Novelty

Several different thoughts made me come to the idea to use AI as a way to blur the boundaries between what is artificial and what is aggregative. Lately I’ve come to the impression that artificial is the condition to aggregate intelligence, but it has no direct relation to intelligence itself. Thus AI as used for strong AI, should stand for Aggregative Intelligence. Let me explain the thoughts that got me to this point.

In one of my working papers on the global brain I ran into trouble to find a good abbreviations. The idea is to update IT-alignment by a focus on crowdsourcing. The idea is as old as my research on novelty regulation. We don't need to build intelligence: we can query it. So my first idea was Intelligence Querying, which would become IQ-alignment … ok, that would be a good way to create confusion. If I'm going to create confusion it could be better have a good reason for it. So I decided to got for AI-alignment, where AI stands for Artificial-or-Aggregative Intelligence.

Crowdsourcing works by aggregating amateur intelligence to expert intelligence. One of the experiments of my former advisor created an aggregation from kinder-garden intelligence to adult intelligence. My own novelty regulation model is to get from non-intelligence to some intelligence by aggregation. Indeed, their is only aggregation of intelligence. It doesn’t seem a satisfying answer.

In another working on bootstrapping I’m transforming the notion of Artificial by Herbert Simon to a more general term. He defines Artificial as human made as opposed to spontaneous, but if your investigating the emerging of intelligence, it should become system made as opposed to spontaneous. A system doesn't need to be intelligent to make other parts, not even for self-replication. In this sense what does artificial actually add as value?

We can understand the artificial by looking how we create laboratories to investigate a specific hidden feature: by creating an artificial condition so that the feature comes observable. In our attempt to understand the hidden feature, we mechanize the artificiality to make the feature more robust and autonomous (for more research on this see Bruno Latour). Indeed, artificial intelligence is exactly what we got with expert systems. They are making the artificial conditions to mechanize some intelligent processes. Ironically it seems very improbable that such research will lead to understanding intelligence itself. As intelligence is aggregated.

It may seem as artificial is quit trivial feature, but we don’t see it that way. Artificial is what makes novelties emerge, not just intelligence. Could we say that the artificial is not important? How would the world look if we only know how things work and not have created technology with it? It wouldn’t be satisfying either. We need both, hence I suggest to create a blur by making AI stand for Artificial-or-Aggregative Intelligence. We may say that our brain is the artifact that creates the condition to aggregate intelligence. I like to make a metaphorical gag with it:

Our minds are like whirlpools, while our brains are like toilets. A day is nothing more than a very long flush. To wake up, we flush our brain, and it stops running until we fall asleep.

After giving several presentations in September, we have begone to visit companies to investigate how innovation is happening there. The idea is to find the AS-IS situation and compare it to some of the literature. I won't be writing about the specific cases, the companies and the people we work with should be able to evaluate that first. I can talk about the methodology.

It is not my intention to create boring questionnaires, but to experience the full complexity of the innovation process. The method can be called Participatory learning based on action research. I know it more from antropology research, just observer or being a participant is a quite different story. The participatory method should lead to an improvement for the partners too, this is very important aspect.

I'm also a bit inspired by the concept of repurposing. There is the story of Gutenberg and his discovery of the printing press. The story goes that Gutenberg had the idea, but could not create it. Only by being on a wine exposition and seeing a wine press did he found a breakthrough on his vision. Repurposing has been important during my whole research, it was a key aspect of my master thesis too. The expected outcome from this participation is a breakthrough on how to create a web2.0 tool for the Enterprise Innovation planning ... still a long way to go !

In Friedman's book "The World Is Flat" you find the expression "creative destruction on steroid". Recently I've been hearing this term more frequently, probably not all have read the book, but the expression does seems appeal to many. In a recent debate on service science we got from the economic crisis to that expression. You could understand this as "flattening is a disruptive innovation". It seems to be a disruption of nations, by globalization and the rise of a new order. Let me outline what I mean with that.

Yesterday I had an interesting talk with Wim Vanhaverbeke who is an expert on open innovation. For example he is a coauthor of Open Innovation: Researching a New Paradigm. To give some idea of the talk I would like to tell about open-innovation as false-negatives. One of the many thing I've learned yesterday.

When you stand on a crossroad of two disciplines, how do you make one aware of the potential leverage from the other? It may be easer when one uses the jargon from the discipline you try to reach at, in this case management. The goal is to manage radical change by creating something similar as Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) for Innovation (so EIP). It is the intention to make a project/experiment for the research on novelty during my PhD. I've been making a small paper as introduction to the idea of EIP, mostly as Doctoral consortium paper for Open IT-based innovation. Here follows the abstract, or have a look at the full extended abstract:

Last moth has been full of stress. Lucky for me a deadline got postponed several times and I've been working on a submission of the open IT innovation call until the 16th. The week after it I was in Viena on the ECCS conference, but with no wifi on in my room. This last week I've been updating all my other stuff. Many nice blog topics are to late now, but let me write something about the papers.

I've made a paper on formalizing novelty and a novelty management. Clearly my writing is the weakest link, I'm not all to pleased about them. I touch swiftly the relation between individual cognition and the collective construction of science & technology. Still the first paper is mostly about individual adaptation. The collective adaptation is more worked out in the novelty management.

Recently I'm getting more into IT management, thanks to the mentoring of the professors at MOSI (E. Torfs and E. Vandijck). During reading in the book "Corporate Information Strategy and Management" I came across the concept and examples of B2B, what stands for "Business to Business". The concept C2C (customers), like ebay was of course known to me. The B2B example was Covisint. Using the web for B2C may be the most strait forward e-commerce example.

It is not evident to change once view of the world, especial when its related to the concept of free will. In the past years I have been busy reviewing the concepts of intelligence. It is one of those concept still full of romance and mysteries. I've found the use of a metaphor helpful to opening up. Try to imagine how old societies behaved toward those issues they could not understand (the moon, the sun, the seasons), in most cases a human like projection and behavior with supreme powers was given.

In one of my working papers I've been searching for a good definition about the essence of my research. In earlier work, concepts as creativity or innovation have been used instead of novelty. Those concepts are biased and do not address the actual research problem.