Networking-as-evolution

A study about the prospects of Agent Technology (part of EU IST research)
seems to attempt a similar approach as our meta-artificial
does (sorry but you need to read back to 2005 :-( ).

It is hosted on a site concerned with roadmapping
the evolution of things to come, in a holistic manner, it
goes several years back to review and assess the progress
of object versus the agent stage of technology. It
entagles events such as Internet and Autonomic Computing
in its overall assessment.

Let's read a piece from the executive summary:


In its brief history, computing has enjoyed several different metaphors for the notion of
computation. From the time of Charles Babbage in the nineteenth century until the mid-
1960s, most people thought of computation as calculation, or operations undertaken
on numbers. With widespread digital storage and manipulation of non-numerical
information from the 1960s onwards, computation was re-conceptualised more generally
as information processing, or operations on text, audio or video data. With the growth
of the Internet and the World Wide Web over the last fifteen years, we have reached a
position where a new metaphor for computation is required: computation as interaction.
In this metaphor, computing is something that happens by and through communication
between computational entities. In the current radical reconceptualisation of computing,
the network is the computer, to coin a phrase.
In this new metaphor, computing is an activity that is inherently social, rather than solitary,
leading to new ways of conceiving, designing, developing and managing computational
systems. One example of the influence of this viewpoint is the emerging model of software
as a service, for example in service-oriented architectures. In this model, applications are no
longer monolithic, functioning on one machine (for single user applications), or distributed
applications managed by a single organisation (such as today’s Intranet applications),
but instead are societies of components.


So, we see the similarities are that it calls for a reconceptualization of computing underling the idea of the network is the computer , a distingushed common concept between us,
(it is in absolute error though by claiming the coining of the infamous phrase above as SUN microsystems trademarks here !!!).

Also, we see it unifies the range of its analysis covering both Internet and the Web but most
noticable is the reference to computing-as-interaction , matching our previous posting.

It also brings in, the concept of Service Oriented Architecture, a development which
is under our macroscope (similar to O'Reilly's radar) but has not made it to this blog yet.

In the study's terminology our meta-artificial could be named as the Evolution
of Communicating Computational Entities.

I am quite surprised to notice that this 100+ page study above produced under the goal to push the taking-up of agent technology comes to the same more or less conclusion as I did, some years ago (blog starts 2005) namely to re-establish a reference model for Internet and Web computing.

Now, one would notice that my own research premiss was to understand the entity Net as a kind of new computing paradigm (*) since paradigm seeking was my goal in previous research life. Correspondingly, the study above aims for massive AI adoption, in the form of Agent Technology arrives at the point to consider such an idea (the new paradigm) as the starting point for progressing on the AI front applied to the present state of things (Internet, WWW etc).

So the clue of this posting is a series of equations (M=A=N):


Meta-artificial is
An evolutionary map of computing-as-interaction is
Networking-as-evolution





(*) I coined the term meta-artificial intelligence borrowing from Tuchin's concept of meta-mechanical process (+) mixing history and terminology since Turchin's approach does target a roadmap to AI but mainly helped my concept construction to understand the Net-as -evolution.

(+) meta-mechanical process maintained by the computing that includes user interaction, so real computing for Turchin is more general case than computing by an autonomous machine in isolation as defined by the Turing machine.



(TBC)