The Infrastructure of Intention

So I am starting a new and rather different job tomorrow. In preparation for that, I have been ruminating on an topic for the last few weeks, trying to turn it into a post before I start and get immersed in a new and probably overwhelming environment.

This idea is nicely captured by the phrase "The infrastructure of intention". That is to say, living things, social systems, technologies, all embody purpose in various ways and all these purposes have various ways of interacting with each other and wouldn't it be great if we could find some better ways of both analyzing these extremely important processes, and improving them? I didn't get very far with this essay because the ideas are just way too big for a blog post, and kept threatening to grow into something dissertation-sized.

Fortunately in goofing off from addressing it I ran into this post by Robin Hanson, which very helpfully reminded me that questions are typically more interesting than answers. So, here are some questions around the idea of intention and computation, some of which have been dogging me for decades. Some managed to get into my actual dissertation, and some others may be addressed in this new gig, but we will see. I'm just a computer programmer, which means most of what I do is just informational plumbing, and it doesn't leave that much time for grandiose theorizing. But high and low have their ways of coming together on occasion.

So, the questions (and pointers to people who have spent more time thinking about them then I have):

• What is the nature of purpose? (Cybernetics, particularly Gregory Bateson)

• How do humans (and animals manage their various divergent intentions? (Freud, Tinbergen, Minsky)

• Can inanimate things have purpose? (Latour, Bennett)
• How do individual goals relate to social structures and institutions? (all of sociology and political science, at the moment particularly Charles Tilly and Mary Douglas)

• How do computer programs embody purpose? (AI)
• Can/should goals be explicitly represented? (Agre and Chapman's situated action critique of planning-based AI)

• How do systems encode and manage divergent and conflicting goals? (Actor theory, Multi-agent AI),

• How does goal-directed behavior work in human activity that is clearly non-functional in any simple way, like religion and art? (Evolutionary psychology)

• Can/should/how can software embody and extend human goal structures (the CSCW field, but originating maybe with Doug Engelbart)

• What would the world look like if computational infrastructure actually supported goals in a powerful way (lots of science fiction, mostly with a dystopian flavor, but for a somewhat more cheery spin, Bruce Sterling's story Maneki Neko)

Big fucking questions, aren't they? And quite out of scale compared with my ability to provide answers, but they won't leave me alone.

Counting the Omer: Netzach (Patience, Eternity)

[warning: very stream-of-consciousness]

As usual I start off by going to the opposite pole -- impatience, the transitory. Thinking about the evolution of technology towards immediacy and how it produces in us a radical impatience, a small-scale anger that triggers at any millisecond delay between us and the digital response we seek.

Sometimes my mind feels like a Wall Street trading pit (do they till have those?) Furiously aggressive and competitive shouters battling each other over tiny differences in abstract transactions, trying to gain some small advantage here, shave some seconds there. Giving themselves early coronaries. Like Wall Street, little actual value is created from all this passion. Presumably it's all in the service of making a shitload of money that will be enjoyed some other time, a time that never seems to come.

I think somehow the effort to create coherent selves (which serve to allow us to not be trapped by every local temptation) gets too caught up in status seeking, and becomes a kind of frantic competition. It's a disorder of volition, a condition where long-term goals and short-term behaviors are too separated to support each other. Patience may be a way to connect the levels.

Patience in a way requires faith, a belief that in fact things will improve, that they'll work out even if we don't get every little thing done, that goals will get closer, even without impossible exertions and emotional flipping out. Eternity is in no rush...by allowing a little eternity to filter into our daily lives, we can moderate the unhelpful proddings of all the things we would like to do and don't have time for. Too much eternity is overwhelming, I suppose -- how the hell are you supposed to get anything done if you think about the ultimately trivial impact of our actions on the universe? But a little is good, it lets you downscale the concerns that loom so enormously.

"Things happen of their own accord, or not at all." -- Gene Wolfe

I don't know, patience can bleed into passivity. Gregory Bateson's was derisive of conscious purpose, as somehow un-ecological or unsound. Easy for him to say. It's the comfortable who can zone out into some kind of cosmic holism, secure in their estates. The rest of us have to scramble for a living, and we need goals and plans if we aren't to be slaves of other people's.

One more thought on eternity: like atheism and anarchism, it is a concept that is defined by negation (in this case, of time), and is thus hopelessly infected by what it seeks to deny. Time is even harder to avoid than god or the state. Yet all three of these concepts make a certain degree of sense, if only as asymptotes or attractors that draw us forward.