March 29, 2005 My Motivations
This project came about in an unusual way. What I used to do for a living was research abstraction and representation systems for computerized systems. The problem is that you have life, and if things go well, you'll have a representation of some element of life in the computer. There are a few — not many — people who worry about the theories behind the abstractions used in such representations.
My primary application for many years was what we called "virtual enterprises." The term has really caught fire recently. The motivation is to disempower corporations as the huge concentrations of power they have become. You cannot do or finance interesting collaborative work these days without large, consolidated, powerful (and selfish) corporations. There are two reasons for this, both accidents of history.
The first is financing. Lenders find it easier to lend eight billion dollars to Boeing to develop a new airplane. Or Ford for the next model, or better yet, Northrup Grumman to develop a new aircraft carrier and its planes (in which case the loan is on the order of over a hundred billion), That's because the corporation in question has a desire to survive and grow and it owns stuff that lenders can find and grab if need be. Oddly, nearly all the stuff in aircraft carriers and the airplanes on them comes from small companies, because they have always been more inventive and for new stuff much cheaper. But try (as I have) to get a billion dollars for a few thousand small Mom-and-Pop companies to make a new car, even though they can do it better, faster and cheaper.
The other problem is a simple matter of collaborative mechanics; imagine that you have companies doing things that they have or anyone else have never done before. And that they start doing it before they quite have it all figured out. That changes that one partner works may have profound implications in processes and parts and even business practices in others. That the creativity of and reward to all the participants is to be maximized but in such a way that everyone compromises for the whole. That the customer is an equal partner in the virtual enterprise. That things are expected to change constantly, so much that the virtual enterprise will evolve, changing partners constantly and even permanently disassembling.
We can do this, we have done it in places. We can decouple the management of capital from the management of imagination and production. We can make things better and a whole lot cheaper and in smaller, custom lots.
But it is hard, and the hardest thing has to do with something called "introspective abstraction." That's where you do stuff and watch yourself and others doing it and them do stuff on another level to improve how you do the original thing. In big companies, you have the guy who stamps metal parts and you have other guys (often 20 to one) managing, measuring, accounting for the way that stamper does his work. If you knew how they did it, you'd be amazed at the inefficiencies and problems in that system.
In the virtual enterprise, everyone has to have the ability to do it all, and potentially for everyone. That means we have to have a way to model work (easy) and model work about work (harder) and do them both using roughly the same "language" (very, very hard) and yet do so that a simple yob can do it well. That last part is where film folding comes in.
I used to work with some very spooky advanced government labs on this problem. We had a lot of resources, in part because no matter how broken business is, the weapon system business is far more broken. One of the things we did was study the motion picture business, the end that actually makes movies. It turns out that they are a terrific example of existing virtual enterprises. Along the way, we found out things that production companies didn't know, so we told them and had a significant impact on what you see.
That was my introduction to movies, about which you can read tons of interesting stuff in my book.
Back to the problem: how do we abstract a thing (or context, or situation or story) and information about that thing with sophistication and still at the hobby level? Well, the most sophisticated abstractions today are in films, and they happen to be the most accessible (of clever ones), in fact billions of people pay hundreds of billions to be amused with many of them.
The computer science research the US Department of Defense does these days is no longer pure research. The once great center, ARPA, now is in the business or war. Because of that (and other reasons, mostly political) advanced, useful interesting research is no longer done in the labs I worked in. So they and I have parted ways.
Oh, I still work on virtual enterprises and produce "useful" results. But a significant portion of my mind is occupied with the higher level world of how we reason about layered stuff, layering that is still central to understanding representation, art, even new ways of reasoning about science. Message me if you want some background on these applications. XXX One element of science is captured in a subsection under here. That is expanded in document similar to this one, but built around a new notion of science.
In the meanwhile, how we abstract and reason about life, and how we represent it all in our primary cultural art form is interesting enough. In fact, it is way cool, fun and addicting. It has changed how I think about movies, indeed how I imagine and dream.
Enterprise integration, abstraction, FIS
