendentalism

Kevin Kelly as interviewed by Andrew Lawler for The Orion, recently:

KELLY: My larger agenda is to bridge the technological and the holy.
These are not two words that most people normally associate with each
other. It is going to be a long conversation to bring

them together.

LAWLER: Is this what you mean when you describe yourself as a “techno transcendentalist”?

KELLY: Right.

LAWLER: But can you really imagine Thoreau multitasking on a BlackBerry? How do you relate transcendentalism to technology?

KELLY: I don’t mean transcendentalist in a monkish or hermitlike
way. I mean transcending in the sense of connecting to a state of
awareness, of living, of being, that transcends our day-to-day life.
It’s not a withdrawal, it’s an emergence. And tools can be used.

LAWLER: Or misused.

KELLY: There’s been a lot of chatter about information overload recently. It is true there’s something different about this [modern] environment in our day-to-day and minute-to-minute awareness. What it means and what we should do about it is really not so clear.

I acknowledge the fact that multitasking and BlackBerrys and iPods and Twitter can be distracting. But we don’t really have the option of ignoring it. The proliferation of devices is necessary to learn new things. And the cost of learning new things is an avalanche of fragmented information. We just have to learn how to live with it.

LAWLER: But don’t we get to choose?

KELLY: It’s not that we don’t have the option to remove ourselves. This phase of cultural evolution, in which we are growing and discovering, requires this tide of twenty-four-hour information. I think it’s necessary and good that there will always be an opt-out option. We want to encourage that diversity, but it will always be a niche. Barring some disaster, society is not going to become a world where everybody stays at home writing poems and reading one long book after another without interruption.

LAWLER: Where is the transcendentalism in this view?

KELLY: The roots of technology go deeper than just human culture. They weave and string all the way back to the Big Bang. Technology is an example—like life and intelligence—of an extropic system, a system that feeds off entropy to build order. And not just order, but self-amplifying order of exploding complexity and depth. Extropic systems create even more entropy in the process—that is, energy runs through the system at a faster and denser pace. This is the definition of self-sustaining systems like a living organism. There’s continuity from the beginning of the universe, which is expanding out and creating space to allow diversity to flourish.

What we have is a long-term trend of increasing diversity, complexity, and specialization—all characteristics of self-sustaining systems. That could be a galaxy or a sun or intelligence. The resulting density of power is technology. I use the term “the Technium.” A galaxy is a system composed of individual technologies, complex enough to have its own self-sustaining qualities including self-preservation. It is self-perpetuating and self-increasing. You could say that humans are the sexual organs of technology—that we are necessary for its survival. But it has its own inertia, urgency, tendencies, and bias.

LAWLER: Other than to reproduce, what is the purpose of these systems?

KELLY: These systems are evolving evolution. They are increasing degrees of freedom. And this is the theological part—we have the infinite game. The game is to extend the game, so that the game will keep going. The game is to keep changing the nature of change. And that infinite game is my view of holiness. You play the game not to win, but to continue to play to make room for all expressions of truth, good, and the beautiful. You are opening up the world to possibility. Every child born on Earth today has some particular mixture of genes and environment, of capability and intelligence to unleash. The game is about trying to educate that individual into a position where they can maximize their potential and possibility. And technology is the instrument.

via www.orionmagazine.org

Kelly’s Technotranscentalism is somewhere to the west of the neo Taoism (or Tao Lite) that I espouse. Tao Lite which is more of a nature religion, based on how the world works. His TT is more focused on the growing noosphere: the game of evolution. He is more of a progressivist, stressing the evolution and wave front of change. New Taoism focuses on the changeless, steady state of natural laws.

But these are two sides of the same coin.

12 January 2010 1 Permalink