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As part of my work with Architectuer & Governance Magazine, I had the opportunity to review a new book: Blown to Bits.  The following conversation will appear in the October issue of A&G.

A&G sat down with the Ken Ledeen and Harry Lewis, the authors (along with IEEE Fellow Hal Abelson) to discuss their new book, Blown To Bits: Your Life, Liberty, and Happiness after the Digital Explosion.  (www.bitsbook.com)
The authors paint a profound picture of the risks and rewards of our techno-enhanced future.  In particular, we wanted to get their insight to the implications of every accelerating technological power on the legacy processes of the enterprise.

A&G:  Much debate has occurred around the future of IT in a distributed, open-sourced, service oriented world.  How do large IT organizations have to change in the decade ahead in order to adapt to the new structures of society, information and business.
BtB: We talk about how institutions move so much more slowly than technology.  This is clearly seen in the world of legislation, and how the legal system has a hard time keeping pace with technology change.  Global 2000 organizations, while smaller than governments, will likely continue to move the governance mechanisms forward quite slowly in the decade ahead.
Look inside traditional IT organizations.  How many cobalt and mainframe programmers do they still have?  Lots more than you might imagine.  Changes are slow to come about because the IT organization is typically focused on guarding corporate assets.
Organizations that have a lot to preserve become very conservative.  On the other hand, organizations without a legacy to manage can become extraordinarily innovative and have the opportunity to surpass the legacy institution.
On the other hand, one of the real opportunities for large IT organizations in the decade ahead is to create enormous value by mining the information that they collected as collateral aspects of their normal business. Leading organizations are finding ways to get at these vast storehouses in information and translate that information to insight and value.  This is a place where strategic IT and enterprise architecture can play a major role.

A&G: What do you see as the future of enterprise in the United States?
BtB: There is a tremendous amount of innovation taking place in entrepreneurial companies, and that is also spreading to other forums.  And it takes large organizations with their span of resources and influence to apply these innovations.   The risk among large corporations is that they miss out on embracing these new organizational paradigms.
As an example, we discuss about how Search is a new organizational paradigm in the book.  Enterprises were built with physical buildings that had rooms filled with file cabinets of information.  That metaphor carried forward into the digital age with file folders and windows and directory structures.  Search turns that paradigm on its head.  Search says you don’t categorize, you find.  While this concept came from small companies, it is now finding a foothold across the largest enterprises, which are the repositories of so much undiscovered value.
Even Google continues to morph itself.  It is no longer “just” a search company.  It is becoming a storage and retrieval company – understanding the value locked in the unstructured data of the world – for companies that don’t consider information as their main product.
A decade ago, the question was about outsourcing my hardware.  Do I want to outsource it.  Should I go to India to make that happen?  More recently, the question turned to outsourcing the application stack.  A critical question of the near future is: Do I outsource my data?  Not just the storage of it, but the management, care, feeding, and curation of it.
Are the employees at Google better in tune with the Enterprise Architecture approach of managing the inconnectivity of that data, the relationships that exist through it, and the associated value that can be captured from understanding those non obvious relationships – rather than your typical IT organization?
If I am an insurance company, I know the relationship between policy and policyholder, but I no doubt have tremendous insight buried in the related grid of information assets that I don’t have a clue about uncovering.  This offers both a tremendous challenge and opportunity for companies in the decade ahead.

A&G:  The workforce for corporate IT is aging, and it is not readily apparent that today’s “digital natives” are overly anxious to step into the shoes of their data center and application management forefathers.  What advice doyou have for corporate IT teams looking to recruit the best and the brightest?

BtB Rekindling the excitement about IT careers of any kind is a major task for the American education system.  Every computer science department is thinking about this.  The Bureau of Labor statistics point to a 50% growth in the need for IT professionals in the coming decade.  But the fact of the matter is that there is a labor shortage in every niche.
Much has been made about the cost benefits of outsourcing IT jobs - $200,000 per head in the US vs. $60,000 per head in India.  The reality is, that in the not-too-distant future, when a company has to choose from these too options, they will find that they will need to hire both –just to keep up with headcount demands.
Companies need to expand their vision of what an IT job entails and help young candidates understand that their skills related to the newest technologies can really make an impact within their organization.

