What this means is that right now there are huge cyber operations happening around the world every day. Some of these are defensive, but many are offensive attacks. Systems are breached, probed, potential damage is rehearsed, future secret entrances installed, small things are broken. The US, China, Russia, Isreal, Iran, North Korea — to name some of the most active countries — plus many more non-state, quasi-state, organized crime agents, like hacker groups, are involved in huge maneuvers that are invisible to the rest of the world. Increasingly these data vs data conflicts are touching the physical infrastructure. The world’s electrical grids, transportation networks, hospitals, water systems all depend on an intangible data structure, where these skirmishes are taking place. So far only a few incursions have crippled physical civic services; a hospital is cut from electricity, or traffic lights are disrupted. My worry is that because there is neither transparency nor agreed norms, these mutual attacks will escalate until something horrible happens. There is no push-back on this arms race. The public doesn’t see it, and the experts who do see it, don’t agree on where to go.

We beings on this planet have evolved an elaborate set of rules about how to conduct war. Weirdly we have agreed on how to kill each other. Some ways are okay and some are not. You can’t kill someone you take as prisoner. You can’t intentionally kill children. You can’t torture. Etc. As new weapons were invented we added them to our agreement. We have agreed to avoid using nuclear bombs (although some countries, including the US, still make them).

Cyber weapons are new, and have not been included in our agreements. In war is it okay to take down a nation’s banking system? Is it permissible to disable everyone’s phones? Should the world accept hacking interference in another nation’s election?

Problematic weapons like nuclear, chemical, and biological ones, have extensive, complicated programs of verification to make sure our collective agreement is adhered to. Part of that process is self-reporting, self-disclosure by those who posses these weapons. None of this disclosure is happening in cyberspace.

None of the countries active in using these new weapons will acknowledge they have the weapons; they deny they are using them, and don’t even communicate when others use the weapons against them. There is a conspiracy of silence in cyberwar. That is the danger.

This silence and denial also creates cover for non-state attacks by criminals, rouge state hackers, naive teenage hackers, to do damage. They are hidden behind the same cloak that nations are hiding behind. Together state and non-state hacking can add up to a potentially mutual destruction. Today every developed country is potentially very vulnerable to a cyber attack. And soon every developed country will be capable of delivering a crippling attack.

We have nuclear arms treaty because we realized we had the capability of mutual destruction . Our next step is to realize we have the capability of mutual CYBER destruction. The remedy is similar: a global agreement on acceptable use of cyber weapons, and a public accounting of those weapons.

A significant hurdle for the accountability of cyber weapons is their close alignment with intelligence gathering. Cyberwar is fought with information, and information is the heart of intelligence. It is very difficult to unravel cyber weapons from cyber tools. There is the thinnest line between hacking a system to learn about it (intelligence gathering) and hacking it to learn how to damage it (reconnaissance) or hacking it to damage it (war). The same tools (weapons?) may be used in each case.

Understandably, the intelligence departments of nations are reluctant to reveal their methods, or share their tools, or in any way handicap themselves. Cyber-weapons derive from cyber spy tools, and it is a challenge to untangle the two. Knowledge and intelligence can be wielded as a weapon. It’s hard to see a way to account for information weapons that does not expose information spying.

But not impossible. We can regulate specific actions via treaties and agreements. Rather than outlaw tools (or weapons), we can outlaw outcomes. We might agree that taking a banking system down is not acceptable, whether you use a computer virus, a social media hack, or a EMP bomb blast. Interfering in an election should be prohibited via any method, even the most indirect.

The remaining challenge is mutual verification of the source of cyber actions. Tracking the source of actions is made difficult by the dark web. Much can be hidden by anonymizers and cleverness. But a lot online is hidden because the global internet is a patchwork of national networks, and because the actual humans creating attacks are shielded from inspection by national laws. Hackers in country X casting spells on country Y, even if proven bad, may be out of reach of country Y.

