Phil Tetlow’s Blog

Most would acknowledge the World Wide Web as a truly astounding thing. It has changed the way we interact, learn and innovate. Like the wheel, the plough and the printing press before it, it has elevated our civilisation in profound and lasting ways. Indeed today it is an unavoidable truth that the future of our world is inextricably linked to that of the Web. Nevertheless, most contemporary definitions of the Web do it little justice and are lacking with regard to their acknowledgement of the Web’s most important constituent.

Broadly speaking the Web can be seen as a model comprising three layers; a sandwich of sorts if you will. The Internet provides the lower slice, with its strict devotion to the transport of data. Supported in the middle is a set of well known enabling technologies used for information representation and dissemination. These include capabilities to support hypertext and extensible data markup. Resting on top, however, is a little understood and relatively neglected layer. As the Web has grown in size and complexity it has become pervasively entwined with the very fabric of our social existence and, in a very real sense, we are as much a part of the Web as it is a part of our collective. We are the final slice that closes the sandwich.

Figure 1: The Web Sandwich

A few facts are beyond question. The Web did not really begin until around 1995 when studies accounted for around 16 million users. By 2001 this figure had grown to over 400 million and some estimates now suggest it to have topped 1 billion by 2005 and expect it to surpass 2 billion by 2010 – around one third of the world’s population by most common accounts. Couple the fact that the Web is well on its way to absorbing significant portions of mankind’s joint knowledge with the raw processing power that is inherent to its technical infrastructure and a social machine the likes of which we have never experienced before is plain. As Gustavo Cardoso, professor of Information and Communication Sciences at ISCTE, Lisbon, said in 1998, “We are in the presence of a new notion of space where physical and virtual influence each other, laying the ground for the emergence of new forms of socialisation, new lifestyles and new forms of social organisation.” Some have even referred to the Web as a higher level of human consciousness, a post-human existence with its own independent cognitive capabilities and conscience, a “Metaman” if you will, as Gregory Stoke so succinctly christened it in his wonderful book of the same name.

There is a warning here as the analogy of a global brain is tempting, because the Web and brain both involve huge numbers of elements – neurons and Web resources – and a mixture of structure and apparent randomness. However, a brain has an intelligence that emerges on quite a different level from anything that a neuron could be aware of. Indeed, many famous writers, like Arthur C. Clark, have contemplated an “emergent property” arising from the mass of humanity and computers. But remember that such a phenomenon would have its own agenda. As individuals we would not be aware of it, let alone be capable of controlling it, any more than a neuron controls the brain.

Some critics openly follow the school of Strong Artificial Intelligence and freely compare the Web to a “global brain” uniting all the world’s disparate pools of information, while other visionaries, such as Bill Joy and Ray Kurzweil , believe that the computational powers of digital technology are accelerating at such a rate that large networks of computers may actually become self-aware sometime later this century. Did Arthur C. Clarke and The Matrix have it right all along? Is the Web itself becoming a giant brain? Many still think no, but consider that it is still worth asking why not.

Begin by jettisoning habitual ways of thinking about what a brain is. First forget about the grey matter and the synapses. Here any reference to a giant brain relates to a more fundamental device for processing and storing information. Second, accept the premise that brains can be a collective enterprise. Being individual organisms ourselves, we are inclined to think of brains as discrete isolated things, possessed by individual organisms. But such definitions turn out to be little more than useful fictions. Bees and ants do their “learning” collectively. The swarm mind is the sum of thousands upon thousands of simple decisions executed by individual members. Replace bees or ants with neurons and pheromones with neurotransmitters, and one might as well be talking about the human brain. So if neurons can swarm their way into sentient brains, is it so inconceivable that the process might ratchet itself up one more level? Could not individual brains connect with one another, this time via the digital mesh of the Web, and form something greater than the sum of their parts – what the fashionable philosopher and priest Pierre Teilhard de Chardin called The Noosphere.

In fact one can go further. As Douglas R. Hofstadter has so eloquently stated in the 20th anniversary edition of his Pulitzer Prize winning book, Godel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid, “the brain that nestles safely inside one’s own cranium is purely a physical object made up of completely sterile and inanimate components, all of which obey exactly the same laws as those that govern all the rest of the Universe, such as pieces of text, or CD-ROMS or computers. Only if we keep on bashing up against this disturbing fact can we slowly begin to develop a feel for the way out of the mystery of consciousness: that the key is not the stuff out of which brains are made, but the patterns that can come to exist inside the stuff of the brain”.
This is a liberating shift, because it allows us to move to a different level of considering what brains are: as media that support complex patterns that mirror, albeit far from perfectly, the world, of which, needless to say, those brains are themselves inhabitant. And it is in the inevitable self-mirroring that arises, however impartial or imperfect it may be, that the strange loops of consciousness start to swirl.

