I completely agree that wiki-projects are exemplary organic growth models compared to the way plans are made by Congress. I certainly support using information technology to move governments toward more direct and efficient forms of democracy. I would love to see things like income tax levels determined in real-time based on the average preferences of everyone's e-government web preferences. Many people still don't have internet access though. I think when a person comes up with a plan they typically consider 2 or 3 factors in a qualitative manner in their mental model of the system and disregard other side effects as insignificant. That paper used a model with 10 or so factors in a quantitative manner. There are many things it leaves out, but such plans are still useful as counterweights in policy arguments against ideas that are extreme in other directions. Regardless, a person couldn't design by hand the circuit layout of the processors that are currently in our computers and phones, and the number of problems that are too big for our brains that computers are helping us with is expanding. If we had a way to design computational models in a wiki manner then we could just add the irrigation and insect migration effects to the model to gauge its sustainability, then other people could make each part of the model more accurate, etc. I think it would help us find real solutions to many problems in a much faster way than listening to political speeches or exchanging paragraphs of imprecise human language on social networking sites.
> Date: Tue, 9 Jul 2013 09:55:38 +0200
> From: jane023@gmail.com
> To: wikidata-l@lists.wikimedia.org
> Subject: Re: [Wikidata-l] Accelerating software innovation with Wikidata and improved Wikicode
>
> Michael,
> The wonderful thing about organic growth models is that they are
> sometimes extremely energy efficient, and very hard for computers to
> compete with. If as you say such a "5-year-plan" to reduce CO2
> emissions were executed, all sorts of other, unintended bad things
> would happen, such as plants and insects moving into areas of the
> country where the ecology is thrown off balance, traditional farming
> communities uprooted, rivers running dry for overuse by irrigation,
> and so on. There are just too many factors to consider. In the movie
> "Broken Flowers" with Bill Murray, one of the (many) funny themes in
> his visits to 20 ex-girlfriends is his rental of a Ford Focus and
> using pre-printed MapQuest maps to locate his girlfriends' homes. In
> one scene he drives along a wooded lane next to a cornfield called
> "Main Street".
>
> Back in 1806 after the Lewis&Clark expedition, the newly mapped
> "Louisiana Territory" was filled in with street names in Washington
> D.C. The "Westward Ho!" movement subsequently populated the area and
> all Indians were conveniently rounded up and moved to reservations. If
> you drive through parts of Nebraska, the Dakotas and Wyoming today,
> you will often come to some "Main Street" where planners calculated
> that a town should be settled, but this never happened. It was a good
> idea in theory to make money by selling land to people who would
> populate the land, but in practise the only successful farmers were
> the ones who settled on land in climates that they knew by experience
> how to farm. It is unknown how many people died in the badlands in the
> 19th century, but you can be sure that the planners in Washington had
> very little knowledge of what they were selling.
>
> But I like the way you think about using Wikidata to solve the bigger
> issues like global warming!
> Jane
> 2013/7/9, Michael Hale <hale.michael.jr@live.com>:
> > Well, you would run into many of the same decisions we already face about
> > how much to limit automated uploads of data if you wanted to turn it into a
> > live programming platform. You can certainly already use DBpedia and
> > Wikidata to get datasets for many cool demonstrations of functional
> > programming though. Yes, I suspect we are just at the learning to walk stage
> > of programming in the big picture. My favorite examples of AI these days are
> > when computers do large mathematical optimization tasks. I was most
> > impressed by a paper last year that optimized the placement and
> > configuration of coal power plants and more farmland to reduce transport
> > related CO2 emissions by 50% for the entire US. The paper was called
> > "Nationwide energy supply chain analysis for hybrid feedstock processes with
> > significant CO2 emissions reduction". A free early version was published
> > here:
> > http://www.nt.ntnu.no/users/skoge/prost/proceedings/cpc8-focapo-2012/data/papers/092.pdf
> > And to think how nice it would be if the customized optimization techniques
> > they developed were merged into the code associated with those Wikipedia
> > articles for everyone to easily use. The reason that task impresses me so
> > much is that if a computer at Pixar draws a nice picture it is just matching
> > what the artists could already partially see in their heads and if Siri on
> > the iPhone tells me a good restaurant to visit it is just doing what a
> > person that lives in the area could do, but if a computer redesigns the
> > entire energy infrastructure for a country I have no idea what the solution
> > will look like in advance. There is a lot of smart information out there if
> > people are willing to look for it. How can the singularity get them to stop
> > listening to the bad information? I think things like Wikipedia are
> > definitely helping us all get gradually smarter though, so I'm optimistic.
> >
> >
> > From: dacuetu@gmail.com
> > Date: Mon, 8 Jul 2013 19:32:37 -0400
> > To: wikidata-l@lists.wikimedia.org
> > Subject: Re: [Wikidata-l] Accelerating software innovation with Wikidata and
> > improved Wikicode
> >
> > Wikidata seems like a good platform for functional computing, it "just"
> > needs Lisp-like lists (which would be an expansion of queries/tree-searches)
> > and processing capabilities. What you say it is also true, it would be ahead
> > of the times, because high-level computing languages never expanded as much
> > as imperative languages (probably because the processing power and the need
> > was not there yet).
> >
> >
> >
> > Wikidata as an AI... how far away is that singularity? :)
> >
> > Micru
>
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