Permanescence
I made up the word. My wife is from Idaho, where they make up words all the time. We laughed recently when I used the word “incipient” in a sentence. She said that she made up words that didn’t exist, but should, while I used words that did exist, but shouldn’t.
I made this one up, though. After umpteen years of college. Really. It was almost umpteen years of graduate school. I made up the word to describe a phenomenon that I had experienced that I have never seen described. This being the case, there aren’t any synonyms. Those that come to mind are all either insufficient or misleading. It is kind of like omniscience or omnipotence, but these are off-base; there is nothing godly or theological about it.
Permanescence is a big deal, though. It could save the world. By this, I mean that it could save the natural world from us, the people, which ought to be a matter of major concern. It could save the world in the sense of all of us — the humans that inhabit the planet. If permanescence existed at some significant level, many of our disturbances and phobias would melt away. There would be more satisfaction.
Before I describe it better, some personal history is in order. I recently learned that I am a YOLD, or a ‘young-old’ person. I am soon to turn seventy, having always resided right at the peak of the baby boom. As a young-old, I have perspective that some indicate can be of value.
Here is a list of things that come to mind with regard to world-saving, particularly where information processing might help. I first learned of spreadsheets on an Apple-II using Visi-calc. I remember Bill Gates as the brash kid at Homebrew that insisted on being paid for his software. His every move for subsequent years was painful. I would in particular like to have about a dozen ‘all-nighters’ back from him.
I learned to program in COBOL in colledge in the 1970s and later Fortran using stacks of cards. I remember when you had to fight through long lines to get a specific computer card to enroll in a university course. To gain access to the computers in a meaningful way, you had to go to a computer center in those days in the middle of the night where the white-coated computer ‘administrators’ would give you fast turnaround on your jobs of less than an hour. I made of a lot of Iranian, Chinese, Indian, and Japanese friends under such conditions in those days.
I used DEC minicomputers. I used a dedicated ADT workstation in one of my first professional jobs that cost more than my salary to do spreadsheets. I used CP/M machines — a Fortune and a Victor before the IBM PC was announced, with a step down in performance and the need to switch over from Wordstar to Word Perfect. I bought a Macintosh the night Apple advertised that you could take one home for a night by leaving an uncharged credit card with them. I worked through the night with it and made some handy charts and graphs for a report for work.
There were important themes: Open systems; relational databases; functional integration; security and encryption, networking; multitasking. The Year 2000 question came and went. The graphical revolution rode the Year 2000 phenomenon onto all of the desktops. Pretty pictures won out over functional systems based on text.
It is more than that I have seen a lot. There was a lot of roadkill. More battles that mattered were lost than were won. Open Systems was an exception. The ability to mix and match hardware is a boon to mankind. Apart from Apple, which doggedly and arrogantly thumbs its collective nose at such matters, interoperability is a global treasure.
It did not go so well with software. UNIX had been the gold standard. Its port to Linux went well. That isn’t the problem. What brought the house down was the collection of social networking tools sponsored by Google and others that bundled up codes and protocols into their dedicated environments with the principal purpose of taking and using user data for their own purposes.
With one fell swoop, “thousands of midichlorians died” as indicated by the mythical Qui-Gon Jinn in Star Wars. Security went by the boards; programmer knowledge of both hardware and software was masked behind layers of kits and tools, and hard-earned system functionality of systems far and wide were lost. In the decades of design and programming before that time, painstaking detail and care had brought computation to organizations with meticulous care as to how many bits and bytes were used. 5k hear, 25k there. By the time of personal computers, you could work with 250k of RAM with room to spare. Programmers would count resources like fit people count calories.
There was a legend of the existence of what we now know as the Internet as it grew in the 1970s and 1980s. It was limited to things like e-mail. Great care went into preparation of such functionality for the real world. Encryption was an early commitment. Many email systems required the transfer of encryption keys to exchange email. Imagine what a feature would have done to society and politics in deployed for the last two decades. The solutions had been there, but the social media people had long ago cast them aside.
Now, systems are corpulent, fatuous, and easily compromised. One smart phone application is multiples in size of entire enterprise systems of the past. They are updated in the most irresponsible of ways — requiring a download of the entire blob, rather than just the parts that were changed. They are not noble descendants of the mainframes of old, they are bastardized orphans brought along by charlatans.
