What Does A Patent Say?

There is a narrative about accelerating technological change, which appears to be supported by an increasing volume of patent activity. I have expressed my doubts about this metric in previous posts.

• Death of Software (November 2004)
  
• Evolution or Revolution (May 2006)
• Rates of Evolution (September 2007)
• Hedgehog Innovation (February 2023)

In their latest book, Ariel Ezrachi and Maurice Stucke also call out the unreliability of this metric.

The number of patents is also an imperfect measure of innovation. ... no correlation between the number of patents in a technological field and the annual performance improvement of that field ... The number of patents does not reflect how disruptive the patented innovation is or whether it's toxic or beneficial. ... Furthermore, patent numbers do not account for the Tech Barons' distorting the innovation paths and monopolizing knowledge. Ezrachi and Stucke p 150

Although despite this caveat, they appear to take the metric seriously when evaluating cities on their support for innovation pp 208-211, p268 n30.

They also suggest a further twist.

It should be noted that not all patents have been transformed into products and services. Some of the technologies may have been developed but not necessarily implemented, Still, they offer a valuable indication as to the assets a company is trying to secure and the direction in which its technology is heading. p238 n1

This is supported by a newspaper article by Sahil Chinoy, which includes a quote from law professor Jason M Schultz.

A patent portfolio is a map of how a company thinks about where its technology is going.

Tech watchers have often interpreted patent applications in this way. In my post Guardian Angel (May 2008), I discussed a patent application that attracted a lot of attention at the time, both because of its content and because of some of the people involved. (Bill Gates obviously, who else?)

But with all respect to Professor Schultz, that's not actually the purpose of a patent. The primary purpose of a patent is not to enable the inventor to exploit something, it is to prevent anyone else freely exploiting it. 

(The purpose of the patent system may be to reward inventors and encourage invention, but that's an entirely different question.)

As reported by Dani Deahl and Sarah Perez, Amazon took out a patent to prevent people doing in Amazon shops exactly what Amazon had always encouraged them to do in everyone else's shops! See my post on Showrooming and Multi-sided Markets (December 2012, updated June 2017). 

And in some cases, a patent is just staking a precautionary claim to an invention that is not currently viable, to make sure nobody else can profit from it.

Obviously this kind of patent game is not the only method used by Tech Barons to suppress innovation that is inconvenient to them, and Ezrachi and Stucke document many others. Sometimes it just means taking over an inconvenient service and shutting it down, as eBay did with decide.com. See my post Predictive Analytics for the Smart Consumer (April 2014).

Meanwhile, if the Tech Barons actually wanted to do something totally devious and evil, do you really think they would submit a patent application for the world to see?

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Sahil Chinoy, What 7 Creepy Patents Reveal About Facebook (New York Times, 21 June 2018) subscribers only

Dani Deahl, Amazon granted a patent that prevents in-store shoppers from online price checking (The Verge, 15 June 2017)

Ariel Ezrachi and Maurice Stucke, How Big-Tech Barons Smash Innovation and how to strike back (New York: Harper, 2022)

Sarah Perez, Amazon, now a physical retailer too, is granted an anti-showrooming patent (TechCrunch, 16 June 2017) 

Related post: How soon might humans be replaced at work (November 2015)

The Aim of Human Society

To what extent is the aim of human society to maintain its equilibrium, as the POSIWID principle would suggest? There is a line of French thinkers who resist the universalism to which some schools of cybernetics aspire, and see the construction of social norms as political rather than teleological or quasi-biological. Xavier Guchet traces the position of Canguilhem and Simondon back to Bergson’s The Two Sources of Morality and Religion

where it is argued that closed morality and religion are without a doubt morality and religion of conservation. Their function is to preserve the stability of the existing social order. On the contrary, open moralities and religions have the function of returning human societies to the élan of creation, of unmaking the existing social order, inventing another order and becoming something else. Guchet 2012

Whereas for Foucault and others, social norms are constructed to protect society from pathological variations that might threaten it, Simondon focused on invention and the creation of new norms.

