Information Revolution

Blogging is making a difference. Uniting communities. Spreading ideas. Worldchanging.

All this has not escaped the attention of BusinessWeek, which made blogging its cover story this week.

Here is some of what they say, in a long, meandering, but stimulating article:

How big are blogs? Try Johannes Gutenberg out for size. His printing press, unveiled in 1440, sparked a publishing boom and an information revolution. Some say it led to the Protestant Reformation and Western democracy. Along the way, societies established the rights and rules of the game for the privileged few who could afford to buy printing presses and grind forests into paper.

The printing press set the model for mass media. A lucky handful owns the publishing machinery and controls the information. Whether at newspapers or global manufacturing giants, they decide what the masses will learn. . .That's the world of mass media, and the blogs are turning it on its head.

But thanks to blogging...

The divide between the publishers and the public is collapsing. This turns mass media upside down. It creates media of the masses.

How does business change when everyone is a potential publisher? A vast new stretch of the information world opens up. For now, it's a digital hinterland. The laws and norms covering fairness, advertising, and libel? They don't exist, not yet anyway.

Hm, reminds me of what CRN says about nanofactories. How does business (or the economy, or society, or geopolitics--choose your term) change when everyone is a potential manufacturer? Will today's laws and norms covering fairness, security, and privacy still hold sway?

Okay, back to BusinessWeek:

Blogs are different. They evolve with every posting, each one tied to a moment. So if a company can track millions of blogs simultaneously, it gets a heat map of what a growing part of the world is thinking about, minute by minute. E-mail has carried on billions of conversations over the past decade. But those exchanges were private. Most blogs are open to the world. As the bloggers read each other, comment, and link from one page to the next, they create a global conversation.

Pretty cool, huh? Just by reading this blog, and especially by adding your own comments, you are part of a global conversation!

Picture the blog world as the biggest coffeehouse on Earth. Hunched over their laptops at one table sit six or seven experts in nanotechnology. Right across from them are teenage goths dressed in black and thoroughly pierced. Not too many links between those two tables. But the café goes on and on. Saudi women here, Labradoodle lovers there, a huge table of people fooling around with cell phones. Those are the mobile-photo crowd, busily sending camera-phone pictures up to their blogs. . .

Wait a minute. Six or seven experts in nanotechnology have blogs? Well, let's see, there's Howard Lovy, there's Josh Wolfe, there's Nanodot and TNTlog, there's Richard Jones, and then there's us. That's six. Can you think of a seventh?

BusinessWeek concludes:

In a world chock-full of citizen publishers, we mainstream types control an ever-smaller chunk of human knowledge. Some of us will work to draw in more of what the bloggers know, vetting it, editing it, and packaging it into our closed productions. But here's betting that we also forge ahead in the open world. The measure of success in that world is not a finished product. The winners will be those who host the very best conversations.

Speaking of blogs, nanotech-aware journalist Dan Gillmor has started his own weblog focused on "grassroots journalism." It's informative and entertaining, so far, and worth a look every day or two (or an XML feed).

On Gillmor's blog, we read an item about "Why Current Intellectual Property Law is So Wrong-Headed" that points to a Financial Times column written by James Boyle. Here's a taste of Boyle's essay:

Since only about 4 per cent of copyrighted works more than 20 years old are commercially available, this locks up 96 per cent of 20th century culture to benefit 4 per cent. The harm to the public is huge, the benefit to authors, tiny. In any other field, the officials responsible would be fired. Not here.

It is as if we had signed an international stupidity pact, one that required us to ignore the evidence, to hand out new rights without asking for the simplest assessment of need. If the stakes were trivial, no one would care. But intellectual property (IP) is important. These are the ground rules of the information society. Mistakes hurt us. They have costs to free speech, competition, innovation, and science. Why are we making them?

Read the whole thing. Post a comment here about your thoughts. Take part in the worldwide conversation. We're glad you could join us!

