A.I. augmented by socnets

"Machines are very limited in learning and predicting the consequences of new interactions. ...From the limited data provided by the sensors, the designers must infer what might actually be going on and what actions the machine ought to take....The fundamental restriction on people's successful interactions with machines is the lack of common ground". - "The Design of Future Things" - Donald Norman

During the pre-social network times, all machines could do was, realize a tree of guesses which is modeled off the designer's imagination and with communication through a refined Eliza-like interface. 'intelligence' is hard-wired apriori, without regard to context.

In this Era of Participation, where you tweet, retweet and your communication with certain people in your social graph, machines can establish a common ground, from this data fairly well and constantly "revise" this common ground based on feedback.

Thus, with the socnet interactions providing the richness of interpretation of context, machines can 'adapt' the context, fairly well.

If this Artificial Intelligence is designed well to connect to the Social Expression, we would arrive at a new level of fluidity in Artificial Intelligence... Augmented Artificial Intelligence.

Oh Curator, My Curator!!!

If you are not following @jhagel in twitter, you are missing out on one of the primary pleasures of connected consumption.

I learn a lot from the links he shares in twitter. I got introduced to the fascinating world of sand animation, through @jhagel. ... and to Richard Florida and many many.

@jhagel's twitter popularity is nowhere close to @guykawasaki. @guykawasaki is sure to provide you with twitter streams with guaranteed regularity and topics that are very helpful, hot and happening and some practical information that you would appreciate for its timeliness.

Yet, @guykawasaki is no match to @jhagel in terms of the richness of content. I think there are two kinds of curators, i.e., the generalists and the passionates.

The generalists know their audience and provide content, following the Keynesian beauty contest doctrine. The passionate curators are those who "cherry-pick" the content that they consume and delights their followers in a profound way.

The hard part is identifying the second kind, i.e., the passionates and building systems, that help users discover those passionate curators that resonate perfectly with them.

Dida-5 and the emergence of Fractonomy

My best part of the day, is dropping my 5-year old to school. Ah! The questions and insights...

Of late, she has become reticent and prefers to listen to Music. Pretty soon, she got bored of her kids' songs. So, I function as her DJ. When a new song plays, she either commands, "I don't like it. Could you change daddy" or she remains quiet.

I noticed that, whenever "Jack and Diane" plays, she sings along. So, I brought in a collection of John Mellencamp. Bumner! She did not seem to like anything other than "Jack and Diane".
So, I kept trying other singers in that Genre.

For her age, her taste is pretty nuanced. She would not like a slow song. Yet she particularly likes Micheal Buble. The traditional taxonomy of musical genres is not very useful for me, to select songs for her.

Pandora did not work for me,beyond a point, partly due to the short rides. Since I am a music lover myself, I curate the songs for her and of late, she rarely says, "I don't like it".

I can almost externalize my daughter's taste pattern, into a new custom genre, which I would call, the 'dida-5'. Her taste is not going to be the same, 2 years from now. It would become 'dida-7'.I am pretty sure, there would be others whose taste fall into 'dida-5'.

The trajectory of her taste could be reliably predicted and would emerge like a fractal, with data from other consumers, bound together, in a connected consumption platform.

I would call this, 'computer-generated' custom taxonomy as 'fractonomy'. I used taste as an anchor for classification. However, Taste could be easily replaced by any other attribute, in this "Everything is Miscellaneous" Era.

A New kind of Newspaper

Anticipation ain't necessarily bad. Simple things like anticipating for your favorite TV Show, adds to the richness of life experience.

While providing the comfort of time-shifting, the Tivos of the World killed such simple pleasures, life has to offer.

During the days when the Newspaper boy is late, it invokes a delicious feeling of expectation.

It is not as if, that we are missing on some critical information or news, but it is the joy of the morning ritual, with a coffee and a Newspaper. Such rituals provide a secure sense of predictability in our lives.