Part of the needed reform for a consensus on cyber war extends to making it harder to hide behind the walls erected by nations. I predict the nations will begin to cooperate more in disclosing the source of actions, including their own departments, for this simple reason: nations will come to understand that there is no national cyber security without global cyber security.

Rather than kumbaya global peace, pure self-interest will drive nations to be more cooperative in the cyber dimensions. When you have a global network, your security is only reliable as the weakest link in that system. Attackers bleed to the least secure edges where they can continue to cause damage. Ultimately security within your nation will fail unless the security of all the other nations is also maintained.

In addition to improving the overt security in peacetime, this requirement for global mutual security can drive the transparency needed to regulate cyber weapons. My only worry is that it may take a huge cyber disaster with many people dying before nations come together in agreement on how we should treat these new weapons.

Originally posted on The Technium

When even more accurate machine translation becomes available in ever more handy forms — like earbuds, or embedded into smart glasses — I can imagine huge economic changes arising from this technology. The first thing it will do is to enable people around the world who have very desirable skills, except the skill of English, to participate in the global economy. This Babel fish would permit a talented programmer in Jakarta who spoke no English to work for a Google. It would allow a talented programmer in Utah to work for a Chinese company, in Chinese. Nor does the translation have to happen online. Two employees in the same room could each be wearing the Babel fish. Of course it is immensely effective combined with virtual telepresence. When a colleague is teleporting in from a remote place to appear virtually, it is relatively easy to translate what they are saying in real time because all that information is being captured anyway. For even greater verisimilitude, their mouth movement can be reconfigured to match what they are saying in translation so it really feels they are speaking your language. It might be even be use to overcome heavy accents in the same language. Going further, the same technology could simply translate your voice into one that was a different gender, or more musical, or improved in some way. It would be your “best” voice. Some relationships might prefer to meet this way all the time because the ease of communication was greater than in real life.

This unleashing and liquidity of talent would be a huge boost to the global economy and would help in leveling some of the inequality between wages around the world.

There would be other effects: films, music, videos, books would not need to be laboriously and expensively translated beforehand, or to reach some level of popularity before getting dubbed. Now with the Babel fish they would be instantly subtitled, dubbed, translated in real time, on demand. Over time, even regional differences (American vs Australian) could be accounted for. This universal translation-on-demand (UTOD) immediately increases the potential audience size for creative works, increasing the probability that obscure interests can find the thousand true fans around the world it’ll need to be sustainable.

I can also imagine this UTOD technology aiding migration and human mobility. When the global population plunges later this century, mega-cities around the world will begin to compete for workers and citizens; without the added hurdle of having to speak a new language will make it much easier to migrate. Many might move to Tokyo if they could virtually speak Japanese fluently.

UTOD might diminish the dominance of English as a second language. Why bother with it? On the other hand it is very possible that having simultaneous translation whispered into your ear all day for years would, over time, with the right attention, act as a teacher and help a person learn another language. Or the program could be modified to accelerate such learning if someone desired.

Today I can use Google Translate for free, just like other Google products. Ideally there would be a free version of Babel fish so that those to whom this would most make a difference would have full access to it. But we know free has its own costs. There will be pressure to insert advertising into UTOD. One could imagine how annoying it would be to be conversing with someone when every now and then you are interrupted with an ad that you both hear in your language. Worse, the ad could be related to what you were talking about, since the machine would “know” exactly what you are talking about in order to translate it. Other biz models would not interrupt you in conversation, but would try to exploit that very specific data in other modes or parts of your life. The poor and desperate are likely to take that bargain, but their data is less valuable (being poor and desperate). Alternatively, there would be a paid (no ad, no track) version.

UTOD, encased in a wearable like a Babel fish, is almost here. If adopted widely its consequences would be enormous, and I think, sudden. Even though it has been gradually improving, it might come as a huge “overnight” surprise to the world.

