Technological Innovation as an Evolutionary Process
Communication from the publishing technology community
Communication from the knowledge management community
Communication from the neurocognitive / linguistics community
Comment on the criticism and
observations
At
http://www.bcngroup.org/beadgames/evaluation/seven.htm
we make one argument for reassessing most PTO decisions regarding software. We also note that because of the introduction of a new generation of data structures and algorithms, we may find that the class of software based on old methods is largely shelved due to non-competitiveness. The relational database is one example. Microsoft and Apple operating systems are also examples. The BCNGroup founders have had discussions regarding a Python/Linux operating system for Peer-2-Peer collaborative networking. There are also other free and open source solutions to operating system and data management requirements.
The technology innovations that we expect to occur include many new micro-manufacturing processes that produce things for the market. These manufacturing processes include pharmaceutical farming and nanotechnology. They often require an interaction with a real physical system, such as the living plant or a nano-product factory. These systems are complex and require open loop control to account for variations in environmental temperature and unexpected perturbations (such as the introduction of a plant virus.) Human-centric Information Production (HIP) requires the same type of open loop control of parameters and interpretations (inferences). Topic maps is one way to standardize discussions about HIP.
We hold that open design computer processes associated with these manufacturing processes should not be considered patentable because computer process is an incomplete part of the manufacturing process. In the next communication, this issue will be explored in more detail.
Certain types of computer processes can assist the manufacturing of new information, but these computer processes do not by themselves produce information. This concept is foundational to Human-centric Information Production. But beyond the argument that an incomplete reduction to practice characterizes software, an additional argument is made that the software patents are hopelessly confused and contradictory.
We seek a new fair playing field where knowledge of what is a new innovation and claims reinforced by expenditures on legal actions are more fairly balanced by objective history and some type of validation that the description of the invention is accurate.
In practical terms the movement to free concepts and abstractions from restrictive ownership will be justified exclusively in economic terms. The value to society, and to a future economic system, in having a freedom of information can be outlined. Perhaps the greatest value will come form increases in the usefulness of information production about situations and in control theory as applied to small-scale manufacturing.
New results from category theory and pure mathematics, reinforces the economic argument and allows law to evolve so that software patents are placed into an objective context.
There are several intermediate solutions. New software new patents might have only a short period of protection. Old software patents might continue to be enforceable for no longer than five years.
But, as in any economic transformation there will be losers and winners. One group of losers will be those in the current information technology community that do not make the transition. This is their choice. Given the size of this community, it is necessary that most make personal choices to leave the computer programming community and help in the development of a new manufacturing and farming movement that will depend on computer aided control of complex (living) processes, like food stocks. { + }. { ^ } { * }
Let the market decide without the inhibitory assignment of long-term property ownership over concepts.
1)
Our
society is able to get on to more productive things than buying and re-buying
software. The confusion about software
that the programming community depends on is sat aside when the software
patents remove the legal protection for what is often fraudulent
advertising.
2) Even without the new primary argument regarding non-patent-ability of concepts, the decisions to start granting process patents and software patents were viewed by many as a mistake.
This new primary argument is stated:
The patent space in computer
algorithms is limited in much the same way as certain classes of algebraic
groups are limited. Theorems, the most
important one (private communication to Dr. Prueitt– 2001) by Dr. Harold Szu
(NSWC- DoD retired) establish the mathematical foundation for a forced
set aside of all patents on computer processes. A single legislative, or judicial, action based on patent
law precedent (Apple verses Microsoft) AND public consensus around a set of
mathematical theorems can be accomplished, thus ending the confusion cased by
improper PTO decisions.
Our arguments are formal mathematical arguments regarding a conjecture on the finite number of categories of programs and the implied existence of a single optimal way to do any thing required of a computer.
The AI myth
suggests that there is no limit to what a computer can actually do. It is for this reason that the AI myth has
to be sat aside by natural science, and this can occur if the National Project
to establish the knowledge sciences is funded by the Congress.
The application of formal mathematics to computer science should have been anticipated when the social movement to separate computer science and mathematics forced additional stovepipes within the universities.
So, for example, a 2002 patent on regarding an ASCII text string as a base 64 number, has to be sat aside because "how else would you do this?" cannot be given an answer. But a deeper problem arises with this patent, as with others.
Some patents are about a core mathematical principle that has been known for centuries. Why should the government assign ownership to an individual over a mathematical concept that has been part of the social fabric?
A simplification of computer science occurs when one starts to ignore these claims of ownership. This is the most important point, and this point has the greatest implications.
The best computer science is much simpler than what is currently owned and sold.