The internet killed such simple pleasures. Yet with the deluge of real-time content in twitter, it is possible to re-invent the secure of predictability in our lives through Media, by the confluence of Technology and Curators.

A Personalized media device that is constructed especially for you, to recreate the morning newspaper ritual, the evening relaxation TV Show and the lazy weekend rituals. ... a new kind of Newspaper and a new kind of Appointment Television.

One man's Curation is another man's junk

The Printing Press made as all Readers. Yet with the great deluge of books, how many have you read completely, following every nuance? Probably a handful.

The Web made us all writers, is a myth. Good Writing requires enormous attention. Robert Pirsig rented a place and used to write from 3 AM when he was working on 'Zen and the Art of Motorcyle Maintenance'.

Like Venky Ramakrishnan the Nobel Laurette says, "You cannot do Science, in order get the Nobel Prize. That is a route to failure and unhappiness". This principle applies to writing as well.

So, people blog for sometime and then they give up, once the initial enthusiasm wears away.

Clay Shirky is right about the fact that, we do all these activities, because of a cognitive surplus.

However, what we could do best, which is unique to each one of us, is the ability to curate digital information, from our own little window.

The videos that we watch in YouTube and the blog posts that we enjoy, the interesting web pages that we visited, we could curate it in Twitter, for instance. If we enjoy consuming and is authentic about our preferences, then pretty soon, one could have a good following in Twitter.

In a matter of few years, digital curation is poised to become a profession by itself. Even though, curation is subjective in that, 'one man's curation, is another man's junk', if we are authentic enough, we could have a Tribe for ourselves. You never get paid to Read, but you would certainly get paid to curate....and Authenticity is the name of the Game.

Usage Roadmaps and Vending Machines

There is an overwhelming trend to make applications exceedingly simple to use. The rationale being, if the user does not "get it", then they might not adopt it at all.

Google brought in this vending machine user interface to the web. Just like, when you want to consume a Diet Coke, you press few buttons and a Diet Coke is dispensed, without much effort from the user's part. You simply type in a few search terms and your product (which is a website list) is dispensed.

Vending Machines result in faster adoption than,say,learning to type using a QWERTY keyboard or driving an automobile. But, unfortunately, such a minimalistic approach might not work for all contexts.

For contexts which cannot be simplified beyond a certain point, I suggest a new tool, called the usage roadmaps.

Instead of releasing newer and newer versions of user interface of the product, which requires constant user learning,you decide on having only one version of the Product UI. A first-time user will have a skin as a User Interface.

As the user progresses in usage, let the menu items and other user interface aids, appear progressively. This requires that your product should have a "usage roadmap".

Such usage roadmaps must align well with product roadmaps.

The Great Race is the Solution to Information Overload

There are millions of contestants in the Great Race. After several minutes of arduous race, only a few survive the final lap.

After more intense struggle, only one out of the millions win. Natural Processes are adept at filtering what they want, from a great number of things.

Yet, we complain of information overload. All we need is a device that conducts this Great Race, so that only the fittest information survives.

It is not possible to design one generic Great Race for everybody. Instead, the context in which the Race happens, needs to be handcrafted, by quietly observing one's likes and dislikes and to what one pays attention to.

After much usage, the Great Race would have been perfected enough, to get you the 6 things that you like from the 6,568,234 things.

Information Overload is an empty term. Just like Nature, Algorithms are waiting to create this recursive structure, of the 6things you like from the 6things. from the 6things you like... As they say, to iterate is human, to recurse divine.

The Information Cycle and the Perpetual Consumption Machine

One of my buddies chuckled about a press release that the company he worked for, gave in 1998. The Press Release goes on to quote him, that he was mandated to give email to everyone.

The Big Machine(Internet) is like the Elephant in remembering things. Though, my buddy did not have too much control over such a message, we in this Social Media times have control over what we choose to share.

One has to be careful about what video we upload in YouTube, the tweets and what information we give out in Facebook and so forth.

