(2004-01-10) Lanier Information Theory

Jaron Lanier and EdgeOrg on Information Theory. Of all the things you can spend a lot of money on, the only things you expect to fail frequently are software and medicine. That's not a coincidence, since they are the two most complex technologies we try to make as a society. Still, the case of software seems somehow less forgivable, because intuitively it seems that as complicated as it's gotten lately, it still exists at a much lower order of tangledness than biology. Since we make it ourselves, we ought to be able to know how to engineer it so it doesn't get quite so confusing... The leaders of the first generation (of Information Theory-ists) were influenced by the metaphor of the electrical communications devices that where in use in their lifetimes, all of which centered on the sending of signals down wires... If you model information theory on signals going down a wire, you simplify your task in that you only have one point being measured or modified at a time at each end. It's easier to talk about a single point in some ways, and in particular it's easier to come up with mathematical techniques to perform analytic tricks. At the same time, though, you pay by adding complexity at another level, since the only way to give meaning to a single point value in space is time. You end up with information structures spread out over time, which leads to a particular set of ideas about coding schemes in which the sender and receiver have agreed on a temporal syntactical layer in advance... The world as our nervous systems know it is not based on single point measurements, but on surfaces. Put another way, our environment has not necessarily agreed with our bodies in advance on temporal syntax... The alternative, in which you have a lot of measurements available at one time on a surface, is called pattern classification... Given how brittle our real-world computer systems get when they get big, there's an immediate motivation to explore any alternative that might make them more reliable. I've suggested that we call the alternative approach to software that I've outlined above "PhenoTropic."