Originally posted on The Technium

We’ll find this dumb-smartness infuriating. It will drive us crazy. How can it beat me here but be so dumb? There will be comedy sketches about this failure, whole movies based on this paradoxical combination of ultra brilliance and utter stupidity. We have some experience with this state in certain handicapped humans called in the past idiot savants. I find that term for humans degrading. But there is a germ of truth in it for machines. The will be idiot-geniuses. Maybe we call them genidiots.

These everyday AIs will be brimming with dumbsmarts. They will be so dumbsmarten they can actually be smart enough to know they are stupid! Or stupid enough to not know they are smart. Both at once.

It should be a short word because we’re going to use it in anger a lot. Sad to say, I predict the word will also be used about humans, when they act like a machine this way. It will definitely become an insult. Perhaps languages other than English already have a word that means Dumbsmart. If so post it in the comments.

Originally posted on The Technium

Most of the VR content in the future will be constructed by makers inside of VR. The working interface to their tools will have volume, thickness, and spatial arrangements. The app Tiltbrush is a good example of an ingenic tool. To create with Tiltbrush, you enter VR and “paint” in three dimensions. You basically paint a sculpture, or sculpt a painting.

The old classical 2D interface of menus and windows aren’t adequate in VR. The new UIs will be volumetric and spatial. As one example, the two industry standard tools for creating 3D worlds and models, the game engines Unity and Unreal, are most commonly used in desktop mode — that is 2D. Their menus and palettes are definitely exgenic to the VR worlds it can make. Recently Unity and Unreal began offering an ingenic version of the editors, whereby developers can employ the engine within VR itself to create VR content. The user must don headgear, enter VR, and inside this spatial world, create. However these versions of an ingenic 3D editor carries over the old 2D metaphor of menus and palettes, so it is not an ideal ingenic tool. Future versions of VR tools will have interfaces optimized for ingenic creation by inventing new organizing metaphors beyond windows and menus.

In a loose sense you could say that web-based tools (like say Google Docs) are ingenic for web-based content. Whereas the classic Microsoft Word in desktop mode is exgenic. And for whatever new worlds that come after the spatial world of 3D, the first tools for them will likely be exgenic 3D tools, and only later fully ingenic.

Ingenic means “the genesis happens within.” Thank you to my son Tywen Kelly, who came up with this term.

Originally posted on The Technium

Your only choice is whether you choose to be thrust forward in time, spending your new life in some random future in some random place, or thrust into the past, in some random time and random place. I have not met anyone yet who would point the lever to the past. (If you would, leave a comment why.) Even if we constrained the time machine to jump mere decades away, everyone points it to the future. For while we can certainly select certain places, certain eras in the past that seem attractive, their attractiveness disappears if we arrive as a servant, a slave, an outcast ethnicity, or even as a farmer during a drought, or during never-ending raiding and wars.

The only argument I’ve heard for choosing the past is that the downsides are known; you have a randomized chance of being a slave, or the fourth wife, or a Roman miner, while the downsides of some future date are unknown and could possibly be worse. Perhaps there is no civilization at all in 500 years, and you therefore arrive in a toxic wasteland, or all humans are enslaved to robots. In this calculus the known horror is preferred to unknown horrors. The likelihood of self-eradication seems to some people, at this point in time, to increase the further out in history we might go. Five thousand years in the future may be as unappealing a destination to some as five thousand years in the past.

But since this is random placement, there is still a higher chance you’d get a bearable life in the future, even if you were at the bottom of that society, than you’d randomly for sure get in the past. If we have any sense of what the past was really like, we intuitively know that today is much better than the past. This difference is probable (not guaranteed) to be true of a future date; it is highly likely no one born in 2070 would want to be born in 2020.