(I am more familiar with Popper's notion of Open Society than with Bergson's. There appears to be some difference between the two notions, but I haven't done enough reading at this point to be able to explain the difference.) 

One way of talking about these questions is in terms of programming. Simon Mills quotes from a book by James Beniger, distinguishing between control (purposive influence toward a predetermined goal) and programming (setting of the goal to be achieved). Mills carries out a close reading of one technology advocate (Sandy Pentland), showing that the success stories of big data are largely based on relatively closed or autopoietic systems, delivering some degree of technocratic efficiency and resilience, but failing to answer the more fundamental question - what is the purpose of society as a whole. Where do the goals come from?

Another way of talking about these questions is in terms of organizational learning. Chris Argyris introduced the distinction between single-loop learning and double-loop learning, which very roughly corresponds to Beniger's distinction between control and programming. While single-loop learning uses simple feedback to improve the performance of a system relative to a fixed goal, double-loop learning allows for the modification of goals in the light of experience. Advanced technologies such as machine learning are not limited to single-loop learning, and may be able to do some limited double-loop learning, in suitably controlled environments. (To go beyond this, we may need some notion of triple-loop learning. But see article by Tosey Visser and Saunders problematizing such labels.)

Sometimes, technologies and sociotechnical innovations are spoken of as ethically and politically neutral instruments, which can simply be used to maintain established socioeconomic and cultural goals. So that falls naturally into the "closed" model of society identified by Bergson. But if technologies and innovations (sometimes the same ones) are described as disruptive, this seems to imply a more "open" model of society.

Obviously there are ethical issues both ways - whom does the disruption serve, but also whom does the preservation of the status quo serve?

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Henri Bergson, The Two Sources of Morality and Religion (1932)

Geoffrey Bowker, How to be universal: some cybernetic strategies, 1943-1970 (Social Studies of Science 23, 1993) pp 107-127 

Philip Boxer, Triple-Loop Learning (Asymmetric Leadership, 8 January 2007)

Xavier Guchet, Technology, Sociology, Humanism: Simondon and the Problem of the Human Sciences (SubStance #129, Vol. 41, no. 3, 2012)

Simon Mills, Simondon and Big Data (Platform Journal of Media and Communication, Vol 6, 2015) 59-72. 

Alex "Sandy" Pentland, Reinventing Society in the Wake of Big Data (30 August 2012). Professor Pentland is also mentioned in John Thornhill, Trustworthy data will transform the world (FT, 5 March 2018, paywall)

Karl Popper, The Open Society and its Enemies (Routledge 1945)

Paul Tosey, Max Visser and Mark NK Saunders, The origins and conceptualizations of triple-loop learning: A critical review (Management Learning 2012 43: 291 originally published online 2 December 2011)

Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy: A cybernetic view of human nature, Henri Bergson, Karl Popper

Related posts: Three wishes (May 2009), A cybernetics view of data-driven (August 2020)

This is not who we are

@jesslynnrose offers an allegory for an unnamed technology company with dubious ethics.

The function of a system is its output.

If you have dog grooming machine that sometimes smashes puppies and you keep running it, you're in the dog smashing business.

If you work for a mass surveillance company that keeps enabling genocide and undermining democracy...

— Jessica Rose (@jesslynnrose) January 7, 2021

 

You might try to guess whether there is any particular technology company she is talking about. People from at least three different companies thought she might be referring to them.

I've had people from three different companies message to ask if I'm attacking them personally and this feels like Schrodinger's take on self knowledge. pic.twitter.com/a2xV1aMJQv

— Jessica Rose (@jesslynnrose) January 8, 2021

A common form of defensive denial takes the form This is not who we are, which @AlexGraul describes as an oxymoron. @ayourtch reinforces this point by quoting from Donella Meadows: Purposes are deduced from behaviour, not from rhetoric or stated goals

In other words, POSIWID.

 

But why does this count as an oxymoron? Because it seems to be openly acknowledging the behaviour that contradicts the espoused identity. 