A&G:  Stewardship of the bits becomes more and more an issue as value shifts from physical to digital ownership.  This shift is accelerating at many of the companies who read our magazine.  These companies used to make their money selling physical goods and running bricks and mortar establishments.  Now their primary value comes from the data they own and the insight it generates.  How should these companies protect their digital assets at the same time leverage them to generate increasing value?
These companies face two orthogonal issues:  How do I find value in the information I have collected, and how do I protect the information that I have?
Traditional digital protection is about protecting the medium – with access codes and firewalls and encryption.  But the growing issue now is about also protecting the “message”.  Who speaks for your brand?  How should you respond and nurture public commentary.  What insight should you give away, and what should you charge for?  How do you (and your customers) know that the message they are seeing is really legitimate?
A&G:  To further your point, look at the explosion of Twitter.  While there are hundreds of thousands of people “tweeting” away every day about life, products, issues etc., very few companies have embraced the medium.  Just recently, an imposter named “Janet” became the voice of ExxonMobile in the twitterverse just by registering and tweeting under the name @ExxonMobileCorp.  She answered questions on behalf of the company for several days before she was exposed.  And even after exposure, she continued to tweet under Exxon’s brand.
BtB: Right, the question becomes one of information security – not just security of the medium.  It is one of the key challenges facing IT today.

About the authors:

Ken Ledeen is Chairman and CEO of Nevo Technologies and has served on the boards of numerous technology companies.  Harry Lewis, former Dean of Harvard College, is Gordon McKay Professor of Computer Science at Harvard.  Together with Hal Abelson the teach Quantative Reasoning 48, an innovative Harvard course on information for non-technical, non-mathematically oriented students.

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SciVestor sat down with Dewey Gaedcke, Founder and CEO of Minggl.com.  He discusses the future of the social grid, how Moore’s Law is powering Web 2.0, and why companies and investors should care about Minggl.

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I’m happy to present the new home of SciVestor videos: SciVestor Insight from Blip TV.  With the video player below, you can view all of our published videos.  Today, we uploaded a great interview with Colin Angle, co-founder and CEO of iRobot Corporation.  Enjoy!

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SciVestor sat down with Doug Lenat, AI pioneer, founder and CEO of Cycorp. He discusses how Cycorp might change the world in the next 10 years, why Moore’s Law is important, and why businesses should be interested in AI.  View the video here: http://scivestor.blip.tv/#926947

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Recently, SciVestor was quoted in a piece on the emergence of Semantic Web technologies in InfoWorld.

With the Semantic Web’s ability to hone in on just the information a user needs, companies based on a Web search advertising model such as Google may have to reconsider their plans, said analyst Jonas Lamis, executive director of SciVestor.

“They may need to rethink their business model because if I have an agent that acts on my behalf and finds things that are interesting for me, it’s not necessarily going to be reading Google ads to do that,” Lamis said.

You can read the full piece here: http://www.infoworld.com/article/08/01/15/sparql-semantic-web_1.html

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Singularity University has been a big fan of “Living in the Simulation” fiction over the years. The original Matrix makes our Top 10 movies list - while the sequels disappointed. Of course, a substantial amount of discourse around this concept has made it’s way into the scientific community - notably in discussions of Existential Risk. Now, from our friends at Massey University in Auckland, comes a study of observable evidence to evaluate if, in fact, we are in The Matrix…

This paper explores the idea that the universe is a virtual reality created by information processing, and relates this strange idea to the findings of modern physics about the physical world. The virtual reality concept is familiar to us from online worlds, but our world as a virtual reality is usually a subject for science fiction rather than science. Yet logically the world could be an information simulation running on a multi-dimensional space-time screen. Indeed, if the essence of the universe is information, matter, charge, energy and movement could be aspects of information, and the many conservation laws could be a single law of information conservation.
If the universe were a virtual reality, its creation at the big bang would no longer be paradoxical, as every virtual system must be booted up. It is suggested that whether the world is an objective reality or a virtual reality is a matter for science to resolve. Modern information science can suggest how core physical properties like space, time, light, matter and movement could derive from information processing. Such an approach could reconcile relativity and quantum theories, with the former being how information processing creates space-time, and the latter how it creates energy and matter.