I have seen the devolution of the profession from the 1970s on. As organizations have embraced computer technologies more and more, computer specialists have risen in organizational power more and more. They eagerly gorge on such power, with nary a thought at to the effect of the enterprise and what they are all about. As I have said over the years, “I have not seen an organization where the computer ‘guys’ have not reported directly to the board of directors.” This is something of a misnomer. The computer guys dictate to the board of directors. Everybody knows that with a few strokes of a keyboard — or clicks, they can shut the whole thing down. I have seen that happen.
There are several reasons for the social, political, and economic morass that we face. This is one of the big ones. I was reading Malcolm Nance’s descriptions of Russian hacking and the states of chaos brought on by lax systems and felt like shouting “None of this had to happen!” You leave the money on the stoop, eventually someone is going to come by and take it. This extends to internal matters. Whose idea was it to give Eric Snowden all of that information in the first place? That bridge was crossed long before with the embrace of the desktop metaphor, which Steve Jobs stole from Parc Laboratories and Bill Gates later stole from them both. Nobody pointed out that the desktop was an inherently bad idea for an enterprise data model (front stoop, etc.).
Young people who have mastered the arts of social media and its various spawn may think of then as the holy grail. Old people don’t know what they know — they have to run their grandpa's computer for him. The current morass is analogous to them to the four forces of physics or something grounded and concrete. It is the baseline to them.
But it isn’t. …and no, no, no, the answer is not to turn thinking over to the machines. In the early 2000s, I had run-ins with fancy artificial intelligence people at DARPA, the federal think tank for the Internet and much of the advance of technology in the good, formative years. They shuddered at the thought that one might empower people with expertise in something other than computers so that they could command system functions and carry out functions based on their knowledge of science and society, not their prowess in computer languages.
Herein lies a dirty little secret. At that very time that America and its allies defeated Russia and its Soviet programs due to its offer of freedom and opportunity, American technologists were locking down the foundations of command-and-control systems features that would give them ultimate power. When no one was looking, authoritarianism won out.
It didn’t seem like that was happening when the graphical Internet was brought to bear. The fun and games — and fancy graphics and communications integration — served as Trojan horses. The plan was a ruse to get you to divulge much, if not everything, about yourself. That could be turned around and it was, with an astounding loss of context, that context being big parts of one’s life. We have all felt the effects; some benefits result from this. Many have succumbed to the allure in spite of the ‘giant sucking sound’ that was their quiet enjoyment of life.
What the contemporaneous technology combine does, it does well. What it doesn’t do that might benefit us, it doesn’t do at all. This question of context is totally unhinged in the social media world, to the point that there are those who doubt even the existence of objective truth. From a political standpoint, it appears as though the knowledge enterprise in its entirety is in peril. If it isn’t that it is not possible, it still lacks potency in the new low-level dialog. How do you convince a person with an 8th grade education that virology matters? Empowered by his social media megaphone, he is offended that you would even make the case.
That systems are impotent does not help. I was criticized on Facebook by a friend because I was “simply offering opinions.” First off, they weren’t opinions that I had offered. They were reasoned conclusions from the application of decision models that I had learned and that are commonly applied. If you know what that is, you may appreciate the difference. It is a difficult task to make the case to lay people when nothing computer-wise really works.
Now, to the point of permanescence. I will tell you how I experienced it before I try to describe to you what it is. At one point in the early 1990s, I had started a software company to provide computer systems and networks to direct selling companies. These have characteristics common to consumer products companies in that they need vehicles for buying and selling, for collecting money, and for clearing out needed transactions such as taxes, payroll, etc. They also have the unique task of calculating commissions and rewards for independent sellers, and the structure of the sales organization mattered. This of Amway as the biggest and most common example of this.
Coming up with and calculating such commissions is the hardest part of being in that business. The people charged with devising such schemes are seldom technical, so they are left to work them out with computer programmers and specialists that have come to understand such matters, but that lack technical skills themselves.
In the course of this business, I was introduced to a means of designing computer functionality that didn’t require traditional programming, but the laying out of trees. Trees represent the task of classification. The model took advantage of this to allow for stepping through the branches of a tree in similar manner as you would go through progressive lists of things. The manager of the vendor essentially locked me in a room and told me that I was going to acquire this software and make use of it. I did.