In some cases, the contradiction appears to be resolved if we believe that the behaviour of a minority is not characteristic of the majority - as if the minority were not fully part of the "we". Bill Clinton used the phrase in 1995 following the verdict in the O.J. Simpson trial, and Barack Obama used the phrase many times. It has also been used on the Republican side. Christopher Scalia calls this a rhetorical sleight-of-hand.

In a corporate setting, executives use this kind of language to blame bad things on the actions of individual rogue employees rather than the corporation as a whole. Yeah, right.

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Donella Meadows, Thinking in Systems (2008). The quote is on page 14 of my copy.

Christopher J. Scalia, Why Obama says That's not who we are (USA Today, 8 February 2016)

See also The Fallacy of Rotten Apples (July 2004)

Forgotten Tricks

Old typewriters didn't have an exclamation mark key. Those accustomed to modern word processors might infer that people didn't use the exclamation mark. @newstypewriter even suggests that this forced writers to "convey excitement by writing artful sentences".



But if you ever used an old-fashioned typewriter, you should remember the workaround - single quote, backspace, point. Numerous people leaped onto Twitter to point out this error.

Which raises the question - how do tricks like this get erased from the collective memory? 

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Another forgotten trick is the fade-out at the end of a pop single. This was sometimes used to conceal flaws in the recording, but was sometimes used as an artistic device. Indeed, the fade-out at the end of the Beatles' Day in the Life was engineered to last for an unnaturally long period. Nowadays, the fade-out isn't thought to suit the way music is consumed, and is typically only used for retro pieces such as Robin Thicke's Blurred Lines.

William Weir, A Little Bit Softer Now, a Little Bit Softer Now … (Slate, 14 Sept 2014)

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Obviously our sense of the possible is influenced by present and future technology, but it is also influenced by our experience of past as well as present technology. New technology occasionally allows people to do things they didn't know they wanted to do, but it often merely finds more streamlined ways of doing things that people could already do if they were sufficiently determined and ingenious. Look at Delia Derbyshire and Karlheinz Stockhausen, synthesizing highly original music without the aid of commercial synthesizers. Whereas if you use the same tools as everyone else, you may struggle to produce music that doesn't sound the same.

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Related posts

Art and the Enterprise (March 2006)
Karlheinz Stockhausen (December 2007)

Subversive Technology?

Some technologies are apparently neutral.

For example, the Internet and other media are supposed both to promote and to undermine the interests of the State and Big Business. Witness Rupert Murdoch and the Chinese Government.

Cameras can be used as mass surveillance devices, or to invade the privacy of "private" individuals (including so-called "celebrities"). They can also be used to read private notes by public servants, and many innocent snap-happy tourists have been suspected of terrorist reconnaissance.

And clocks. "I was your slave, now you are mine, I am Time."

But even if a given technology can be used in both ways, it may still lean more one way than the other. Are some technologies genuinely subversive; if so, how have they been allowed to exist?

Further Reading

• BBC News: Secret Cabinet briefing notes accidentally revealed by a housing minister
• Scribe: Teleleaks and Versions of Reality
• Robin Wilton: The Law In All Its Majesty; Two Shots, Two Feet
• Bruce Schneier: Security Risks of Street Photography; Taking Pictures from a Train; Tourists, Not Terrorists
• Wikipedia: Sousveillance

Quick Fix and White Lies

Some overweight people eat too much, and could use some help stopping eating. Nowadays you can get a pill that fills your stomach, so you feel sated. Why do we feel that there’s something wrong with this idea, or perhaps something wrong with a world in which this kind of idea thrives? Gianpaolo writes “Am I the only one preferring to go after the causes rather than the symptoms?”

What are the causes of overeating? One of the problems is that some people don’t have an effective STOP signal. So taking a pill that triggers a STOP signal could introduce an effective control mechanism [footnote]. The pill acts as a proxy for food. The brain receives a message that it interprets as “stomach full of food” – this interpretation is untrue but helps to produce a good outcome – what we sometimes call a white lie.

