Where to pitch a cricket ball: an object lesson from the England cricket team

Something a little different today: Fast bowling line and length. The wealth of information on ESPNCricinfo's site makes for some fascinating observations on where to bowl a cricket ball. This information is taken from ESPN's cricinfo coverage of the Champions' Trophy One Day International between England and Australia on 8 June 2013.

In a nutshell, for a right armer, it should pitch OUTSIDE OFF STUMP. Exhibit one: all right arm seam bowlers bowling for England against Australia:

Given right armers will be bowling "over the wicket" (that is, to the left hand side of the stumps at the bowler's end) There is a clear "line of best fit" here which shows the line is towards middle stump.

When bowling to left hand batsmet they will tend to aim across the batsman and well outside his off stump. There's a very good reason for this: they'll get tonked if they put it on his leg side!) Because of the right armer's natural action, the ball will tend to "swing" in the air from right to left: away from the right hander and towards the left hander.

Note also that, to a right hand batsman, ALMOST NOTHING PITCHES IN LINE WITH THE STUMPS. The ball *should* land outside the line of off stump. Note also that NOTHING, BUT NOTHING, goes down the leg side. 

Also interesting to see what a difference consistency makes: 

Here's Mitchell Starc, the Australian left arm opener. He is bowling mostly left arm over the wicket, but is bowling round the wicket occasionally, which will make his "scatter pattern" more varied, but not so much as to explain the wide spattering here - this is like a Jackson Pollock!  Ten overs of this has cost Australia 75 runs for just one wicket  - incredibly expensive in a one day game.

Compare that to Stuart Broad (After 8 overs: he's still bowling as I write!)

This is really remarkably consistent line and length. But for one yorker, everything is short of a length - just a bit to short to drive, but not so short the batsman is comfortable playing off his back foot. He has to be watchful, and as a result Broad is very economical.

A Blue Peter guide to writing like a Lawyer

It takes years of study and practice to write properly florid legal text. While celebrity lawyers like Stanley Fish have taken ill-advisedly to the presses to entreaty us to write all our prose the same way, no-one actually enjoys reading legal text: not even the curmudgeon who has taken such pleasure in writing it. Construing a contract should not be a boldily pleasure but an act of ascetic sufferance the reward for which comes in the hereafter^[1]. Legal counsel does this so the client doesn't have to.

So here is a rare peak inside the fevered mind of a deal lawyer. Take a simple sentence conveying a simple proposition. The less content the better. For example:

Unless we hear from you before the end of the week, we’ll assume you are happy with the termsheet.

Now imagine you are the deal lawyer. Your client asks you to “just have a quick look at this statement to make sure this is ok”. Here is your chance.

The first job is to depersonalise. Law is a formal, not colloquial. It is business. We should not countenance a familiar “we” and “you”: this is a commercial contract not a family reunion, or an outreach centre. Parties should address each other as if they were unacquainted third persons.

Unless the vendor hears from the purchaser before the end of the week, the purchaser will assume the vendor is happy with the termsheet.

But why have easy-to-follow active tenses, when we can depersonalise things further, and elongate with denser constructions? The passive tense is your friend. (If you are a commercial lawyer, you have to take friends wherever you can find them).

Unless the vendor is advised by the purchaser before the end of the week, the vendor will be assumed by the purchaser to be happy with the termsheet.

This all still seems a little loosey goosey. Commercial lawyers have no truck with loose geese. It is time to start layering on detail. This is a painstaking job, and should be done in stages. First, be infinitely clear about the times, dates, deadlines.

Unless the vendor is advised by the purchaser on or before the close of business in London on Friday 22 March 2013, the vendor will be assumed by the purchaser to be happy with the termsheet.

I said infinitely clear. So don’t forget contingencies! What, for example, if 22 March is a public holiday?

Unless the vendor is advised by the purchaser on or before the close of business in London on Friday 22 March 2013 (or, if such date is not a business day in London, the close of business on the immediately following day that is a business day in London), the vendor will be assumed by the purchaser to be happy with the termsheet.

Infinitely clear, I said: We have not yet provided what should happen if the immediately following business day falls in the following calendar month. Perhaps there might be some adverse tax consesquences. You might have to book revenue in a different quarter. Who knows? Better be safe than sorry. After all, as deal counsel you can’t rule out a week and a half of public holidays being spontaneously declared (a Royal Wedding for example), or war suddenly breaking out. And you can be sure, if war should break out between now and the end of the week, the very first thing your client will do is sue your ass for forgetting to think about it. Sure as eggs. So be careful.

Unless the vendor is advised by the purchaser on or before the close of business in London on Friday 22 March 2013 (or, if such date is not a business day in London, the close of business on the immediately following day that is a business day in London, provided that if such immediately following Business Day would not fall in the calendar month of March, such date will be deemed to be the business day in London immediately prior to Friday 22 March), the vendor will be assumed by the purchaser to be happy with the termsheet.

As we inspect the detail, note that some of this original language is a bit sloppy. What is meant by “happy”, exactly? And what if our napkin contradicts the legal contracts we’re going to draw up?

