garethace

Good Interview from across the pond: Amtrak CEO David Gunn

First Page:

http://www.masstransitmag.com/script/search.asp?SearchSiteURL=/articles/2003/mt_12-03/mt_12-03_01.htm

Second Page:

http://www.masstransitmag.com/script/search.asp?SearchSiteURL=/articles/2003/mt_12-03/mt_12-03_02.htm

Here is just a small quote from Howard Rheingold’s book, Virtual Reality. Brooks explained, that intelligence amplification had much more scope for development and use, than work happening on AI, at other universities.

Brooks sees three areas in which human minds are more powerful than any computer algorithms yet designed. “The first of these is pattern recogniition, whether visual or aural” he said. “Computer scientists don’t even have good ways of approximating the pattern recognition power of a one-week-old baby uses to recognise its mother’s face from an angle and with a lighting it has never seen before.” In which case, Brooks believes, it is possible to multiply that power by using the computer to show humans patterns in ways they are not normally able to perceive, and let the human side of the system decide which ones are meaningful.

The second major area of human computational superiority is the realm of what Brooks calls evaluations: “Every time you go to the supermarket, you’re performing the kind of evaluations that the computer algorithms we have today can only roughly approximate.” The third area of human mental superiority is in the “the overall sense of context that enables us to recall, at the appropriate moment, something that was read in an obscure journal twenty years previously, in reference to a completely different subject, that we suddenly see to be meaningful.”

According to Brooks, the three areas in which computers are more skilled than human minds are “evaluations of computations, storing massive amounts of data, and remember things without forgetting.” I asked Brooks how he thought a human-computer cooperative system ought to be built, and he replied: “I think in an ideal system for tackling a very hard problem, the machine does the calculation and remembering and searching of data bases – and by calculation I mean the evaluation of some very complicated functions – while the human being does the strategy, evluation, pattern recognition, planning, and fetching information in context.”

When you start to define the interface for such a system, you bring yourself to the threshold of VR. Brooks presents it as an ineluctable logic, the same logic that computer graphics pioreer Ivan Sutherland followed in 1965 when he made the first head-mounted display and mapped out the agengda for all those in the future who would seek ways to put the user inside a computer-created world, insted of peering in at at it through a narrow window.

Now if you really want to see places, where Fred’s ideas are used today, just look at Tim Hubbard’s ideas for a public domain project to look and analyse, organise and order the data for the human genome. They are using an online web service to try and someway annotate and ‘develop’ that data into something useable. This kinda brings one back to a study of Ivan Sutherland, Frederick Brooks, and many other early VR pioneers.

The pioneers like Brooks in VR, were just concerned about guiding the early steps of a new technology in the right direction. Something like Neil Gershenfeld and personal fabrication nowadays. Having left IBM, and done the operating system for the IBM 360 mainframe, Brooks managed to get a graphics system from IBM to get started in University of Northern Carolina, with early VR systems. This was back in the late 1960s and early 1970s.

Brian O’ Hanlon.

you describe, graphically, the structure of your organisation – painting the entities and the relationships between them; you “draw” the flow of information through it; you express rules of your business in an English-like language;

Yeah, didn’t Fred Brooks say something like show me your flow charts, and hide your tables, and I will be even more confused. But show me your tables and hide your flow charts, and everything will be clear. Eric Raymond, underlined this, in the Cathedral and the Bazaar, by saying, good design structure and dumb code is much better than the other way around. I heard Fred Brooks saying in his Silver Bullet Essay, well worth tracking down, if you haven’t already read through it – that contemporary monitor screens just aren’t up to the task of graphically representing a flow diagram for software. Something like the size of a desk would be more suitable, and even then, a lot of engineers have been known to forsake the desk, for the wider expanse of the floor.

Had a good chance to read your post properly there, and absorb it properly. I had a very similar conversation not a long time ago, with someone else on Fuzzy Logic, compared with statistical methods of generating the exact same tools. Except, if you call it statistics it sounds old-hat, but at some conference, the AI bunch claimed that some billion dollar helicopter project in Asia, had been saved from a mess, just by applying ‘Fuzzy Logic’ to the problem. What my friend so clearly pointed out, was that describing something old, with new cool terminology was all that was going on. In your case, you are talking about something slightly different, about cool new technologies, whose ideas are seductive, displacing otherwise good technologies, whose ideas aren’t at all as sexy perhaps.

By far the most entertaining novel I have read about software engineering, is by Bill Blunden, called Cube Farm, about his experiences with working on several software engineering projects, in Minnesota back in the day. Mostly, Bill specialises in keeping the legacy software applications going now. Having had such an awful experience at Minnesota, he decided that ‘new technology’ was not for him. Well worth picking up a copy of Cube Farm, if you do need a good laugh.

