My Solution to Every Problem in the World

You know what they say, “When you have a hammer everything looks like a nail”. My hammer is ‘thinking in terms of information networks’ ??.

?? Mind you, I don’t mean communication networks through which information travels, I mean actual information networks made of information.??        

I’ve come to think that coordinating the information humans produce, manipulate, exchange and build on is key to the most important planetary problems of our era.

For the last years, I’ve been quasi-continually picking the brains of my fellow academic researchers and entrepreneurs and compiling a wealth of ideas and suggestions from them. I've asked scientists how information is shaped in the scientific spheres they are most expert in. I've asked them what becomes of their best ideas for improving the world, and what do they need in order to be concentrating on the work they think matters. With my hammer I’ve melded all this input into a concrete proposal.

The proposal is here: https://arxiv.org/abs/2309.10531. It is a proposal for an "organic Web", and intermediary between the Web and the Semantic Web. It is based on the MMM datamodel which is to knowledge contributions what the OpenStreetMap datamodel is to geographical data.

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(tentative honey to attract bees I'm looking forward to work with)

1. The MMM datamodel turns out to have some CRDT like properties.
2. It relies on a notion of “epistemic locality” that makes a local-first implementation natural.
3. Epistemic locality is an opportunity to exploit a parallel between the knowledge commons and the historically successful agrarian commons.
4. As you might have guessed from the title of the proposal, I’m attempting to provoke the Semantic Web community: the Semantic Web proposal is almost as important and urgent as my proposal. More on that later.

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?? An education in theoretical computer science and years of practice of research on a mathematical object called “Boolean Automata Networks” is what shaped my hammer.         

I’ve come to understand that even in mathematics where control is maximum over the meaning we convey to other humans, information is a tricky tricky thing. Information that is used to inform on something less formal than mathematics, is bound to take some life of its own. Information is ubiquitous. Some of it is formal but most of it isn’t. Bits of information are continuously meeting, combining and impacting on our human activities and through our human activities. For the most part it happens without us really paying attention. I don’t think anyone is to blame. I doubt there even is enough human attention available to be aware and control everything that happens in the world of information.

Fundamental Problems

With little exageration I think, if we say that humanity’s fundamental problem NO 1 is:

?? FUNDAMENTAL PROBLEM NO 1: subsistence         

then I can say that humanity’s fundamental problem NO 2 concerns information.

?? FUNDAMENTAL PROBLEM NO 2 concerns information.        

The central problem related to information is and has always been to get the right information across in the right form to the right people who can actually use it to make their lives or the world better (or at least different). This entails appreciating the quality of information not just in binary terms (good/bad, true/false) but also in terms of who can take interest and understand the information, and how the information fits in a given context.

The Scale of Problems

Hardin who emphasised the term “tragedy of the commons” in the 60s warned us about the scale of problems changing the nature of problems.

The scale of problems changes the nature of problems.

A long time ago it was OK to scare of an entire herd of bisons off a cliff just to kill the one bison that was needed to sustain a tribe of humans for a week. Times have changed. Humans still need to eat but the problem of human subsitence has fundamentally changed. There are now too many humans and too little bisons. It isn’t OK any more to waste many bisons in the process of feeding humans.

Problems related to information are among the most obvious to have undergone the effects of scaling recently.

Information Ages

The 1st Information Age which was marked by the advent of the Gutenberg’s printing press. At that time, half the population couldn’t read. Authors distributed their ideas to other humans through the new information technology (IT). The proportion of people acting as authors was tiny. Times have changed. Literacy is far better than it was several centuries ago. The 2nd Information Age brought about by the internet and the Web has democratised authorship.

Modern information technology has democratised authorship.

The proportion of the population now acting as authors broadcasting their ideas to others through the new IT is probably comparable to the proportion of people using the Web which is near 60% of the world population in 2023.

The 1st Information Age accustomed authors to gather and organise their ideas, their pieces of information inside documents. ?? Documents are printed or digitally rendered and then distributed to readers. Humans have naturally been addressing ??Fundamental Problem No 2 by evaluating documents and sorting them out into well indexed collections, libraries and file hierarchies where documents can be found and read again.