Unless the vendor is advised by the purchaser on or before the close of business in London on Friday 22 March 2013 (or, if such date is not a business day in London, the close of business on the immediately following day that is a business day in London, provided that if such immediately following Business Day would not fall in the calendar month of March, such date will be deemed to be the business day in London immediately prior to Friday 22 March), the vendor will be assumed by the purchaser to have consented to the material economic terms of the transaction, as set out in the term sheet which is attached to this letter as an annex, such consent always to be subject to the legally binding terms of the transaction as shall be agreed between the parties on or before the closing date.

It still isn’t clear who we’re talking about. Just in case anyone is in any doubt, can we say? With infinite certainty?

Unless Joe Bloggs (such person, together with its successors and assigns, the “Vendor”, which expression will, unless the context requires otherwise, include reference to such person’s directors and employees (“Personnel”) but will exclude reference to consolidated and non-consolidated affiliates of such person, howsoever described (“Affiliates”)) is advised by John Doe (such person, together with its successors and assigns, the “Purchaser”, which expression will, unless the context requires otherwise, include reference to such person’s Personnel but will exclude reference to such person’s Affiliates) on or before the close of business in London on Friday 22 March 2013 (or, if such date is not a business day in London, the close of business on the immediately following day that is a business day in London, provided that if such immediately following Business Day would not fall in the calendar month of March, such date will be deemed to be the business day in London immediately prior to Friday 22 March), the Vendor will be assumed by the Purchaser to have consented to the material economic terms of the transaction, as set out in the term sheet which is attached to this letter as an annex, such consent always to be subject to the legally binding terms of the final transaction documents as shall be agreed between the parties on or before the closing date.

But hold on: what if my client agrees to change the deal in the mean time? Or events overtake us?

Subject to any subsequent mutually agreed amendment to the terms hereof between the parties, such amendments if made orally to be subsequently confirmed by the parties in writing within a reasonable period of time (provided that any failure to confirm such oral amendment shall not operate to vitiate such amendment) or any other written agreement between the parties, whether or not expressed as an amendment hereto, which is intended to modify the terms of this agreement, unless Joe Bloggs (such person, together with its successors and assigns, the “Vendor”, which expression will, unless the context requires otherwise, include reference to such person’s directors and employees (“Personnel”) but will exclude reference to consolidated and non-consolidated affiliates of such person, howsoever described (“Affiliates”)) is advised by John Doe (such person, together with its successors and assigns, the “Purchaser”, which expression will, unless the context requires otherwise, include reference to such person’s Personnel but will exclude reference to such person’s Affiliates) on or before the close of business in London on Friday 22 March 2013 (or, if such date is not a business day in London, the close of business on the immediately following day that is a business day in London, provided that if such immediately following Business Day would not fall in the calendar month of March, such date will be deemed to be the business day in London immediately prior to Friday 22 March), the Vendor will be assumed by the Purchaser to have consented to the material economic terms of the transaction, as set out in the term sheet which is attached to this letter as an annex, such consent always to be subject to the legally binding terms of the final transaction documents as shall be agreed between the parties on or before the closing date.

The problem is, now, that this is starting to look like a pretty onerous sort of obligation, so we need to be extra careful to protect your client’s interest. How do you know that your won’t be held to a technical provision with malicious intent?

Subject to any subsequent mutually agreed amendment to the terms hereof between the parties, such amendments if made orally to be subsequently confirmed by the parties in writing within a reasonable period of time (the reasonableness of such period as determined by the parties acting in good faith and in a commercially reasonable manner and provided that any reasonable failure to confirm such oral amendment shall not operate to vitiate such amendment) or any other written agreement between the parties, whether or not expressed as an amendment hereto, which is intended to modify the terms of this agreement, unless Joe Bloggs (such person, together with its successors and assigns, the “Vendor”, which expression will, unless the context requires otherwise, include reference to such person’s directors and employees (“Personnel”) but will exclude reference to consolidated and non-consolidated affiliates of such person, howsoever described (“Affiliates”)) is advised by John Doe (such person, together with its successors and assigns, the “Purchaser”, which expression will, unless the context requires otherwise, include reference to such person’s Personnel but will exclude reference to such person’s Affiliates) on or before the close of business in London on Friday 22 March 2013 (or, if such date is not a business day in London, the close of business on the immediately following day that is a business day in London, provided that if such immediately following Business Day would not fall in the calendar month of March, such date will be deemed to be the business day in London immediately prior to Friday 22 March), such Purchaser acting in good faith and in a commercially reasonable manner, the Vendor will be assumed by the Purchaser to have consented to the material economic terms of the transaction, as set out in the term sheet which is attached to this letter as an annex, such consent always to be subject to the legally binding terms of the final transaction documents as shall be agreed between the parties on or before the closing date.

Good faith. I like that. But wait a minute: if in acting in good faith that doesn't mean my client is somehow responsible to to its counterpart as some sort of fiduciary does it? Best be sure by using the great smart bomb in the lawyer’s armoury. For The Avoidance Of Doubt. No five words in the legal lexicon are more apt to create doubt where none before existed.

