The England Bypass - an Ontological Approach

I see that Mr. johnson, following up his triumph in delivering an imaginary bridge in London, is proposing a more ambitious imaginary bridge between Scotland and Northern Ireland. A sort of bypass for England. Apparently this is something to help keep the Union together, and since this is the only idea he has for the wider Union he will want to keep the consultation on this going for as long as he needs the distraction, or at any rate for as long as there is a Union.

The great thing about imaginary stuff like this is that all the money is spent on consultants. As a consultant, this naturally got me thinking.

Now I am not a chartered surveyor or a civil engineer or anything like that. I am an ontologist. My first reaction to this idea was that since ontology is the study of what there is, there was not a lot of call for an ontologist for something whose sole purpose is not to be built.

That's not strictly true of course, since there are different schools of thought in ontology. The 'Realist' school says you can only create an ontology of things that exist in the real world, whereas the 'Conceptualist' school allows for ontology based representations of things that do not exist, including those that might never exist - a vital requirement for risk modelling, for example. But this is getting too serious for what started as a couple of my usual drive-by postings in social media.

I thought about it some more and realised that an ontology based contribution to the bridge project would indeed be valuable.

First we start with a couple of existing constraints: the pontoons can't be built all the way to the sea bed as this is further than such things have ever been built. And even if they could, there is unexploded ordnance down there so you would end wishing they hadn't.

To address this you would need floating pontoons. And if you have floating pontoons you don't need twenty miles of them since you can float them back and forth; you only need one or two, maybe three at most. Then you only need the little bit of roadway between them.

For further efficiency you can arrange the pontoons in parallel with the roadway on top of them and maybe a little bit of retractable roadway at either end.

The bridge would need some big engines at one or both ends to move it back and forth.

Then there is the matter of pedestrians. If it were possible to have static pontoons, would pedestrians be expected to walk the entire twenty miles across the bridge? What happens during bad weather events, when the potential costs of rescuing them as they blow off or get swept out to sea becomes prohibitive?

With the floating pontoons solution, pedestrians would not be walking anyway, so you would add some superstructure in the form of a dry place for them to shelter from the weather. This might have seats, maybe even a bar. Some windows of course.

Further cost savings are possible. You don't need retractable roadway at both ends since the moving pontoons make it possible to turn the whole bridge by 180 degrees - so I just halved the cost again right there.

So there you have it - an ontological solution to the bridge problem. You might choose to call it something else, but that's a terminology question, nothing to do with ontology. I have simply defined what its characteristics are; the characteristics that are the best fit for the engineering problem as stated.

Now where do I send the bill? I think the going rate based on the Garden Bridge is something like 53 million per quarter mile.

The Vampire Apocalypse and the Ontological Duality of Rights

It’s Hallowe’en and the No-deal Brexit deadline has come and gone. Brexiters are out on the streets in their dozens to express their disappointment that the country did not crash out of its international relationships and obligations into the sunlit uplands of a grey English November day.

But what would it have meant? What was this project that the last two Prime Ministers seemed so bent on? For what did they intend that ordinary citizens should be prepared to go without basic medications, ports jammed with trucks clearing customs and a hard border with the United Kingdom’s nearest neighbour?

In the spirit of Hallowe'en I thought I might share a few thoughts about the ontological nature of rights in relation to the narrowly-averted No-deal Brexit. 

I’ve been thinking about what it means when a government withdraws some vital right from its citizens, such as rights to data privacy or the right to life. Recent examples range from the proposals to make British people’s data available to US firms in a future UK/US trade deal in contravention of the legal rights under which that data was handed across, to more serious matters around healthcare – for UK citizens in the EU and for people in the UK whose vital medical supplies would have been disrupted by a No-deal Brexit.

As an obligate hæmophage the latter is of particular concern to me if a no-deal Brexit were to happen. I should qualify that I am not an active hæmophage, and never will be for as long as basic medical supplies of certain endocrines, in my case thyroxine, remain available. Nor does it now seem that thyroxine was on the list of medications that UK citizens were to go without if the government’s intended ‘No deal’ form of Brexit went ahead, unlike the medications needed by many others. But we only know this because a Belfast newspaper published a list. So while it seems that those of you with the appropriate endocrines in your veins can rest easy in terms of what we potential hæmophages need to do to stay alive, it would be extending too much credit to the UK government to say that they were not prepared for people to go without thyroxine, or any other particular medication. Information on the supply chains that would be affected by a no-deal Brexit for medications has been very hard to come by, and one wonders whether the government itself had a handle on these.

But that is not the point here. I and many others may turn out to be OK, after many months of worrying otherwise and having to make drastic life plan alterations to mitigate against the personal risks this represents. Others will be less fortunate if no-deal ever does happen, in particular those whose medications have a short shelf life such as Type 1 diabetics, and those whose treatments require radioactive elements, the half-lives of which render any delay in the supply chain intolerable.