It is this change of focus from material components to abstract pattern that allows the quasi-magical leap from inanimate to animate, from the meaningless to the meaningful, to take place, whether in our heads, on the Web or wherever. But how does this happen? After all, not all jumps from matter to pattern give rise to intelligence or any greater notions of conciousness, quite obviously: In a word, not all patterns are conscious. But the strange and complex self-referencing patterns prevalent on the Web fit the bill perfectly and certainly appear to signpost potential routes to higher levels of being.

Today the problem is not establishing whether the Web contains strange yet special swirly, twirly, vortex-like patterns, that has long been established fact. Rather the real issue concerns whether it is possible to draw a practical line between the emerging Web and any resultant entity which we might normally choose to describe as living. This is not for lack of rigour in our understandings however, as for one thing we have a good grip of the underlying mathematics involved. We appreciate, for instance, that the Godelian strange loops that arise in formal systems in mathematics allow such systems to “perceive themselves”, to talk about themselves, to become “self-aware”, and in a sense it would not be going too far to say that by virtue of having such loops, a formal system acquires a form of “self”. No, the real problem is one of complexity and volume. The Web is now such a copious thing that it breaks down human understandable models involving reduction and classification. To label it as a whole would be just as meaningless as to try and dissect it for the purposes of anatomical analysis. But then that is both the beauty and the dilemma at the heart of complexity.

So, today’s talk of a giant global brain is cheap. But there is a difference. These days, most people who talk this way are speaking loosely. Tim Berners-Lee, the Web’s acknowledged father, has noted parallels between the Web and the structure of the brain, but insists that the concept of a global brain is a mere metaphor. Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, in contrast seems to have been speaking literally: humankind was coming to constitute an actual brain; like the one in your head, except bigger. Certainly there are more people today than in Teilhard de Chardin’s day who take the idea of a global brain literally. Are they crazy? Again philosophy quickly gets in the way of a clinical answer, but there is mounting evidence to suggest that they are not as crazy as one might at first think.

There are those who point to evidence that human brains already have a long history of forming higher-intelligence. Individual human minds have coalesced into “group brains” many times in modern history, most powerfully in the communal gatherings of cities. The city functions as a kind of smaller-scale trial run for the Web’s world wide conjoined extravaganza, like an Andrew Lloyd Webber musical that irons out its problems in the provinces before opening in the West End. As in the urban explosion of the Middle Ages, a city is not just an accidental offshoot of growing population density – it is a kind of technological breakthrough in its own right. Sustainable city life ranks high on the list of modern inventions, as world-transforming as the alphabet, which it helped engender, or the Web which may well be its undoing. It is no coincidence that the great majority of the last millennium’s inventions blossomed in urban settings. Like the folders and file directories of some oversized hard drive, the group brain of city life impregnated information with far more structure and durability than it had previously possessed. So it appears a natural progression to conclude that the Web looks to be the digital heir to that proud tradition, uniting the world’s intellects in a way that would have astonished the early social networks of Florence or Amsterdam. Macrointellegence emerged out of the bottom-up organisation of communal life and it will do the same further on the Web.

There are others who are sympathetic to this view, but believe that it still needs further clarification. Emergence, they argue, is not just some mystical force that comes into being when agents collaborate; there are environments that facilitate higher-level intelligence, and environments that suppress it. To the extent that the Web has connected more sentient beings together than any technology before it, you can see why one might sensibly consider it as a kind of global brain. But both brains and societies do more than just connect, because intelligence requires both connectedness and organisation. Plenty of decentralised systems in the real world spontaneously generate structure as they increase in size: cities organise into neighbourhoods or satellites; the neural connections of our brains develop extraordinarily specialised regions. Has the Web followed a comparable path of development over the past few years? Is the Web becoming more organised as it grows? The apparent and overwhelming answer is “yes”.

The Web is in some ways like a brain, but in important ways not. The brain does not just let information ricochet around the skull. It is organised to do something: to move the muscles in ways that allow the whole body to attain the goals set by the emotions. The anatomy of the brain reflects that: it is not a uniform web or net per se, but has a specific organisation in which emotional circuits interconnect with the frontal lobes, which receive information from the perceptual system and send commands to the motor system. This goal-directed organisation comes from an important property of organisms in that their cells are in the same reproductive boat, and thus have no ‘incentive’ to act against the interests of the whole body. But the Web, not being a cohesive replicating system, has no such organisation.

