all-knowingness

The Delusion of All-Knowingness: From the Garden to the Tower to the Cloud

THE DELUSION OF ALL KNOWINGNESS: FROM THE GARDEN TO THE TOWER TO THE CLOUD

You’ll be just like God, knowing everything, ranging all the way from good to evil.”…Gen.3: 5

With the Internet, there is no longer an excuse for not knowing… B. Krzanich, CEO Intel

The Garden: All Knowingness and the delusion of Self-Providence

It was the best of times. The accounting provided by the Jewish Torah and Christian Bible indicates that long before such a formal construct as history had been codified, Sapiens (triune-man) had brought their unique giftedness fully to bear. Having been granted dominion over the material world, their souls were constrained only by the boundaries of their uniquely animated reason, imagination, interests, and creator-ability.

It was the worst of times. In the Garden, rather than a quest for new dimensions of Creator sanctioned dominion, sapiens desire for Creator like transcendence exposed their vulnerability to treachery. The father of deception counseled that All-Knowingness was but one bite away. Sapiens bite at All-Knowingness proved both catastrophic and generationally contagious, genetically encoding desire for creatoresque Self-Providence.

The Tower: All Knowingness and the delusion of Self-Sufficiency

It was the best of times. Sapiens, ensconced in a flood-free enclave, sought a symbol to undergird their resistance to divine direction to disperse. The Tower project symbolized permanence, possibly arresting the neurosis induced by the continuing phenomena of rain; the rainbow contract offered little consolation. The Tower provided scant strategic advantage – e.g. reconnaissance of storm clouds on the distant horizon; nor did it impart tactical efficacy – e.g. training to develop critical skills that might serve them well in the future. The Tower was a monument to the first Sapiens inspired permanent city-state.

It was the worst of times. Some aspirations inspire the onset of opiate-like addiction – which disengages spiritually gestated moral authority and imperils social and personal accountability. Sapiens, no less vulnerable to spiritual deception than ages earlier, determined they’d restore their divinely diminished creator-ability through enhanced collaboration. The Tower actually evidenced a new genetic mutation of an old sapiens weakness with contagion potential: Self-Sufficiency born of counterfeit All-Knowingness.

The Cloud: All Knowingness and the delusion of Self-Supremacy

It was the best of times. The sages of Melbourne, Palo Alto, Cern, Beijing, Tel Aviv, et al, synchronized their breathing as the technology mother ship arrived and breached the zone where virtual-digital-knowledge resides. This zone is the by-product of a Sapiens induced digital big bang, which formed a network-centric-ecosystem comprised of many interoperable jurisdictions, e.g. computing, communications, storage, big data, analytics, and applications. This distant digital relative of the analog Tower is called the Cloud.

Suddenly complexity became fast, free, easy… and invisible…T. L. Friedman1

The Cloud is delivering unprecedented benefit; it has brought huge global value directly to the desktop and smartphone, and similarly enabled individuals to broadly touch the outside world – e.g. this blog. Few products, services, relationships, or destinations, are beyond its reach. Many presumptively declare the Cloud as wise, declaring it the sovereign authority of who and when. Many believe that the emergence of quantum computers and artificial intelligence will enable the Cloud to better “amplify the power of machines, the power of one, the power of many, and the power of flows1“, advancing sapiens beyond Self-Providence and Self-Sufficiency, to the portal of Self-Supremacy.

It was the worst of times. The Cloud alone adjudicates digitally articulated policy in its own interest, e.g. elevating All-Knowingness over Personal-Privacy. Destitute of social or psychological discernment, the Cloud is wholly incapable of distinguishing those of noble intent from those of nefarious intent: governments in the name of national security and criminals for personal gain, competitors for strategic advantage and businesses for commercial leverage, and terrorist for political conquest and rebels for thrills. The Cloud enables little more than nominal attributes of privacy, by way of anonymous trusted-third-parties, proxies, and vulnerable security technology, of it’s choosing. It also offers the opportunity to surrender to Big Data and Analytics agency simply by clicking “I Agree”.

The Cloud is considered to be rapidly evolving from a kluge-of-capabilities to cogent-entity status; many believe it exhibits pseudo-sentient analytic proficiency. Nevertheless, the Cloud remains highly vulnerable to nefarious human agency, which uses it to alter past and present accounts to form a new you of their choosing, e.g. profiling. Often the Cloud is positioned where principles, not binary data, ought to moderate. The Cloud now undergirds political party hostilities by furnishing weapons grade accusations and innuendo; its social network agency has abated the tactile connectedness critical to maturation of inter-personal skills. The Cloud has no master, yet it remains connected to an evergreen supply of covert and clandestine information-nutrients. Laws, standards, and threats are powerless to thwart or restrain Cloud-sourced virtual-synthetic-facts.

Disaster or Doxology:

The view from above the Cloud: While deception dons coats of many colors, pride is the color it uses to subvert well-being and foment catastrophe. All-Knowingness was the shade of pride donned by deception in the Garden and Tower, and now the Cloud. In the Garden, deception championed Self-Providence; shame and eviction are what followed. In the Tower, deception held out the illusion of Self-Sufficiency; thereafter, diminished collaborative facility was necessary to thwart a new global contagion.