The point though is that this UK government, both under May and now under johnson, was willing to risk whosever lives it took, to tear up all the UK’s existing EU treaties and in so doing introduce constrictions and congestion into the supply chains for vital medical and other supplies. Regardless of today’s actual outcome, they were willing to withdraw this right from any number of the country’s residents. These are the implications of going after a No-deal Brexit.

None of this is an objection to Brexit itself – I don’t like it but if the majority really want it, it can be done within a proper legal framework.

Put simply, this government indicated itself willing to withdraw the right to life. In the teeth of considerable Parliamentary and juridical opposition it continued to pursue a course of action in which this right would be actively withdrawn, right up to the end.

Let’s say that again: The Government of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland was prepared to withdraw the right to life.

That is a pretty basic right.

What does this mean?

This is not a blog post about politics. Today I want to explore something about meaning. What does it ‘mean’ for a government to withdraw the right to life?

What does anything mean?

A bunch of us have been getting together to unpack the more interesting corners of meaning. This is the realm of formal ‘semantics’ – put simply, how we formally pin down the meaning of one concept or another using a combination of formal logic and applied cognitive science. We use the logic to make unambiguous statements about what something is (‘There is this thing, it is a kind of one of those and it is distinguished from other kinds of those by this this and this’). That’s what we call ontology. Then we use the basics of cognitive science to consider how we build out the meanings of complex concepts, like credit default swaps or oregano or the right to play a song, by fixing these in a network of concepts (called a ‘semantic network’) in which these complex concepts are derived from combinations of semantically primitive, or foundational concepts. These foundational concepts may be things like goals, identity, commitments or a particular shade of blue. Just as the meanings in human brains arise from combinations of our sensory inputs, so concepts in the wider social and business world arise out of primitive notions like rights and obligations, social and linguistic acts, intentions and so on. Everything else is just a combination of these: kinds of something, framed in terms of their features, that are themselves defined with reference to other kinds of something. This is what we call a ‘foundational’ ontology.

So we started looking at what would be a good semantic model, a foundational ontology, for ownership, rights and related concepts.

It turns out there are two sides to two sides to this.

First we look at the basic ontology of transactions. This is known as the Resource, Event, Agent (REA) ontology and was created by leading researchers in the accounting space [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Resources,_events,_agents_(accounting_model)].

Under the REA ontology any transaction can be considered as an exchange of two or more sets of Commitments (Figure 1).

Figure 1: The REA Ontology of Transactions and Commitments

Note that in ontology we focus on concepts, not words. While the words ‘commitment’ and ‘obligation’ may be used interchangeably in general speech, we will pin down one concept and call it Commitment, and later we will formalize another concept and call it Obligation.

In a typical transaction for goods or services, one Commitment may be the commitment to deliver some goods, while the other, reciprocal Commitment in that transaction would be the commitment to pay an agreed amount of money in settlement for those goods. Each Commitment has detailed terms setting out how the parties agree to deliver the goods or the payment (or indeed, other goods in exchange).

The REA ontology can be further generalized to frame any kind of contract, not only those which exchange measurable commitments in a financial transaction. So for example a property rental agreement may include the commitment not to play loud music after 11pm. This is still a Commitment.

The concept of Commitment as it is understood here is not specific to one or other party; it is an ‘in the round’ or ‘helicopter’ view of that which is a commitment, as seen from the perspective of any neutral observer. The Commitment has two parties to it, an Obligor and a Beneficiary.

One early criticism of REA was that it does not represent accounting concepts in a way that is compatible with traditional double-entry book-keeping. This is not a weakness. By representing the concepts that accounting deals with, without framing these from the perspective of one party whose books are being represented, REA provides a sound overall semantic framework for understanding transactions and other contractual exchanges.

To address these concerns, the Semantic Shed [ www.semanticshed.org ], a community of practice in business semantics modeling, developed a bridging ontology to connect the REA terms to basic double-entry book-keeping terms. To do this, we used a basic ontological trick: for any given kind of thing in the world, we define what it means to be some ‘side’ or ‘aspect’ of that thing. This may be one side of a coin, one face of a die, or one aspect of some less physical thing, like a Commitment, from the perspective of one or other participant (party) to that Commitment. This notion of an Aspect specializes a more general ontological notion of some ‘contextually defined thing’ (sometimes called ‘Relative Thing’). Figure 2 shows this trick.

Figure 2: Aspects of a Commitment

In this case, contexts of the ‘aspects’ of some Commitment are the perspectives of one or other party: the obligor and the beneficiary. The two sides of a Commitment as seen from these parties’ perspective we call a Right and an Obligation. Note again that while the words Obligation and Commitment may be used interchangeably in general discourse, here Obligation means a Commitment as seen from the perspective of the Obligor. The other side of the same Commitment is called a Right.

These Rights and Obligations, as seen from the perspective of some one party, can then be reflected in books of accounts as assets and liabilities respectively, provided these can be expressed in monetary terms, as in transactions for goods or services.

