Asmiov's Gaia and the Brilliance of the Masses

I was recently re-reading Vernor Vinge's Fire Upon the Deep, and began thinking about the Tines in relation to Isaac Asimov's Gaia from Foundation's Edge. These sci-fi classics are far from the first to explore group mind theories, but are easily among the most popular and prominent.

For those unfamiliar with these novels, allow me to define:

Tines: Aliens which merge four to eight physical bodies into a hive mind called a pack. These dog-like creatures communicate via sound waves, and each pack represents a single consciousness. Greater or fewer Tines in a pack results in stupidity or insanity.

Gaia: Planet of 1 billion people all tied together into a telepathic group consciousness when it was founded; this consciousness was eventually extended to the non-human life, and later to the inorganic material of the planet. Outside of the group consciousness, each individual maintained a separate consciousness. (Thanks Wikipedia!)

Gaia and other group mind theories have grown almost as quickly as the Internet which spawns them. With the ubiquity of Bluetooth earpieces and wireless bandwidth, the dream of a technological Gaia inches closer to a reality.

Is this a good thing? Probably not. As technology brings more people together, the more humanity is lost. See the virtual personalities and stalkers of MySpace, Facebook, and Second Life. Simply examine the emails and IMs sent and received every day. Gruff, one-line fragments from which we tease some meaning and invent the rest.

Of course, the "Wisdom of the Crowds" collective thinks this is the greatest thing since sliced bread. Popularized by James Surowiecki and overtaken by the likes of Tim O'Reilly and Jimmy Wales, the concept is simple: a large group of nonspecialists is more intelligent than any expert. This is the thinking that founded Wikipedia and DARPA's controversial Policy Analysis Market.

While Surowiecki's original thesis put large boundaries around this "crowd wisdom," the meaning has now morphed into any crowd is wise. Forgotten are the original catechisms of "Diversity of Opinion" and "Independence." Of course the failure causes have been ignored: homogeneity, centralized management, information cascades, and emotional factors. With Surowiecki's constraints, how is it possible to form a wise crowd?

The technologists of today pushing for the Gaia of tomorrow are primarily devotees of this new so-called "crowd wisdom." Perhaps it's more appropriate to call it the "Brilliance of the Masses." This brilliance is on display for us daily: dumbed-down news, soccer hooliganism, politicians, etc.

If the thought of this future Gaia is not disturbing enough at this point, consider this is the most popular video of all time on YouTube:


UPDATE: Jaron Lanier has a nice thesis on the Wisdom of the Crowds at the Edge titled "Digital Maoism: The Hazards of the New Online Collectivism"

Hiring in the Age of Change

Moore's Law is no longer a thing of wonder and imagination in this brave new world. The fanciful futures created by the imaginations of people like Jules Verne, Arthur C. Clarke, and Vernor Vinge are reached and surpassed at an astonishing rate. Technological innovation continues to increase exponentially. Despite all this, hiring strategies have barely advanced over the last 100 years.

Employers still create standardized job listings; they're just posted on web sites instead of newspapers. Employers only look at standardized resumes; they're now Word documents sent by email instead of letters sent by post. And in this age of tremendous innovation and change, employers still look for skills over adaptability.

Hiring for specific skills has become a flawed strategy in today's marketplace. In the 1920s, most parents could directly teach their children the required skills for employment throughout their lives. Now it is almost impossible to even imagine the types of jobs our children will have. New technologies, and their accompanying skill sets, rise and fall with the seasons.

Does this mean that experience and technical skills are useless? Far from it. But the ability to adapt and succeed in an ever-changing technical landscape is much more valuable.

For a concrete example, would a development manager for a Java Struts project prefer a programmer who spent 5 years maintaining a single simple application based on Struts or a programmer who spent 3 years in a succession of 6-month MVC projects, only one of which is based on Struts? Looking at the resume, most HR recruiters will push the programmer with 5 years of Struts experience. However, the programmer with 3 years of MVC experience is more likely to provide valuable contributions over the long-term. Technologies like Struts come and go, but the ability to pick up these technologies quickly is good forever.

Employers know this, but obliquely choose to ignore it. There are a number of reasons for this, the most common being "this is how we've always done it." People don't get fired for using the tried and true, no matter how anachronistic. Almost every workplace has processes that are carried out, even though no one knows why anymore.

The other reason is that it's a lot easier to quantify a skillset against a checklist than examine a qualitative measurement of adaptability. This is especially valid in large organizations where hundreds of people join and leave every day. Simple wins a lot of points in trying to overcome that amount of volume.

In the end, this is an education problem. Most recruiters know the catchwords, but lack deep understanding of what they mean. Few recruiters are capable of recognizing related technologies and "substitutable" experience. Even for those that do, the standard job requirement formats are inadequate to communicate the true requirements.

Also, many managers and recruiters are unable to distinguish the difference between 5 years of experience and 1 year of experience repeated 5 times. To revisit our earlier programmers, it is a fair characterization that 5 years maintaining a single application is not going to provide 5 full years of experience. After a while, each day becomes much the same. This could be easily characterized as stagnation.

This is not to imply that a candidate who has hopped from project to project is inheritly better qualified than the one that didn't. There needs to be more education and freedom within the hiring process in order to move beyond a checklist of skills and years of experience.

Start Your Keyboards!

Welcome to my musings about technology, it's uses, and the business of creating it. After years in the IT industry, I decided to share my thoughts with the world, since nobody else seems to care. At least not without me buying the beers!

What are my qualifications, you ask? Well, I own a computer and an internet connection. That seems to be enough to exude intellectual authority these days.

Hopefully something you read here will provoke so thought or change the way you look at things. If you eek out a glimmer of insight from these posts, it's all worthwhile for me.