The denial of progress is directly linked to ignorance of the past. There are romantic notions of the past that are not based on evidence; some of these lovely visions of the past are not untrue; it’s just that they are select, rare, privileged slivers that disregard the actual state of most humans for most times in most places, which any serious inquiry into global history will reveal. Today there is still huge discrepancy between the well-off of the world and the bulk mass of most humans in most places. But the point of the time machine thought experiment is that virtually everyone would rather be at the bottom today than at the bottom 200+ years ago. Indeed, those most eager to point their time machine ride into the future are those who have the least today, which is the bulk, or most of humanity. We would rather inhabit a random future role than a random past role because progress (on average) is real.

Originally posted on The Technium

However there are two characteristics in Asian culture today that hinder the innovation spirit. These two traits are loosely but widely held. They are held by the society at large, and they are self-reinforcing by the society, but — evidence shows — are in no way genetic, or rooted in individuals. Those two traits are: embracing failure, and questioning authority.

In most traditional Asian cultures, the good of the group is elevated. Failure by one person disgraces the whole group, and questioning authority undermines its integrity. Yet, embracing failure and questioning authority about “what everyone knows” is a key attribute for innovation. The relative lack of these qualities in Asian societies is one reason it is not as fast in developing breakthrough inventions compared to cultures that do. However, the evidence shows that when hundreds of thousands of Asians migrate from their homeland to a different culture, they can very quickly adopt these two traits to become the most innovative people in the world. Some very high percentage of successful startups in Silicon Valley were founded by Asians coming directly from traditional Asian cultures. This suggests that these traits are fairly malleable, and that it does not take much to alter in place. I can easily image Asian cultures in the future becoming beacons for innovation, by embracing failure and adopting challenges to authority.

Indeed this is already happening. While innovation centers like Silicon Valley tend to dismiss the innovation capabilities of regions like China and India, the west is somewhat blind to the speed at which these cultures are changing. In Asia there is a collective and individual desire to be more innovative, and there is also a wide-awake realization that the two missing qualities need to be addressed. And so they are being addressed through education, government policy, and new company culture. The results are that a first order innovation is spreading in Asia. This is sometimes referred to as incremental innovation: a long chain of continuous improvements. Japan, Korea and China are the world leaders in the excellence of manufacturing. Nobody makes things at scale as well as they do, and this was achieved through many innovations in the manufacturing methods. They choose to innovate machine excellence and they did.

The second order innovation — the breakthrough — does not happen as often in Asia, but it will very soon. In the 1800s America was derided by Europe as the land of pirates, thiefs, copycats, counterfeiters, and dumb imitators — and it was. Americans stole technological know-how, IP, and anything that could be copied (like Charles Dicken’s novels) wholesale in order to jump-start their own culture and industries. There was a very long tradition of this. First the student copies the master to perfection, and then the student becomes a master that others can copy. Asia has been doing the same as a student. But it is quickly becoming a master of technology, and it will begin to create masterpieces and deep innovation.

It is important to recognize that these two qualities of embracing failure and questioning authority are not the only qualities needed for innovation. Creativity, hard work, empathy, endurance, and many others are required. But these latter qualities are already widely shared in Asia, and the former two are relatively sparse — but becoming more common. I fully expect to see a major technological advance come out of China in the next 10 years that will wow the world, and lead to something that everyone in the world wants.

Originally posted on The Technium

I wrote this small essay for Maria Popova’s anthology The Velocity of Being: Letters to a Young Reader. This book is a collection of letters paired with art, words by writers matched with art by artists. The intent is to encourage kids to read. My piece follows:

Imagine you can choose your own superpower. You get to pick one of these three: flying, invisibility, or being able to read. Which one do you choose? Flying is not so useful without other superpowers; invisibility is okay for being naughty or for a little fun but not good for much else. But if you could read, especially if you were the only one who could read … you’d be the most powerful person on Earth. You would be able to tap into all the wisdom of the smartest people who ever lived on the planet. Their knowledge would go from their heads through squiggles on paper through your eyes right into your head. You would learn things from them that no ordinary mortal would ever have enough time to learn by themselves. You would kind of be as smart as everybody in total. In fact the best ideas and knowledge from geniuses long dead would be in your mind. Not that you have to remember it all. Any time you want you can use your superpower of reading to find the exact information you need using the lookup method.