One party’s Right is the other party’s Obligation. If we consider one Commitment in a general goods transaction, the Commitment to deliver the goods, this Commitment has two parties: the delivering party and the receiving party. From the perspective of the delivering party, this is the Obligation to deliver the goods; from the point of view of the receiving party (the buyer in the overall transaction), it is the Right to receive those goods. The other Commitment that makes up the transaction similarly can be viewed as being the Obligation to pay for those goods or as the Right to receive that payment, depending on your viewpoint. One Commitment’s Obligor is the other Commitment’s Beneficiary, and vice versa.

All transactions, and contractual exchanges more generally, have two dualities:

1. The duality of Commitments: one Commitment is exchanged in consideration for another in a transaction or contract;
2. The dual viewpoints of each Commitment, as an Obligation to one party and as a Right to the other

4

What does this mean for Rights more generally? We speak of certain inalienable rights, such as the right to free expression, the right to life and so on. Normally we refer to these as being simple, singular things in their own right. Since some of these were hard-won over the centuries, it is appropriate that we do so. However, even these universally enjoyed rights may be framed in terms of the double duality of contracts.

This matters when we consider what happens when a rogue government (and if you have a better name for any government that would subject its people to a sudden reduction in rights, I would like to hear it) decides to withdraw the right to life for a section of the populace for which it is responsible.

Figure 3: What it Means to Own Something

Consider for example what it means to own something (Figure 3).

Ownership consists of a number of rights; for example the right to hold something, the right to dispose of that something as the owner sees fit, the right to benefit from that something in various ways, and so on. Some of these are shown in Figure 3, though there is more detail to be found.

Ownership also includes the right to control something – you can own something without controlling it, for example if you own a fleet of cars and rent those out. But you could only confer that right to the renter because it was yours to confer as a result of your owning that thing.

Each of these rights forms one side of one Commitment. At this point the language runs out of words, since we don’t normally speak in formal ontology. There is some Commitment, of which these rights, like the right to life, are one aspect. The corresponding Obligation is a little vaguer – basically the counterparty to the owner of something is society as a whole. If you live in a society where the concept of ownership exists, then society, in conferring upon you the right to enjoy a thing that you own, participates in (is a party to) that Commitment by virtue of committing not to interfere in your enjoyment of that thing. For example, not to take that thing away. Not to steal your stuff.

There are some societies, for example the Xoi San of Southern Africa, where this concept of ownership apparently does not exist, or is framed in very different terms. It is a given society or culture that recognizes or does not recognize the concept of ownership, and in the case where we do have this concept in our society, it is that society which enables the existence of the Ownership commitment, under which you as Owner get to enjoy the thing and we as the rest of society, as party to that same commitment, are obliged to leave it in your hands.

If that is one Commitment, what is the ‘Contract’? And what is the other Commitment on the other side of that contract?

This is the ‘Social Contract’. We will Leave aside for now such nuances as whether the Social Contract is based in society at large or in government or the legal system specifically – each of these will give rise to broader or narrower kinds of Social Contract with specific distinguishing features.

The Social Contract is a contract, so it is something in which two sets of Commitments are exchanged. In one set, we have things like the Ownership Commitment above, along with those Commitments of which the right we enjoy are the rights to life, to free assembly, to free expression and so on. Figure 4 shows the overall picture.

  

Figure 4: The Social Contract

If the Social Contract is a Contract, then what is the other side of this? That is, not the other aspect of the Commitment (we have that already) but the other Commitment in the Social Contract?

What is exchanged for those Commitments is our own commitment to society. These are my commitments not to steal people’s stuff; not to beat people up or interfere with them; not to prevent their exercise of free speech and so on. On that side of the Social Contract then are those Commitments of which I am the Obligor: to do or refrain from doing those things that impact on the rights of others in society, and thereby of society as a whole. These may even include things like the Obligation to pay taxes, in the case of the kind of contract that we have with governments.

As an example, society and the government it appoints has an obligation to maintain the peace. In the early days in the UK this was called ‘The King’s Peace’ – it was new enough that people saw and named it as a real, identifiable thing. This is the Commitment (seen in the round). Government has an obligation to maintain the King’s Peace and we as individuals have the right to enjoy it. On the other side of the social contract, to which we have made a bundle of Commitments, one of these represents (to us) our obligation not to disturb the Peace. If I disturb the peace (actually called ‘Disturbing the Peace’), this carries with it certain liabilities. This is the mechanism whereby each of us ‘paying in’ to our individual Commitment to society, this being aggregated into the obligation that society pays back to each one of us, in terms of the Peace and other well defined Obligations.

If I breach these obligations – if I violate, from my side, the Social Contract Commitments of which I am the Obligor, the word for me is Criminal.

