9) Revolutionary Implications

Part 9 of the 12-part series - 'A Grand Machine to Beat Covid-19' - ventures deeper to explore the radical impacts that the Machine will have on science, innovation, economics and society.

The Machine certainly doesn’t stop at C-19. The MMM-model can be usefully applied in any scientific field or technological sector. So, it naturally expands to confront other diseases, advancing across medicine, healthcare and the life sciences… climate change, engineering, robotics, etc. – ever growing and diversifying. As this happens, the revolutionary implications of the system should become increasingly apparent, from a number of different perspectives.

The Idealised Scientific Method

The MMM attempts to manifest the idealised scientific method – applying it right across the innovation spectrum, from foundational science through to technological development and systems design. The general approach can be summarised as follows:

1. All available information and data is collected, connected and made openly accessible

2. The world identifies key questions and issues, problems and opportunities

3. The world Challenges itself to compete and cooperate in finding answers and solutions – generating a large number of ideas and designs, prototypes and systems

4. All answers and solutions are assessed, as scientifically and objectively as possible, according to pre-specified criteria… with tests carried out regularly and publicly, by neutral third-parties

5. The most effective answers and solutions are spotlighted for the special attention and scrutiny of the world

6. Key solutions and technologies are protected by public intellectual property, enabling anyone to use and improve

7. Research and innovation funding and rewards are allocated in an efficient, meritocratic and well-informed manner

8. The experiments cycle and refine, refocus and set sights higher… but never really end – continuously driving scientific and technological progress forwards

This contrasts with traditional research and innovation systems, which institutionalise numerous features that impede and conflict with the clean application of the scientific method, including: corporate over-secrecy, clandestine projects, organisational inwardness, journal paywalls, closed peer-review processes, funding gaps and uncertainties, failure to report on unsuccessful research, badly-targeted grants, nation-state boundaries, the startup ‘Valley of Death’, inflexible regulations, etc. And the current IP regime directly contradicts the scientific method in a thousand-and-one different ways. All of these problems, can be solved, reduced or mitigated, through the application of the MMM approach.

The current system’s general reliance on grassroots initiative from researchers and innovators is, in many ways, admirable. If a scientist seems to discover something interesting, then (hopefully) others will conduct research to confirm or refute their findings… and often comparative studies are undertaken. Innovators can invent technologies and if they get regulatory approval, then the markets (and marketers) decide how good they think it is. Perhaps a neutral expert or a consumer test group will objectively evaluate it… perhaps not. There is a great deal of freedom, although a lack of funding and investment excludes many from making use of these opportunities.

The Machine enables the positive aspects of this approach to survive and thrive, leaving grassroots initiative undisturbed (or facilitating it with flexible funding programmes). However, it dramatically changes the system – by developing a universal tapestry of interconnected Challenge Programmes and institutionalising third-party, competitive-style testing. Every intellectual and practical problem has a bounty on its head and all humanity’s most important experiments run repeatedly or continuously.

All the electric battery/ energy-storage devices we have should be tested in a big open competition, held every year, with rewards for top performers and IP buyouts for technologies that achieve key innovation milestones. Same with water desalination systems, digital education software, unmanned aerial vehicles, etc.

Numerous overlapping experiments turning the whole universe into one Grand Experiment that never ends. As each threshold of capability is surpassed, we simply reset our sights higher and continue. Once the MMM institutionalises this improved application of the idealised scientific method, humanity will never go back.

Digital Technology

As the Machine expands across fields and sectors, it’s destined to fundamentally alter the World Wide Web itself. Information and data becomes more deeply interconnected and linked… and new universalised formats evolve. Integrating thousands, and ultimately millions, of pieces of software and technology, the platform advances systems interoperability on every level. And eventually, all the most significant parts of the WWW are being fed through the MMM to be crowd-processed and organised. It seems like the natural upgrade for the next generation of the web.

AI is likely to make significant advances through the Machine, because every cognitive task undertaken by the human crowd will also be attempted by a ‘crowd’ of digital systems. And they’ll be able to see how the humans do it, with the Action Network’s detailed task breakdowns enabling a granular level of observation. Cutting-edge AI is often developed through systems that imitate biological evolutionary processes – natural selection dynamics applied as programmes compete to achieve objectives, with the most successful hybridising to spawn the next generation. As the MMM also replicates this same evolutionary process, it should become an especially fertile platform for advancing AI.

