Epic : A fascinating and possibly prophetic flash film of things to come in terms of information aggregation, recommendations, and filtering. It focuses on Google and Microsoft’s (along with a host of others, including Blogger, Amazon, and Friendster) competing contributions to the field. It’s eight minutes long, and well worth the watch. It touches on many of the concepts I’ve been writing about here, including self-organization and stigmergy, but in my opinion it stops just short of where such a system would go.
It’s certainly interesting, but I don’t think it gets it quite right (Googlezon?). Or perhaps it does, but the pessimistic ending doesn’t feel right to me. Towards the end, it claims that a comprehensive social dossier would be compiled by Googlezon (note the name on the ID – Winston Smith) and that everyone would receive customized newscasts which are completely automated. Unfortunately, they forsee majority of these customized newscasts as being rather substandard – filled with inaccuracies, narrow, shallow and sensational. To me, this sounds an awful lot like what we have now, but on a larger (and less manageable) scale. Talented editors, who can navagate, filter, and correlate Googlezon’s contents, are able to produce something astounding, but the problem (as envisioned by this movie) is that far too few people have access to these editors.
But I think that misses the point. Individual editors would produce interesting results, but if the system were designed correctly, in a way that allowed everyone to be editors and a way to implement feedback loops (i.e. selection mechanisms), there’s no reason a meta-editor couldn’t produce something spectacular. Of course, there would need to be a period of adjustment, where the system gets lots of things wrong, but that’s how selection works. In self-organizing systems, failure is important, and it ironically ensures progress. If too many people are getting bad information in 2014 (when the movie is set), all that means is that the selection process hasn’t matured quite yet. I would say that things would improve considerably by 2020.
The film is quite worth a watch. I doubt this specific scenario will play out, but it’s likely that something along these lines will occur. [Via the Commissar]
I think your prediction of how such a system would work out makes sense. I thought the flash film was pretty interesting, if a bit simplistic. It’s a state similar to something I can easily envision us reaching in the near future but I would expect a more complex business structure behind it.
Is Google News really edited by computer? That’s interesting.
I also enjoyed the similiarities between the EPIC system and the Metaverse Library of Snow Crash…although the personalization here is far more extensive, the idea that anyone can contribute information, and be paid for it is the same.
I liked the thinly veiled jab at the current relatively shoddy state of mainstream media of late…though I hope that this is a more pessimistic view of the future of media, I wonder, given what seems to pass for mainstream media…to find good journalism, more and more it seems that a reader has to sift through the bad stuff…information filtering….which the film did touch on, though in a somewhat different aspect.
Plus, the EPIC logo with the pi symbol in the shadow was really neat.
Also, I’m with DyRE, I imagine the business behind all of this would be much more complex than that.
Well, I think something like EPIC will happen, complete with inaccurate reporting, etc… but I’m not so sure that the pessimism is warranted. These sorts of systems don’t produce immediate perfection, but they are able to (eventually) extract something worthwhile from a chaotic mess. And we’re well on our way towards creating a chaotic mess in terms of information. We can only hope that with the increased ability to create and disseminate media, there also comes new technologies to filter and correllate said information…
Interestingly enough, we’re already living in a somewhat similar world. There are “trusted” mainstream media sources, and then there is the internet. The internet is considerably less trustworthy (containing much that is false, shallow, and sensational), but (as has been a recent theme here) that does not mean it is useless. Ironically, it is it’s untrustworthiness (and the willingness to acknowledge it’s untrustworthiness) that makes it useful, and it is beginning to challenge mainstream media.
EPIC would probably start in a similar manner. No one would trust it at first, and they would thus do a lot of information hunting and filtering in an attempt to verify any given story. If the system is built to facilitate self organization, this person’s efforts will be propagated throughout the system (probably not as an individual, but as part of a trend, so to speak). Standard practices will develop and become automated, and so on. EPIC would work, but only if its participants acknowledge its flaws, however massive (and at the beginning, its flaws will be massive).
So again, I’m not so sure the film’s pessimism is warranted, even if it is accurate…