Using this language – the ontology of the double-duality of rights – we can address such questions as: What does it mean if society has extended to me none of the rights in return for which it expects certain obligations from me? Or what does it mean if a government takes it upon itself to unilaterally revoke one or more of the rights to which I have been accustomed, and for which I have engaged in a firm Commitment to that society?

These are difficult and dangerous questions. The reason we try to discourage governments from rowing backwards on the Commitments to which it is a party, such as the Right-to-life Commitment, is because we have all entered, in good faith, into a transaction with our country, our society and our government, in which we extend to that society as a whole our own Commitments, and expect in return the reciprocal commitments on their side of the deal.

As soon as that is not the case, we are no longer equal participants (parties) in society. Ontologically, this is Feudalism. We had moved far beyond that. Yet some in positions of what they call power (in fact positions of responsibility for discharging Society’s obligations towards us) would want to return us to this one-sided feudal set-up (which is not really a contract as it is one sided), in which the government can dispose of the populace’s rights as it sees fit. This is not the thing we signed up to.

We could, in theory, go out and indulge in all manner anti-social behaviors, from hæmophagy on down. We won’t, because we believe that most of you are good people who would hold up your end of the Social Contract even when your government does not. But you have an ontological emergency on your hands: the nature of a contract is that it cannot be allowed to remain unbalanced indefinitely. Claims become due eventually – someone has to pay the ferryman.

As it turns out, even while the government showed itself willing to withdraw from key aspects of the social contract, the parliament and the (Scottish) judiciary fought a principled struggle to prevent this happening. They prevailed. Thanks to their efforts, the social contract has not been broken, at least so far. We wait for the next deadline in January but it seems less likely that we will face the governance failure of a no-deal Brexit. The apocalypse has been averted.

What sort of apocalypse would this have been?

There seems a peculiar fascination in popular culture with the notion of a zombie apocalypse – as though in any scenario where society as we know it breaks down, our antagonists are the mindless, living dead. People without agency. If there ever is any kind of apocalypse, it is realistic to assume that society’s counterparties will be of a more proactive frame of mind. Not the undead but people wanting to stay alive, whatever it takes. If the social contract ever does break down, it is not the mindless undead we should fear but the disenfranchised living. It is not a Zombie Apocalypse but a Vampire Apocalypse we should prepare for.

Happy Hallowe’en!

Mike Bennett

London

October 31 2019

Outrunning the Tiger

I have arrived at a disturbing political conclusion.

I was skimming through the thing from the White House to Pelosi and others about impeachment https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/6459905-White-House-Letter-to-Pelosi-Impeachment.html. It makes a lot of grandiose and frankly unlikely and in some cases unhinged statements, all about impeachment not being constitutional and so on.

Earlier I was reading the unattributed briefing from Number 10 https://blogs.spectator.co.uk/2019/10/how-number-10-view-the-state-of-the-negotiations/  about how they would go around bullying European countries individually, even though, leaving aside the morality of that, those countries would not be individually negotiating for deals with the UK anyway.

In both cases, these were documents or statements that bear little relation to reality and it is unlikely that their authors can have been ignorant of that. But in both cases they read well with the political base they are aimed at. Indeed everything from johnson and Cummings has been aimed at creating a story that Sun readers and their ilk will understand even when the intended EU recipients of these communications cannot have been expected to be convinced by them.

Then I realised something: remember the old story about two guys running from a tiger? One of them stops to put his trainers on, the other says 'You can't expect to outrun the tiger just by putting trainers on' and the first one says, 'I don't have to outrun the tiger!'

I think the new politics is like that. Everything they do, everything they say, they have realised that at no point does it have to be effective in the real world, or to convince any intended recipient or work in any legal system.

They do not need to outrun the tiger. Welcome to the new politics of Nikeocracy.

Grins without Cats

[Author's Note: This is something I wrote as part of some training material on thinking conceptually. I decided it could also stand as a blog post, so here it is]

"Alice had often seen a cat without a grin but never a grin without a cat"

 - Lewis Carroll, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland

What is it to form a concept, or to hold a concept in mind?

In Alice in Wonderland, the Cheshire Cat talks with Alice for a while and then fades away to invisibility. The last thing remaining before the cat disappears is its grin, prompting Alice to remark that she has often seen a cat without a grin but never a grin without a cat.

Note that it is not the mouth of the cat that is last to disappear, nor its face or any other physical part of it, but rather its grin. Carrol is playing with us here, presenting the notion of something which disappears little by little, not strictly according to its parts but in such a way as to leave behind something more abstract. A grin, like a fist or a lap, is not really a physical part of something at all, but the configuration of one or more of those parts, in this case the mouth and possibly eyes of something, typically of a human. 

On a side note, cats do not of course smile, but the notion of the Cheshire Cat and its grin is one that had been around in the culture for some time, variously ascribed to church carvings, badly painted rural pub signs involving heraldic lions, or the simple notion that Cheshire abounds in dairy products, causing the cats to have a huge grin. So the idea of something or someone “grinning like a Cheshire cat” was one that already existed before Carroll invented the eponymous character in Wonderland.

