Denting the Universe

"We get to make things, things that nudge the world, in what we hope is the right direction ... we get to put a dent in the universe" - Wilson Miner (Build 2011)

Wilson Miner - When We Build from Build on Vimeo.

Conferences, Storytelling, and Progress

Last week I attended TEDxSMU and posted that it was not that great. I want to explain why.

Aim Ridiculously High

”The solution is simple: Aim almost ridiculously high.” - Max Levchin cofounder of PayPal on jumpstarting innovation. -Forbes

TED is the best I have ever seen when it comes to finding and collecting great content and having the original author describe what has captured their passion and why it matters. This is why I expected so much of an event that has the TED logo.

Storytelling

The world is awash in information but it is short on meaning. Most of science and technology is boring at face value. It is when you see how it can be used to do something that matters that science has value. As Steve Jobs has demonstrated, great things come from the collision of science and art. The world is broken. It needs great storytellers to spread the word on what is broke and why we should work so hard to fix it.

Ira Glass on storytelling
Excellent storytelling, Malcolm Gladwell on the Norden Bombsite

People

People are more important than information. Who they are, why they strive, how they got to where they are, all matter in the bigger picture. Great things are made by people. How people change, how they learn, how they step out of the shadows and do something great, all matters as much as the accomplishment. This is especially true for local events where the people you know could be the first hires in a startup, the people you share great ideas with at a party, or the people that lead something great that you should be a part of.

Time

"A man who dares to waste one hour of time has not discovered the value of life." - Charles Darwin

Any event has to be judged against what one could have been doing with that time. There are so many great sources of exceptional content that the bar is set pretty high.

Here are a few:
www.ted.com
www.stumbleupon.com
twitter.com

Informed, Spirited, and Soulful

“I believe there is a place in the spectrum of television for really good conversation, if it is informed, spirited, soulful.” - Charlie Rose

“Almost everything–all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure–these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important. Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. You are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart.” – Steve Jobs’ Stanford Commencement Address

During the course of peoples lives they do what they must do. The degree, the job, the presentation, the project. Its simply a concern for acquiring power and wealth and avoiding unpleasant things. This is not where great things come from. It comes from a great love for searching, understanding deeply, and working on something greater than yourself.

There is a moment when you see what the world was like before you existed and what the world will be like after you are gone, and you see all the knowledge and culture that we have inherited from our ancestors, that you are not motivated by the status quo. You want to understand things deeply, and put your name on the next step up the ladder of progress. This is what TED conferences mean to me.

Carl Sagan and the way the world could be.

The Sagan Series
http://www.facebook.com/thesaganseries
http://www.charlierose.com/view/interview/6174

Bluring the Line Between Investor, Customer, and Buisness

Most businesses are built on the idea of "build it and they will come". I'd like to propose the opposite, a "find people that want it and it will get built" model.

Fractional Effort

The Nasa budget is $7 billion a year.
$7 billion a year / 300 million people = $23.33 a year per person
$23.33 / 12 months = $1.94 a month
$1.94 / 30 days = $0.06 a day

How many 7 billion dollar projects could be created for $0.06 a day ? How many problems could be solved if you could break them up into $0.06 worth of effort ?

Bootstrapping

How do you get critical mass behind something that needs to be done ? Suppose you could:

1. Get allot of people to say what they want and how much it would be worth to them.
2. Group people that want the same or similar things
3. People post solutions or ideas to problems that have allot of money behind them.
4. People with the problem "invest" in people solving the problem.
5. The investment return could be stock or a discount off the first purchase.
   

If there are millions with a problem, the investment would be pocket change.

Research

Not all businesses have immediate solutions to peoples problems. Maybe you need a prototype, proof on concept, scaled down test, etc. People contribute to make it happen and move things down the pipeline from risky far out idea to proven techniques that are ready to go.

Think how this would be radically different from a market where only things that are known to return a profit get built. Collecting and concentrating micro-investment from customers gets people that really really want something to take allot of risk and push to the edge of whats possible. What if a million people put in $10 to build and design an open source iPad ?

