BAE systems is going to manufacture insect-sized robots (modeled after dragonflies and spiders) for US army to be used as extended senses for the soldiers on the battlefields (original article). A contract worth 38 million US dollars.
This is the first way to do it, namely making robots that look and behave like insects.
The second way attacks the problem from a complete different angle : build technology into living insects, so that they become cyborgs. Experiments are already taking place.
Already in the fifties scientists began to implant electrodes in the brain of bulls to control their behavior.
Again in 1992 a rat could be steered in any direction thanks to electrodes in its brain.
Later on it were spiny dogfish that could be steered thanks to brain implants.
But all these animals are too big for military purposes. And the problem with the smaller ones, the insects, is that the electronical devices are too big to be implanted in the insect.
Nevertheless one of the newest DARPA projects is exactly to do the trick with insects. They develop “tightly coupled machine-insect interfaces by placing micro-mechanical systems inside the insects during the early stages of metamorphosis”.
So next time you see a moth on your window, perhaps it is an insect G.I. Jane …
Now I see that fractals are used in data mining as well. Krishna Kumaraswamy showed that “the fractal dimension can be used as an indicator tor the amount of information hidden in tha data”. For more details see the article
Of course fractals are best known for the beautiful artwork they deliver. See for example Fractalism dot com.
And you can even bake fractal cookies (edible !), see the related article.
Sherif Mansour wrote this seven techniques, or should I say, guidelines of how to get a wiki in your enterprise :
pick a good wiki
let your wiki ‘virally’ grow
find and empower wiki champions in each team
start off as open as possible, worry about guidelines later
refer people to the wiki where you can
bottom-up, not top-down
training should not be more than one hour demo
I do not have any experience with enterprise wiki‘s, but still I think there may be room for a top-down adoption, but not unless the top uses the wiki in a consistent manner, and give the good example !
Today I discovered that the swarm / web 2.0 approach has reached the film industry.
Matt Hanson wants to make and finance a movie via internet with the aid of 50.000 people paying 25 pounds each and collaborating on the project.
When I was a lot younger, I somewhere read, or was told that “alive” means : has the ability to reproduce itself. At that time, it seemed very logical. Plants and animals, even bacteria, do reproduce themselves.
At that time.
Recently I began to see things from another angle.
Scientific facts can be tested. So let us do the test. Take a box, put a plant in it and let us come back let’s say in a month. I reckon the plant will be dead and produced no offspring. Idem with a little bird in the box. Idem with about anything … alive.
Conclusion : “alive” does not mean “can reproduce itself”.
What is missing. Fairly obvious : food, light, water, another animal of the opposite sex, the right environment, and so on. So who is reproducing who ? Or what is reproducing who, or what ?
If it is the environment with everything in it that reproduces the living things, what makes those things living ? The environment (re-)produces a lot of things : snowflakes, flames, patterns in a waterfall, … are these things alive ? Why not ?
In an earlier post I wrote about evolution and (re-)production. Evolution did not start when life started, but with the big bang (or earlier ?). Everything evolved, and the most successful structures took over time after time. Now these successful structures are called bacteria, humans, insects …
In the course of this evolution we can observe a few paradigm shifts :
First episode : sort of random production of new structures, no ressemblance whatsoever with the original structures. Example : a mountain transforms in a pile of debris by means of erosion. A bit of non-randomness can be observed also : forming of snowflakes, of cristals as a result of some physical properties.
Second episode : copying of old structures. The structures that are most easily copied were the fittest. Here I think of the ancient soup a solution of among others more or less large organic molecules where random production but also some copying was going on.
Third episode : copying of old structures, not based on the structure itself, but on some other structure containing the necessary information, the plan. This means that the structures of the first level from the second episode had evolved and created a second-level structure that facilitated the copying of the first-level structure. So in the third episode the first-level structures had began to shape their environment.
Fourth episode : idem as third episode, but here, the second-level structure had become complex enough to further shape parts of the environment that were not parts of the first- or second-level structure. Hole-digging, nest-building, house-building … A third-level structure building was going on. You see: no plants do that, just animals. (or do I miss something or, some weird examples ?)
Fifth episode : Second-level structures pass information to one another that is not part of the structure : ants leave pheromone trails, bees dance, birds sing, people write blogs. Memes are born. They are not structures, but another sort of information units that follow the survival-of-the-fittest-rules where the most successful continue to be reproduced.
Sixth episode : Groups of second-level structures use memes to co-operate in order to create third-level structures of such a complexity that these third-level structures are able to copy themselves and eventually evolve. It is the episode of artificial intelligence with for example robots creating even more intelligent robots. As you know, this episode has yet to start.