What Carroll does here is invite us to consider the Cheshire Cat as two discrete notions: that of a cat and that of the felinely improbable grin which it wears.

Concepts are discrete. Many of the things we think about or imagine are combinations of several distinct notions. Since the mind is configured for maximal laziness, these concepts are almost always amalgams of more reusable, generic stuff. A person with a smile is not one concept but two: a person and a smile. The smiling person combines both the characteristics of what we know of a person, and the characteristics, implications and so on, of a smile.

Consider the following:

“I want to speak to the markets,” Leadsom smiled, with the air of someone who imagines you can negotiate with gravity. There was absolutely nothing to fear, she went on, smiling that smile again. Andrea Leadsom’s smile is terrifying. It is the smile of the school careers adviser telling you flatly that the school is looking for a night caretaker. It is a smile that is powered by the extinguishing of your future. You can’t escape Andrea’s smile. And it’ll certainly come for you if you try.

 - Marina Hyde writing in the Guardian, 9 July 2016

at https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/jul/09/andrea-leadsom-tory-leadership-am-dram-peasant-revolt

Here Hyde, writing in the Guardian about a (hopefully soon forgotten!) leadership contender for the UK’s Conservative Party, focuses in on the smile of the contender as a thing in itself, with properties it owns quite distinctly from anything that might characterize Leadsom herself. The smile is terrifying. It is powered by something. It is inescapable. It can come for you.

Of course these are not things one generally credits a smile on its own of being able to do. This is literary license at its best. But that’s the point: literary arrangements like this work because we think by means of discrete and separable concepts. Being able to say meaningful things about something like a smile go well beyond logically tractable notions of truth. The smile is a thing we can think about and ascribe things to, even unlikely things.

Note also how, in line with what we know of how something gets its meaning in the first place through the repeated passing of signals along some neural pathway, the smile in question was able to acquire in the writer’s (and the reader’s) mind, characteristics of the smile of a school careers advisor. Characteristics which are invoked in the reader’s mind, not specifically about school careers advisors alone, but by that kind of person and situation, wearing that smile. Before, presumably, it is given back to Leadsom, its current owner.

It is this kind of artistic appreciation that is needed if one is able to consider, understand and use concepts qua concepts in semantic analysis. 

This is not simply about understanding how people think and communicate, although it is also that. Part of the art of conceptual thinking is being able to recognise and hold in mind as a discrete concept, something like the grin of the Cheshire Cat, the career-destroying smile of the schools advisor, or that same smile on the face of one of the more worrying political candidates of the age. 

Two smiles, three wearers. Let's hope that Ms Leadsom isn't grinning like a Cheshire Cat in September. 

The Imp of the Mostly Perverse

OK let me get one thing out of the way at the start: I am one of those awful people who did not vote in the EU Referendum. I was away in Florida on business and I basically lack the organisational skills to figure out whatever it is you have to do to make a postal vote happen. 

Another reason I felt it wisest to spare you my vote was some of the ideas being put forward by my personal Imp of the Mostly Perverse.

You see I am on principle a floating voter. I might be that I nearly always vote for the sensible, good-person choice, but I make it a principle to march into the polling station arm in arm with my IMP and make my choice only when I am right there in the booth.

I’m a firm believer in the principle of the secret ballot but I may as well tell you these choices usually involve some kind of Lib Dem, or an independent where one is available, or people I know and respect as being right for whatever the job is. Sometimes I may even vote for one of the more independent-minded Labour types. At the recent London Mayoral election someone on line had suggested that London was in a Christian country and could not possibly have a Muslim mayor. Being a proud secularist I left the Imp of the Mostly Perverse firmly at home and went straight round there to vote for the only candidate I could sensibly have chosen in the first place (I would have preferred David Lammy, who lost in the Labour primaries; not because I always agree with him but because I felt he was the only candidate with the kind of large personality that London needs; but maybe an unassuming pragmatist is what London needs sometimes).

With the EU Referendum coming up, my political IMP had a couple of interesting ideas that might have swung things to an “Out” vote. Not necessarily in Britain’s interests.

One of the IMP’s ideas is one I’ve been sounding off about for a long time, which is that by joining the EU, Britain effectively turned its back on a whole community of nations with which it shares not only a language but also the full range of educational and professional qualifications, the Commonwealth. Why should Kenyan tea or New Zealand butter or Zimbabwean beef have to go through all the same EU trade hurdles as any other country in the world, in order to access UK markets? Those arguments about the curvature of EU bananas were not as trivial as they sound, since a strange number of EU territories are somewhere in the tropics but are also pieces of France by means of some little understood geographical alchemy. So the rules favour French bananas over those of Britain’s neglected Commonwealth friends and relations.

Why for that matter, should it be easier for Romanian or a Lithuanian nurse to work here, than a Zimbabwean or a Ghanaian? I'd happily see both, but surely the folks who come from our world are an easier fit for many roles? 