After a few years of active sharing, the Johari Window about people's personal life is likely to be closed and would be open only a tad bit. But,there is one trend which is unlikely to be reversed, i.e., the connected consumption part.

i.e., sharing about the books you liked, the movies you enjoyed, the youtubes you laughed about, the pithy quotes, the TED Video you resonated with, ...the list is endless.

Boiling this connected consumption slivers, into meaningful patterns would make this great big machine into a perpetual consumption machine.

They taught us in Elementary School that, the water we consume is what the Dinosaurs drank way back, due to the Water Cycle. Similarly this perpetual consumption machine needs a personal information cycle, to discover new content from other people's information cycle and deliver us pure content forever.

Contemplation in this Continuous Partial Attention Culture

"I estimate that the ratio of useless to relevant reading material is about twenty to one. With that in mind, my advice it to reduce the literary inflow to a maximum of two newspapers a day, two weekly magazines, and two publications in a specialized field. Get off distribution lists. The reward will be an opportunity to engage in that underappreciated occupation, contemplation." - 'Maverick', Ricardo Semler.

Maverick was written over 16 years before the great information Tsunami, i.e., the fastflip, wikipedia, blogs, tweets, the RSS Reader and the other 6,586,4554 ways in which we can get information.

So, while the principle will remain invariant,namely, one should spend time to think, rather than constantly consume information, the prescription needs to be overhauled. In fact, because of the overwhelming number of sources and the rate of change of the medium, it is impossible to come up with any sort of prescription.

When we thought, we had finally settled on the 10 blogs, that we are finally going to care about, a group of people are postulating, that blogs are old and that Lifestream is the new buzzword. It is beyond question, that lifestreams would be replaced by yet another trend.

It becomes more and more crucial that we need a system that would infer one's likes and dislikes, prioritize slivers of interest and constantly prune sources and provide the individual with enough time to what Ricardo Semler characterizes as "Aristotle, who didn't subscribe to The Wall Street Journal once said, 'Thinking requires leisure time.'"

Information overload is an empty term. Just like bees and ants are 'programmed' to work, we need to design a whole species that process data, so that we would be able to spend time on that crucial occupation, contemplation.

So, what is Connected Intelligence?

The benefits of Collective Intelligence is pretty self-evident and manifests in several shapes and forms in our everyday life.

As Thomas Maloney puts it, "Collective Intelligence is about groups of individuals acting collectively in ways that seem intelligent".

In fact, exhibiting collective intelligence is not just limited to human beings, but to the entire living species. Ants operating as a colony do remarkable things, when compared to the individual ant, which is not very bright.

In contrast, a single individual could function as a trimtab and is capable of steering the massive ship of humanity, by their individual intelligence.

Not just the Teslas and Einsteins of the world, but there are millions of us, albeit in differing Contexts and Grades.

Connected Intelligence is about creating a spontaneous network of individual intelligence that achieves a common purpose, without the need for a planned orchestration.

Technology presents many possibilities for designing affordances for the Connected Intelligence.

Recommendation Engines and Infinite Monkey Theorem

"The infinite monkey theorem states that a monkey hitting keys at random on a typewriter keyboard for an infinite amount of time will almost surely type or create a particular chosen text, such as the complete works of William Shakespeare."

In 2003, Plymouth University Researchers left six monkeys and a computer in a cage,for 4 weeks. All the monkeys could come up with, were long sequences of A.

The experiment probably was "fun" and not scientific, because the concepts of time, infinity and probability are in measures beyond the average human experience.

Even though, there are billions of people in the Planet, the number of people who bought, "The world is flat" is probably in the order of thousands, which is a small number.

The law of large numbers does not scale down very well. This is why the notions of collaborative filtering, i.e., boiling the consumption patterns of all users into one universal set, does not work.

However, my hypothesis is that: "a Monkey randomly curating tweets for an infinite amount of time will almost surely link to Hamlet".