The Cloud – envisioned as master-servant of sapiens quest for All-Knowingness enabled Self-Providence and Self-Sufficiency – has been besieged by powerful and unrelenting cyber espionage, subversion, interloping, piracy, mass surveillance, and profiling. As in the Garden and Tower, the Cloud opines to discordant spiritual revelation and displaced moral integrity. While direct personal control of privacy and security would substantially thwart such Cloud misadventure, true resolution requires the Words of the Creator to reside in the Hearts of Sapiens – not acts of Congress, Courts, Corporations, or Churches.

The All-Knowingness and Gross-Secrecy Conundrum

THE ALL KNOWINGNESS AND GROSS SECRECY CONUNDRUM

          Rather than to make scapegoats of engineers, it might be wiser to lay before them a work programme… Elmer Ambrose Sperry, 1930

The development of narrative scripts (writing systems) for numbers and then language facilitated the archival preservation and broad dissemination of facts, fictions, accounts, and fantasy. However, narrative scripts were not nearly as proficient at preservation and dissemination of data as for information, likely inspiring and influencing development of computational scripts (mathematical systems).

The analog embodiment of these scripts accommodated physical and access control of data and information. Analog vested scripts together with analog networks comprised of oceans, seas, rivers, tributaries, and estuaries, brought potent benefits to mankind. Collaboration among family, friends, foe, colleagues, and importantly neighbors, increased in practice and value, as did commerce.

Digital scripts (binary systems) enable composition (production), preservation (storage), replication (virtual copies), and dissemination (distribution) of data and information. Importantly, they enable systems, devices, appliances, and applications to directly engage; machine-to-machine communication is a critical network centric process.

The Digital Ecosystem and Monoculture rely on digital scripts. The Digital Ecosystem is enabled by: Network Service Providers such as AT&T, Verizon, Charter and Comcast; Network Technology OEM such as Cisco, Juniper, and HP; Mobile Architecture Providers such as Microsoft, Apple and Samsung; Application Portals such as Facebook, Google, and Yahoo; and Cloud Facilitators such as Amazon and IBM. The Digital Monoculture enables interoperability among disparate data, applications, and devices.

The personal, commercial, and institutional benefits derived from global access to data and information, and Cloud facilitated on-demand digital resources, are apparent. The former aqueous networks have given way to a digital network of networks called the Internet. Like other game changing advances, digital script enabled technology found itself the chaperone of unintended consequences, the specter of all-knowingness.

In many regards, the Digital Ecosystem and Digital Monoculture are no more vulnerable than were the aqueous commercial networks, transports, and cargos of centuries past. Presently, sophisticated weaponized malware renders differentiation of noble from nefarious intent a daunting technical challenge. The broad disintegration of propriety and privacy has fomented unintended consequences, the specter of gross-secrecy.

All-knowingness is highly addictive. Its proponents crave access to data and information for which its owners hold reasonable expectations of privacy; they see their covert and clandestine actions as expressions of urgent benevolence and commercial expediency. Gross-secrecy is also highly addictive. Its proponents evidence totalitarian resistance to encroachment of both their contemporary and vintage stashes of secrets, believing personal risks always outweigh collective security interests.

Just as all-knowingness is antithetical to privacy, gross-secrecy is antithetical to collective security. Some would argue correctly that security would be enhanced were the barons of all-knowingness to impose this knowledge on everyone with regard to those in their sphere of influence (e.g. contact lists). Others would no doubt argue that vulnerability would be exacerbated as gross-secrets were mismanaged, misunderstood, and manipulated. To varying degrees, both conditions already prevail. Neither all-knowingness nor gross-secrecy alone can serve our highest security or moral interests.

It is important to recognize that neither point of view, all-knowingness or gross-secrecy, is necessarily diabolical, although such cogent consideration runs counter to our social and cultural conditioning, not to mention capitalistic instincts. It is crucial that we determine which resources can and cannot resolve this conundrum. Politics can never resolve this conundrum; politics only offers analytics but can’t run, pass, or catch. The solution must carry the essential genetic markers of the conundrum itself, technology.

Recently, a government coterie (by all accounts considered technology neophytes) missed a valuable opportunity when they marched into the valley of American technology giants with cease and desist vibrato, rather than specific lawful collective security objectives. Such specificity would have allowed the participants to memorialize specific technical goals and boundaries, to which the most creative community of technologist on the planet could innovate. Now positioned as combatants rather than citizen partners, both have launched media campaigns that bring resolution no closer.

Many rightfully question whether all meets the eye. The government might very well posses the assailant’s in-coming and out-going communications Meta data, iCloud backup, social media postings, radicalized training CV, and finance, relationship, and travel history. Could the Administrations petition, based on the All Writs Act of 1789, also seek to weaken limitations imposed by recent lawfully enacted legislation: 2015 Cyber Information Sharing Act (CISA), 2015 Modified US-EU Safe Harbor Privacy Framework, and the 2015 Revised Patriot Act? Do American technology companies fear being labeled as conscripted informants of the U.S. government by their global competitors more than they fear U.S. government demands as a harbinger of future demands by other governments?

The most recent outbreak of conundrumitis evidences a disastrous breach of best practices. Politics has cast itself in the role of technologist, issuing specific court sanctioned technical directions. Technologists left with but two courses of action chose the path of lawful resistance over technical submission, challenging the constitutionality of the Attorney Generals petition.

Self-inflicted wounds are now running neck-and-neck with those realized from attacks and assaults by perpetrators. How to get members of team-america to focus more on an effective game plan than on who is captain or who will get the loudest applause, is actually the most dangerous and challenging conundrum we face.

Only Technology can enable All-knowingness and Gross-secrecy to beneficially Coalesce