info assembly line, "flits" (long)

[Vladimir Z. Nuri]

these are a few ideas I've been working on intermittently for
some time on the possibility of an "information assembly line"
of the future.

Alvin Toffler was one of the first futurists to predict the
"third wave" or information economy. we are very steadily moving
our way into this new shift, with numerous signs attesting to
it, and reactionary forces ("Buchananism", see recent Wired)
arising as well.

however, we are only at the tip of the iceberg. even state-of-the-art
information economies like Silicon Valley I would not consider full
implementations of the idea. what would it really mean to have
an entire economy that is related to information? (caveat: I 
certainly am not saying that we will no longer have physical goods,
this is a misunderstanding of Toffler's thesis, and anyone who wants
more info on this point should consult his writing).

Moore's law comes to my mind, the trend that computer capability has
been doubling approximately every 18 months ever since chips were
first invented. what could this power have on a future information 
economy (henceforth abbreviated IE)? I tend to think that the future 
IE will make the current world wide web look like child's play, although it
will be built on top of it. we are far from implementing the full
capabilities of information technology in our economy.

==

first, I think the use of microcurrency is going to play a very
major role in the future IE. it will allow people to easily own
mini-businesses in much the same way the web has allowed everyone to
own printing presses. I've written elsewhere on cybercurrency, but
I also tend to think it will have the effect of creating new
monetary standards. whereas in our current economy, wealth is
typically tied to major world economies, particularly the US
through dollars, I've said how I think stocks will come to be
thought of as a kind of currency, and that any company that sells
stock is essentially circulating its own currency. I think the
short term effect of cybercurrency is going to be a grafting on
top of existing government cash schemes, but that much to their
chagrin they are going to eventually realize it tends to make
their own regulatory and supervisory role obsolete-- or at least
displace it.

==

now imagine taking the cybercurrency concept and applying it
to an information economy. what you will tend to see is that 
cash transfers will increasingly be automated. cash will be
like the blood flow of society. you will see companies automating
their payment processes so all the man-labor associated with
handling the paperwork will tend to evaporate. you will of
course still have verification systems that prevent payment
when payment is unjustified, but the massive frameworks and
bureacracies inside companies today that are used to deal with 
cash flows will tend to be automated and diminished in size.

==

the idea that strikes me most about an information economy
is that you're going to see systems that are similar to the
concept of the assembly line for the industrial economy. 
I believe we will literally see information assembly lines
in the future. what kind of form would they take?

we already have "information assembly lines" in companies today
but they are abstract concepts of flow of work that are
not fully automated. parts of the assembly line involve people
moving around documents, sending letters, having conversations,
etc.  I tend to think that much of this will be increasingly
encoded in cyberspace. a company will see its role as an
information processing component. 

let's say this sample company gets a work order. the primary 
means of transfer will be through cyberspace. today cyberspace
is seen as an adjunct to paperwork-- the paperwork is primary,
but you can put the paperwork in cyberspace file cabinets, 
send it via cyberspace, etc.  I believe this will exactly flip
in the future, so that the paperwork is seen as an adjunct to
cyberspace. the documents will be freely transportable in 
cyberspace, and one can always track their location, just like
one can always see where some object is on an assembly line.
the work order will be thought of as primarily a document 
existing in cyberspace, with it taking various forms in
different places on the assembly line based on actions of the
information workers, who process it and tie it with other
documents, etc.

==

what does today's cyberspace lack to pull off this vision? after
a bit of thought I think one word to describe it might be
"continuity" or "persistence". there are so many obstacles in cyberspace to
transporting documents. it requires too much manual effort
on the part of each person to translate documents into particular
formats, send them via email, etc.  what we need is the cyberspatial
equivalent of continuity: people anywhere can look at the same
object and see the same thing, and that thing can be moved around
in cyberspace without ever losing its identity.

the problem is that today the concept of a "document" in "cyberspace"
is merely a concept. I can't point to some "place" in cyberspace
when I want someone to grab a document from me. I can't say, "here
it is". I have to go through an artificial series of steps to
encode the document, such as emailing it, ftping it, 
uuencoding it, or whatever.

what I am getting at is that we need a kind of virtual reality to
pull off the information assembly line to its utmost potential. I
believe we literally need to create a visual metaphor for the 
information assembly line that transcends the concepts of email,
different computers, etc.  I should be able to "pick up" and "move"
a document in cyberspace as easily as I move a piece of paper in
the real world. the whole system of different servers, different
software packages, different protocols, all this should 
be *invisible*  to me in the same way it is invisible on the current
WWW.

imagine that one actually created a total virtual reality 
information assembly line. what kind of form would it take? you
would see different things that can be done to documents
as "tools" that can be applied to them. you would see their
locations as simple visual metaphors that ignore the concepts
that segregate information. for example, you might see a single
file cabinet that represents every record in an entire company,
regardless of its location anywhere in that company. tough to
pull off? of course, but this is what we are headed towards, in
my opinion.