Link I just thought you might like too:

http://www.aceshardware.com/forums/read_post.jsp?id=115080617&forumid=1

Just to expand a bit, by use of analogy on things hard and soft. The concept of money has always been ‘hard’. Hard-cash, hard currency. In our language we have this notion of money actually standing for something real, tangible that one can practically touch, grasp and contain. Just like cities are thought to be physical, atom-based things – things you can define, cost, plan, build and subsidise. What more enlightened thinking about urban design has highlighted, is the softer issues to do with cities, the flesh and veins stuff that bind them together in many ways. So lets just talk a little about money as hardware and software, in Ireland, in the world context, or 2005. As I get older, I understand more, that we don’t change terribly as individuals – but the world around you can change very radically, and set us up in different relationships with everything. These changes in history, have often been very sudden, unpredictable and unforgiving. We are finding it very difficult to discard some pre-conceptions about the way things work. Things that hark back to an earlier time when economies depended more on the working with atoms than with electronic bits. Even in traditional native industries like agriculture here in Ireland, the information associated with the carcass of meat – describing its quality, its age, its market and its origin, all the paperwork to do with subsidy etc – seem almost as important as the atoms that make up the meat itself.

“The markets conversion rate between atoms and bits has been running at about ten to one.”

Neil Gershenfeld’s chapter on Smart money, in ‘When Things Start to Think’, is a very interesting read, I recommend it. Development of computer technology in the 80s and 90s centered around creative manipulation of words, images, sounds and movies. But computing is becoming more pervasive and people are using computing now, while on the move. They are wearing several computers on their person, without hardly noticing it. It is not just about multimedia. When you begin to get a digital equivalent for something like money, it changes the way that money can be handled and how we think about it. I would argue, that with cities you are faced with a similiar challenge – to mix up your definition – with ideas from the soft and the hard sides.

“Money now represents nothing more than beliefs”

“What the market thinks it is worth.”

Are we going to end up with a poor standard for digital money – something proprietary, thrown-together and fairly restrictive like MIDI in the music industry – or will we have a more reliable open standard. Will we have people here in Ireland, for instance, working to create ways to manipulate digital money, and improve those ways, through open collaborative working? I mean, the recent health care computing systems news breaker, tells you just how important open collaborative working might be in the future. There you have something composed of both hardware and software – the buildings, beds, heating, lighting, environment of the hospitals – and the services provided by the doctors and nurses – the diagnosis, the care and the understanding. Then you have technology, which isn’t working well enough apparently, to allow all that to happen effectively.

“At the end of the gold standard, computing was done by relatively isolated mainframes. Computers were needed to record financial trends but did not create them.”

This imbalance is a recipe for disaster, because committing resources to a position is easy compared to evaluating the financial risk of a prortfolio of derivatives, which requires a detailed understanding of the state of the markets and how they are likely to move. In this unequal competition, the trading side almost always wins out over the risk assessment side. Some firms effectively give up and ask the traders to evaluate themselves. Tellingly, Lesson at Barings, and Iguichi at Daiwa, both kept their own books because their managers from an earlier generation did not feel capable of supervising them.

The solution is to recognise that the further that assets get divorced from underlying resources, the more necessary it becomes to merge spending with monitoring. Each new algorithm for valuing something must be mated to a new algorithm for assessing it. Back-end accounting then moves to the front lines, drawing on the same data feeds and mathematical models that are used for trading.

So that really, is why I think virtualisation, back-end computing of Sun Microsystems, and this whole space is important for the future. But I guess the point is, is it going to be transparent enough, so that the best brains can gain access to it, and improve its flaws. Thats a lot to ask of society – because we tend to think of stuff like money and creation of ‘value’ as some closed private kind of thing. I don’t know, because transportation is such a large physical concept in many peoples’ minds. And money is another very ‘large’ concept too, in everyones’ mind – I think this bias, to look at money, transportation, agriculture, health care, as atom based is a hangover from the 19th century and industrial revolution.

Brian O’ Hanlon.

There are two ways of being creative. One can sing and dance. Or one can create an environment in which singers and dancers flourish.

Warren G. Bennis.

The RIAI’s biggest problem, is that it doesn’t do anything – it doesn’t get directly involved in the management of it’s creative resources, it’s own members. It doesn’t get involved in the early training of young architects, who will one day, hope to become members – it doesn’t seem concerned in their well being. In fact, the RIAI does not go out of its way to attract and encourage new members at all – that is why they are a monopoly. At the other end of the scale, the RIAI does nothing whatsoever, to attempt to deal with changes in technology etc, that affect the profession of architecture. You have older architects out there now, whose ideas about design and how to practice, simply do not match up with the needs of today’s client and building contractor. By its failure to act, the RIAI is a monopoly – an obstacle in the way of progress. You have mentioned the film industry, well then, lets take a good look at another monopoly, Hollywood. I liken Hollywood in many ways, to the static organisation of the RIAI, which has been responsible for the intellectual capital contained within architectural design for a 100 years. By this, I mean the young people who are in the early stages of their development – and protection for them, as much as the older guys who have spent 30 years established in practice. I don’t think young architects are too worried about their name ‘Architect’ being copyrighted or not – they are more worried about the failure of the institute to help them in any way. In this day and age, the RIAI really doesn’t understand the world out there.