Reading is a superpower that also gives you a type of teleportation. It can transport your mind to a different place than where your body is. The feeling of being immersed in a different place, or even a different time period, can be so strong you may not want to leave.

When you have this superpower you can see the world from the viewpoint of someone else. You see the outside through their eyes. This is an amazing power that allows you to get more things done with others, with less violence and sorrow. It also helps protect you from the mistakes and untruths of others as well as your own ignorance.

In the real world of course, you would not be the only person with this superpower. Many other people acquire this power. This doesn’t diminish your power, it actually increases it. Because others can read, they can write, which increases the number of living minds you can connect your mind with. With the power of reading today you can connect with billions of other minds, in almost real time. Their minds can be funneled from anywhere on the globe right to your mind.

More and more of our society is centered on pictures and images, which is a beautiful thing. But some of the most important parts of life are not visible in pictures. Ideas, insights, logic, reason, mathematics, intelligence. These can’t be drawn, photographed, or pictured. They have to be conveyed in words, arranged in a orderly string, and can only be understood by those who have acquired the superpower of reading.

This superpower is always with you; it will never leave you. But like all superpowers, it increases the more you use it. The more you write, the better you read; the more you read, the better you write. It does not matter where you read, whether on bits of paper, or on a screen. It does not matter where you write, whether on bits of paper or on a screen. Someday in the future there will be new machines and even newer ways to read and write. This is a superpower that will only increase in value and power as time progresses. At any time, it beats any other superpower you can name.

Originally posted on The Technium

For many years overpopulation was the Ur-worry. The prospect of too many people on a finite planet stood behind common environmental worries from pollution to global warming. Significant numbers of educated couples skipped having children at all, or no more than one child, so they would do their part in preventing overpopulation. In China, having a single child was a forced decision.

While the global population of humans will continue to rise for at least another 40 years, demographic trends in full force today make it clear that a much bigger existential threat lies in global underpopulation.

That worry seem preposterous at first. We’ve all seen the official graph of expected human population growth. A steady rising curve swells past us now at 7 billion and peaks out about 2050. The tally at the expected peak continues to be downgraded by experts; currently UN demographers predict 9.2 billion at the top. The peak may off by a billion or so, but in broad sweep the chart is correct.

But curiously, the charts never show what happens on the other side of the peak. The second half is so often missing that no one even asks for it any longer. It may be because it is pretty scary news. The untold story of the hidden half of the chart is that it projects a steady downward plunge toward fewer and fewer people on the planet each year — and no agreement on how close to zero it can go. In fact there is much more agreement about the peak, than about how few people there will be on the planet in a 100 years.

A lower global population is something that many folks would celebrate. The reason it is scary is that the low will keep getting lower. All around the world the fertility rate is dropping below replacement level country by country so that globally there will soon be an un-sustaining population. With negative population growth each generation produces fewer offspring, who producer fewer still, till there are none. Right now Japan’s population is way below replacement level; indeed Japan is losing total population; every year there are fewer and fewer Japanese. Most of Europe, Eastern Europe, Russia, the Former Soviet Republics, and some Asia countries are running below replacement levels. It goes further than Japan. Today Germany and Ukraine have absolute population decline; they are already experiencing the underpopulation bomb.

The shocking news is that the developing world is not far behind. This is not the stereotypical image. While developing countries are above replacement level, their birthrates are dropping fast. Much of Africa, South America, the Mid-East and Iran have fertility rates that are dropping fast. The drop in fertility in has recently stalled in some sub-Saharan African nations but that is because development there has stalled. When development resumes, fertility will drop again — because fertility rates are linked to urbanity. There is a deep feedback cycle: the more technologically developed a society becomes, the fewer offspring couples will have, the easier it is for them to raise their living standards, the more that progress lowers their desire for large families. The result is the spiral of modern technological population decline — a new but now universal pattern.