Twitter is only one-half

If everyone in the planet talked at the same time, we would be hearing billions of speech, all at the same time. Thankfully, Nature has a mechanism to prevent this catastrophe, from happening.

Nature loves constraints. Take for example, the plain old Air. It enables transmission of Sound and at the same time, Air prevents Sound from going overboard.

Twitter is a medium unlike Air. It is merely a medium of transmission devoid of friction of any sort, which is why we could possibly get every tweet, from our neighbor to a gal in a distant land, all at the same time.

The work is only half-over. We need a way to be able to pay attention to the tweet of an interesting guy from our neighborhood. If he does not resonate with our present worldview, the tool should switch him automatically,with the gal in Finland, who is far more interesting to us.

This could be instrumented by an 'intelligent follower switch'. Your tuner in Scan Mode,switches to different stations, unless you pause and pay attention. This feature would be incredibly useful, if the switch is intelligent, based on what we listened to, in the past.

Constant switching could get annoying too. There is a delicate balance. Such a switch must have the right constraints designed in place, just like 140 characters is a fine constraint, that makes twitter what it is.

Is Google Reader, a perfected Stage Coach?

"Removing the faults in a stage-coach may produce a perfect stage-coach, but it is unlikely to produce the first motor car." - Edward de bono
The Publishers, Studios and Record Labels (PSL) belong to the Era of Information Scarcity. With the Great Flood of Information, the PSLs are starting to disappear. We are at the cusp of a filter inversion, from the Talent to Attention.

But, we cannot design the attention filter by perfecting the Talent Filter. The Google Reader is one such improved Stagecoach.

The Attention Filter needs to be instrumented taking into account the following:

1. Technology alone is capable of providing dynamic affordances to readily access content from an astounding variety of Sources. Google Reader currently provides a static affordance to access content. The dynamicity is upto the Reader.

2. Such Content comes from varying degrees of fidelity and Creating context for the content becomes indespensible to consuming content.

3. Context creation is still a Human Endeavor, in spite of tremendous advancements in Technology.This fact was realized and is leading to the surge of social "connected consumption" tools like Friendfeed.

4. Technology could be used to collect and correlate consumer's attention and reputation data, without compromising on Consumer Privacy.There exists a fine balance between monetization and privacy in the "Social Networking" world, where the Facebooks and other socnets of the world are struggling to get a handle of.

I think Social Interaction is very entertaining and enriching yet unnecessary for connected consumption. Technology could beautifully connect this vast connected intelligence, into a personalized kaleidoscope.

So, instead of the Morning Newspaper, you would rely on this attention filter in providing you continuity of experience and consistency. .... in providing the 6 things from the 6,586,433 things, that you care about.

The Search Mindset

Whenever you go to a typical American Supermarket, you deal with 40,000 choices for purchasing 18 items. According to Kevin Kelly, on an average you complete Shopping in 20 minutes.

On one hand, it is an incredible feat. But, on the other, not so much. Constraints lead to simpler decision-making.
Your Physical capacity to bring back the goods and Money acts as hard constraints. ...and the social rituals of having different categories of meals, such as breakfast, lunch,etc., constraints the type of food that you would need and acts as one of the many soft constraints. All these constraints bring a beautiful structure, in reducing this magical feat into a pedestrian ritual.

Constraint is not neccessarily bad. The biggest constraint of all,Gravity, makes life possible.

It is not the same case when we consume digital goods from the internet. We live in the Age of Free. Our cognition though limited, is stretched due to the mojo of the internet.

There are millions of pages to chose from. The only artificial constraint that you have today is the Search Term.

Facebook and our Friends in real life, shepherd us in some artificial direction. Yet, the magical mojo of the Internet, make us go astray, like Mary's little Lamb. We tend to spend more time, shopping for digital content, than actually consuming.