It has always been my belief that easier movement of both trade and people with the exciting and fast-growing nations of the Commonwealth would be to everyone’s benefit. Trade would aid the growth of many of those countries far more effectively than aid does.

I grew up in one of those countries myself, Zimbabwe – and with British parents I am not untypical of the mix of people and cultures that comes out of that world. When I came to this country as an adult in 1981 I found the British attitude to us small-minded and dismissive. In Zimbabwe the sense which many of us had was that a colony becoming independent was kind of like a child growing up and leaving home (I daresay this view was not shared by all of my countryfolk but it was there). The British attitude, at least from those few English people I met when I first arrived in London, was that if those countries did not “want” Britain any more then good riddance to them.

I do not know if British attitudes have improved since then, though I suspect they have. Nor was it clear that this Brexit referendum was the time to unpack something I had long considered to be a lost cause, a historical mistake and nothing more. 

Interestingly, there were vox pops on the news articulating this viewpoint, and it may have accounted for the close result in Birmingham – but there was no-one in the political campaigning who took ownership of this idea. If there was, this would have immediately repudiated the notion that to vote for Brexit you had to be a racist, since this approach would tip the balance away from seeing more immigrants of European ethnicity, and towards those who have shared in some part of our proudly long and diverse history but only a few of whom are ethnically European.

Were the British now big enough to take ownership of a new, positive relationship with the Commonwealth by now? I didn’t know. Who was I to tell the British who they are?

While this first of the Imp’s ideas has Britain’s interests at heart, the second was rather more brutal. I’ve seen how Europe works as a great, vibrant, interconnected thing. I can see that it needs to be more integrated to reach its full potential - it was clear from the outset that you can’t have one currency without a more formally federal kind of government and more centralised monetary policy. Other recent challenges faced by the EU have served to reinforce this point. 

It is equally clear that Britain a a whole cannot and will not ever be part of such a unified project. In terms of whatever is that elusive something that holds Europe together, Britain is about as European as the Valles Marineris.

So one thing I would seriously have to think about as the pencil hovered over the ballot sheet was, is Britain’s continued presence in the EU something that will make it easier or harder to move the European project forward? As someone who wants Europe to succeed, my IMP would be asking which option is best?

As it turns out, the deal that Cameron worked out in the run-up to the referendum was one which would allow Europe to pursue greater integration without Britain standing in the way. An option, incidentally, which expired the moment the Referendum vote was known – so those who are pushing for a reversal or a re-match, are missing the fact that any future British membership of the EU would not be on the special, one-off basis that Britain had always had and was set to continue with.

So that would have taken care of this one of the IMP’s ideas – but again why was this not part of anyone’s political campaign? There must be many voters who would want to be reassured about what would make for a strong Europe as a trading partner on our borders.

As with the Commonwealth so with Europe: what if anything is Britain’s vision for it and its place in relation to it? And who am I to tell the British who they are?

So I basically recused myself on the basis that I was curious to see who the British thought they were, and in order to make sure that my Imp of the Mostly Perverse was safely out of harm’s way in the swamps of Florida when the time came.

This was all on the back of a kind of complacency that in the end, the British would vote for whatever they were least happy with so they could carry on grumbling about it.

I was wrong as well as unkind in thinking this.

I also failed to spot that, as someone who is sort of half from somewhere else, I am basically your typical Londoner and had every right to vote for my own interests and my own vision of things, whether people out there in the Shires shared those views or not. I passed up on the opportunity to be me, someone who has shared in the life of these islands for longer than a lot of their people have been alive.

There was a third possible and non-racist reason that some would consider a Leave vote, but it is one that is too politically sophisticated for my IMP. This is the notion that the European project is somehow bound up with and coextensive with the prevailing and frankly unwise political consensus about how economies should be run, a neo-liberal something which started with Thatcher and Reagan (neither of them continental Europeans I notice), and that voting “Out” would somehow help bring this economic misadventure to an end. I’m all for smashing up that thing – or at any rate prodding it firmly and repeatedly with very sharp things until we can have an economy which benefits people rather than corporations and elites. I just don’t know if this is the event that would bring that about. 

So in spite of the ugliness that it became and the things that have been believed and heard and said since the result, not all reasons to vote “Out” were intended to be racist, nor were all of them ignorant or short sighted.

Now it seems my Imp of the Mostly Perverse has cast its vote in my absence, and we are in the still not quite believable position where the United Kingdom has (as a whole but not in all of its parts) voted to simply up and float away from the European Union relationship that it had. 

There is a common theme that underlies the two reasons that my political IMP might have voted Leave. This is the notion that in most situations, people should follow their heart even when their head seems to be saying something different, because then whatever you do will be done from a place where you believe in it.