Idea Economy

The Flow of The Network

Here is the problem. You have ideas, people, and time. How do you route ideas to people in the least time ?

A solution is to:
- organize all the ideas so they are browsable, searchable, linkable, and commentable.
- allow people to express how important the idea is so that it is seen by more people
- allow people to directly route ideas to people they know
- create an idea economy

An Idea Economy

How it works:
- You have an idea or you hear of one.
- You decide how much you would pay groups of friends to read the idea. Some you might pay more, some less.
- You decide how much you are asking friends to pay you back if they like the idea.
- Your friends read the ideas that pay the most first and payback the ideas they like.
- You see who liked the idea. You group people by what ideas they pay for and use this to set how much you promote your ideas to those groups.
- You use your profits to promote ideas further.

Small World Networks

A small world network is one where the average number of connections between any two nodes is low. This is the "6 degrees of separation" between you and everybody on the planet idea. So you can imagine that the idea economy way of passing the same idea from person to person might route it to that one person that really really needs to know it.

Not Just Ideas

So maybe its not an idea but a problem, a wiki, or a top 10 list. Everyone gets paid to participate and contributes funds to pay for people's participation. X amount for every problem solution and Y for every solution that works. X for every item added to a top 10 list. Y for voting for an item. Z for any item that makes it into the top 10.

Gourmet Spam

What if you could answer a question and everyone out there could pay you to read their ad, or idea or whatever. Maybe you have a separate inbox for it all. It would let all the information about you out there get info to you. Maybe you assume an anonymous identity and people pay you to answer questions. Are you going to buy a house in the next 6 months ? Are you looking for a better job ? Maybe you have a really specific question you want people to answer. You only pay people in city X to answer. And its really not spam. Spam is free to send. Someone could set up their inbox to only accept messages that are pay to read. Spammers would be forced to send to a narrow audience. Someone might set a question/ad adrift like a message in a bottle among everyone that answered a question with a specific answer in hopes someone might pick it up.

Why

If people get paid for the information they share, they will invest more in what they share and create economies of social interaction that scale and self organize beyond the simple barter economy of friendships.

Talking with the Whole World

Every so often I have one of those ideas that shakes you up a bit. You realize something fundamental. For me its the insight that the best solutions and meaningful ways of living are about talking, listening, and new ideas. Those three simple things can do so much. And from one point of view they are what makes us so revolutionary relative to all the other living things. So here is the case.

Apes in the Storm of Change

While watching a Nova presentation on Human origins I found out that Africa, particularly the rift valley, was a very varied place weather wise around the time that humans branched off from apes. You'd have floods, droughts that would last a decade or two, nice weather, and then repeat. So if you were a lion or a gazelle the whole ecosystem was getting rebooted every few years. No rain, grass dies, gazelles die, lions die, or move on. It rains grass grows, but no gazelles or lions. The ecosystem had opportunities caused by inconsistent weather. Or seen another way, grass can't evolve into gazelles, and gazelles into lions in a decade. But in comes a clever ape who figures out how to foridge for plants in a drought, hunt antelopes when they are around, and pass this info on to offspring. You have a opportunity for better communication between parent, offspring, and random people leading to better survival. How to hunt, what plants are safe to eat, etc. Human culture adapted 1000x faster than static gene-programmed animals. Changing culture is like installing new software on the same old hardware.

This starts to explain allot. Why do people like completely made up stories, particularly ones with hero's who learn how to overcome some evil foe ? Why do people enjoy hanging around and talking ? Why do children want to learn from their parents ? Why do fashions change ?

The Environment

So culture adapts to its "environment", but nobody really sets up the environment. Cultures will exist to the extent that they are allowed to exist. If we allow oppressive governments we might get oppressive governments. If you allow unfair and exploitative practices you will get unfair and exploitative practices.

A while back Carl Sagan's Cosmos series talked about ancient Greek culture, Leucippus (theory of atoms) Democritus (democracy and many other things). Greek culture was a result of the mixing of cultures that traded in the Mediterranean. A child growing up might hear about many religions and many leaders and governments. There was no "that's just the way it is kid". There were lots of answers to the same question. The result is the foundation of western society, a culture that can survive the chaos of cultural collisions.