A vast plethora of algorithms, programmes and technologies criss-cross one another on the MMM… learning, interacting and integrating. And we’re continuously Challenging the Machine to use these to improve its abilities to do things for itself. It’s likely that this will result in AI becoming stronger. (Who knows by how much?)

Economics

The MMM will have profound implications within the realm of economics – an intellectual discipline, born when Adam Smith analysed the workings of a pin factory, during the early industrial revolution. The tools and machines were great, but Smith noticed that the real revolution lay in the production-line’s sophisticated division of labour. The pin-making process was divided up into numerous carefully-sequenced steps with each worker specialised in a particular task – proper mass-production. Applying this basic principle, further and further, has continued to pay dividends for humanity… and we now have manufacturing tasks divided up through bewilderingly-complex global supply chains.

The Machine is destined to become the pin factory of the Information Age – crystallising the Innovation Revolution. The analogy is particularly accurate, because almost all the crowdsourcing mechanisms, technologies and systems utilised by the MMM already exist in some form – as did a colourful diversity of individual machines, prior to the emergence of the industrial factory.

The revolution comes when we take a variety of component machines, scale them up, integrate them together along a conveyor-belt, divide the labour up mass-production-style and organise a coordinated workforce. In this way, the Machine leads humanity into the age of mass-produced innovation.

Another deeply significant economic implication relates to intellectual property. The central economic controversy of the 20th Century was between ‘capitalism’ and ‘socialism’ – ‘who owns the capital goods’… the means of production. In the dematerialising knowledge economy of the 21st Century, ‘who owns the knowledge’ is becoming the most important question. Leading to the possibility that the classic controversy could arise in a new form. Some policymakers believe the Western World needs to protect its IP and some private companies feel they benefit from the current regime. Whilst on the other hand, there are growing calls to open up the innovation system.

This could become an entrenched ideological conflict between ‘open’ and ‘closed/ protective’ innovation, perhaps fought between the traditional protagonists of ‘left’ and ‘right’. But it doesn’t have to be that way, because the particular economics of knowledge/ innovation actually makes this a very different question to the one fought over last century.

As an economic product, knowledge/ innovation is a ‘non-exclusive’, ‘non-rival’ good, which can be distributed at zero marginal cost (it’s free to share and everyone can utilise it without impinging on others). Another important factor is that innovation naturally suffers from systemic ‘market-failure’, which the current IP system can’t properly fix (innovation is under-incentivised for private actors and IP rewards aren’t valuable enough to compensate).

These special, interrelated characteristics ultimately mean that economic logic decisively comes down on the side of (mostly) open innovation, with significant public funding for foundational science, research and development. Fortunately, this actually represents a clear win-win-win for citizens, governments and businesses, so should be able to find support from across the mainstream political spectrum… with no need for anyone to make unhappy compromises.

We won’t go into the technical details here, but essentially: private enterprises, from independent inventors to multinational companies, are offered better rewards for producing useful innovations. The value of the Challenge prizes is generally set higher than the value of the private IP rewards they replace, encouraging substantially greater levels of investment in all types of innovation.

By funding this, it may seem as if global tax-payers are losing out – paying more for the private IP than it’s apparently worth. But actually, they win as well, because public IP is worth much more than the equivalent private IP and the enhanced incentives for innovators will deliver tax-payers substantial returns on their investment… especially in their capacity as global consumers. (It’s also worth noting that public IP would only be purchased for the most important innovations… whilst in the majority of cases, the private IP regime remains in place.)

The MMM approach thus marries up synergies between the interests of almost everyone: politicians of all stripes and nationalities, people from poorer parts of the world, profit-seeking businesspeople… entrepreneurs, consumers, researchers, etc. The institution could help us to avoid a potentially harmful political deadlock regarding the innovation system – nipping it in the bud, by providing a solution that works well for all.

Organisation

Integrating crowdsourcing systems with professional staff-teams on a Challenge-centred online platform could help to change the nature of work. Giving organisations an efficient interface that they can use to access external resources, knowledge and talent… and an easy medium to interact with other bodies and the wider public.

Traditional organisations rely on top-down task-allocation, oversight and enforcement, with hierarchical chains of command directing the work. Conversely, the Action Network tends to rely on public, peer-to-peer self-organisation guided through horizontal webs of communication. This effectively represents a (complementary) new type of human organisation… one that technological advances have only recently enabled.