Subject to any subsequent mutually agreed amendment to the terms hereof between the parties, such amendments if made orally to be subsequently confirmed by the parties in writing within a reasonable period of time (the reasonableness of such period as determined by the parties acting in good faith and in a commercially reasonable manner provided that any reasonable failure to confirm such oral amendment shall not operate to vitiate such amendment) or any other written agreement between the parties, whether or not expressed as an amendment hereto, which is intended to modify the terms of this agreement, Unless Joe Bloggs (such person, together with its successors and assigns, the “Vendor”, which expression will, unless the context requires otherwise, include reference to such person’s directors and employees (“Personnel”) but will exclude reference to consolidated and non-consolidated affiliates of such person, howsoever described (“Affiliates”)) is advised by John Doe (such person, together with its successors and assigns, the “Purchaser”, which expression will, unless the context requires otherwise, include reference to such person’s Personnel but will exclude reference to such person’s Affiliates) on or before the close of business in London on Friday 22 March 2013 (or, if such date is not a business day in London, the close of business on the immediately following day that is a business day in London, provided that if such immediately following Business Day would not fall in the calendar month of March, such date will be deemed to be the business day in London immediately prior to Friday 22 March), such Purchaser acting in good faith and in a commercially reasonable manner, the Vendor will be assumed by the Purchaser to have consented to the material economic terms of the transaction, as set out in the term sheet which is attached to this letter as an annex, such consent always to be subject to the legally binding terms of the final transaction documents as shall be agreed between the parties on or before the closing date. For the avoidance of doubt, the parties enter this Agreement as arms’ length contractual counterparties, at what they consider to be market prices, for valuable consideration and without notice of any interests to the contrary and nothing in this Agreement will constitute or be construed as, or be deemed to constitute or be construed as, a joint venture or partnership between the Vendor and the Purchaser. Neither the Purchaser nor the Vendor shall assume or be deemed to assume any fiduciary responsibilities or other analogous obligations of a trust or agency nature, and each parties hereby acknowledges that it has obtained such legal advice as it as considered necessary or appropriate to assess the suitability and/or appropriateness of entering into this transaction and expressly disclaims any reliance on the other, or any responsibility for advising the other, as to any risks, economic, legal, regulatory, reputational or otherwise, which may arise (whether or not such risks to arise) as a result of the contemplation of the transaction contemplated herein.

And so our 19 word napkin scribble has evolved into a 500 word behemoth. And we haven't yet started inserting indemnities, let alone a governing law clause. It requires no particular acumen, but just sheer bloody mindedness, to carry on, as we lawyers like to say, ad infinitum. Ad nauseam, even.

---

[1] i.e., when the bill becomes due.

Thomas Kuhn, Science and that dreaded word “Culture”

Should we pay more attention to the relativists?

A correspondent on one of my reviews recently remarked, “Oh yes, of course objective reality exists”, in exasperation at my hesitation before that thought. 

Though few trees fall in the internet forest which make less sound than my blog posts, I thought it would be worth expanding on this comment, if just to see if anyone at all was listening.

While Thomas Kuhn, whose book I was reviewing, never said anything quite as incautious as I tend to, the chain of thought that leads there can be traced back Kuhn’s wonderful The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, as short and elegant a book of philosophy as you could hope to read.

It is also is something of a bête noire amongst a certain group of scientists who regard it as the cause of much modern (or post-modern) mischief.

Kuhn argued that the direction scientific development must be significantly influenced by the environment in which it is produced. For one thing, a scientific discipline of any sophistication will have developed its own institutions, social structure and hierarchy. The social rules surrounding credentialised practice and discourse within the discipline will be quite complex and very formal.

This observation (which ought to be familiar to anyone with any experience of organisational hierarchy) puts certain scientists into quite a flap, especially when the dread word “culture” is used in place of “environment”. That science is objective, and not culturally determined, is something of – well – an article of faith.

But in this context “culture” is simply shorthand for all those necessary conditions for science even to be carried out: the body of established knowledge; the rules of acceptable scientific procedure; the academic institutions and research institutions; the journals and societies; the undergraduate and postgraduate community which trains, credentialises, develops and evaluates developing science and the practical work of scientists in the field: All of those things which distinguish between neurobiology and homoeopathy¹.

“Thomas Kuhn’s insight was that this picture of inexorable progress towards an unchanging goal doesn’t seem very well to fit the historical record.” 

Nonetheless the proposition that science is coloured by its necessarily human context – is a product of its culture – undermines the supposition, taken as read since the enlightenment, that the journey of science is one of progressive truth-revelation. Science (courtesy of which plants photosynthesise, aeroplanes stay in the sky and planets orbit the sun) surely progresses: inexorably, it zeroes in on transcendental laws of the cosmos: Aristotle had a good old go, Ptolemy got a bit closer, Copernicus and Tycho Brahe really started to get warm, Newton got it largely right and, since Einstein the process has been one of ever more infinitesimal fiddling around the edges.

