Glomming together: Thoughts for Labor Day
Excerpted from Kurzweil's The Singularity Is Near, at 297:
Friend of Futurist Bacteria, 2 Billion B.C.: So tell me again about these ideas you have about the future.
Futurist Bacteria, 2 Billion B.C.: Well, I see bacteria getting together into societies, with the whole band of cells basically acting like one big complicated organism with greatly enhanced capabilities.
Friend: What gives you that idea?
Bacteria: Well already, some of our fellow Daptobacters have gone inside other larger bacteria to form a little duo. It's inevitable that our fellow cells will band together so that each cell can specialize its function. As it is now, we each have to do everything by ourselves: find food, digest it, excrete by-products.
Friend: And then what?
Bacteria: All these cells will develop ways of communicating with one another that go beyond just the swapping of chemical gradients that you and I can do.
. . .
Friend: Now, wait a second. Sounds like we'll lose our basic bacteriumity.
Bacteria: Oh, but there will be no loss. . . It will be a great step forward. It's our destiny as bacteria. And, anyway, there will still be little bacteria like us floating around.. . .
Friend: You always were an optimist.
====
Take a look at the Primo Post Human.
Why trust?
The Flickr Flap has reached the BBC. The Flickr community feels itself to be real, and some of its members resent having to use [free] Yahoo! IDs. They're Flickr members, not Yahoo! corporate shills.
The real problem, and the reason for the flap, is an essential mistrust of Yahoo!. Yahoo! bought Flickr and owns the servers that house it. So far, zip has happened to change Flickr's operations because of the Yahoo! purchase. It would just make it easier to coordinate across the entire Yahoo! network (Yahoo! says) if everyone was logging in using the same system.
Flickr users might be saying: “Yahoo! acts well now, but how can anyone predict how they will act in the future? If Yahoo! is a content provider, won't they be in the business of somehow packaging and selling our content?”
Google is having similar trust issues. Sure, we like Google now, but why should we trust the Google of five years from now with such deeply detailed information about our online lives?
Both Google and Yahoo! have to persuade online communities of two key things: (1) “they” are “us” — they understand the value of user-generated online environments, and wouldn't try to sell them back to us, and (2) their DNA is already in place, is trustworthy, and is held dear from the top to the bottom of the company. It's a hard problem. Avoiding missteps is a crucial part of solving it, but it's hard to predict in advance which particular moves will be viewed as missteps.
All trust is created through repeat interactions that involve some risks on both sides. Maybe the Flickr Flap should be seen as a step that involves some risk. If it goes the right way for Flickr, Yahoo! should be trusted just that much more. If it doesn't, the Flickr community can make noise and many people will be listening. Dropping out of Flickr in a symbolic “mass suicide” seems shortsighted.