Yes, it was nice that we had so many good things from the European Union, but deep down, did we really deserve those things if the UK’s heart was not really in the European project? We may lose nice things for a while – maybe even a generation – but in the longer run if the country is acting in line with its own convictions, this should find us in a better place than when we were constantly grumbling about, and holding back, the thing we were noncommittally part of. I believe, admittedly on very little real evidence, that it is better to be whole-heartedly who we are, than half-heartedly who we are not.

If you can’t be true to yourself, no-one else is going to do it. Sometimes you don’t know where that is leading you, but I have always lived by that notion in my personal life and I’m secretly pleased to see that the UK has had the courage to do exactly that, unknowns and financial turmoil and all. I just wish there was not the undercurrent of xenophobia and racism that has come to accompany this thing. Mainly though, I suspect those events are a form of political looting brought about by the power vacuum that followed the result, a sort of opportunistic bout of self-expression by unpleasant forces that we always knew were there but usually kept in their box. I don’t think they speak for any of the reasons that a country should either throw its soul into the European project, or realise that it never will, and leave it to those who are able to do so. Those who are able to do so may well include several parts of what is now (and ideally could somehow remain) pieces of the United Kingdom as well.  

Now it is up to the United Kingdom, right across England and Wales, London and Scotland and Northern Ireland and somehow Gibraltar, to come up with a common notion of who we are. Maybe there will be more than one such notion and more than one set of futures, or maybe there is still something we can all find that we share, even wandering Londoner types like me. 

Maybe if we follow our hearts as a group of whatever we are, there will be options we had not yet thought of. Options that will allow us to reach a potential that is best for each little piece of this Untidy Kingdom, for all of it, for Europe and for our friends across the Commonwealth and the wider world. For the first time, we are in a position to find out. 

St Petersburg, Florida

26 June 2016

The Thousand Dollar Human Brain and other Questions

A Facebook friend, Carola, posted a link to the following site which gives a number of predictions for the future.

http://singularityhub.com/2015/05/11/the-world-in-2025-8-predictions-for-the-next-10-years/

Go check it out, it's a great read and a valuable resource.

However, some of the claims, like an exact speed threshold from which could decide to call something "A $1,000 Human Brain" got me going. I could not let that pass.

So here, for what's it's worth, are my own comments, confirmations and counter-claims for the Year 2025 (original text in blue highlights):

1. A $1,000 Human brain

In 2025, $1,000 should buy you a computer able to calculate at 10^16 cycles per second (10,000 trillion cycles per second), the equivalent processing speed of the human brain.

Speed is no indication of performance. The architectures of the human brain and a computer are so different that reaching this threshold of speed in no way makes it a "human" brain.

We may well end up with programs or parallel-processing machines which emulate the architecture of the human brain more accurately than today's computers, but this is not the metric to look at.

2. A Trillion-Sensor Economy

The Internet of Everything describes the networked connections between devices, people, processes and data. By 2025, the IoE will exceed 100 billion connected devices, each with a dozen or more sensors collecting data. This will lead to a trillion-sensor economy driving a data revolution beyond our imagination. Cisco's recent report estimates the IoE will generate $19 trillion of newly created value.

This is happening. To what extend all this new data amounts to "newly created value" depends entirely on what we do with this information. Information does not usually deliver value until it can be turned into knowledge.

3. Perfect Knowledge

We're heading towards a world of perfect knowledge. With a trillion sensors gathering data everywhere (autonomous cars, satellite systems, drones, wearables, cameras), you'll be able to know anything you want, anytime, anywhere, and query that data for answers and insights.

With perfect knowledge comes perfect falsehood. Just having lots and lots of information does not mean we know more.

However, the examples given mainly relate to information derived at first hand, so in general the quality of knowledge will go up. I wonder if we will see a move towards creating deliberate falsehoods on some of these channels? Vested interests suggest we will - along with increasing moves by industry and by states that are beholden to industry, to limit the reach of free-flying and wearable sensors, and legal challenges to the use of information people don't like.

4. 8 Billion Hyper-Connected People

Facebook (Internet.org), SpaceX, Google (Project Loon), Qualcomm and Virgin (OneWeb) are planning to provide global connectivity to every human on Earth at speeds exceeding one megabit per second.

We will grow from three to eight billion connected humans, adding five billion new consumers into the global economy. They represent tens of trillions of new dollars flowing into the global economy. And they are not coming online like we did 20 years ago with a 9600 modem on AOL. They're coming online with a 1 Mbps connection and access to the world's information on Google, cloud 3D printing, Amazon Web Services, artificial intelligence with Watson, crowdfunding, crowdsourcing, and more.

Most likely. And the new arrivals will be a lot less tolerant of the level of geekhood that most of us have taken for granted. The first wave of people connected to the Internet were native geeks (and a few hangers-on like me); the second wave have been turned into geeks by Facebook and conditioned (by the purveyors of hand held devices) to put up with a shocking loss of control of their information and apps.

In East Africa people already use the Internet and mobile connectivity for payments and so on, at greater sophistication than most Western folk. The winner in this next part of the race will be those who can make internet applications interface sensibly to normal people without requiring them to think like geeks. This third wave will demand it.