Thomas Kuhn was a historian, and his insight was to observe that the picture of inexorable progress towards an unchanging goal doesn’t seem very well to fit the historical record. Ptolemy’s geocentric model of the cosmos, which must have seemed eminently satisfactory at one point (for 1,600 years, as a matter of fact), bears almost no relation even to Copernicus’ heliocentric model, let alone to Linde’s Multiverse model, in which bubble universes nucleate in a space-time foam². In the language of evolution, these succeeding theories are not adaptations of their predecessors, but new organisms wiping the older beasts out. Extinctions. Whatever truth Ptolemy was closing in on, it was not the same one that interested Linde.

This leaves scientists in a cleft stick: either everything which went before and was believed to be science in fact wasn’t (which makes you wonder how they’re so certain this time) or it was, but it was just temporarily barking up the wrong tree (which also makes you wonder how they’re so certain this time) or it was, and they were barking up the right tree, but it’s just not a tree we’re interested in any more. Each of these options as unfortunate implications.

A less complicated reading can be arrived at by reducing science’s ambition from “sole revealer of the sacred truths of the cosmos” (which sounds a little religious, doesn’t it?) to “devising pragmatic models of how the universe appears to work, to help us get along in it”. Under this less ambitious framework, as new information comes to light prevailing models can be adjusted, and where no adjustments can save the day, models can be jettisoned entirely, something only apt to happen when a better model is to hand (a broken model is better than no model at all). Kuhn’s observation was this is how science does seem to operate.

As sensible as it is, it is still Richard Dawkins’ cue to work himself into a righteous frenzy at the thought of Kalahari bushmen examining rabbit entrails. Dawkins’ own impression of the argument goes like this:

“There is no absolute truth. You are committing an act of personal faith when you claim that the scientific method, including mathematics and logic, is the privileged road to truth. Other cultures might believe that truth is to be found in a rabbit’s entrails, or the ravings of a prophet up a pole. what is only your personal faith in science that leads you to favour your brand of truth.” ³

The idea that we may as well consult the entrails of rabbits as Newton’s laws of mechanics when devising flying machines is, of course, absurd. And while it’s obviously a gross distortion of any actual philosophy – Dawkins quotes only his own vivid imagination – this sort of bluster has won more people over than it really ought to have.

Even without guaranteed privilege of science over non-science, good science still has a way of differentiating itself, but the richness and complexity of its account and its predictive power. Flying machines designed by reference to the configuration of rabbit entrails will stay in the sky less often than those designed according to modern aeronautics, and that should carry the day. (If, statistically, it didn’t, there might be something those rabbits know that we didn’t!)

Next time: Defending the indefensible? Relativism proper.

1Homoeopathy has its own culture too, of course.

2I have absolutely no idea what this means. And nor do I want one.

3“What Is True?” collected in A Devils Chaplain, Phoenix, 2003

A Singular Thesis

The information revolution has brought our planet to an inflexion point. This is our generation's industrial revolution, and conventional wisdom of all sorts is suddenly in doubt. But is the universe really about to wake up? Are we about to look into the face of God? Ray Kurzweil thinks so.

Julian Jaynes rounds out his wonderful The Origins of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind with a sanguine remark that the idea of science is rooted in the same impulse that drives religion: the desire for “the Final Answer, the One Truth, the Single Cause”.

Nowhere is this impulse better illustrated, or the scientific mien so resemblant of a religious one, than in Ray Kurzweil’s hymn to forthcoming technology, The Singularity Is Near. For if ever a man were committed overtly - fervently, even - to such a unitary belief, it is Ray Kurzweil. And the sceptics among our number could hardly have asked for a better example of the pitfalls, or ironies, of such an intellectual fundamentalism: one one hand, this sort of essentialism features prominently in the currently voguish denouncements of the place of religion in contemporary affairs, often being claimed as a knock-out blow to the spiritual disposition. On the other, it is too strikingly similar in its own disposition to be anything of the sort. Ray Kurzweil is every inch the millenarian, only dressed in a lab-coat and not a habit.

Kurzweil believes that the “exponentially accelerating” “advance” of technology has us well on the way to a technological and intellectual utopia/dystopia (this sort of beauty being, though Kurzweil might deny it, decidedly in the eye of the beholder) where computer science will converge on and ultimately transcend biology and, in doing so, will transport human consciousness into something quite literally cosmic. This convergence he terms the “singularity”, a point at which he expects with startling certainty that the universe will “wake up”, and many immutable limitations of our current sorry existence (including, he seems to say, the very laws of physics) will simply fall away.

Some, your correspondent included, might wonder whether, this being the alternative, our present existence is all that sorry in the first place.

But not Raymond Kurzweil. This author seems to be genuinely excited about a prospect which sounds rather desolate, bordering on the apocalyptic, in those aspects where it manages to transcend sounding simply absurd. Which isn’t often. One thing you could not accuse Ray Kurzweil of is a lack of pluck; but there’s a fine line between bravado and foolhardiness which, in his enthusiasm, he may have crossed.