This new model also has political ramifications – allowing governments and public bodies to engage citizens to collaborate on collective projects… and vice-versa. If integrated crowdsourcing is able to help the traditional ‘state’ to significantly improve emergency-response capabilities, then the system is likely to be applicable in many other areas as well. MMM-style platforms (replicated within the political sphere) would enable multi-directional citizen engagement and participatory democracy, allowing the public to play a key role in the provision of public services… and politics more generally.

The system’s capacity to objectively establish facts and data, can help to better inform the decisions of both citizens and governments… and the MMM can also help to improve public and political engagement with science. A greater understanding of science amongst non-scientists would certainly be a useful advance for the global knowledge economy.

The Machine’s approach to emergency management can be replicated and reformulated to address many types of natural and human-made disaster. For example, specialist earthquake response systems can be developed using the Innovation Factory and then implemented through the Action Network. Same goes for tidal waves, volcanoes, nuclear accidents, floods, droughts, refugee crises, etc.

The arrival of the Coronavirus triggered a sector-specific crisis of the innovation system, as the world recognised that the existing regime couldn’t hope to deliver the required rate of inventive progress. Reforms were rapidly instituted and the MMM can turn these temporary modifications into a full-scale Innovation Revolution.

The platform’s expansion facilitating the transition towards a new ‘Global Open Innovation System’ and triggering a series of scientific and technological leaps forward, on multiple fronts: personalised medicine, digital education, renewable energy, AI systems, etc. As a meta-innovation – improving our capacity to innovate in all areas – the positive impacts of the Machine should reverberate far and wide.

The Monster in the Machine

But it’s not all sunflowers and rainbows. Understanding the MMM and realising what it means should send a shiver down the spine of any sensible Citizen of the World. Who could forget the dire warnings of the dystopian prophets, past and present? The Machine sounds like Big Brother’s Big Brother… or the Demon staring out of the Black Mirror. It’s certainly possible to imagine numerous negative effects and sinister scenarios playing out.

The most obvious issue is that the Machine would collect together an unprecedented volume of sensitive data – personal medical histories, genetic maps, mobile-tracked location data, and a million other intrusive details. Clearly, that leaves considerable scope for misuse and abuse, were this information to fall into the wrong hands. The MMM would certainly require top-of-the-range cyber-security.

But, of course, the whole point is to display the information publicly, which makes it especially difficult to preclude misuse. Ideally, sensitive, private data needs to be separated from public profile data, with the former anonymised before being added to research datasets. But this is easier said than done, because data is most useful when it gives as many specifics as possible, whilst effective anonymization logically necessitates removing various details. This is always a thorny issue when it comes to open health data and is made even more complicated, in this case, due to the MMM’s reliance on a crowdsourced workforce.

Ultimately, compromise solutions can be found for many of these problems, but the central issue remains – Orwell’s Big Brother would envy the power of the MMM dataset… which makes its existence intrinsically dangerous. This is a significant problem, that can’t ever be completely resolved. However, the key fact is – a Machine-style master-dataset is such a supremely powerful tool, that realistically, it’s simply bound to happen in the end. Some comparable form of mega-data-collection will eventually reach MMM-like levels, set up either by governments or major tech corporations.

So perhaps, the best option is for citizens to do it themselves, and establish the MMM as an international, non-profit organisation with decentralised leadership, oversight and control. If the Citizens of the World take firm ownership of the Machine now, then it makes it harder for anyone to turn similar systems against them in the future. In grand historical terms, this might be one of the most significant positive impacts of the MMM…

Summary

To summarise the wider implications of the Machine… it:

1. Manoeuvres our innovation system to align with the idealised scientific method

2. Upgrades the World Wide Web to the next level

3. Significantly advances AI technology and systems

4. Enables the mass production of innovation – dramatically increasing quality and quantity

5. Offers a win-win solution to an emerging political conflict regarding intellectual property

6. Establishes a new model for work, collective action and human organisation

7. Facilitates the design and implementation of all kinds of emergency management system

8. Improves participatory democracy and citizen engagement with politics and science

9. Galvanises the Global Open Innovation Revolution

10. Proactively wrests control of humanity’s centralised research data archive on behalf of the Citizens of the World

Read the next blog in the series - Part 10 - The Coronavirus Terror