Programming Pauls of Wisdom

Forget web 2.0 - lets have real radicalism

What is radical? Well, Lisp is a fairly radical language. Learning it forces a lot of changes into your programmers mind. he biggest for me (and I am not far down the road) is that of everything evaluating at the same time. Procedural languages (think line 10 then line 20) are great. Turing complete. But think of functional example - perhaps an excel spreadsheet - change one item and all the rest of the spreadsheet changes - you could even build in a circular loop if excel did not catch it. The loop could run and change itself again and again and again. It would be what i call radical.

I am old - I remember the early 90s and that thing called email. I remeber the realisation, the understanding that we were doing something that was changing the world. An ISP then was radical.

I do not see the same thing with web 2.0. There is nothing wrong with Flickr, its just that people used to go to the local pub take photos on their (amazingy powerful 1mb pixel) cameras and load them up to their web pages with funny "tags" - like paul drunk.
And amazingly one could search for them on those antiquated Yahoo search sites. Flickr makes this easier, and does some heavy lifting in searching - but it is just a php site with a mysql backend. It has got the user interface right, but nothing in its bones has changed the world.

Google - now that changed the world. The best example is its spelling checker - it checks my spelling aginst how all the words are spelt on all the pages out there. it changes as the language changes. That little innovation is the difference between the procedural spell checker and the functional language speel checker.. Because both flickr and google use the meta information each of us put into our uploads, they feel the same. But flickr is relentlessly old world. It lives in its sandbox, and can only change if it is told to. Google changes as the world changes. The algorithms behind the two are different orders, different ways of looking at the world.

Here is another example. Cyclists in London are calling for a 20mph speed limit. Currently London has a default speed limit of 30 Mph, and people usually do 35 -40. SO why is 20mph radical. Because it forces change on every other level. At 20mph there is no quick drive - there is only slow drive. There is the knowledge that you cannot put your foot down , so leave early or dont travel. The cars you buy - why sell a 2 ton monstrosity when everyone does 20 - a fender bender in a 2CV will ot hurt at those speeds - so I can make a light car. That runs on batteries.
It will be safer to walk, to cycle, so more will be done. Shops and habits will change to accomodate it. All it takes is a politican willing to commit suicide.

But look at how we enforce traffic speeds - speed cameras. Now imagine speed cameras every where to catch these speeders who do 21mph. They can watch the street. And if they see a crime other than speeding. Mugging for example. Can a persons skeleton frame geometry be use to identify them and track them from camera o camera, street to street. MIT has been doing it for years. And if that mugging is spotted and the culprits tracked as they run from street to street, will we be able to send a cop to pick them up. What happens in a world when any violent activity is noticed, the suspect tracked and collected by (probably bored) cops in less than ten minutes. Crime stops. Well crime outside your home stops.

What would you pay to live in a city where there was no crime.

What about a police state, loss of privacy and liberty? Wel thats what they said about Robert Peels police force. Anyway cameras that wath our every move and are only monitored by police is a police state. So we should have laws that require free access to these images. That will make life harder for the bloke who does not want his wife to see which htel he uses at lunchtime, but much better for the rest fo us.

Add to that - should we allow the export of this technology to countires where no such law exists. Should we alow Cisco to build the great firewall of china? (If they did not china would build it anway and the CIA would not get its claws in. But then would china trust Cisco to build a network of cameras watching everyone in Beijing. The CIA would no longer need to leave their armchairs to do the spying. Of course foreign powers could spy on London from their own armchairs too. But we would know who was watching those cameras. And we would not have crime on our streets. You see - everythng changes at once - the functional language versus the procedural.

But it has to be whole hearted. A gated community is divisive. Crime free kensington is different from crime free Kensal.

Anyway - web 2.0. The current web 2.0 are simply factor improements on the past. Not clean breaks, not radical. But the crime free city above is decidedly radical. It is feasible. Perhaps it is inevitable. But it is part of a functional look at the internet. The internet links our lives, intermingles and creates a meta-humanity. BUt currently that meta-humanity is linked by published information - information I deliberately place onto the Internet. The next sea change will come from stuff I place on the net simpy by doing - by linking my physical life to my virtual life. Whether by walking past a camera, by buying lunch or asking my doctor why my ear aches, I can contribute to this new open source, I can place my information on the internet for metahumanity to use. To know if a crowd is forming down a street, to know if food deliveries need to go west or east, to know if the virus is spreading or receeding, my actions become part of meta-humanitys knowledge about itself.

This linking of the physical and the virtual will require geo-location, unique ids of everything, massively accurate video analysis tools, and the vision to see the future.
We have GPS, we have RFID, video tools grow more powerful each day. Welcome to the future - no crime, no disease (see that dumping of food where the rats live).

We shall give up our freedom from being monitored for the benefits of being monitored.
We always have. The tribal leader demanded our crops in retrn for protection from the other tribes. We gave because the deal was a good one. Its just that at a certain size the protection racket needs to become government.

And when it does that is a radcial change - same people in charge- different world.

posted by paul @ 4:22 PM