===

I've written multiple times about Negroponte's ingenious concept
of "bits vs. atoms". in the above spirit, 
I think we need a slight additional paradigm
shift on the concept of bits, something I call a "flit". 

the concept of a bit is too abstract for me. for a virtual reality
and an assembly line, I would prefer to say that information has
two additional components other than a binary true/false value:
a *location*, and a *time* that it is at a location. in this way
information better matches our reality that we deal with every
day. I would say the "flit" concept is a pivotal missing link
in creating an information assembly line.

I would say that an information assembly line document is
actually composed of "flits" instead of bits. each "flit" can
have a different location at different times in cyberspace.
it is a sort of "fleeting bit", a bit that can move around to
different places.

this requires a somewhat radical shift in current technological
thinking. currently we see data as stationary stuff that sits
in some place, and people come along and run programs that
churn up the bits and spit out new bits. but the new bits are
not nicely tied to the old bits except through our own memories.

==

instead I would say that the key concept of information is to
say that it has a content and a state at some time. a document
composed of a bunch of "flits" can be broken up into its 
component "flits", and the "flits" can be sent in different
directions and recombined into different documents. but because
they are "flits", I can *trace* their destinations over time.

what does this mean? it is the concept of debugging applied to
information technology. imagine that I once had a document, and
I want to know what happened to it. because it is made of 
"flits", I could say, "where did the flits that comprise this
document go?" I would get an answer about their entire history--
what programs the moved through, how they were recombined, 
where they now reside. I could trace backwards too. "where did
this flit come from?" -- the system would trace the origination
of the flits.

what the flit concept does is introduce a *context* to a bit.
a bit has no "context".  where did a bit come from? the situation
with information is that it always has a *context* and is tied
with other information. (so in addition, I might like to suggest
that "flits" can be "tied together" with each other).

when today's software spits out some document, there is nothing
necessarily tying that document with the original input except
the memory of the humans. I would suggest that the information
assembly lines of the future will replace this concept. nothing
will be left to the imagination. things that are part of people's
memory today will be made explicit in the systems of tomorrow.
the abstract concepts we have of systems being "tied" together
will look very embryonic and impoverished compared to these
new techniques.

"flits" would have an identity irrespective of companies. one
could track them moving through different companies if necessary.
(the "flits" might therefore also have security aspects associated with
them.)  the point is that the data must not be disconnected, it
must be seen as continuous, and I think a flit-like concept is key
to accomplishing this.

==

notice today how much our systems diverge from the flit concept.
we are always losing bits, and not tying them together. whenever
a system goes down, all those bits evaporate. this would not
be acceptable in a flit universe-- it would be like an object
suddenly blinking out of existence. obviously we don't consider that
an acceptable behavior of objects in our current reality, why
should we allow it in cyberspace? cyberspace has a long ways to
go. today's cyberspace is barely sufficient for what is required.

in a flit universe, I would like to see flits "pile up" in a
queue when a machine breaks, like what happens in a real 
assembly line. the assembly line metaphor is really crucial
here. imagine that on some assembly line, all your objects
suddenly disappear when a machine anywhere on the assembly
line breaks. you have to then run other machines to "bring
back" the flits. a ridiculous concept. instead, I'd like to
see flits pile up when some machine goes down on the assembly
line. once you get the machine running, it automatically starts
back going through the flits.

a lot of this implies "transaction tracking" by conventional
standards. I would suggest that "transaction tracking" and
integrity assurance are only the barest rudiments of what is
required to pull off an information assembly line. the 
belief that these are now considered incredibly cutting-edge
and state-of-the-art technologies
is a good indication of how far we have to go.

==

I mentioned Moore's law above because I think it takes care of
all objections that "so and so that you are proposing would take
too much time". imagine that we have virtually unlimited 
computational capabilities-- what could we then do with this
kind of power? tracking "flits" would be an excellent use
for all this power, imho.

in future essays I may explore further the properties of flits
and give more examples.