All that it would take to break this downward spiral is that many women living in cities all around the world decide to have more than 2 children in order to raise the average fertility level to 2.1 children. That means substantial numbers of couples would have to have 3 or 4 children in urban areas to make up for those with none or only one. It is possible it could become fashionable to have 4 kids in the city. The problem is that these larger families are not happening anywhere where the population has become urban, and urbanity is now the majority mode of the population and becoming moreso. Every developed country on the planet is experiencing falling birth rates. The one exception has been the US because of its heavy immigration, primarily because of catholic Hispanic immigrants, but even that is changing. The most recent report shows that the birth rates of hispanic immigrants in the US is dropping faster than ever. Soon the US will be on par with the rest of the world with plunging birth rates.

To counter this scary population implosion Japan, Russia, Australia pay bonuses for newborns. Singapore (with the lowest fertility rate in the world) will pay couples $5,000 for a first child and up to $18,000 for a third child — but to no avail; Singapore’s rate is less than 1 child per woman. In the past drastic remedies for reducing fertility rates were hard, but they worked. Drastic remedies for increasing fertility don’t seem to work so far.

Our global population is aging. The moment of peak youth on this planet (measured as the average age of humans on the planet) was in 1972. Ever since then the average age on Earth has been getting older each year, and there is no end in sight for the aging of the world for the next several hundred years! The world will need the young to work and pay taxes for medical care of the previous generation, but the young will be in short supply. Mexico is aging faster than the US, so all those young migrant workers that seem to be a problem now will soon be in demand back at home. In fact after the peak, individual countries will race against each other to import workers, modifying immigration policies, but these individual successes won’t affect the global picture.

The picture for the latter half of this century will look like this: Increasing technology, cool stuff that extends human life; more older people who live longer, millions of robots, but few young people. Another way to look at the human population in 100 years from now is that we’ll have the same number of over 60-year olds, but several billion fewer youth.

We have no experience throughout human history with declining population and rising progress (including during the Black Plague years). Some modern countries with recent population decline have experienced an initial rise in GDP because there are fewer “capitas” in the calculation made per capita, but this masks long-term diminishment. But there can always be a first time! We might be able to figure it out. Here is the challenge: this is a world where every year there is a smaller audience than the year before, a smaller market for your goods or services, fewer workers to choose from, and a ballooning elder population that must be cared for. We’ve never seen this in modern times; our progress has always paralleled rising populations, bigger audiences, larger markets and bigger pools of workers. It is hard to see how a declining yet aging population functions as an engine for increasing the standard of living every year. To do so would require a completely different economic system, one that we are not prepared for at all right now.

The challenges of a peak human population are real, but we know what we have to do; the challenges of a dwindling human population tending toward zero in a developed world are scarier because we’ve never been there before. It’s something to worry about.

Originally posted on The Technium

The new Disney movie Lion King marks a threshold for a new way of making a film, another step erasing the line between artifice and reality, between the virtual and the natural.

The entire set of the film — all the background and characters –are virtual, that is, computer created. The entire movie was shot in what we would today call VR. As this article makes clear, the director John Favreau says “We’ve basically built a multiplayer VR filmmaking game just for the purposes of making this movie.” This is a method that will be ordinary, if not normal, for many movies in the future.

The film is created by using virtual cameras inside the virtual wildlands of Africa. The virtual animals go through their programmed moves, like an actor would, and the cinematographers must capture and record their performance inside the VR world. Sometimes the direct will reshoot a scene to get a different angle, or a shift in the light. The director of photography, Caleb Deschanel, says “you really are doing exactly what you do when you make a movie.” The actors that voice the animals will act out their roles in a room rigged with microphones. They will be filmed as they move and their movements will be used to guide the animal movements. Those human actions will be translated into lion, or baboon or elephant behaviors, but their human voices remain. The action is built around the voice.

