“Is Information Magic? It Better Be.”

Constellation Pictures
Is there really an image of a bear in the nighttime sky? How about an archer, or some girls, or a big and little dipper?

Across the planet and the centuries, people have seen pictures in the stars—and more or less the same pictures, too. It takes a special kind of intelligence to do that. Dogs, for example, are intelligent creatures, but they don’t see the pictures.

As soon as people saw the star-pictures, they did another distinctly human thing: They made up stories about the pictures. Those stories were an attempt to comprehend the structure of something infinitely large and not directly knowable, and to make humanity a home in it.

But, again, are the star-pictures “real”? Before we answer that, let’s ask this: Are the stories real? Well, of course they’re real. They exist, don’t they? People invented them and there they are. They have whatever reality stories can have—which happens to be a lot.

Well, the pictures are real, too. In exactly the same way.

The pictures came from pattern-recognition applied to data-points, and the stories are models of reality based upon the pictures.

Humanity is now creating a cosmos of its own—a digital cosmos in which the stars are points of information. Trillions upon trillions of sensors and controllers built into everyday electronic devices, products, and environments will generate whole starfields of data-points around themselves. The pattern-recognition built into the digital cosmos will “see” meaningful pictures in that infinity of stars, and those pictures will generate stories that will in turn make sense of human reality in ways never before possible.

The Magic of Databases
You’ve heard the famous observation by the writer Arthur C. Clarke: “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.”

Most ordinary, non-technical people first “got it” about the magic of databases from Amazon.com. It started with “People who bought this also bought this.” Then it became “People who clicked on this also clicked on this.” Then it moved beyond being about “people” and started being about you: “The store you made.”

And then Amazon sat up on the table and started having…opinions: “We think you’ll like this.” And to an uncanny degree, the opinions and suggestions were right. You’d never even heard of half the things they were recommending, but those things just happened to be right up your alley.

Amazon stopped being a “store” and started being an intelligent entity that—to some very real degree— understood who you were and what you cared about.

“Please Drop Everything You’re Doing So We Can Serve You Better”
Did you ever receive an email from Amazon.com that said, “Dear Valued Customer: Please take three hours to fill out the following 400-question survey so we may better understand your tastes and needs and preferences”? No, you didn’t. If that had been Amazon’s approach, they wouldn’t be around today.

On the other hand, do you think that in the last three years you’ve spent a total of three hours in the pages of Amazon.com? Probably you have. And even if you never bought a single thing, even if you just clicked around, you fed Amazon’s picture-making brain a lot of dots. Every click of your mouse was like a new star in the sky, and now Amazon sees a picture of you and can tell you a story about yourself. It’s a beautiful story in which you discover many wonderful things that you never knew about. Sure, in the story you buy all those wonderful things from Amazon.com, but hey, as far as we’re concerned, they earned it.

Amazon.com is a very smart company because its leaders believed in the reailty and value of the pictures and stories you could get from a zillion little points of information. They backed up that belief with a lot of investment, and took the mechanisms of the Internet to a whole new level.

Your Own Private Milky Way
The act of leaving your star-trail in the Amazon galaxy was “transparent” to you. You weren’t thinking about it. It required no special effort or conscious thought. It cost you nothing. It was the invisible by-product of normal activity, captured and then analyzed by ingenious systems invented to create value from something that ordinarily would have disappeared into the ether.

That’s the magic of databases—which are, after all, just endless space to hold our stars.

In the truly connected world of the Pervasive Internet, not only people but all electronic or electro-mechanical products and machines will leave similarly invisible trails of information stars, all the time.

That’s why we use the term “Invisible Business” to describe the impact of the Pervasive Internet on commerce and consumers. It means extraordinary value gleaned from something that used to be used to be thought of as insignificant and thrown away. It means trillions of genies in trillions of bottles invisibly taking care of trivia that isn’t worth the attention of something as important as a human being.

Given a constant stream of star-points (sensors in smart devices), and sufficient analytic and inference-drawing intelligence (smart device management), the possible pictures and stories (smart services with real-world value) are unlimited.

In business, this translates into system optimization, extraorindary new partner and customer connectivity, and “global enterprise automation.”

Exhilarating or Terrifying?
Some people love to look up at the stars. The majesty of the cosmos makes them feel bigger, not smaller. They accept the mystery of being one point in a universe of points. They feel augmented and ennobled by it, not diminished and threatened.

But other people dislike the infinity of stars. We know people who literally cannot look up into the nighttime sky. The sight of even a sliver of the cosmos sends them into vertiginous panic.

The infinity of information-points in the digital cosmos causes panic in some people, too. They fear that it will take away their identity and privacy. They would rather live with the consequences of ignorance than let other people have information about them. They don’t want anyone “monitoring” anything about their lives.

In future issues of “Currents” we’ll undertake a serious discussion of security, privacy, and freedom in a truly connected world. For the moment, we’ll say only this: Governments and monolithic companies are not creating or controlling pervasive computing and global networking. They would like to, no doubt, but unfortunately (for them) the toothpaste is out of the tube and it’s not going back in. There will be no Microsoft of the Pervasive Internet—not because Microsoft saw it too late and failed to act (although you could certainly make that case), but because monolithic trolls collecting tolls at every gateway are the rapidly disappearing dragons of a primitive past.

The people who are creating the pervasive, ubiquitous digital future happen to be privacy freaks. Their obsession with privacy and freedom leads to their obsession with the necessity of open, interoperable technologies. This is the global community of people you can thank for getting unbreakable encryption built into your Web browser, for example, despite concerted efforts of the U.S. government to keep it from happening. Without them, there would be no secure e-banking, e-commerce, or e-anything. These are the true inventors of the future. They are committed to individual control of individual information, and that’s the way it’s going to be.

So, if “Big Brother” is the first thing that pops into your head when you hear about things like smart devices and invisible, global automation, you’re working with an antique constellation-picture of the future. Take another look at those stars.

[Editor’s note: You can comment on this piece or anything else we do by sending email to feedback@harborresearch.com.]