The spotlight of the Nov-14 issue of the HBR Magazine is the "Internet of Everything".
No, I do not want to know everything, nor do I want to be absolutely wise (and I do not want to live infinitely long either).
My world view is speculative realism in the sense of Quentin Meillassoux. In short, if we do not know more properties of a real behavior than represented in our models, our models ARE reality.
I want to explore and experiment...
What can vampires teach us?
Remember, they live infinitely long and are wise… But they need one rare thing: blood and everything they do is finding optimal strategies to get it…this is inspired by this Freaconomics blog post.
Jim Jarmusch made a great film about vampires: Only Lovers Left Alive. A quiet and dark film with a feeling of timelessness…giving the impression that any world is important. The two immortal lovers give an impression of absolute wisdom, high culture, connectedness…of vampires.
How wise they are, they are caught to live at night, buy (at dark markets) or steal blood…
Freakonomics asks: what if there was a free blood market? The film gives the answer...
Program everything?
We strive for knowing and understanding everything. You can only program at universal systems. Universal in the sense that they are solid enough to store and fluid enough to allow "signal" transformations. If we want to program everything we need to connect everything.
The phrase "internet of things" has arisen to highlight new opportunities exploiting new smart, connected products transforming data into computational knowledge.
To program everything you need languages (and interpreters) that represent things in the same way - as symbol. A symbol can describe a mathematical expression, graph, movie…even a program. Symbolic means, they are all pieces of data.
Are data the blood of the new high culture of the "internet of everything"?
Co-evolution in the program grid
Think of weather forecasts and energy optimization. If you have sensors in a high resolution grid you can provide better weather forecasts and if you have better local weather forecast you can optimize energy consumption via sensing. A perfect co-evolution.
Isn't this great? Let's drive progress through this kind of co-evolution?!
When uncertainty is good
Remember, we only learn from turbulences and gain from disorder.
Even if we have everything connected and have clever computational knowledge engines...What truth do our information sets represent? Are we able to distinguish noise from content? Do our perfect knowledge engines generalize? Are their unified best practices for our decision?
Back to philosophy…it's even more complex
Life happens...
only at the small border between chaos and order. And with "life" we mean biological, physical, economic, cultural, social…
There are no equilibriums and optima in the large. We ride the waves and when we ride them we change them.
If we "know everything", we stand still?
The faster we approach the horizon the faster it fades away
So, don't let us forget the modeling, parameter identification, simulation, speculation, validation… Don't let us forget that there are ill posed problems, undecidability, uncertainty… note that big data may also be a big joke and that tightly coupled complex systems may cause a horrible operational risk.
EveryWare can create great opportunities, but it needs individual assessment to which extent it should be exploited. Don't just adopt it fast and blindly...