Again, the point here is that intelligent systems depend on structure and organisation as much as they do on pure connectedness. And that intelligent systems are guided toward particular types of structure by the laws of natural selection. A latter-day Maxwell’s Demon, who somehow manages to superglue a billion neurons to each other wouldn’t build anything like the human brain, because the brain relies on specific clusters to make sense of the world, and those clusters only emerge out of a complex interplay among neurons, the external world and our genes, not to mention a many other factors. Some systems such as the Web, are geniuses at making connections and are overloaded with structure, but are they an outcome of natural selection? Again a moot point, but as a social machine the Web has certainly developed out of a dynamically natural consensus of human contribution, so perhaps such consensus could be construed as resembling a “natural” form of selection, a meme-like vote of confidence perhaps?

Yet, in the midst of the entire Web’s networked complexity, a few observers have begun to detect macro-patterns in its development, patterns that are invisible to most observers and thus remain largely unnoticed. The distribution of Web sites and their audiences appears to follow power laws for instance; the top ten most popular sites are ten times larger than the next hundred more popular which are themselves ten times more popular than the next thousand sites. Other online cartographers have detected “hub” and “spoke” patterns in traffic flows. But none of these macro-shapes actually make the Web immediately more navigable or informative. These patterns may be self-organising, but they are not adaptive in any direct way. Even so, regardless of the endless conjecture available, brain or no brain, one thing is certain; the Web is a fascinating and phenomenal creation that has to be admired if only for its rapid rise and unquestionable impact on us.

From an engineering perspective the Web is not only fascinating, but brings with it its own set of unique challenges. If one were to study IT folklore, for instance, one “tradition” would stand out. When it comes to the provisioning of IT systems, a group of capable and motivated individuals will most often be directed at a problem in need of a solution. They will analyse all relevancies with gusto and, at some point, conceptualise a “box” within which they can be contained. This spells out the boundaries of their attention, both in terms of the problem itself and their eventual solution. Once complete it will be filled with all the necessary gadgetry, information and code required to make the solution “do its job,” and, for all intents and purposes, once it has demonstrated its capability to perform the right tricks, the lid will be closed and the solution will live out its life in isolation. It will be independent, encapsulated and blissfully unaware of the outside world beyond its immediate effect.

Notice the emphasis on the term “closed” here, for the systems produced in such a way are closed in a truly classical sense; so much so that they may even be considered in terms of the Second Law of Thermodynamics. This states that if a system is cut off and does not receive energy from its surroundings, the amount of order contained will either remain constant or, more likely, decline over time. Of course this law was conceived to describe more real world systems, but replace the term “energy” with “causal interaction” and an immediate relevance can be seen with the abstract domains of computation and information.

Such closed systems have served us well for some time, but the arrival of the pervasive global technology platform we know as the Web is increasingly forcing us to reconsider their definition and value. Today the thought of any system being closed, even in proximity to the Web, is rapidly losing credence. Furthermore such systems need not be considered as purely technological. As already outlined, the Web is not just about technology. It is a complex amalgam of the social and the technological, and to understand its fabric as a complete whole requires a rounded appreciation of both. In fact, by such a token all technologies are social in that they come into play in particular combinations of technical and social actors. With the Web’s unique catalytic capabilities, however, this interplay becomes more pronounced, implicating much higher orders of systems than hitherto normally expected. Organisations, communities, nations and even cultures can all similarly be seen as caught up in the Web’s anatomy and all for remarkably similar reasons and motives. Hence the information and systems’ space occupied by both individuals and organisation is beginning to gain cloud-like qualities though natural processes of osmosis and evolution. No longer is data from purposefully designated data silos being used in isolation. Now there is an increasing propensity to mash-up out of preference, as all levels of society and commerce gain the ability to augment the information at their disposal. Take Wikipedia as an example. How many contemporary corporate reports do you think have been passed off as being authorative purely on the grounds of Wikipedia donating “expert opinion”? Hundreds, thousands, millions? The smart money will bet at the top end of the scale. “Open” is in vogue and looks likely to remain so for some time. But what does such openness imply for the Engineer?