I decided to apply the tree model to the commission problem. It didn’t really make sense to me from the outset, but I had bought it and I held them at their word. It wasn’t really clear how the model was going to work, as it was so different from anything I had used before. After a month, there was a pretty good kind-of questionnaire. After three months, it was a very good questionnaire that could do some calculation. Now that I understood the tool and knew the problem-set better, I decided to start over. For one thing, having used the trees to sort out my thinking for that early period, I came to understand the issues at a much more fundamental level.
I carved out some of my day each day, and for nine months I worked on the thing. At the end of the time, it was done. I mean, it was really done. It was perfect. I could use it to design any of the myriad of sales schemes with untold variations and permutations. If a tweak was needed, it could be added in an instant, given the power of tree branching. By linking the tool to a primary system, I could use it to lay out many variations of the programs with real data to evaluate outcomes — something never before possible. The traditional systems typically too months to design and required Herculean efforts to modify. This new thing could be changed at will. You couldn’t break anything because it had been ferreted out logically. In the process of designing the thing, I thought of many permutations of the standard plans that no one had ever thought of before. Using the trees had broadened out my thinking in a number of ways.
That was OK. We had a modicum of success with it, but the competition went berserk. They basically were off in the Ukraine trying to come up with dirt on me.
I reflected on the experience. My favorite phrase was, “What if this applied to something that mattered to mankind?” You most likely would agree.
This was permanescence. I was an expert in the subject. I had applied my knowledge to the task. In the process, my knowledge was substantially augmented. I had taken the time to get it right in my third round of design. Once I had put the time and effort to it over time, I ended up with a tool that would allow me or another user to carry out a highly complex decision process in minutes. Incidentally, the compensation plan tools were used to set up compensation plans that the computer could then carry out in a flash without any action on the designer’s part.
What kinds of decision sets would benefit from such capacity? There are many, and I am pursuing programs for use of this in health and medicine. To be sure, we are not talking about artificial intelligence, but it is easy to confuse the two. Under artificial intelligence, a machine is sorting through data and setting up decision models. Using the trees, people are doing this.
Over the years, I have have a handful of opportunities to introduce this to Silicon Valley types. They hate it. At one point in the 1990s, we were giving lunch to some Silicon Valley visitors in our offices when we explained what we were talking about. They simply got up and left without finishing their meals. It is possible that they had noticed the enticing tongue tacos offered across the street, but I think it was more likely that they did not like what they were hearing.
Imagine, though, what pervasive permanescence would convey to society. Think of perfunctory tasks, like journalism. What if the way to get published was to walk your work through expert-driven trees? What if the context and content of such trees were controlled by the communities in question? Well, you would need to trust them. How could this be achieved? You would need to establish standards with input from insiders and outsiders.
If someone didn’t like it at all, he or she or they could be given the chance to compete. Trees could be linked under certain conditions — themselves defined in trees. This would bring in due process to be sure — in all things.
In sum, a pervasive forest of possibilities of this kind is possible. It looms as a massive task. One experience I had about fifteen years ago is enlightening. I had organized a group of scientists at my university to discuss similar matters. Most of them were virologists and immunologists. As such, this may prove interesting, if not helpful, in our viral crisis.
We were discussing the modeling of a certain virus’ life cycle using trees as described here. One biologist said the first step was to consider the infinite ways in which the virus could attach itself to the vascular wall of a host’s vein or artery. Another participant — a manufacturing engineer — responded by saying, “I don’t know how many options there are, but I guarantee they are not infinite”. They discussed it — the virologist and the manufacturing engineer — and they concluded that in fact there were about three options.
Therein lies an important kernel of truth. The options in a problem set are never infinite. If that were to be the case, knowledge would be lacking in that thing, in that set of relationships. If so, the incipient relationship was poorly-defined, something that use of the trees serves to ferret out. Such clarification and learning if very unlikely to take place when using traditional ‘if-then’ logic, if for no other reason that any programmer or engineering doing the coding would not know of such things in the first place.
This brings two issues to the foreground. The first is that we need to get back to the basics. Email needs to be fixed; encryption needs to be tied to everything. Trees can help with this. Not mentioned before, the Open Source movement is a godsend. The second is the use of the trees to define the processes we need to grow and thrive. Permanescence can be achieved, but it will take more than a free lunch to get there.