This history is described rather roughly, but I think you see the line of it.
So what is life ? I think it started in the third episode, with the two-level structures. And where does it end ?
today I read a “position paper” : “On doing knowledge management” by Joseph Firestone.
He starts by saying that nobody knows what KM is. There is no unique definition. So he makes his own. To me it was rather new. The point is : he makes the difference between the knowledge process and changing the knowledge process. And only the second of the he considers as knowledge management. This is a bit awkward.
The knowledge process is how the information is shared, stored, retrieved. (Yes, Information. To me knowledge is information in the head of someone, but later on that).
In contrast to the knowledge process, you have the business process. It is difficult to see the difference : where does the one ends and the other one starts ?
His definition of knowledge management: “KM is the set of activities and/or processes that seeks to change the organization’s present patterns of knowledge processing to enhance both it and its knowledge outcomes.” So to me it is change management of that part of the business that has to do with knowledge. It is all a bit confusing.
Let us make a comparison : human resource management. Does this only deal with changing the way an enterprise manages its employees ? Or is the actual management of the human resources an integral part of HRM ?
Is project management about managing a project or is it about changing the way projects are managed ?
Never knew academic professors could get lost that far in their own theories.
About change management : “if you cannot manage change, change management” 🙂
About knowledge and information : to know is something YOU do alone, to inform, is something you do to another, passing information. So knowledge is information in your head. What you pass to another is information. Only if he understands it, it becomes his knowledge.
Here are the 5 ways I found in an article on KMWorld dot com (for more detail see the original article.):
slow performance : of course no one wants to sit there and wait
inconvenience : meaning that what you look for is all the time in different formats like MSWord documents, spreadsheets, presentations, flowcharts for which each time a new software has to be launced. Is to me also a bit like the first point, because that way things become slow.
limited functionality : well, it should be able to do what an experienced web2.0 user is used to, and the same for the administrators. I should be sized for you enterprise. Do not use a personal wiki on a stick as an enterprise wiki !
no transparency : meaning that the user should not have to know where the info is (on which platform) that he searches. Seams awfully basic, no ?
unclear objectives : This puzzles me. Can you exactly know in advance, I quote “what’s really important to users when it comes to finding the information they need to do their jobs”. It’s enterprise 2.0 we are talking. Swarm behaviour. They have to find it and be able to share it. Can’t they decide all along what is important enough to share or to search for ? And I had to smile even more when I saw the next sentence : “Make sure to consider your needs both now and in the future”. That’s nice, someone who needs to know the future requirements of his users. As if knowing the actual requirements is not hard enough already.
I saw a lot of posts today about Phalanx, a system to counter DDos attacks. (article on New Scientist). They all shouted something like “swarm intelligence in action!”.
“Swarm”, yes, but “swarm intelligence”, no.
All the intelligence comes from the system designers. The only intelligence in the swarm is the fact that the computers in the swarm are picked randomly to pass their information to the server.
The fact that they shield the server from overloads of information has nothing to do with swarm intelligence but with al massive force of dead load, a sort of concrete wall with a door in it and a doorkeeper letting through one bit of information at a time.
When did I wrote : “through ant glasses, everything looks like a swarm” ? There I quoted a long list of things you supposedly can do with swarm intelligence. Apparently I have to add an item : use a massive swarm as a dead obstacle.
In the intelligent universe by James Gardner he writes about the four essential elements for self-reproducing objects (John von Neumann) :
a blueprint with the info
a factory with the construction
a controller to see to it that construction follows the blueprint
a duplicating machine to copy the blueprint
Gardner uses this model to explain his model of cosmological replication.
But what about evolution/natural selection and this four essential elements?
In other words : does evolution works with self-reproducing objects like von Neumann machines, or does it use another mechanism?
Are these self-reproducing objects :
genes
chromosomes
bacteriums
mammals
chickens
eggs
??
What is a self-reproducing object ? stricty speaking : something, no matter where you put it, it replicates itself. Of course to the four essential elements, you have to add some basic matter, otherwise you can only make copies that are half the size of the original (if you split in 2 for example).
With self-replicating objects, there can be no evolution. The controller prevents any deviation from the blueprint, so everything will stay exactly the same. So far for the controller. This leaves us with a blueprint, a factory and a blueprint-copy-machine, or in other words :
information (= the blueprint)
an environment (=the factury, including the copy machine, but also the substrate to hold the information)
So where are we ?
We have som information that is stored on some substrate.