Not surprisingly there is good news and bad. The bad digs deep into the human psyche and questions the very reason why we communicate as a race. Unfortunately this quickly points toward the preservation of the individual over the many and outlines the tendency in us all to be self serving. First and foremost we are attracted to information exchanges that promote our personal interests and through such practices can easily violate the interests of many higher order systems at play around us. The popular press has seen many examples of emails leaked for personal gain for instance and the blogsphere is almost entirely dedicated to self expression. This causes problems as we have little or no rules in place to govern such information flows. Where are the ethical guidelines?
The premise of society as a self regulating entity died when our ancestors organised many, many years ago. From such rudimentary beginnings laws sprang which predominantly control our behaviour in favour of the masses. We cherish such patterns and have developed many social systems to preserve them, yet on the new found frontier that is the Web lawlessness still prevails, order emerges and sociotechnical power ebbs and flows. Furthermore there is strong evidence of hitherto undefined fundamental laws at work that might well make the Web a particularly special place.

The Second Law of Thermodynamics rests on the principle of negative feedback for its famous description of descent into chaos. Nevertheless, recent work into high scale sociatechnically, and especially economically, complex systems, appears to promote an inverse law, a Fourth law of Thermodynamics which speaks of autocatalytic potentials and possibilities for “positive” growth. Whenever rapidly advancing technology is involved, indicators point toward positive feedback gaining prominence and allowing for the distinct possibility of order coming out of chaos. This is “order for free” and its effects are as yet little understood in high scale sociotechnical systems. A tantalising insight into such behaviour can be seen with the invention and mass adoption of the QWERTY keyboard. Although it is ubiquitous today it is by no means the most efficient design for human typing. In fact, Christopher Scholes designed it in 1873 so as to specifically retard typists and hence compensate for jamming problems common to typewriting machines of the time. Soon after its invention the Remington Sewing Machine Company mass-produced a typewriter using the QWERTY system, which led to lots of typists beginning to learn the layout. A little further down the line and other typewriter companies began to offer QWERTY versions of their own machines to meet increasing demand. This, of course, meant that still more typists began to learn on QWERTY units and so on and so on. Through this process of positive reinforcement the QWERTY keyboard layout is now used by millions. It is entrenched in our economic practices, social interactions and is essentially locked into our collective consciousness for the foreseeable future. Positive feedback has catapulted it to be the standard, for all its flaws and weaknesses.

There is one other relevance that binds technology, positive feedback and growth in rather unexpected ways. The concept of Darwinian Preadaptation provides a means by which positive feedback and serendipity can be linked and may not be as rare as one might think in sociotechnical circles. Stuart Kauffman presents a powerful example in this in his recent book “Reinventing the Sacred” and points to a problem common in early tractor manufacture. The companies involved knew that for mobile machines to work the land effectively they would need large power plants to drive them and thus went about the business of constructing massive engines to sit upfront of their inventions. This posed a problem however, as big engines demand a strong chassis on which to sit. At first all attempts at chassis construction failed, until one bright engineer pointed out that the need for a chassis was superfluous to the design of the tractor as a whole. By designing a massive engine his fellow engineers had already built sufficient bulk and strength into the engine’s block for it to support its own weight and much more besides. Hence the manufactures dispensed with the chassis idea and bolted the steering gear and wheel bearings directly onto the block. The problem was solved and Darwinian preadaptation invoked. Marry such preadaptation potential with the increased opportunity for new application offered up through positive feedback and a veritable chain reaction could occur; hence the reason why technological advance has become exponential in recent times.

Such exponential behaviour has particular ethical relevance. Terms like “positive”, “growth”, “order” and “serendipity” may well appear to have been introduced in a beneficial light, but beneficial for whom? The individuals involved at the point of conception or instigation? The organisations they work for or the communities within which they choose to mix? The countries in which they are resident or the religions to which they subscribe? Furthermore we may be sufficiently far up the curve for any such single action or exchange to have major impact. Just like the archetypal butterfly in chaos theory, one whispered comment on a blog site could quite literally affect millions for better or worse. Already we are seeing academic interest in hate focused blogging communities and early findings provide disturbing reading. In particular they point to the high topological density within such communities and their inherent efficiency for disseminating information. This may well be harmless when such dissemination relates to benign content, but there will always remain the potential for misinterpretation even in such circumstances. Thus negativity, extreme beliefs and propaganda are offered new mechanisms by which to easily spread in a viral manner. This is further compounded by statistics outlining the current demographic of the blogsphere. Further research[1] is starting to confirm what many have expected for some time, in that a significant proportion of the blogsphere’s audience is aged under thirty five, with further significant subgroups tending toward “youth” classification. Such groups may well be the easiest to influence and most likely to gravitate toward extreme views. Hence not only are Web communication channels in favour of the spread of deviant perspectives, but the receivers at the end of such channels may well be particularly receptive to such views. Again the environment is primed for serendipity and positive feedback to take hold, but this time with potentials for real and significant impact on wider society are heightened.