Numbers

I really think most people do not see the vast expanse of information that is out there.
- What do you know ?
- What do other people know ?
- What % of what you don't know would revolutionize your thinking ?
- How much effort would you put toward searching for something really great ?

Somewhere in the mountains there is some monk pondering the questions of life and he might find something really great. He might tell a few other monks, and they might tell some friends but maybe it stopped there. The idea never hit the tipping point of finding the people that would take the idea and spread it. The monks got old and died and the idea went with them. So much of culture is just what survived. What got passed on, written down, or told at some party to entertain the guests. Everything else is gone, extinct.

Making Culture

So how do you make a kick ass culture. Some possibilities:
- have allot of people spend allot of time listening and reading. You might call this education, but maybe its something you really love.
- have allot of people talking and writing about what they think, hopefully some of which is original and creative.
- create an economy where doing the first two are valued and the people that do it best are recognized and can make a living at it and even the smallest and least valued participation can find an audience and learn.

If you were a kick ass idea how would you get recognized?
- find the people most likely to listen
- let the people who love the idea promote it to people they think would like it
- get saved in an organized way somewhere so that people can find you again and never get lost

Its worth noting that big professional corporate marketer types know all about culture and try to shape it to their benefit. Its every marketer's dream to create a cult following that makes your product an essential part of a happy life, even if its all a sham. But this is another topic.

Quality

Its worth saying that not all of culture is great. You have the junk-food-equivalent of conversation, and sensational stories. But I'd hope that people would find the balance when given lots of choices.

The Internet

So what happens when:
- millions of people talk
- millions of people listen
- software filters it, makes it searchable, lets people promote it to friends, and creates an economy where it has value.
- lots of people find cool stuff that they then participate in, creating grass roots institutions and businesses of passionate people
- this iterates for a while

What happens ? ... culture like the world has never seen happens.

The Drake Equation for Information, Why the Future of the Internet Will Be Fun

So there is this equation, named after Frank Drake, that allows one to guess the potential number of extraterrestrial civilizations in our Milky Way galaxy. You make a guess for a bunch of probabilities and multiply them all up and the numbers are rather amazing. When I think of ideas, I think there is kind of an equivalent equation for all the ideas out there that are meaningful to you, from those that are just neat to the oh-shit-my-view-of the-world-just-did-a-180-and-I-have-to-sit-down ideas. So here goes:

I_like = P x I_day x f_web x f_publish x f_read x f_like

I_like - The number of ideas you like, encountered over the course of a single day.

P - The total population of the world, 6,692,030,277 as of 2008.

I_day - The average number of ideas each person has every day that they might share. I will use 10.

f_web- The fraction of people who can read and write and use the internet. I will use 1/10. According to this source 25% of the world has internet access.

f_publish - The fraction that publish their thoughts in a place that you could find. Could be face-to-face, email, blogs, twitter, facebook, whatever. I will use 1/100.

f_read - The fraction of everything published or spoken that you find and actually read. I will use 1/1,000,000.

f_like - The fraction of ideas that you read and like. I will use 1/10.

So 6,692,030,277 x 10 x 1/10 x 1/100 x 1/1,000,000 x 1/10 = 6.6 ideas per day that you like

The first thing I think when I see this is that we don't get squat. We sit on the shore of vast amounts of information and sip a few little drops everyday. Now those drops are many many times more interesting than the average of whats out there, but still very small and no where near whats possible.

So imagine if some cultural shift could multiply each fraction by 10. People could read more and think 10x more thoughts, have some spare time and publish 10x more, and find the internet interesting and read 10x more. The result would be 6,692 interesting ideas per day or 1 idea every 12 seconds. Constant neat stuff that never gets old. Now imagine that 1 out of 10000 ideas you like are really big. You would get one of those every other day.