His approach to evolution is a good example. He talks frequently and modishly of the algorithmic nature of evolution, but then makes observations not quite out of the playbook, such as: “the key to an evolutionary algorithm ... is defining the problem. ... in biological evolution the overall problem has always been to survive” and “evolution increases order, which may or may not increase complexity”.

“Kurzweil seems to be genuinely excited about a prospect which sounds rather desolate, bordering on the apocalyptic, wherever it manages to transcend sounding simply absurd. Which isn’t often.”

But to suppose an evolutionary algorithm has “a problem it is trying to solve” - in other words, a design principle - is to emasculate its very power, namely the facility of explaining how a sophisticated phenomenon comes about *without* a design principle. Evolution works because organisms (or genes) have a capacity - not an intent - to replicate themselves. Nor, necessarily, does evolution increase order. It will tend to increase complexity, because the evolutionary algorithm, having no insight, is unable to “perceive” the structural improvements implied in a design simplification. Evolution has no way of rationalising design except by fiat. The adaptation required to replace an overly elaborate design with more effective but simpler one is, to use Richard Dawkins’ expression, an implausible step back down “Mount Improbable”. That’s generally not how evolutionary processes work: over-engineering is legion in nature; economy of design isn’t, really.

This sounds like a picky point, but it gets to the nub of Kurzweil’s outlook, which is to assume that technology evolves like biological organisms do - that a laser printer, for example, is a direct evolutionary descendent of the printing press. This, I think, is to superimpose a convenient narrative over a process that is not directly analogous: a laser printer is no more a descendent of a printing press than a mammal is a descendent of a dinosaur. Successor, perhaps; descendant, no. But the “exponential increase in progress” arguments that Kurzweil repeatedly espouses depend for their validity on this distinction.

The “evolutionary process” from woodblock printing to the Gutenberg press, to lithography, to hot metal typing, to photo-typesetting, to the ink jet printer (thanks, Wikipedia!) involves what Kurzweil would call “paradigm shifts” but which a biologist might call extinctions; each new technology arrives, supplements and (usually) obliterates the existing ones, not just by doing the same job more effectively, but - and this is critical - by opening up new vistas and possibilities altogether that weren’t even conceived of in the earlier technology - sometimes even at the cost of a certain flexibility inherent in the older technology. That is, development is constantly forking off in un-envisaged, unexpected directions. This plays havoc with Kurzweil’s loopy idea of a perfect, upwardly arcing parabola of utopian progress.

It is what I call “perspective chauvinism” to judge former technologies by the standards and parameters set by the prevailing orthodoxy - being that of the new technology. Judged by such an arbitrary standard older technologies will, by degrees, necessarily seem more and more primitive and useless. The fallacious process of judging former technologies by subsequently imposed criteria is, in my view, the source of many of Ray Kurzweil’s inevitably impressive charts of exponential progress. It isn’t that we are progressing ever more quickly onward, but the place whence we have come falls exponentially further away as our technology meanders, like a perpetually deflating balloon, through design space. Our rate of progress doesn’t change; our discarded technologies simply seem more and more irrelevant through time.

“Evolutionary development is constantly forking off in unexpected directions. This plays havoc with Kurzweil’s loopy idea of a perfect, upwardly arcing parabola of utopian progress.”

Kurzweil may argue that the rate of change in technology has increased, and that may be true - but I dare say a similar thing happened at the time of the agricultural revolution and again in the industrial revolution - we got from Stephenson’s rocket to the diesel locomotive within 75 years; in the subsequent 97 years the train’s evolution been somewhat more sedate. Eventually, the “S” curves Kurzweil mentions flatten out. They clearly aren’t exponential, and pretending that an exponential parabola might emerge from a conveniently concatenated series of “S” curves seems credulous to the point of disingenuity. This extrapolation into a single “parabola of best fit” has heavy resonances of the planetary “epicycle”, a famously desperate attempt of Ptolemaic astronomers to fit “misbehaving” data into what Copernicans would ultimately convince the world was a fundamentally broken model.

If this is right, then Kurzweil’s corollary assumption - that there is a technological nirvana to which we’re ever more quickly headed - commits the inverse fallacy of supposing the questions we will ask in the future - when the universe “wakes up”, as he puts it - will be exactly the ones we anticipate now. History would say this is a naïve, parochial, chauvinistic and false assumption.

And that, I think, is the nub of it. One feels somewhat uneasy so disdainfully pooh-poohing a theory put together with such enthusiasm and such an energetic presentation of data (and to be sure, buried in Kurzweil’s breathless prose is plenty of learning about technology which, if even half-way right, is fascinating), but that seems to be it. I suppose I am fortified by the nearby predictions made just seven years ago, seeming not to have come anything like true just yet:

“By the end of this decade [i.e., by 2010] computers will disappear as distinct physical objects, with displays built in our eyeglasses and electronics woven into our clothing”

On the other hand I could find scant reference to “cloud computing” or equivalent phenomena like the Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing project which spawned schemes like SETI@home in Kurzweil’s book. Now here is a rapidly evolving technological phenotype, for sure: hooking up thousands of serially processing computers into a massive parallel network, giving processing power way beyond any technology currently envisioned. It may be that this adaptation means we simply don’t need to incur the mental challenge of molecular transistors and so on, since there must, at some point, be an absolute limit to miniaturisation, as we approach it the marginal utility of developing the necessary technology will swan dive just as the marginal cost ascends to the heavens; whereas the parallel network involves none of those limitations. You can always hook up yet another computer, and every one will increase performance.