From a corporate perspective the news is not much better. The same demographics also suggest a seven to one ratio between personal and corporate blogging activity. This means that organisational blogging is alive and well on the Web. Unfortunately there are no known statistics to assist with identifying the subject matter of such corporate blogging, but it would not be an outside bet to suggest that at least some percentage relates to systemic leakage. Such leakage will most likely relate to individuals exposing corporate information assets for the betterment of their immediate business contexts, but this may not necessarily be the most pronounced effect. By way of a simple analogy, the “boxes” inside their organisations have started to bleed publicly, offering up the potential for the transfer of “bodily fluids” with some rather unexpectedly eclectic partners. This may seem extreme, but on the Web, corporate can communicate with corporate, individual or culture and likewise reverse exchanges can take place. Indulgences of this kind could indeed be dangerous and we are quite literally seeing cross-species exchange in which compatibilities are not always guaranteed. Thus new and unique opportunities for the transmission of infection are being offered up as the classical boundaries of our corporate systems start to erode. What might be safely tolerated within corporate life might actually prove fatal if let loose in the in the wider public domain.

This obviously raises a whole new set of challenges for the global business community and as yet there are few signs of acceptance let alone coherent action to control and prevent. One thing is for sure however in that the sociotechnical climate in which business is done is changing at speed. Furthermore there appears a strong case to suggest that several pillars of both software and information engineering communities are now under threat. A sea change may well be on its way, be that perpetuated from within or forced by circumstance. There is little comfort if we turn to history for advice as well. This tells us that federal bodies are normally looked to for intervention when such radical change is evident, but the Web has already shown itself to be impervious to such attention. It has no federal constrains or allegiances and, more importantly, no obvious morality to which we can appeal directly. In many ways the Web is very human and in others it most certainly is not. It is nonetheless self regulating, but in ways that are often emergent and almost always out of reach. For that reason it may well be noble to speak of ethical conduct in relation to information exchange on the Web, but concrete efforts to produce and enforce ethical frameworks could well be in vain. Rather, instead of us trying to direct the Web it may be furiously trying to advise us of the inevitable, in that dramatic social and commercial change are on its way

Indeed the Web might be pointing the way to higher levels of governance and morality. Higher that is in terms of abstraction and not standard. As our capability to master technology has advanced we have really only made progress in one direction; that of abstraction itself. The more we understand the sociotechnical space, the higher we can rise above it and the greater the range and flexibility of solutions we can offer. Now it appears we have abstracted to levels with global significance and the outcomes of our success may well hold the ability to overwhelm those organisations and individuals who contributed to our very technological success. Perhaps nowadays we should turn to our technology for direction rather than it turn to us?

Research in the field of Web Science is starting to get to grips with the Web in its own right and by so doing is trying to figure out what the Web as a whole might be about and how it might affect us all. It recognises a broad range of influences, taking in thinking from areas as diverse as sociology, physics and law, not to mention traditional technology disciplines such as computer science. Nevertheless, despite such contemporary movements, little is being done to outline how we might contribute towards the betterment of the Web for the good of humankind. Some have proposed already that it would be wrong for us as individuals and organisations to even think of attempting such a thing and that heroism is pointless in the face of inevitable change. All the same, those with a strong social conscience might object forcefully. As has already been explained, the Web is eminently susceptible to change if the conditions are right and there is no material evidence to suggest that extremes at the moral end of the spectrum should be rejected in favour of the immoral if the drivers are right. It may simply be a question of what “gets out there first.” Furthermore, the scale free nature of the Web’s structure suggests that significant influence can be exerted by just a few well placed ideas. For those who do indeed believe they might change the Web for the good, this surely provides a call to arms. There are always leaders in any area of human endeavour and both classical IT and contemporary Web communities provide no exception. Currently these leaders are silent on the issue of information ethics, but this is mostly out of ignorance and not compulsion. All that is needed is to raise the profile for the morale cause and the Web will once again open itself up to both positive and negative change. It is hence time for the leadership to step forward, the debate to begin and ethical standards to emerge through survival of the fittest. Engineers inclined to contribute please step forward.

[1] http://technorati.com/blogging/state-of-the-blogosphere/