Wish somebody figures out how to harness this connected intelligence into a beautiful order, using Technology and to make consumption in the internet more joyful... that we spend more time consuming and help us break away from this perpetual search mindset.

Curator Pools are about Connected Consumption

Social Networks come in a variety of shapes and forms. They provide a culture of "Synthetic closeness" (this is a term coined by a caller in an NPR Program).

Yet, if I want to use these socnets for the sole purpose of "connected consumption", it begins to break down,like the Google Reader does.

Google Reader works extremely well initially, with a small set of feeds. With power usage, as you add more things into your Reader, you would soon be inundated by the Stream of Contents. You learn to treat content,not as though, it is from an inbox, but as a stream.

Yet, you need to constantly forage to manage,what gets into the curated stream. This is where, the Friendfeeds of the world, come in. You could pretty much share your digital consumption portfolio, to your friends, by asking friendfeed, to pull content from a variety of sources from delicious bookmarks, to youtube favorites and the movies in Netflix.

So, you no longer have to tweet or Facebook Feed, whatever you consume in the internet, Friendfeed pulls it for you. This is an awesome affordance, if you want to share as well as easily consume what your friends consume.

Yet, the Quality of the curation stream is still limited by your "friending" ability. Friendfeed and its digital cousins, remove the "foraging ability" limitation and replace it with your limitation of "friendability".

Connected Consumption need not be and is not about socialization. In fact, Connected Consumption is not about socnets, but about "Curator Pools".

Curator Pools are powered by Algorithms that "naturally select" invisible curators dynamically for you, based on your consumption and reputation history.

Is Twitter the modern-day equivalent of a Barber Shop?

What a waste of time, bandwidth, power consumption and cognitive surplus of thousands of people, who read your inane tweets, in the guise of your lifestream?

...and then the spammers who never give up DMing you, until you block them.

Ok. Someone tweeted about an earthquake within a minute of its happening, from California.

Hey! I am an average Joe. What can I do about the Earthquake in a remote place, and why can't I see it in CNN as Breaking News?

Fine. People use it as a tool to organize collective action. Like I said, I am just an average joe. Why do I care about changing the world and other lofty buzzwords?

Wait. If not for a phenomenon called connected consumption, all this would be meaningless chatter and Twitter would be the modern-day equivalent of a Barber Shop. It might be all about idle talk and spam, if not for the connected consumption part.

Ordinary People forage the web for information and Twitter creates a platform to share this curated information in real-time. However, for this curated information, I can endure the idle talk, but I hate the constant pruning activity of my following list to get rid of the spammers and the boring folks.

I am almost tempted to go back to using Facebook. But, how many people can I meaningfully 'friend' and so the scope of the curated stream is very small.

Eye of the OM

Kevin Kelly asks about the scenarios in which the "unstoppable" Google would get sidelined.

I think, when we start saying,

"I will not search here or there.
I will not search anywhere.
I do not want the keys jam,
I do not like them, Sam-I-am."

Consider the following three trends:

1. Everything is not miscellaneous anymore!!

In the present time,David Weinberger is absolutely right. "Everything is miscellaneous",is the central reason, Google is what it is. Google gives me a list, which is devoid of context and I use my interpretation to choose a few and filter out the rest.

But,one day this 'contextlessness' is not cool anymore. When the digital forests of information is so massive and my needs of information consumption is richer and subtler, that I don't want to construct meaning,everytime I want some information. I give out so much information about myself to the internet, that you should construct the context and give me what I want with surgical precision.

2. I don't want and can't handle everybody!!

"Here comes everybody", warned Clay Shirky. Sure the "Numa Numa" dance was interesting. I could learn all about the Marzipan cake from Wikipedia. Google certainly disrupted, "Knowledge is Power".


But, one day, with the posterous of the world and the speech-to-text tools in the mobile, literally, everybody is providing me information and entertainment, real-time, with a range of usefulness (from great to junk),that my cognitive surplus is going down, day by day, with the million Gary wannabes. I demand that, somebody set the "Bozo bit" correctly, after 'knowing' who I am.