I suppose it’s easy to be smug as I type on my decidedly physical computer, showing no signs of being superseded with VR Goggles just yet and we’re already three years into the new decade (he also missed the mobile computing revolution, come to think of it), but the point is that the evolutionary process is notoriously bad at making predictions (until, that is, the results are in), being path-dependent as it is. 

You can’t predict for developments that haven’t yet happened. Kurzweil glosses over this shortfall at his theory’s cost. 

A version of this article was first published on Amazon in 2010.

The future's so bright I've got to wear VR goggles which help me empathise.

If your kids already spend eight hours a day online, the future depicted in Pareg and Ayesha Khanna's “Hybrid Reality” might ring true for you. Others may be harder to persuade.

Hybrid Reality is the short monograph which I suppose serves as flagship publication Pareg and Ayesha’s Hybrid Reality Institute, an organisation whose raison d’etre seems to be the pursuit of unfettered wishful thinking about the potential of technology. Good luck to them: dreaming up whacky visions of the future does sound like fun, and while it’s hard to see any practical application for the Fortune 500 companies the authors claim as their clients, if they’ve managed to persuade these conglomerates otherwise, happy days. Especially if in the future, everything is going to be crowd-sourced and free.

Hybrid Reality is thus an attempt to sketch out a future based on extrapolating current trends of technological development: a (thankfully slimmer) companion-piece to Ray Kurzweill’s The Singularity Is Near.

In fairness, Hybrid Reality quickly moves beyond stock platitudes about crowdsourcing, but where it does it does so without much credibility. The text is plastered with buzzwords borrowed from other disciplines and deployed with carefree abandon: 

“accelerated evolution creates what we might call a Heisenbergian or quantum society: we are particles whose position, momentum and impact on others, and the impact of others on us, are perpetually uncertain due to constant technological disruptions.”

Okayyy. Amongst the rhubarb there is a point to be made about rapidly disrupting technologies, but that’s not it. To the contrary, the rate of change is so fast that genuinely novel technologies and businesses have little chance to establish themselves, and that those which get a foothold do so as by fiat as sober business development, and then proceed to hammer everyone else into the ground. In such a nasty, brutish and short environment conditions favour not elegance and sophistication in design but the lowest common denominator. 

Breath-taking technologies of the sort which overflow this book, on the other hand, assume a sophistication which needs a warm and safe environment in which to incubate. Increasingly, new technologies never get the chance to be smart. It isn’t accelerated evolution that’s going on, but accelerated extinction.

“In such a nasty, brutish and short environment conditions favour not elegance and sophistication in design but the lowest common denominator.” 

I suppose you might expect a degree of credulity from faculty members of the “Singularity University” but, still, their vision owes as much to science fiction as it does to academic analysis and nothing at all to the traditional discipline of economics. Perhaps the dismal science, too, will succumb to the information revolution: cavalierly, Samuel Huntingdon’s maxim is reformulated so that it is not economics but technology that is “the most important source of power and wellbeing”. Older hands will recall hearing that kind of talk before, and it didn’t work out so well in 2003 when hundreds of “new economy” business models folded when it turned out they did need to generate revenue after all.

It’s easy to be a naysayer, of course, but all the same my hunch is that the Khannas’ monologue has little value for anything but excitable kite flying. Many of their assertions strongly suggest this pair really, literally, need to get out more. “Of the eight hours a day children today spend online, 1.5 involve using avatars…” they say, as if that initial premise may be taken as a given. Eight hours a day online? Which children are these, exactly? “Robots are incontestably becoming more ubiquitous, intelligent and social” and “represent an entirely new type of ‘other’ that we interact with in our social lives”. Elsewhere, “Technik”, as they put it, seems to have the power to change the laws of nature, and in the short term: “The average British citizen will likely live to be 100 years old”, they predict. Technik is so clever it can even grant us powers which we already have: In the future there will be virtual reality goggles, we are told, which can “sense other people’s stress levels”. Just imagine being able to do that.

“Many of their assertions strongly suggest this pair really, literally, need to get out more.” 

You can, in any case, read your fill here of all the ways the internet of things will provide an untold wealth of cool free stuff, but note the lack of any financial analysis: All this cool stuff requires effort: not just to design and conceptualise, but to manufacture, distribute, house, power, maintain and (to extent it can’t be fully computerised) operate. And effort, generally, requires money. Previous generations of technological development have shifted the labour demand curve upwards: automation has taken out repetitive, low value tasks but created more complex ones designing, building and maintaining the machinery to carry out these tasks: as a result we have grown busier with each development, not more idle - though our occupations have been more complex, challenging and rewarding. The Khannas’ brave new world would, by implication, flip that on its head.