Today live-action action movies are often completely sketched out in a rough crude “previs” (pre-visualization) stage before they are filmed. That way the directors can watch the movie before it is filmed. Animated movies, like those from Pixar, are also completely prevised at various stages before being rendered or lit, which enables everyone working on them to see the movie before it is made. Now with ever more realistic movies, not of fantasy worlds, but of the real world, the previs stage is the same default. In a real sense, Lion King is an animation. It will be interesting to see how Hollywood classifies it. It totally looks live action, but like Toy Story, it is actually painted layer by layer, from rough doodles to finished 3D photo realistic synthetic video.

The movie Avatar pioneered in creating totally artificially constructed worlds, but in that movie the actors were “live-action” or real. In Lion King the actors are animals that are not real. Ready Player One also had virtual sets and virtual actors, and it was filmed by pushing a virtual camera through the virtual set, but the world they inhabited was not quite photo realistic in the same way or detail that Lion King is; here nature looks real down to each blade of grass.

The new way of movie-making uses a virtual production process which employs a video game engine to create the landscapes and characters, including animals. Each object, scene, character is computer generated to look so convincing that most people can’t tell they are not real. Except the animals may speak, or humans fly. Lion King is the cumulation of four strands of new filming: 1) CGI, computer special effects, 2) wholly animated movies like Pixar’s Coco or Up, and 3) the “previs” multiplied by a 1,000 and 4) VR and video games. The special effects guru Robert Legato says “Everybody does VFX movies, everybody does animated movies, everybody does live-action movies — but to mix all of them together to make something that belies how it was done is, I think, the game-changing portion of all this.”

How far can this go? I believe it will go all the way. It may become easier/better to creating a New York City apartment in LA (or Beijing) to film a movie in, than to film in an apartment in New York City. Because movie making is about controlling all the variables, which are easier to control, and easier to expand, when done virtually. All the world becomes a stage, one that you can’t tell is not the real world. That dream has been way to expense to even imagine, but with Moore’s Law it won’t be out of reach for long. As Glenn Derry, a veteran fx leader said, “We’ll know virtual production will have made it, when we do rom-coms with it.”

Originally posted on The Technium

2) The natural habitat of data is in the commons. It is born in the commons, and will return to the commons, even if it is granted temporary monopolies. The longer it spends in the commons, the better.

3) Data is a shared resource, that only exists in relationship to its sources and substrates.

4) Any party that touches or generates a bit of data has rights and responsibilities about that data.

5) Rights always have corresponding responsibilities.

6) Control of data is both a right and responsibility that is always shared.

7) Privacy is a misunderstanding that does not apply to data.

8) Data is made more valuable by being connected to other data. Solitary data is worthless.

9) Data is made more valuable by moving. Storage is weak because it halts, “Movage” is better.

10) Both directions of movage are important — where it came from, where it goes.

11) The meta data about where data goes is as important as where it came from.

12) Ensuring bi-directionality, the symmetry of movage, is important to the robustness of the data net.

13) Data can generate infinite derivative data (meta data) but they all follow the same rules.

14) When new data is generated from data (meta data) the rights and responsibilities of the first generation proceed to the second.

15) At the same time, meta data has claims of rights and responsibilities upon the root data.

16) Data can be expensive or free, determined by the market. It has no inherent value.

17) Data is easy to replicate in time (free copies) and difficult to replicate over time (digital decay). The only way to carry data into the future is if it is exercised (moved) by those who care about it.

18) Like all other shared resources, data can suffer from the tragedy of the commons, and this commons must be protected by governments.

19) As the number of entities, including meta data, touching a bit of data expands over time, with claims of rights and responsibilities, some values will dilute and some will amplify.

20) To manage the web of relationships, rights and responsibilities of data will require technological and social tools that don’t exist yet.

Originally posted on The Technium