One reason we might be uneasy about a mechanism that is based on a white lie is that it may not be sustainable. How long is it going to take the brain to learn that the message is untrue, to distrust and ignore it? Are there situations where the brain needs to distinguish between the proxy and the real thing? What happens when the pill stops working?

From a system engineering perspective, this unease corresponds to a principle that information flows or control flows ought to be true. There are countless systems where this principle has been breached – usually to force some subsystem to do something it wasn’t originally designed for. Systems engineers are wary of the complications that can ensue from proxies and automated white lies – but also appreciate how such mechanisms provide a powerful way to solve problems quickly.

But sometimes it’s okay to have a mechanism that works for a while, even if it isn’t going to work for ever. If people are committed to changing their lifestyle – whether this involves over-eating or smoking or any other bad habit – then there may be nothing wrong with a pill that helps them through the transitional period.

Thus it seems we may sometimes combine a “quick fix” with longer term change. But there is a strong risk that some people will just take the quick fix - or even a long succession of quick fixes. and fail to do anything else. And (perhaps as a consequence of this) there are many people who object to “quick fix” solutions on principle. For example, brief therapies (such as hypnotherapy and NLP) are scorned by practitioners of psychotherapy, who hold that deep problems require lengthy intervention.

It is certainly true that some deep and messy problems require deep and lengthy and costly intervention. And it is also true that some people (especially politicians) are too easily seduced by quick fix solutions that create more problems than they solve. So it is wise to be cautious of relying on the quick fix. But the principled objection to the quick fix goes beyond sensible caution, to an outright refusal to consider its merits in any circumstances. So where does this aversion to the quick fix come from?

One possible answer can be found in Albert Borgmann’s analysis of technology; the quick fix belongs to a technologically distorted view of the world, which Borgmann calls the Device Paradigm. According to Borgmann, we expect technology to deliver things to us quickly, safely, conveniently, and ubiquitously; technology presents us with a series of devices that disconnect us from the real world of cause and effect. (The quick fix pill sets up a fantasy that the pill is all you need.) Borgmann’s answer to this is something he calls Focal Things and Practices: engaging (or reengaging) deeply with chosen aspects of the world.

Ultimately, the objection to the quick fix pill is an ethical one - not just the belief that people ought to be able to control their own behaviour without the need for pills, but the belief that there is some positive value in engaging with the world in certain ways. I feel sorry for people that need (or think they need) the stomach-filling pill, because it seems to take something away from what makes us human.

[Footnote] In terms of Donella Meadows’ “Places to Intervene in a System”, this mechanism appears to qualify either as Negative Feedback (Level 8) or Material Flow producing Information Flow (Level 6/5).

Screw in a Lightbulb

Seth Godin invites bloggers to blog about compact fluorescent lightbulbs (blog, squidoo lens, initial response).

"Why have only 6% of all US households installed even one CF lightbulb?"

Seth is puzzled. It can't be the economics, it can't be the environmental impact. And it's not the geopolitical impact either. "So, why are people apparently immune to the benefits. I mean, why won't we even try one of the bulbs?"

What is the problem? What is the real problem? Is there a problem at all?

Lots of reasons and excuses have been posted in reply to Seth's original post. Apparently, doing something unusual seems to involve more effort (ÜberEye), and effort isn't cool (The Mostly Honest Truth). CF bulbs may not be compatible with your current fittings (including dimmer switches), so you might need to get the toolbox out (PaleGreen). More excuses from 12 gurus.

Apparently something as simple as changing a lightbulb turns into a major shift in lifestyle - the Happy Burro sees the reluctance to use CF bulbs as a case of a more general problem of bad habits, alongside the fact that "One in eight people who survive a heart attack change their lifestyle to avoid another attack. So the resistance to CF bulbs becomes an example of what Glenn Parton calls The Machine in Our Heads.

Some of Seth's readers have pointed out the commercial role of Wal-Mart in promoting CF bulbs, and the happy alignment of economic and environmental interests in this particular case. BloodHoundBlog sees this as an example of the redemptive power of capitalism. (So it's a pity this kind of alignment doesn't happen more often.)