For argument’s sake, let’s say the robots can fully take over, perform our manual labour, wipe bottoms, cure diseases and revolutionise production across all industries and agricultures so that human intervention is not required at all. Hard to see, but let’s say. Is a permanent state of situation of blissful, but chronic, total global unemployment a feasible basis for an economy?

As far as I know, man cannot live by Facebook likes alone. Last time I checked, rent wasn’t free. Nor was power, food, nor raw materials. As we go on, they’re getting harder (and costlier) to extract. So who will finance these lives of leisure? With what? Why? Who would provide services, when there was no-one to pay for them? Is it perhaps the case that personal labour, rather than being an unfortunate by-product of the “old economy” way of doing things, is in fact an immutable in the calculus of value?

Dreaming about amazing technologies which might be coming down the pike is the job of a science fiction writer. The academic question is less glamorous and more fundamental: how, within the new parameters of digital commons and in a post-growth world, can anyone devise a business model able to deliver them? These, it seems to me, are the really challenging questions, and you won’t find them addressed in this book.

Occam’s Razorburn

Stephen Hawking’s latest book raises far more questions than it answers. Such as, why hasn’t he been reading Thomas Kuhn, and what really is the benefit of unifying theories which don't seem to need unification?

In which we meet yet another first-class scientist who wishes to self-identify as a second-class philosopher and a comedian from the back end of steerage.

Since few will buy A Grand Design for its wit we can forgive Stephen Hawking's appalling attempts to be funny, but it's not so easy to forgive his philosophical ignorance. Certain physical scientists might be better off unacquainted with the modern philosophy of science (though those who know it possess a welcome sense of perspective and humility). But not world-renowned cosmologists. Their field continually bumps up against the boundary of what science even is (and it doesn't have a "no-boundary condition", whatever that might be).

So when Stephen Hawking claims that "philosophy has not kept up with modern science, especially physics" it suggests not only a lack of perspective and humility, but that Hawking has been skipping on some required reading.  Especially since, having written off the discipline, Hawking seems barely acquainted with it. He mentions few philosophers more recent than Rene Descartes (d. 1650). So it is hard to know who he thinks hasn't kept up.

Particularly when Hawking's first grand pronouncement is "model-dependent reality": the idea that there may be alternative ways to model the same physical situation with fundamentally different elements and concepts. "If [such different models] accurately predict the same events, one cannot be said to be more real than the other." Physics has, apparently, been forced into this gambit following recent failures to get unifying calculations to work themselves out. In any case it isn't quite the neat trick Hawking thinks it is.

Firstly, while model-dependent reality might be news to Stephen Hawking (he seems to think it the fruit of modern physics' womb) the philosophers he hasn't been reading have been talking about it for years, if not centuries, to the constant sound of scientists' excoriations. It is even part of Descartes' philosophical fabric (and, more tellingly, Darwin's, but picking a fight with modern evolutionists, while fun, is a story for another day). That is to say, it sounds like it is the physicists who are finally catching up with the philosophers and not the other way around.

Secondly, in the grand game of philosophers' football that Cosmology has become, the model-dependent reality play is something of a surrender before kick-off.  For if it is true that the same phenomenon can be plausibly accounted for in multiple, "incommensurate" (© Thomas Kuhn) ways, then the hard question is not about the truth in itself of any model, but the criteria for determining which of the (potentially infinite) models available we should choose in the first place. 

This question is not one for physics, but metaphysics. It necessarily exists outside any given model (© Paul Feyerabend). Here we meet our old friend, Occam's Razor. This isn't a scientific principle at all, but a pragmatic rule of thumb with no intellectual pedigree: all else being equal, take the simplest explanation. Occam's Razor is a favourite instrument for the torture of hapless Christians by grumpy biologists: all your tricksy afterlife wagers and so on fail because evolution is so much less complicated and has so much more explanatory value than the idea that an omniscient, intangible, invisible, omnipotent entity pulling strings we can't see to make the whole thing go.

But, alas, in seeking a grand unification of things that really aren't asking to be unified, cosmology reveals some almighty snags. Unification under Hawking's programme, if it is even possible, involves slaughtering some big old sacred cows. To name a few: causality, the conventional conception of space-time; the idea that scientific theories should be based on observable data and their outcomes testable. It bows to some truly heinous false idols too. For example: seven invisible space-time dimensions, a huge mass of invisible dark matter, an arbitrary cosmological constant, a potentially infinite array of unobservable universes which wink in and out of existence courtesy of a mathematically inferred "vacuum energy"). Hawking doesn't propose solutions to these problems, but seems to think they're a fair price for achieving grand unification.

I'm not so sure: other than intellectual bragging rights, the resulting unified theory has no obvious marginal utility. And it has political drawbacks: believing one's model to be the truth carries potentially unpleasant implications for the suppression of those who don't.