For 5 centuries, documents have been the unit of information targetted by our solutions.

Granularity

Documents typically contain multiple pieces of information and often overlap. The same informal idea can find itself almost systematically repeated in the introduction of every article produced by a scientific community. A document conveying lots of valid and relevant expertise can be wholly discredited because of something false or unethical in it. A dangerously misleading piece of information in an otherwise serious document can be broadcasted as safe and authoritative just like the document containing it and its author.

Despite this granular nature, just like herds of bisons, documents have been the right level of granularity for a long time.

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Times change, scales change, problems change and so solutions can’t remain the same. And essentially, to avoid waste and inefficiency, solutions must target a level of granularity appropriate for the scale at which they are to apply. In other terms we need to refine our solutions. Although this seems like a mere adjustment, it is not. To kill a single bison rather than the entire herd, you need an entirely new approach to hunting, perhaps even an entirely new approach to cooking and eating, if not an entirely new social organisation.

Problems we have with our Own Solutions

Before we talk about profound changes, we need to make one thing clear. It is important not to confuse:

1. the original fundamental problem we are trying to solve again (e.g. human subsistence), and
2. the problems that we now have (e.g. bison waste) with our historical solution to the fundamental problem (e.g. scaring bison herds off a cliff).

Solving the latter (e.g. by designing a parapet that stops all but one bison from falling off the cliff) can be a lot trickier and impose a lot more constraints than finding an alternative solution to the former (e.g. inventing the lasso or hunting mushrooms).

The fundamental problem stays actual but our historical solutions to it go out of date as constraints are added.

What has happened to fundamental problem NO 1 has now happened to fundamental problem NO 2. It is time to drop historical, granular, document-based solutions to it and start fresh, taking into account what has changed in the 5 centuries that separates us from the 1st Information Revolution, and most importantly taking into account the democratisation of authorship.

This is what my proposal proposes to do. l think that coordinating the information humans produce, manipulate, exchange and build on is key to the most important planetary problems of our era. And now that we’re a few decades into the 2nd Information Age, I think we have the technology to keep a better watch on the world of information.

The Semantic Web Proposal is amost as important and urgent as mine

There are so many documents being produced and distributed today, that people who read, collect, evaluate and sort out documents are struggling to keep up. The resulting degradation of public information is notoriously consequential and alarming.

The Semantic Web proposal stems from an understanding of the need for more fine-grained control of information. It proposes to extract fine-grained pieces of information from traditional documents ?? and to structure them so that the information becomes machine-processable. Indeed machines can help us manage information. However, presently the Semantic Web approach only palliates the problems we have with our historical document-based solutions, as opposed to solve humanity's??original Fundamental Problem NO 2 concerning information -- which doesn’t mention ?? documents. Huge amounts of information are still being produced mostly by humans for humans. Information continues to be recorded in unstructured documents. Documents continue to be the main source of information... all this exactly as if authorship hadn’t been consequentially democratised and as if, unlike the printing press, modern IT hadn’t changed anything fundamental to the way information is conveyed.

I contend that to palliate the effects of democratised authorship is not enough.

To palliate the effects of democratised authorship is not enough. Authorship has to be reinvented for the 2nd Information Age.

In order to build an updated sustainable solution to the fundamental problem of information, I propose to take the democratisation of authorship into account at the core of the solution. I propose to redefine authorship. And I propose to redefine what we call have been calling “a document” for the past 500 years.

The granularity of information has to be reduced not just for machines but also for humans.

And as we all are creatures of habit, I propose to provoke fundamental change without changing anything substantial in authors’ daily lives 1. We need a solution that is that is compatible and supportive of our traditional document-based habits. But the solution musn't be reliant on traditional documents like the Semantic Web is. I propose a solution that is self-standing so that even if no new traditional document were produced, we would still have a human friendly solution to ?? the Fundamental Problem of information.

1 See especially Supplementary Material B, Section “Interface Layer”.