Now obviously this is too much for any one person so people rank and filter stuff and only the really good stuff gets to you when you have time. Or maybe this overload increases your threshold for what is interesting. And what happens when people get exposed to the world of ideas, come to similar conclusions about what is great, and all start thinking about what everyone else likes. Multiply another 10x to f_like. Information nirvana all the time.

Read-Write Culture, The Next Big Idea That Will Change Everything

Lawrence Lessig on Charlie Rose

This is long but I promise its worth it. For a long time I've looked at all the problems and all the great things and saw that how they became great or how they will be solved were the same process. Great things are usually the creation of many people, though its usually the last guy who adds the last critical piece that gets the credit. Big problems are so complex that its beyond any one person to understand it all and come up with a solution. So people working together is very important ... duh :). The trick is how do you get people together in a deliberate organized way. Not just kind of random or with huge efforts like knocking on doors or buying expensive commercials. So this last week has gotten me really excited in that I see one way it could work and its simple and powerful. So here it is.

How do ideas happen ? Think of all the things that you think are great. Did you make them yourself from scratch ? Probably not. You heard them somewhere and mixed in your own ideas. And you think that the way you see them is better and more meaningful, at least to you. If you look at everyone doing this everywhere. Some one hears something, thinks about it, and shares it, there is a kind of idea evolution. Richard Dawkins calls it meme evolution. Its kind of a free-speech market-place-of-ideas kind of thought and its the basis of people getting together to socialize since the beginning of time.

Now for some science that will blow your mind. So there is the theory of evolution. Basically it states that there is variation in a population and some in that population are better suited to their environment and they have more offspring and increase in number in the next generation. This simple little process over a long long long time made all life everywhere. But there is an odd thing about that life. It was unaware of what it was doing. It acquired competence in dealing with the environment without cognition of what, why, how, or anything. Ants for example don't think. They just follow some simple rules that implement a near optimal search algorithm based on scent trails. So evolution produces competence without cognition.

So I promised some mind bending stuff so here it comes. Ideas that go between people evolve like life. They have variation. Some are better suited for their environment, i.e. people like them more, and they pass on to the next generation of ideas i.e. people talk about what they like. But, and here is where it gets good, this process has always been limited to the people around you, the dozen or so people you see in everyday conversations. But now there is the Internet. You could talk to the whole world if you could filter out all the crap and get what you like, the whole world. Let me say that again, the whole world, all 6,692,030,277 people as of 2008. Somewhere out there, there is one guy that is going to have an idea and he is going to share it and it will spread and change and adapt and change the world forever, for the better hopefully. And the people that work on that idea won't even realize how big it is, just like the ants who have competence but not cognition until its there, done, and someone steps back and sees the forest for the first time when all they have been looking at are trees.

So where is this happening ? Take a look at Twitter and Facebook. Not the "my-dog-just-farted I'm-going-to-sleep-now" conversations, but the moments when someone finds something really neat. Something special and they share it and someone else sees it and goes wow I see the world a little differently now. And the number of people sharing and learning and working on what they have discovered grows and grows and grows till people start talking about a fundamental shift in culture. A shift from mass produced ideas to grassroots ideas, from read culture to read-write culture.

This type of culture is different. New things don't come from a big R&D Lab and then sold to the masses each one exactly the same. They come from semi-professional amateurs laboring away at what they love, getting together, and sharing ideas, each unique, just for fun. Trying really audacious things that have a high risk of failure but huge returns. And they don't care if it fails. Its fun. Something a R&D Lab in a big company with established products would rarely try.

So get ready. Its is going to be a wild ride.

Here are all the sources that got me thinking:

Lawrence Lessig on the next big idea
http://www.charlierose.com/view/clip/9648

Competance without Cognition
DARWIN AND THE EVOLUTION OF REASONS By Daniel C. Dennett on http://edge.org/ (no direct link)

The Origin of the Mountain Bike
TED talk "Charles Leadbeater on innovation" http://on.ted.com/67W



Cloud Super Intelligence (Slides are hard to follow but possible to get the gist)
http://www.slideshare.net/AndersSandberg/cloud-superintelligence

Cloud Superintelligence

View more presentations from Anders Sandberg.