Read the full paper here.

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By James Flanagan
THE NEW YORK TIMES
Monday, December 24, 2007

Nanotechnology companies, nurtured on billions of dollars in government grants and venture investments through most of this decade, are getting ready to go public.

Being near to taking such a step is another stage in the evolution of nanotechnology, the science of materials measured at billionths of a meter, or 1/500th of a human hair.

Experts note that nanotechnology-enabled products are already used in industry.

“There are 200 commercial products in cosmetics, apparel and sporting goods in which nanotechnology plays a role,” said Lynn Foster, emerging technologies director for the law firm Greenberg Traurig and author of the 2006 book “Nanotechnology: Science, Innovation and Opportunity.”

Foster cites clothing with a coating of nanoparticles — from Nano-Tex Corp. of Oakland, Calif. — that repels stains.

And increasing numbers of nanotech products are in the offing.

Mihail Roco, senior adviser for nanotechnology at the National Science Foundation and an architect of the government’s research effort, predicted in an interview on the Web site of the National Nanotechnology Initiative that by 2015, nanotechnology will play a crucial role in $1 trillion worth of products, “which would require 2 million workers.”

Companies in nanotechnology speak of adapting their research to medical innovations, in which nanoparticles would deliver medicine directly to individual cells, and to solar energy, in which nano-enabled photovoltaic coatings would capture and store the sun’s energy at a lower cost than today’s solar panels.

The NanoGram Corp. in Milpitas, Calif., is aiming some of its research efforts toward such solar ambitions.

“We have 58 of our 69 employees working in R&D in the clean technology area, including solar power,” said Kieran Drain, chief executive of NanoGram, which earns money by licensing innovations to manufacturers of optical and electronic products.

NanoGram has a venture with Nagase & Co. of Japan, a manufacturer of light-emitting diode, or LED, screens for digital devices.

“Our nanomaterials enable the screens to emit more light,” Drain said.

In its 11-year history, NanoGram has spun off or sold operations to other companies in communications and medical electronics.

In the past two years, the company has raised almost $27 million in venture capital backing and looks to go public in 2009, “when we’ll have become larger in annual revenues,” Drain said.

Another company hoping to go public is Unidym Inc., which works with clusters of carbon nanoparticles that possess extraordinary properties in tensile strength and conduction of electrical current.

Sean Olson, vice president for operations and strategy, said Unidym is working with companies that produce the touch screens for cell phone devices, automatic teller machines and airport check-in terminals.

“Our carbon nanotube technology makes the light-emitting chipsets less brittle and able to emit more light,” Olson said. “Our screens can take a pounding.”

Unidym, based in Menlo Park, Calif., is a subsidiary of the Arrowhead Research Corp., a public investment company that was founded in 2003 to back small companies engaged in nanotechnology research.

Arrowhead, based in Pasadena, Calif., is advised by half a dozen professors at the California Institute of Technology.

In March, Arrowhead helped Unidym merge with Carbon Nanotechnologies, a Houston-based firm that was founded by the late nanotechnology pioneer Richard Smalley of Rice University, who won the Nobel Prize for his work.

“Unidym and Carbon Nanotechnologies make a powerful combination for the future of the semiconductor industry,” said John Miller, vice president of business development at Arrowhead.

Miller explained that nanoparticles, working at atomic scales, can produce semiconductors at more infinitesimal levels than current electronic technology and at lower cost than today’s manufacturing plants, which typically cost $5 billion to build.

