The Future of CooperationTim O’Reilly

O’Reilly Media

State of the ValleyFebruary 8, 2013

“The skill of writing is to create a context in which other people can think.”

-Edwin Schlossberg

Cooperation

Social Structure Among Gorillas

“The silverback is the center of the troop's attention, making all the decisions, mediating conflicts, determining the movements of the group, leading the others to feeding sites and taking responsibility for the safety and well-being of the troop. Younger males subordinate to the silverback, known as blackbacks, may serve as backup protection.”

Wikipedia

Social Structure Among Chimpanzees

“In chimpanzee society, the 'dominant male' does not always have to be the largest or strongest male, but rather the most manipulative and political male which can influence the goings on within a group. Male chimpanzees typically attain dominance through cultivating allies who will provide support for that individual in case of future ambitions for power.”

Wikipedia

Image: John Mitanihttp://sitemaker.umich.edu/mitani/

The Evolution of Complex Societies

Band

Tribe

Chiefdom

State

The “Invisible Hand” of “the Market”

“It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker, that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest. We address ourselves, not to their humanity but to their self-love, and never talk to them of our own necessities but of their advantages.”

Adam Smith 1759

What comes next, as the internet weaves us all into a single global brain?

“The future is here. It’s just not evenly

distributed yet.”

- William Gibson

The Three Player Game

“I have come to read [the history of the innovation economy] as driven by three sets of continuous, reciprocal, interdependent games played between the state, the market economy, and financial capitalism.”

- Bill Janeway

The State as Kleptocracy

“By the state, I mean the political entity that has sufficient coercive power to establish the rules for the other players.”

- Bill Janeway

Ronald Coase 1937

Yochai Benkler 2001

“In this paper, I expand consideration of the policy implications of the apparent success of free software in two ways. First, I suggest that the phenomenon has broad implications throughout the information, knowledge, and culture economy, well beyond software development. Second, I suggest reasons to think that peer production may outperform market based production in some information production activities.”

“Given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow”

--Eric Raymond

Google

Facebook

Even Apple’s product is co-created by “the market” of its users

A dozen apps on the original iPhone. Now over 800,000

“the Adhocracy”

Cory Doctorow

The State as Kleptocracy

“By the state, I mean the political entity that has sufficient coercive power to establish the rules for the other players.”

- Bill Janeway

“global consciousness is that thing responsible for deciding that pots containing decaffeinated coffee should be orange”

–Danny Hillis (via Jeff Bezos)

–http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/a/network/2005/03/16/etech_3.html

The market as an example of collective intelligence

“Simple? Yet, not a single person on the face of this earth knows how to make me.”

- Leonard Reed, 1958

http://www.fee.org/library/detail/i-pencil-audio-pdf-and-html

“No matter who you are, most of the smart people work for someone else.”

- Bill Joy

Kasparov vs. The World (1999)

“The greatest game in the history of chess.”

-Gary Kasparov

“Although Krush was inferior to Kasparov in nearly all areas of chess, in this particular area of microexpertise, she surpassed even him.”

- Michael Nielsen

Counter example - how hits beget hits, importance of independence...

Individuals influence each others’ decisions about cultural products such as songs, books, and movies; but to what extent can the perception of success become a “self-fulfilling prophecy”? We have explored this question experimentally by artificially inverting the true popularity of songs in an online “music market,” in which 12,207 participants listened to and downloaded songs by unknown bands. We found that most songs experienced self-fulfilling prophecies, in which perceived—but initially false—popularity became real over time.

Reflexivity

“...social theories are reflexive. Heisenberg’s discovery of the uncertainty principle did not alter the behavior of quantum particles one iota, but social theories, whether Marxism, market fundamentalism or the theory of reflexivity, can affect the subject matter to which it refers.”

- George Soroshttp://www.ft.com/cms/s/2/0ca06172-bfe9-11de-aed2-00144feab49a.html#ixzz2KF9avwwD

“The message system used in the nervous system…is of an essentially statistical character.”

-John von Neumann

“In a pulse-frequency-coded system, meaning is conveyed by the frequency at which pulses are transmitted between given locations - whether those locations are synapses within a brain or addresses on the World Wide Web…Information is being encoded (and operated upon) as continuous (and noise-tolerant) variables such as frequencies (of connection or occurrence), and the topology of what connects where, with location being increasingly defined by a fault-tolerant template rather than by an unforgiving numerical address. Pulse-frequency coding for the Internet is one way to describe the working architecture of a search engine, and PageRank for neurons is one way to describe the working architecture of the brain.”

- George Dyson

The invisible hand of the market + the internet = the global brain?

The Industrial Internet

How does our society change when our factories and devices are connected to the internet’s global brain?

Jeff Immelt of GE at the Industrial Internet conference

The Google Autonomous Vehicle

Human-Computer Symbiosis

“The hope is that, in not too many years, human brains and computing machines will be coupled together very tightly, and that the resulting partnership will think as no human brain has ever thought and process data in a way not approached by the information-handling machines we know today.”

– Licklider, J.C.R., "Man-Computer Symbiosis", IRE Transactions on Human Factors in Electronics, vol. HFE-1, 4-11, Mar 1960. Eprint

2005: Seven Miles in Seven Hours

But it isn’t just better AI

“We don’t have better algorithms. We just have more data.” - Peter Norvig, Chief Scientist, Google

AI plus the recorded memory of augmented humans

The technology-enabled super-clerks of the Apple Store

Google Glasses - our cyborg future?

The State

“The legitimate object of government is to do for the people what needs to be done, but which they cannot, by individual effort, do at all, or do so well, for themselves.”

-Abraham Lincoln, July 1, 1854

“Do we just want to be a crowd of voices, or do we want to be a crowd of hands?”

- Jennifer Pahlka

Vending Machine Government

Vending Machine Gov concept from Donald Kettl: The Next Government of the United States

Government as a platform means an end to the design of only complete, closed “applications.” Instead the government should provide fundamental services on which we, the people, (also known as “the market”) build applications.

Government as a Platform

Federal Aid Highway Act of 1956

Dwight Eisenhower

google home page / information age

GPS: A 21st century platform launched in 1973

Gordon Moore

Clay Johnson

Govtech Fund I

“What if interfaces to government could be simple, beautiful, and easy to use?”

- Jennifer Pahlka,

channeling 2011 Code for America Fellow Scott Silverman

79

“Government of the people, by the people, and for the people.”

It still means something.

The Presidential Innovation Fellows and Code for America are both recruiting now.