[Hollywood] It is now facing major technological challenges on several fronts. The new generation of low-cost digital production equipment enables anyone to make a reasonable quality film for a fraction of the conventional cost. This, in turn, allows a new generation of people to become film-makers without needing Hollywood’s money (for example, The Blair Witch Project). The cost of distribution is also about to fall. A celluloid print of a 100-minute 35mm film occupies four or five reels, costs over $1,300, is bulky and heavy, and starts to deteriorate after a few hundred screenings. It costs $400,000 to make enough five-reel prints for a national British release and $3 million for an American release. For a hundred years, there was no alternative. But video distribution, either by DVD or direct-to-cinema by satellite, now delivers sufficiently good quality to wean the companies off celluloid.

[cut…]

What is not in doubt is that, faced with these challenges, Hollywood will behave as it has always done, and as dominant companies tend to behave in any industry. It will try to continue unchanged for as long as possible.

Architecture as we like to think of it, is under huge threat from the same kinds of technological breakthroughs. The profession of architecture faces competition from many new levels of ‘management’ in the design process. Rather than helping architects to understand and deal with this challenge, most architects are left to deal with it themselves, and to do so very poorly. It is much cheaper and easier to design things nowadays than it was 50 years ago. It is much cheaper and easier to manage things in a distributed fashion – rather than in the old-fashioned way, of the centralised office structure. Information technology has de-centralised the whole process of design and building – without asking the permission of the architectural profession. The centralised office of the architect, has less and less to offer clients each day. You have educated and capable young people in Ireland today who want to practice as architects – but they are not being encouraged or helped by the system. The RIAI is intent on carrying on, as if, the same 20 people wanted to qualify each year – and basically you import whatever surplus you need, on short term arrangements. It sounds like a way to run a small, exclusive fishing club on a stretch of salmon river – than it does suggest a way to run a dynamic and innovative profession for the entire country! This architectural practice gave an AAI lecture in Dublin city last year:

http://www.henchion-reuter.com/

They practice here in Ireland and in Germany. They told the audience how in Germany the trades people coordinate with each another directly to achieve perfection in the end result. Apparently, in Germany a client can be their own ‘manager’, because the builders there still operate like craftspeople, and get into sync with each other. He showed slides of the finishes and component design within the buildings. To achieve a similar result in Ireland, it would take several levels of management, to force the trades to get into sync with each other. The trades here don’t want to know about anyone else. In my experience, of doing visualisation for clients who build 1 million pound houses – they are amazed when they see views of interiors done using 3DS VIZ technology – it is a level of service they never receive from an RIAI architect. In fact, I was working on a job, where a fight started between the client and architect – the client complained that the job was on site – and should have seen the visualisations to begin with, not at the end of the design process. The Architect told the client to ‘bugger off’! I lost my position doing visualisations for the firm, because I had encouraged the client to expect a level of service, that they were not supposed to expect. Even on a project, to design and build a house worth 1 million. I was attempting to do, what I imagined an architect was supposed to do – to satisfy their client as best they could. Oh, the naivety of a young architectural student! You see, I did paintings for several clients when I was a young man and that is how I would approach my task. I began to study in architecture coming from that kind of creative background. I had read about the famous architects in magazines doing such wonderful work for the clients – that was the kind of service I wanted to aim for, even if on a smaller, modest scale. As a young architectural student here in Ireland, I was promptly told to straighten myself out, and avoid ‘rocking the boat’.

If you think about it – cyberspace, as in telephones, faxes, TV and radio, emails, digital document formats, spreadsheets, drawing and image file formats have all happened in parallel to the rise in need for ‘management’ of building projects. Builder’s cabins on sites now, resemble information centers like the American military have in the gulf war campaign. Building contractors are connected directly with their managers through all kinds of wires and signals. When Sputnik went into orbit, it kick-started the development of the ‘ARPANET’ in the United States. The ARPANET in turn, helped to facilitate America’s expansion into science and creative endeavour. Nowadays, the USA holds a kind of rare position in terms of intellectual capital. In my overall studies of communication and all things digital, my definition of cyberspace has expanded to include many old systems like the telephone. Heck, even the post and telegraph service, was an early cyberspace. The humble telegraph was probably instrumental in the management of many projects in the early days of cyberspace. With cyberspace getting bigger, more powerful and more accessible each and every day, so too is the importance of various managers in the design process. Architects cannot do anything to stop this expansion of the digital universe, but don’t seem interested in getting into a position to deal with it. Other professions, other than architects have augmented their capabilities using the tools of communications and information technology. They appear to have solidified their position in the construction industry. This is a real shock to myself, or any of my old college friends who want to cling to the notion of a creative individual working with pencils and a roll of paper. The cosy image of the architect, that the RIAI seems to cling onto, like some old man gripping onto a blanket. In other words, the RIAI system of protection for architects, doesn’t protect or manage that creativity any longer.

Brian O’ Hanlon.

This is a nice article I was looking at only today:

http://www.architectureweek.com/2005/0907/tools_2-1.html