Arrowhead Research is backed by Fidelity Investments, a mutual fund company; York Capital Management, a hedge fund company; and other public shareholders.

“As a public company, we can take a somewhat longer-term perspective on earning a return on investment,” Miller said.

He gave that as a reason Arrowhead was able to combine Unidym with Carbon Technologies.

Venture fund investors in Carbon Technologies, which was founded in 2000, “needed to get their money out,” Miller said.

Arrowhead can now reap its own return when it assists Unidym in going public, possibly next year if general market conditions are favorable.

The Arrowhead example points up two factors in the recent evolution of nanotechnology.

One is the role of universities.

In disbursing $8 billion in research grants since 2001, the National Nanotechnology Initiative has worked through 60 or so universities all over the United States.

And it is still working through the universities that have been designated as Centers and Networks of Excellence, including the Center for Nanobiotechnology at Cornell University; the Center for Scalable and Integrated Nano-Manufacturing at the University of California, Los Angeles; the Institute for Nanoelectronics and Computing at Purdue University and others.

The other factor is the fickleness of financial market opinion.

At the beginning of this decade, nanotechnology was greeted with predictions of instant wonders and investment success.

But when technological developments seemed to take longer than anticipated, investor enthusiasm cooled and nanotechnology was looked on as an overhyped promise.

Now attitudes are becoming positive again, Foster, the nanotechnology author, said, and “we’ll see many firms coming to the public markets.”

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Several of my colleagues from the Singularity Institute (Bruce Klein and Ben Goertzel) are organizing a conference in March of 2008 to share and coordinate efforts across researchers in the area of AGI.

The event is scheduled for March 1-3 in Memphis, TN at the University of Memphis. Topics for the event include:

• Foundations and Theory of AGI
• The Role of Embodiment in AGI
• Key Enabling Applications for AGI
• Management of Complex Goal Structures
• Lifelong and Multi-Strategy Learning
• Case-by-case Problem-Solving
• AGI-based Natural Language Processing
• Connecting Sensorimotor and Concept-level Cognition
• Coherence of Integrative/Hybrid AGI Systems
• Evaluation and Comparison of AGI Projects

The submission deadline for papers passed today. For more information, see the event website at: http://www.agi-08.org/

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I’m blogging Gartner Symposium down in Orlando this week.  My favorite session so far is: Generation Virtual: How a 40th-Level Half-Elf From Secaucus, New Jersey Will Change Your Business, by Gartner Analyst Adam Sarner.

I’ve been attending Gartner Symposium for the last 5 years (as part of my day job at an enterprise software company), but have only recently seen any recognition from Gartner that there is a relationship between their heavily IT crowd and the emergence of transformative technologies like virtual worlds and AI.

Of course, they cast this presentation in the “mavericks” track so as not to scare the assembled techies too much, but the very fact that Gartner is investing research dollars into this space is a bell-weather in my opinion.

Adam’s predictions:

• All you need is love: By 2015, 2% of people in the U.S. will be married to people they will never meet in person.

• A convenient truth: By 2015, time spent online will compete with the real world becoming the most “green” activity, reducing the average person’s overall carbon footprint by more than 50%.

• The dot-com bomb: Sales and marketing of products and services to virtual personas will “explode,” overtaking B2C spending by 2020.

• The day the earth stood still: By 2020, more than 70% of R&D investment in personal robotics will shift to virtual personal assistants.

• Mayor McBlank: A city will elect a virtual anonymous persona for mayor by 2020.

One of Sarner’s more powerful memes was the relationship between Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs and the emergence of Virtual worlds and AIs. Sarner believes that the virtual world is providing the “self-actualization” that Maslow forecast, but few have been able to achieve in Meatspace.

The latter half of his presentation focused on the emergence of personal AIs – what he called “persona bots”. His take:

In 2017, the persona bot will be mass adopted (more than 20 million active persona bot users in the U.S. alone; more than 10 million in the rest of the world). The drivers for this mass adoption are primarily the persona bot’s time shifting/time saving ability, and ability and authority to carry out tasks on the user’s behalf. The persona bot’s strength will be its ability to be at many virtual places at once, seeking vast amounts of territory, while filtering back and reporting on relevant information.