For example, my work on applying several of these patents in new ways lead to the notational system for Orbs:
http://www.bcngroup.org/area2/KSF/Notation/notation.htm
In making this application of concepts, I invented new mathematics that I regard as mathematics and not property. The first definitions and theorems of this new mathematics is published at:
SLIP Data Structures and
Programs
and
Evaluation of indexing, routing and retrieval technology
Other examples exist.
3/28/2004 8:42 AM
Director, www.BCNGroup.org
Sent: Sunday, March 28, 2004 3:51 AM
Paul:
I have supported myself my
entire career by creating and selling my software.
Please explain how this
action would benefit me, my technology, or a lifetime of sweat equity
investments.
DB
Hi Paul:
I've continued to track your endeavors through the emails you send
out.
Remember to use language and concepts that an 8th grader would know to
build up to the understanding you seek.
< psp – human-centric
information production (HIP) is simply
claimed to not be simple when in fact it is simple when approached by open
minded individuals. But in any case,
why does the business community have this right to demand that science be
understandable without any effort or background?
As I see it, your technologies go straight from scanning content (i.e.,
data) and containers (i.e., metadata) to semantic-networking in a few simple
steps, with many more maps of possible semantic networks, and therefore
possible meanings, coming out of the same content, while then allowing the
human users to determine and register their own relevant meanings, ontologies,
knowledge, and awareness (i.e., historical, situational, and potential events)
from that content/container corpus.
This is the perspective I'm using in pitching your technologies to my
employer, clients, and prospects.
R.R.
Paul
The fact is, when we talk of the brain we almost by default employ that same pesky conduit metaphor that the cognitive psychologists have found underlying folk conceptions of language and communication. We talk of parts of the nervous system sending signals back and forth and transmitting information hither and yon, and it doesn't seem odd to talk about this physical system in that way. Yet it smuggles in the question of where does all this, in the end, get transmitted? No one wants to admit a little man in the head, but that's where this kind of talk leads. Where's the little man in the head that perceives the flow?
I've just picked up Sydney
Lamb's Pathways of the Brain and was delighted with the beginning of the
first chapter in which he comes down hard on a matter that bugs me a lot.
First he tells us about his daughter (p. 1):
Some years ago I asked one
of my daughters, as she sat at the piano, "When you hit that piano key
with your finger, how does your mind tell your finger what to do?"
She thought for a moment, her face brightening with the intellectual
challenge, and said, "Well, my brain writes a little note and sends it
down my arm to my hand, then my hand reads the note and knows what to
do."
Not too bad for a five-year
old.
Lamb goes on to suggest that
an awful lot of professional thinking about the brain takes place in such terms
(p. 2):
This mode of theorizing is
seen in ... statements about such things as lexical semantic retrieval,
and in descriptions of mental processes like that of naming what is in a
picture, to the effect that the visual information is transmitted
from the visual area to a language area where it gets transformed
into a phonological representation so that a spoken description of
the picture may be produced....It is the theory of the five-year-old
expressed in only slightly more sophisticated terms. This mode of
talking about operations in the brain is obscuring just those operations we are
most intent in understanding, the fundamental processes of the mind.
I agree with Lamb whole-heartedly. It's that pesky conduit metaphor again and it really is in the way of understanding how the brain operates. These folks talk of brains as though they process patterns of bits in ways that are formally no different from what happens in digital computers. The physical dynamics of neural processes are irrelevant to them while, for us, they are central.
The interests of the software industry are not our primary interests. However, the problems created by software patents and by the monopoly over concepts and algorithms has lead to a health Open Source software movement and to new thinking on how to support continuing innovation regarding how computers are used. Our advise is to shift with the times and look to the Open Source movement.
The development of an understanding of the effects of the hundreds of thousands of software patents, and eventually the consequences to the notion of patenting information itself is something that many people are becoming aware of.
It is well known that large biotechnology companies try to restrict access to the use of biological processes via the ownership of generically engineered life forms. The music industries restriction over the enjoyment of music uses a similar business model. We just claim that these types of business models are unnecessary.
The BCNGroup is going to demonstrate that objectively evaluated innovations in mathematics and computer science can be managed by appealing to first principles of Constitutional governance. The specific proposal is given in our Charter.
We are not suggesting that our solution is the only one, but that society needs some relief form the errors in judgment made regarding that nature of software. The Open Source movement provides one type of solution, CoreSystem Inc is suggesting an Open but Protected model, and the BCNGroup is suggesting that scientific peer review should supplement PTO decisions and be used to create a history, a curriculum and objective placement of short term (five years) protection for algorithms.
There is a beyond state, where the use of the computer is not encumbered by ownership of basic concepts - those concepts being abstractions and thus very similar to mathematics.
We support the National Project to Establish the Knowledge Sciences.
Technological Innovation as an
Evolutionary Process
Director, www.BCNGroup.org