DARPA, that’s interesting! “Translating [something] into numbers that a computer can recognize”! This is what we need for a machine readable culture and economy. Sensational. Thanks.

“DARPA is two-year-old $50-million Human ID at a Distance program. And while automated face recognition receives the most attention, DARPA is also funding efforts at a handful of universities to identify people through their body language. The theory is simple: in the same way that each person has a unique signature or fingerprint, each person also has a unique walk. The trick is to take this body language and translate it into
numbers that a computer can recognize. One approach is to create a “movement signature” for each person.”

Digitizing perceptual/intuitive experience leads to the opportunity for the kind of projection of possibilities that the most sophisticated chess programs can now perform.

Hope your work with HBSP goes well. I have many friends there.

very well said, and, as usual, most illuminating.

I guess what I was thinking of was a world in which we begin to map the “dimensions” of which you speak, so that more of the world, more of the cultural world, is machine readable and we are then in a position to see little changes working their way, in a complicated, interactive set, towards a new form.

The thing is, and I know you know this, the forms come and go so quickly that without this early warning, the likes of social scientists (my kind of social scientist) is reduced to a constant state of surprise. We are only beginning to “get a handle on” the new cultural innovation when we are blind sided by yet a new one.

This was the thing that impressed by so much watching Pip at work in front of a capital markets crowd telling them about what to expect about the tech sector. He really does have things mapped and the question, for me, is how we could map the qualitative things that I need to care about.

Once we have something like this, then it might well be able to situate an enterprise in a flow of information that allows it to respond in real time instead of play catch up.

I dont think we can say this isnt possible until we have a new set of markers and a new set of concepts with which to think about them. This is the topic of the book I am working on for HBSP but this is at the moment going a little slowly!

The post we got from Tom is hopeful in the way I think we must be hopeful. But then these are not very hopeful days, are they? Anyhow, thanks a mill.

I agreed by saying something like, “yeah, rocket science is easy compared with this. You have all the rules of physics [all those great numbers] to count on when you’re sending a rocket to the moon: you know how much it weighs, where the moon will be, how much thrust you’ll need…all reliable. When you’re picking sweaters, you’re trying to predict human behavior, for which there are no rules as reliable as those of physics.”

We undoubtedly need both qualitative and quantitative ways of thinking to understand the dynamics of the modern world. A mentor taught me that using one OR the other to understand reality isn’t incorrect, just incomplete.

I once again press upon you D. N. McCloskey’s If You’re So Smart, which contains a beautiful chapter on the relation between ciriticism and poetry as being like the relation between social science and entrepreneurship. Crudely, if we had a critical theory that could precisely explain and predict what produces great poetry, then any critic in possession of that theory would be able to be a great poet. Such a critical theory would thus eliminate the scarcity of great poetry. Don’t hold your breath.

The same logic applies to economic or anthropological theories that try to pin down the properties of successful business in advance–such theories would be self-annihilating, because once they were disseminated competition would destroy the very opportunities they picked out.

When I teach business strategy, the very first thing I lecture on is that a successful theory of business strategy cannot be an algorithm for making money. If I had exclusive possession of such a theory, I would have used it long ago to become wealthy enough not to be standing in front of my students. If the theory were non-exclusive then competition would destroy the benefits of knowing it. The role of theory in business strategy is like the role of chess books or golf books or military science books–not to magically enable the reader to surmount all rivals, but to eliminate gross errors and to focus creative tihinking on the right questions. I don’t think anthropology can realistically aspire to any more than that either.