Examples:
genes contain the information to build some creature, and that information is stored by means of DNA or RNA. To do the replication there is a whole environment providing the basic materials, the factory and the copy machine to replicate the genes. The replicate can be different from the original by copy errors/mutations
a meme is some information stored in for example a human brain, or is written in a book, or is being typed in a wordpad textprocessor right now. I you have an environment with humans and computers in it it can be duplicated by means of copy/past, by reading it loud and recording it … and adapting it, so it does not contain exactly the same information any more
a cristal that is growing contains information of how that cristal is built. The environment uses this information to add to that cristal
an egg contains the information to build a chicken. With the right environment (chickens, food ..) it becomes a chicken which lays eggs
What I mean by these examples is : to have -not necessarily exact- replication you only need something, information and an environment that can use this information to make a copy or to even make something else, provided the first information is used. And when you have this replication the result is evolution. This holds from the first nanosecond of the big bang to the selfish biocosm hypothesis (a cosmos where creatures develop that become so intelligent that they make new/altered copies of the cosmos).
Have you ever been eating a good meal ? I mean, a really good meal, from a top chef? I bet you could not tell what was in it. Oh yes, perhaps you knew it was lobster, but which spices did he use ?
My point is that spices should be used to make your meal better, not to be tasted. Sounds contradictory? If you are tasting spices, what about the delicious duck? did you forget about it ? Or did the spices ruin it ?
The same thing goes for a beautiful woman (or man, if you like). If you see nothing but makeup, I suppose she had a lot to hide. You should not see the makeup, you should only see a more beautiful woman.
And yes, the same thing, as far as I concerned, goes for knowledge management. You should not see it or hear it (except if you are responsible for it). Everybody should not been shouting : “knowledge management, let’s do knowledge management”. No, it should be there unnoticed, or if you do notice it, it should be a change that makes your job a lot more easy. It is supposed to help, not to give you more work making your job tougher !
It is like I wrote in one of my earlier posts : KM should be a windmill, turning without human effort and helping us doing our job. Not a threadmill for which you have to hire someone to keep it going.
aware of knowledge: what they tell you because they find it important
unaware of knowledge: what they do not tell you, because for them it is so obvious and they think everyone knows it
aware of lack of knowledge : what they tell you they should know but don’t
unawere of lack of knowledge : what they do not know that they should know but don’t
Although it is quoted from the work of an IT analyst during his requirements analysis, I think you can use it when gathering information (knowledge ?) about functions/roles in the enterprise.
Great post about the problems between knowledge management and management. Since good knowledge management is all about enhancing cooperation between individuals by facilitating access to/publishing/commenting/ on every information and management is all about hierarchy and power and keeping information secret there is indeed a lot to write or discuss about it. This article by the hand of Olivier Amprimo (who did btw his Ph.D. on it) is long but worth wile.
The same subject is discussed and a very structural solution is offered in this book by Olivier Zara : Collective intelligence management
Our knowledge is what we learn from the day that we are born (or already before?) till this very moment. A lot of what we ‘know’ is in fact what we think we know, our opinions we formed based on … what ?
A bunch of physicists has formed a model to simulate communities and their opinions. What is the overall opinion of a community ? How is it possible that there can be several competing opinions in one community and a dominant opinion in another community.
A lot has been written about dragons, mostly in fairy tales. But can there be smoke without fire ?
There are two problems with dragons : First : is fire-spitting possible ? Can a land animal produce flames without burning itself ? There is one scientific article that investigates this problem. Although hard scientific stuff, the content is worth the effort of reading it till the end.
Second : If a male dragon is doing his ‘thing’ with his female : how can he prevent himself from incinerating her while he is in a heat ?
It is probably not going to happen in my lifetime, but people are already figuring out some ways to expand our intelligence in the entire galaxy. Sentientdevelopments
has made a list of se7en ways to accomplish this.
I suppose the time or the way of space travel wil be deadly for ordinary human beings. But what about copying the information content of the brain in a sophisticated artificial brain, so you can explore the distant stars and planets as a robot, with far more capacities than a flesh and blood creature.
And no danger, because the original (and several copies) are still here on earth and of cause also at a distant backup planet.
Only one problem, similar to outlook and palm pilot : syncronisation of all these brains. I suppose that will easily be done via a wireless intergalactic network of some sorts.
Let’s dream on.
I hope someone will backup my brain before I die …
Image from Wikipedia In a previous post about emergence I wrote that with mondialisation there are not enough societies any more to form patterns at a higher level. Hence the end of emergence.
In this post I highlight another ending : the end of aggregation.
In histories clans formed and got extinct, larger civilisations formed and got extinct. What if there is only one civilisation left ? One unique mondial civilisation. Soon or later it may end.