Just as the customer will have the persona bot as a “killer application,” companies will have their own automated bot for critical relationship handling, such as sales, customer service and marketing. By 2010, more than 15% of B2C Fortune 1000 companies with a Web site will use a chat bot for online customer service. Top drivers, such as 24/7 presence and the ability to communicate domain expertise, will help customers navigate their way toward a purchase. A practice already used is text-based hybrid bots with the ability to start an automated conversation with a customer, then alert a live representative to take over the avatar once a lead is qualified. Eventually, companies will need to develop an interaction process around a fully automated persona bot gathering information from a fully automated company bot.

Sarner’s recommendations to the assembled IT intelligentsia:

• Companies should organize and target products and services online based on mankind’s journey toward self-actualization.
• Sell to the persona, not the person. A persona will show you how it wants to be treated.
• Create virtual environments as a way to orchestrate customer exploration toward purchases.
• Shift from collecting demographic data to psychographic data for understanding online persona behavior and its interaction with others.
• Shift Investment from known customers to unknown ones. Focus on the influencers within the meritocracy.
• Develop and retain or outsource new skills to attract, connect, contribute and gain insight from personas and virtual environments.
• Begin to develop strategy, process and technology around relationships with persona bots as a tool for mutual exploration.

I’m glad to see that Gartner is getting on board. Their perspective will help drive attention and investment to the area.

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Peter Thiel, PayPal co-founder, SIAI benefactor and Principal of Clarium Capital, took the stage at the Singularity Summit Sunday and gave a great talk about considering when and how to lay down bets on The Singularity. His basic premise was that along the bell curve of plausible outcomes, the most likely scenarios eventually migrate toward the tails: very wonderful or very catastrophic. And of these two possible outcomes, either is acceptable to investors.

On the “wonderful” hand, the run-up to AGI creates the biggest investment boom in the history of humanity, and the positive results yield a world of never-ending promise. On the “catastrophic” hand, advanced AGI gone awry causes humanity to disappear in a cloud of [insert your favorite existential risk scenario here] dust. In that scenario, the investor has bigger problems than the lack of return anyway.

Thiel believes that we may already be experiencing economic upheaval that is paving the way for the long boom. He asks, “What if the peak of insanity in March 2000 was really a peak of clarity? But those technologies were not the decisive sets of technologies?” What if the gyrations in the markets since then represent the global investment community lining up behind possible scenarios that they hope will produce “wonderful results”?

To illustrate his point, he discussed the investment strategies of Warren Buffet. He asked the intriguing question: Is Warren Buffet betting on The Singularity? According to Thiel, Buffet’s portfolio was traditionally focused on value stocks. But this has shifted in the last decade toward insurance and catastrophic reinsurance products. Thiel believes this is a classic adoption of the wonderful vs. catastrophic philosophy of Singularity investors. For Buffet, Thiel sees 4 possible outcomes for his investments:

1. Nothing bad happens: Buffet happily collects the premiums from his policy holders and maybe even lives to 1000.

2. A Mild disaster like 9/11 occurs: This helps the insurance industry in that it allows them to raise rates and drives more policy purchases.

3. A big catastrophe happens [Thiel showed a rendering of nukes exploding over Manhattan]: In this scenario, the rules get changed. The Government steps in and makes things whole for the insurance industry.

4. [Again, insert your favorite Existential Risk scenario] – No one is around to collect.

I believe Thiel is onto something here. I have always been a fan of “riskless profit”. That’s why I love investing in investment banks and casino companies and insurance firms. They are as riskless as they come. As long as the people show up, there is profit to be had.

Now Thiel brings a new dimension to this perspective. There is profit to be had in Singularity enabling technologies or there isn’t. Either way, it’s a safe bet.

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