Twitter and the Global Brain

Four Seperate Ideas

Dreaming Big

Every so often a venue opens up where ones success is only limited by the audacity and grandness of ones dreams. As I look around the world I see random events. Things happening just because they ended up that way, good things and bad, especially the bad. As I look around I also see something crazy great, the Internet and the communities being built on it, free to create connections across time from the past to the present, across geography from one culture to another, and across wealth with few barriers of cost. So the stage is set. We can take our dreams of how we wish the world worked and begin to change it from this dreary place where we have to live with what we happen to randomly get, to a place where everything that needs to happen does.

Truth Telling

The world is hard to understand. Our brains have a go at it and often get it wrong. Its part of the everyday. The trouble is that recognizing a mistake is often more difficult than making the mistake to begin with. And its not fun to be wrong. In fact being wrong about a major life choice can be a disaster (religion is an example). Not many people go looking for all the ways they are wrong. The nice thing about the world though is that there are experiences where the truth of something leaps out with a good chance of being right, a truth telling event. As a programmer, every day I build something that if it is faulty I have only myself to look to as the cause. I come face to face with my mistakes and how I make them, day after day. And I think this is the best way to find the truth, to go looking for it, to inundate ones mind with views and perspectives where you can experience that moment where the truth leaps out with clarity, even if it is a disaster.

Luxury

What do you value? When have you been happy ? ... Not the giddy rush of adrenaline but the moment that you remember with quiet earth-shaking tears of joy. Was it material ? ... something constructed with great precision and difficulty like a watch or a car? ... Or was it a moment where a dream touched Earth and became real. Dreams of action, of wrongs corrected, of dignity restored, of possibilities never before seen, of diseases cured, of space explored, of the environment saved, of lives changed. Would you exchange one form of luxury for the other? Would you draw a line above which you gave away to change the world, perhaps forever? Your money is your vote.

The Culture of Work

Do you have a career? Do you acquire job skills? Do you think about peddling your skill set among the highest bidders? And at the end of the day you take your money and do what you really want to do? Does this skew economic activity toward the basic necessities and what people do in their free time? What is money in an economy supposed to do? First and foremost it allows people to specialize and be more productive and then trade their services in a free market. All of their own free will with no central organizer and it all works wonderfully. Well not quite. Ever try to start a business? It often takes allot of work to put things together before their is a profit to keep things going. So most people settle for working for someone else, serving the interest of a business, perhaps a large one. What if you don’t like your job ? How much misery is endured by people around the globe simply as a result of a lack of choices brought about by the high barrier of creating a business and that business's inability to find those few that would love to work there? If you could solve that problem you could change the culture of work. People would set out to accomplish some activity instead of having a career. They would create businesses around something they love. What people do with their daily time might actually matter to them beyond just income. People might invest in businesses they love, maybe more just to get it done. What would get accomplished then? Would we call it work?

A Million People

Consider the following:

• People's minds are machines capable of learning.
• The mechanism of learning is fallible (Ex. racism, sexism, fanatical religions, genocide, etc. ).
• Fallibility decreases if there is an increase in IQ, amount of knowledge, and critical thinking ability .
  
• An omnipotent intelligence could learn in an infallible way.
• The mechanism of learning is discoverable.
  
• One theory of learning is called "Society of Mind" where there are competing cooperative agents interacting in ones mind to form a single unified self.
  
• It should be possible to connect people through the Internet in a simple way that mimics the learning process of a single mind.
• The more people in this network the less its fallible.
  

More With Less

Recently Nicholas Negroponte of the MIT media lab announced the initiative to build a $100 computer. Why haven’t we done this before with other things? There is a quote from Einstein that seems to fit: "Any intelligent fool can make things bigger, more complex, and more violent. It takes a touch of genius -- and a lot of courage -- to move in the opposite direction". Ever look at a house and think to yourself, how could that pile of sheet rock and lumber be worth $100,000 dollars? Would you live in a house that did almost everything a normal house did but only cost $10,000 dollars? What would you do with the other $90,000 dollars? Would you work less and have more free time? Isn’t innovation great?