Idem for startup companies that grow, merge, at the end become the only one in the world (like in some SF stories). If it gets bankrupt, there is nothing left …
If we overlay the same picture on elementary particles forming atoms, molecules, rocks, planets, galaxies, black holes : eventually the last big black hole may swallow the last galaxy. Result : nothing left exept perhaps a new big bang ?
Evolution is a weird something. It goes the opposite way of entropy. Do they keep one another in balance ?
Source: WikipediaNatural selection has given rise to an highly intelligent species : humans. In all this natural selection thing, intelligence, or the ability to, has been stored somehow into our genes and are passed on to the next generations.
Now we are heading for a time where chips will be implanted in our (or our childrens) brains. This means our intellectual capacity will no longer be dependent of the information stored in our genes, but in stead on our mindset. Genes will lose the battle to AI implants. AI implants with built-in memes to enhance the spreading, buying, choosing themselves (or their brand) for our children will win this battle. Likewise their ability to convince other decision takers to use them to build in non-biological intelligent systems.
If genes are no longer the important units/information carriers for natural selection to work on, why would men be the carrier of intelligence ? Why not chips, inplanted in men, bonobos, chimpansees, or robots ?
In any case : it will be the end of not only human supremacy, but also human values, ethics etc …
Since Charles Darwin we ware aware that natural selection favors the fittest individuals. What does this mean ? Simply that these fittest ones have relatively more offspring that survive to the next generation.
But I wonder : is this only applicable to living organisms ?
Let us take a closer look at the significant words:
offspring : individuals that are more or less alike to their parents. This is caused by the mechanism of reproduction which is more or less a copy machine.
next generation : means “at a later point in time”.
So if we rephrase it : natural selection causes some types of things to be more abundant at a later point in time.
Why is a type of things more abundant then another ? Two events are accountable : i) creation of things and ii) destruction of things (by their own forces or by their environment). If some types are created much faster than destroyed, they get more abundant. With humans this is simple : if a couple has more than two children, their gene pool is growing (actually it is more complex than that, but the simple explanation is enough for now).
Great ! And … have these things to be alive ? Could this not be also the case with dead matter ?
Right after the big bang there was nothing but a bunch of elementary particles. You know a lot of them have the habit of dissapearing after a fraction of a nanosecond or so. You will find not much of them in your body, because they were selected away by … natural selection. The more stable ones of them accidentally formed more complex structures we know as atomes and later on molecules. The stable ones survived and kept cluttering together (accidentally ?) to form whole packs of inert matter (rocks, sand …), the hughest of which we call planets, stars, galaxies. Some of the complex molecules had the characteristic of acting like a mould where similar complexes where easily formed, the xerox machine was born which gave rise to all the living things we know and not yet know.
Children learn by first acting and and learning from the result. At Linköping University in Sweden they train robots the same way, using fuzzy logic and stuff.
This makes me think of ants foraging for food. They just wander around until they find something and then return to their nest leaving a pheromone trail, so their fellow ants can find the food source. As brain cells are connected and ‘fire’ to one another, perhaps in the learning phase these firings lay some sort of brain-pheromone-like trail between the good action and the desired result, so the next time, with a similar problem the brain follows this trail from the result to the good action, thus doing the proper firings which cause the right muscle actions ?
I suppose it is not that simple, but the big pictures match, don’t they ?
Source: WikipediaWhen we mix all the technological evolutions we will get humans who can e-think (telephathy) and chat simply by thinking. The chips in their minds, connected to the www will do the rest.
A step in that direction is already set : Mind gaming. You play just by thinking.
Source: WikipediaSome posts ago I wrote on altruism in animals, more especially about why honeybees behave in an altruistic way (workers work for others in stead of having offspring themselves). Shubhendu Trivedi wrote a similar post, but a lot better and elaborated than I did. I you are up to even the mathematical details of altruism, read his excellent post
As knowledge management comes more and more in the picture, people have started to making lists of websites that have to do with knowledge management. So, since I love meta levels, I decided to make a list of these lists :
and since a meta-list is also a list, I am tempted to add a link to this present list. But this would be totally meaningless. Would it ? I someone asked you to name the children of your parents, would you not include yourself ? So let’s do it : Zyxo List of KM-lists
Do you remember the bugs in the movie Man in Black?Together they mimicked an human man. The same feature of coworking insects is used in a lot of other SF stories.
In reality animals cannot do that. What ants can do is building living bridges to overcome obstacles. This video shows a simple example.
With all the hype of swam intelligence nowadays, some people have started to build ant-size robots to perform the same trick. They call them “symbrions” or evolving ‘swarm’ robots.
Read the article on the Symbiotic Evolutionary Robot Organisms’ project
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