There are practical drawbacks, too. We are asked to reject existing theories, which still have quite a lot of utility, in favour of something that it infinitely harder to understand and work with. The accelerating expansion of the universe without any apparent acting force seems to violate Newton's second law of motion. Without an outrageous end-run, the first nanosecond of the Big Bang (wherein the universe is obliged to expand in size by ten squillion kilometres - i.e. far faster than the speed of light) seems to violate the fundamentals of general relativity. String theory requires seven necessarily unobservable space-time dimensions and/or entirely different universes, and even then doesn't yield a single theory but millions of the blighters, all slightly inconsistent with each other (hence the appeal to "model dependent reality).

From the camp which wielded Occam's Razor so heartily against the Christians, this seems a bit rich. If these are the options, then the razor might slice in favour of the big guy with the beard.

But these aren't the options. We could save a lot of angst, and perhaps could have avoided digging trillion dollar circular tunnel under Geneva, had we employed model dependent reality the way the philosophers saw it and not the scientists (and shouldn't we call a spade a spade and label it cognitive relativism, by the way?). Since it crossed the event horizon of observability modern cosmology has become arcane, stunt-mathematics. If there were a chance that it might deliver time-travel, hyperspace or a tool for locating wormholes to other galaxies or universes then one could see the point in this intellectual onanism. But none of that seems to be allowed. So we should therefore ask the question "but why? What's the point? What progress do you promise that we can't achieve some other way?" No one seems to be able to answer that question.

But if we park it, what's left of Stephen Hawking's latest book is some pretty ropey jokes.

Enterprise 2.0: New Collaborative Tools for Your Organization's Toughest Challenges: Andrew McAfee

Why has the Facebook revolution made nary a dent in corporate culture, and how to change that. Andrew McAfee has some not-so-starry-eyed answers.

 
I have long been entranced by the potential of the collaborative internet and have, as a result being trying my darndest to evangelise its benefits in my professional life - no small challenge, involving as it does a bunch of lawyers inhabiting the more cobwebbed crannies in the infrastructure of a bank. To that end I've set up wikis, libraries, discussion forums and sharepoint sites all, for the most part, to no avail. Old habits die hard in any circumstance, but amongst moribund lawyers they live on like zombies.

In recent times I have taken to trying to understand, or at any rate deduce, whether it is simply a challenge to the design of our particular distributed system or whether it is more a problem of the psychological configuration of the communal working environment, or some unholy, un-dead combination of the two, which renders barren my efforts. Given my current place of toil is basically one gigantic supercomputer, part human, part machine and therefore, you would think, ripe for the benefits enterprise collaboration can bring - it is frustrating to say the least to discover how immune it appears to be to those very charms.

In my studies I have consulted learned (and excellent) theoretical volumes like Lawrence Lessig's Code: Version 2.0 and Yochai Benkler's The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom, and populist ones like Chris Anderson's The Long Tail and Don Tapscott's Wikinomics: How Mass Collaboration Changes Everything, and all tell me, with varying degrees of erudition and insight, that the new world order is at hand.

Except, for all my efforts and enthusiasm, it isn't. Of the 800 odd articles in our wiki, I have personally authored, in their entirety, about 90 percent of them. I can't persuade anyone to use a discussion board but me (discussing things with myself palls after a while) and while SharePoint has been taken up with some gusto, it has invariably been done so stupidly, without thought for the collaborative opportunities it offers. Everyone sets up their own SharePoint sites, protects it like a fiefdom, and ignores all others.

I have been looking for the book that explains these challenges of the new world order and which explains how this entropy can be fought. Andrew Mcafee's Enterprise 2.0 might just be that book.

Mcafee is a believer, and a convert from a position of scepticism but, unlike (for example) Chris Anderson, he is not so starry eyed that he can't apprehend the challenges presented. Mcafee takes us through four case studies (all thrillingly on point for me!) of business executives trying, and struggling, to collaborate using existing tools. Mcafee maps these efforts (namely technological solutions) to his own sociological analysis which differentiates groups in terms of the strengths of existing ties between the individuals purporting to connect: there are strong bonds (as between direct colleagues in geographically centralised team, weaker bonds (as between fellow employees of a wider organisation) and right out at the limit, no particular bonds at all - the Wikipedia example. Different types of emergent social software platforms (ESSPs) work better for different types of community bond. Mcafee also deals with the "long haul" challenges, which acknowledges that, particularly where there is an "endowment" collaboration system to overcome (email being the most obvious), or where collaborative opportunity is "above the flow" rather than in it (i.e., collaboration is a voluntary action completed after the "compulsory" work is done), the change in behaviour will take a long time, so stick with it (encouraging stuff for this lone wiki collaborator!)

Ultimately Mcafee doesn't have the answers - nor should we expect him to - but his analysis is thoughtful, credible (as opposed to the more frequent "credulous") and optimistic - Enterprise 2.0 needs evangelists and "prime movers" who are engaged and prepared to stick with it - meaning that this is well recommended as a volume for those wanting a practical view of the enterprise benefits of social networking and Web 2.0.