5. Disruption of Healthcare

Existing healthcare institutions will be crushed as new business models with better and more efficient care emerge. Thousands of startups, as well as today's data giants (Google, Apple, Microsoft, SAP, IBM, etc.) will all enter this lucrative $3.8 trillion healthcare industry with new business models that dematerialize, demonetize and democratize today's bureaucratic and inefficient system.

Biometric sensing (wearables) and AI will make each of us the CEOs of our own health. Large-scale genomic sequencing and machine learning will allow us to understand the root cause of cancer, heart disease and neurodegenerative disease and what to do about it. Robotic surgeons can carry out an autonomous surgical procedure perfectly (every time) for pennies on the dollar. Each of us will be able to regrow a heart, liver, lung or kidney when we need it, instead of waiting for the donor to die.

There was an article in the US about 100 years ago predicting things we would see in the next 100 years. Nearly all of them were substantively right, apart from the one predicting universal free health care for all Americans.

All these technical innovations are happening, but the question of who gets them is one of politics (cost etc.) not technology. Unless there is the political will to address free healthcare across the board, these innovations will mean that people with high incomes will be healthier and live longer than those without.

6. Augmented and Virtual Reality

Billions of dollars invested by Facebook (Oculus), Google (Magic Leap), Microsoft (Hololens), Sony, Qualcomm, HTC and others will lead to a new generation of displays and user interfaces.

The screen as we know it — on your phone, your computer and your TV — will disappear and be replaced by eyewear. Not the geeky Google Glass, but stylish equivalents to what the well-dressed fashionistas are wearing today. The result will be a massive disruption in a number of industries ranging from consumer retail, to real estate, education, travel, entertainment, and the fundamental ways we operate as humans.

This is coming, but I think the statement about the way it will pan out, is a mistake.

The things that could be enabled by the use of VR goggles and the like, could have been enabled any time since the mid 90s by a simple shift in the way that people are expected to interact with information. William Gibson set out the vision in 1985 (Neuromancer, describing cyberspace).

But the experience of immersion can be replicated on a flat screen, albeit less dramatically. A true cyberspace implementation would be usable both on flat screen / tablet and with immersive goggles, and would be independent of the medium.

If people didn't have the imagination to see this before, there is nothing to make me optimistic of them achieving it now just because there are goggles. There needs to be a disruption to the operation system itself, not just the user interface. See also (4) above.

Meanwhile, expect to see a big increase in geo-located head-up displays, with people running to get to a restaurant before their battery goes flat.

7. Early Days of JARVIS

Artificial intelligence research will make strides in the next decade. If you think Siri is useful now, the next decade's generation of Siri will be much more like JARVIS from Iron Man, with expanded capabilities to understand and answer. Companies like IBM Watson, DeepMind and Vicarious continue to hunker down and develop next-generation AI systems. In a decade, it will be normal for you to give your AI access to listen to all of your conversations, read your emails and scan your biometric data because the upside and convenience will be so immense.

Watson still uses brute statistical force over any real understanding of meaning, according to most insider accounts (there is some mention of ontology). Artificial intelligence took a wrong turn in the 1980s and, at least in the kinds of apps that are being cited as game-changers, shows no sign of returning. Brute force statistics usually gives the right answers and requires no-one to understand how meaning works. Last time I checked into a hotel in Shanghai and passed the receipt through Google Translate, it got every word right except the name of the hotel, which it replaced with the statistically more probable Hyatt. That's not so useful when the reason I wanted the thing translated was so as to be able to find the hotel.

So we can expect to see a linear progression in the results achievable by brute force statistics. Things won't progress to a different kind of intelligence as long as this route remains commercially viable.

8. Blockchain

If you haven't heard of the blockchain, I highly recommend you read up on it. You might have heard of bitcoin, which is the decentralized (global), democratized, highly secure cryptocurrency based on the blockchain. But the real innovation is the blockchain itself, a protocol that allows for secure, direct (without a middleman), digital transfers of value and assets (think money, contracts, stocks, IP). Investors like Marc Andreesen have poured tens of millions into the development and believe this is as important of an opportunity as the creation of the Internet itself.

Definitely one to watch. Again, from what we have seen in East AFrica, it will be the newer wave of Internet adopters who really drive this forward, especially in rural and informal economies, and in cultures like Africa where economic activity tends to work from the bottom up.

Bottom Line: We Live in the Most Exciting Time Ever

We always have. Except maybe in the 14th century

Postscript

As a useful illustration to my comments on (7), when I posted my comments to the article on Facebook, that system decided that the word "brain" in line 1 should be replaced by the name of an account I know of that begins with the word "brain". I had to go back in and edit that out. Expect to see a lot more of that sort of annoyance as a result of more badly thought out intelligence trying to help us with brute force statistics.

Any thoughts or comments?