The adoption of technology typically follows an S-curve. Questions about technology adoption therefore need a timescale. Fairhaven, the River says that Seth's figures date from 1999, and produces figures that suggest we are already further up the S-curve. But not far enough, not quickly enough for marketing people who are often impatient to reach a mass market. (To be fair, Seth doesn't always take this position.)

Let's analyse this properly. The system we are looking at here is the system of technology adoption. This system has a characteristic shape - the S-curve - which is produced from the interaction between a number of forces, including the economic interests of producers and consumers, and including the growing maturity of the product and its production process, relative to available substitutes. And technology substitution follows a double-S-curve.

POSIWID invites us to think about the "purpose" of this S-curve. In fact, the S-curve deals with a lot of the issues raised in the CF bulb case - the risks of new products, difficulties of process and interoperability, ramping up production, ramping down production of earlier products. Marketing people may be impatient with the realities of technology change - but you cannot alter this system without understanding it thoroughly. Merely exhorting people to adopt a new product is not going to make any fundamental change.

Note: Most of the popular theories of technology diffusion, adoption and substitution derive from Rogers (1962) and from Utterback and Abernathy (1978), although they are commonly attributed to more recent authors.

Nuclear Weapons

What is the purpose of the atomic bomb (or any other weapon)? Can a weapon be regarded as successful if it is never used? Some people might think that a weapon can ONLY be regarded as successful if it is never used.

Umberto Eco argued that the bomb was an act of communication.

“Until the middle of the century the force, the power, still resided in guns and in weapons. After the middle of the century the real power is in information. Even the atomic bomb is used today not as a weapon but as a message. The fact, the happy fact, that it is not used means that it is not the bomb in itself which works: it is the continuous exchange of messages between powers.” [Umberto Eco, interviewed by Christopher Frayling, The Listener, 11th Oct 1984]

More recently, in a post entitled Weapons and Weapons Technology as Rhetorical Devices, Michael Goldhaber identifies Ronald Reagan's "Star Wars" initiative as one of the most powerful weapons of modern times. It never really worked properly (in the engineering sense), but it brought about the collapse of the Soviet Union.

But Goldhaber also quotes Anton Chekhov:

“If a gun is on the table in the first act, it will go off by the third act.”

Chekhov understood that a weapon possessed a tragic aura of inevitability, its destiny. A weapon is also an attractor - it draws (however reluctant) our attention. It is this combination of forced attraction and apparent inevitability that makes it all the more likely that any weapon will be used sooner or later. If it works.


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iPod

Why did the US government fund research in microdrive storage, electrochemistry and signal compression? President Bush reveals the answer:

"They did so for one reason: It turned out that those were the key ingredients for the development of the iPod."

[source White House via PRnewswire, GMSV and Barry Briggs]
[see also BrewTown Politico and Engadget]

Over the years, the US Government has invested significant amounts of money into hi-tech research and development, much of it for aerospace and military purposes. Billions of dollars are poured into the space programme, but at least we get useful civilian spin-offs such as non-stick saucepans. (Wikipedia says this is an urban legend, but who can trust Wikipedia these days?) Billions of dollars are spent on DARPA, but at least we get the iPod.

This is a classic POSIWID argument. In recognition of this, I believe President Bush deserves be elected as an honorary member of the POSIWID institute for his dedicated commitment to the cause of POSIWID.

However, there are a few minor difficulties with the details of the President's argument. Although some of the iPod technology comes from Xerox Parc, some of it comes from Hitachi and Toshiba and the Fraunhofer Institute. And can the US Government take the credit for the research that enabled the iPod without also taking the credit for the research that enabled Internet porn and phishing?

It is of course possible for unprincipled thinkers to use POSIWID selectively or misleadingly, drawing attention to a minor (but popular) side-effect in order to distract attention from the major purpose. Such abuse of POSIWID would of course lead to immediate expulsion from the POSIWID institute, even for someone as prestigious as the US president.

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