[p2p-research] Ubiquitous information technology fields

[Ryan]

Could the commons be governed by AI? I think probably yes...


Ryan

Sent to you by Ryan via Google Reader: Ubiquitous information
technology fields via Broader Perspective by LaBlogga on 11/8/09
The broadest thematic point in futurist Ray Kurzweil’s opening keynote
at Singularity University on November 6, 2009 was that once any area
becomes an information technology, it starts conforming to the
exponential curves of Moore’s Law progress that have defined the
computing and communications industries since 1900 or earlier.

Health is well on its way to becoming an information science with
genomic sequencing and synthesizing, bioinformatics and continuous
automated biomarker capture. Energy is starting to be an information
science with the smart grid, essentially an electron routing network
allowing on-demand ingress and egress of diverse flows. Many other
fields could behave in the networking and packet-routing metaphor,
directing fungible quantized resources to where they are needed and
requested like people in driverless cars, neurons in a brain, clean air
and water molecules, disease management and health care delivery. Since
demand varies, market principles could be used for unobtrusive resource
allocation in automatic markets that meet and transact per
digitally-inferred demand profiles and pre-specified permissions.

All science is in some phase of becoming or has already become an
information science in the sense of using computational models,
simulation and informatics. With computation and communication becoming
increasingly embedded in every manufactured object, it is obvious that
many more if not all fields could become information technologies.
Intelligence, for example, is becoming an information science. With the
exponential growth of computing, it is likely that at some future
point, machine intelligence could surpass that of humans. One path
forward is to reengineer life into technology that can keep pace with
technological advances. There are already three dimensions of progress
towards this goal: understanding the existing examples of the brain
through neuroscience, simulating and building de novo intelligence in
software and robotic forms and integrating human and machine
capabilities with brain-computer interfaces, creating the biomolecular
interface of integrating organic and inorganic material.

Social sciences
The question arises about how seemingly subjective and nuanced fields
like politics could become information sciences. In the short term this
is already happening with citizen journalism and collective
organization through social networking (examples: flashmob protests and
Twitter Iran election feedback). In the longer term, it is imaginable
that political artificial intelligences, pleasantly absent the agency
problem and special interests of human politicians, could start to
perform low level political tasks and over time be used to a much
larger degree in policy formation, public resource allocation and
administration of nation state affairs.
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