Mike Treder

Comments

[michael vassar]

Here's a blog link involved in our conversation. The nominal topic is cheap & easy genetic engineering, but little of what is said doesn't apply to molecular manufacturing..

[Mike Treder, CRN]

Where's the beef--I mean, the link?

[cdnprodigy]

Patent and Copyright laws protect vested financial interests. Boyle considers this motive, but then dismisses it with the suggestion regulators are merely stupid, as if a regulatory beauracracy doesn't have similiar vested interests. 6000 children die daily in Africa for a lack of medicines at cost of production; a function of Patent laws designed to "grow" the African consumer market. Most people in the world cannot afford a computer and internet access to take advantage of "freely" available content. This isn't due to a scarcity of resources, but is facilitated by the same dynamic served by Copyright laws. As if merely being born into a country bountiful enough to have the capacity to bicker over Copyright laws isn't enough of an incentive to add to the global knowledge base... Whatever goo's or Hitler AI's occur in the future may have been preventable had the wealthy X% taken advantage of the intellectual potentials of all citizens.

[michael vassar]

Sorry, here's the link I meant.
http://www.futurepundit.com/mt/mt-comments.cgi?entry_id=2729
Actually cdnprodigy, there will probably never be a goo, and there will *definitely* never be a "hitler AI". True AI only happens once, and it brings about singularity, for better or for worse. How it's made will determine whether anything survives singularity, but there certainly won't be any war, torture, or malice involved, just something perfectly banal, like a sphere of smiley faces expanding at the speed of light and replacing everything else.

[Chris Phoenix, CRN]

Mike, don't forget Glenn Reynolds; he's not focused on nanotech, but has written about it.

I'd caution about your list of nanotech experts; several of the blogs listed are inexpert about molecular manufacturing. Some of those are expert about nanoscale technology, but we shouldn't be implying that they are expert about molecular manufacturing.

Chris

[Mike Treder, CRN]

Chris, of course you're right that most of the bloggers I listed are "inexpert about molecular manufacturing." In fact, the only two that I would describe as expert about MM are Nanodot and us.

The article I was quoting from did not distinguish between nanoscale technologies and MM; it just said "six or seven experts in nanotechnology." By a loose interpretation of the term, Richard Jones, TNT, Howard Lovy, and Josh Wolfe all would qualify.

What's remarkable to me is that *even if* you include the broad definition of nanotechnologies, there still are only a half-dozen "experts" writing about it regularly on the Web.

The field is quite young, but like a child stricken with acromegaly, it may grow brute strength well before it achieves maturity. That is, MM could enable far greater power than our institutions are prepared to manage safely and responsibly.

The dearth of blogging experts, especially about MM and its implications, is strong evidence for the conclusion that the world is likely to be caught by surprise a few years from now. If so, nanotech could develop into an exceedingly ugly and dangerous child.

[cdnprodigy]

Michael, I agree threats of a goo-wake devouring earth's surface at the speed of sound is unlikely. But even Nick Bostrom's goo models would tie up a significant amount amount resources to combat. A couple dozen goo-bombs release simultaneously might be too much to overcome. Even one, operating successfully in the earth's mantle might not be defendable against.
I think questions about AI singularities ultimately reach very deeply into the field of personal identity theory. We want to know if we will be on the otherside of an AI singularity. Would our perfectly reconstructed minds down to whatever level of precision you care to measure, constitute us? If the AI is truly friendly, it would probably not waste any resources allowing our oft unfriendly minds to exist. If it is truly moral, it would probably recede away from earth at the speed of light and let us wallow in our own mess; we would have to deal with the emergence of multiple AI's. There is the possibility a singularity will have no bearing on human activities. Ideally, some sort of "grandfathering" rule would be in effect: progress with the contingency past actors get the fruits of the future. But an AI that can't find an infinite energy source is likely to cannabalize our brains (and all other matter) for utilitarianism.