3. Fingers are not the window to the internet

As long as the keyboard is the only interface to the world, I could tolerate a list. Google is certainly my window to the brave new world.

But, one day, when my expectation increased from getting a list, by typing, to commanding the 'mobileputer', "This dude is using the term, non-linear strategic action. I want to understand where he got the term from and how relevant is this term to the current context.", just like I command my automobile to increase the fan speed.

Or I am watching a movie and Jack Nicholson drops the name of that expensive coffee and I slap my forhead and my mobile wakes up to give me, yes, indeed this is true, that such a coffee exists. I don't care about any other info., only what I want. Just find out what I want from who I am and my gesture. But, don't make me wear those weird-looking gadgets all over my body, like the Sci-fi movies.

So, when the three trends hit the tipping point, Personalized curation would not only be the only means of preserving the richness and diversity afforded by the Long Tail, but the only way, for me, to do a great number of cool things with this connected intelligence, without expending my precious attention.

If you think, this ain't gonna happen, reflect upon how much information your eye filters to get the information that you decide to place attention on.

Google,"the window to the internet", would be replaced by the "Eye of the OM". (OM=One Machine is Kevin Kelly's term). Personally, it is going to a be a great while for that to happen.

Blindspots and Change

Just like individuals have blindspots, that prevent us from understanding the complete picture, Organizations have blindspots too.

There was this "naughtiness" blindspot, about the picture, that was trending up, in Twitter.

Soon after, a Video rendered the "naughtiness" blindspot absurd, by widening the visual field.

While most of the organization ventures on the shared vision, a small group of people, must focus on getting "hard data" that discovers new mental models, that could support or contradict the current vision of the Organization.

This group should be completely oblivious to the Organization's Vision and is merely interested in collecting, sharing and presenting different mental models, pertinent to the business context of the Organization.

So, when a contrarian mental model is the 'right way', no persuasion is required to change the current collective mental model.

The more stronger the evidence, the more faster, the course correction could be.

Lesson in the email - Passion dispels constraints

In my previous birth, when I had a Garage Startup, the following incident illustrated the compelling need for Shared Values in an Organization.

A bright guy, let us call him, Rockstar Engineer, who worked with large telecommunication companies came to work with me. We worked on a Stack that will interact with a Voice-Over-IP Hardware, which was also under development, at the time.


After a few months, when we were almost done, I summoned the Rockstar Engineer.

"Will our Software work on the day, the Hardware arrives?"

"Well, Plan a month for integration testing and making fixes, after the hardware arrives."

"No. I am expecting it to work on the very same day, when the Shipment arrives."

"Are you kidding? It ain't gonna fly."

"No. I am serious."

"Well that is not how things work in telecommunications. It takes months for integration."

"I don't care about norms. I believe we can make it work. If you can't figure out, I will tell you how?"

The argument became more intense in the next few days and I got the attached flame email from the Rockstar Engineer.

I chose to ignore it for the time-being and waited for the Hardware to arrive.

The Hardware arrives on the appointed day, they unwrap it, provision it and tada!.

The very first conference call worked without any sort of tweaks. I still vividly remember the pure joy in the Rockstar Engineer's voice, when he conveyed the good news on the Phone.

The belief, I have is, "Passion dispels Constraints". The Rockstar Engineer was bright, open-minded and diligent, yet was blinded and conditioned by his past experience.

It dawned on me that, without shared core values, which defines an organization's culture, goals(even, if they were common) are hard to achieve and almost impossible to Scale elegantly.

As Peter Drucker wrote, "Every Enterprise requires commitment to common goals and shared values. Without such commitment there is no enterprise; there is only a mob."

If you want a practical example of Culture, you should attend the Zappos 2-day Bootcamp.

P.S.: The Rockstar Engineer is a great friend since then and we often joke about the email.