However you have stumbled over a deep link to this article , you might see SOS as a distinctive Morse code sequence associated with phrases such as “Save Our Souls” and “Save Our Ship”. When it became a standard after prevailing over CQD it was used by any case of maritim accident, first reported by the sinking of the Cunard liner RMS Slavonia on 10 June 1909.
Happy about it’s ambiguity i will use it here also as an abbreviation for Social Operating System. If you keep your attention and curiosity you will read about the intention of our community to publish it’s charter, embedded in the long history of coded social operation systems, the challenge to mitigate the impact of AI – Artificial Intelligence and about the infinite game to establish a location to invent some Game B spin-off.
<humor>By the way, you do not need to wear a mask by reading this post.</humor> But be aware about that it might change your view on your life – in society and in community.
Coding is a process of using something to deliver something else sometime in the future expecting the capacity of decoding by somebody someway. The meaning had shifted to IT and software over the last years but it make sense to recognize the roots of the word coding. Showing a grime, pointing in a direction, putting stones together as a landmark, painting cave walls – all these are coding activities. Coding goes far beyond humanity as most of us discovered in spring 2020 by learning about RNA and DNA and virus mutations. Likewise it seems beyond our horizon of understanding to find something which is not coded itself. Just as the approach of science your reading of this article is purely decoding. The medium – here a flat screen with pixels – represented as a blog post and created, hosted and delivered by software plays a important role in this process of decoding. I will come back to this later.
Expecting the capacity to decode something implies the presence of something else, the learned ability to return the code into the original, to benefit from the understanding, promised by giving attention to the code. In other words: You can learn only what you already know. The difference between education (in German Bildung) and training (in German Ausbildung) is more clearly coded in the German language because the second is an extension of the first. It is for sure another story to tell about education, here i like to continue with learn equals decoding.
From a more scientific point every decoding leads to an inherent process of coding in the field of the receiver, because processing and storing information again is a process of using something to deliver something else sometime in the future expecting the capacity of decoding by somebody someway.
I shorten Social Operating System by using SOS. To explore the term lets start with Operating System. In case of a simple computer model it means an intermediate between hardware and application software. The transition between the operating system and hardware looks easier than it is – you might think in a Central Processing Unit (CPU) in which coded software defines moves of electrons along cable ways. But even the boot sequence of an Operating System itself is coded in software which has to be loaded into a physical system. All this is done by BIOS, the fundamental Basic Input Output System. And this layer itself is implemented partly hard wired and partly software based. The transition between the operating system and applications – like the browser you actually use to display this article – is smarter and depends on design patterns. It could be, that the operation system provides basic functionality like to open a basic window or to handle requests for CPU-time in multitasking systems. Beside IT we could think of an Operation System as an intermediate between hardware like rain water, and software like taking a shower at home. The lake as a storage, the pump, the pipe and the water infrastructure in a town and inside a building are more related to the hardware, the contracts between storage investors, suppliers and town hall and the land lord of the building are more software related. All these contracts are based on language, culture, habits and embedded in a very complex environment we called society. Therefor we could use the terminology of computer science to re-view society. And this is, what i like to name Social Operating System or SOS.
Before i went straight to a contemporary living community and its implementation of SOS i like to frame you a bit by walking around and play with these ideas of social basic input output systems and some different types of social operating system technologies.
If you see an Operating System as an assembly of definitions, parameters, functions, logical implementations you will find similar parts in social operating systems. Some of this social operating systems might boot which one god, some other with many, in some cases you should contribute time to him once a week, in others many times a day. Some other social operating systems are booting with a ruleset for monogamy or polygamy, some others are booting with a certified certificate of business partners to form a new company. Some are more related to politics, to food, to food production or to health.
In IT we have single user single task operating systems as well as multi-task and multi-user operating systems. Society – like an intranet – is a multi-user multi-task and multi-operation-system assembly. The world as a location of multiple societies would be the multi-intranet of multi-user multi-task and multi-operation-systems, lets call it Internet.
The main reason for any implementation of any of these operating systems is to balance efficiency and innovation by lowest possible costs. This leads to the Yin & Yang of everything. You are also motivated to update your operating system, if the hardware has changed to adept better to your new environment and if you might take advantage out of a more advanced handling of this hardware.
The cost factor in natural environments is based on bio feedback loops of mutation and selection, sometimes crossing dramatically tipping points.
In this set of ideas a social operation system therefore is based on a process of using something to deliver something else sometime in the future expecting the capacity of decoding by somebody someway.
The final draft of our charter is according to these definitions our BIOS – Basic Input Output System which allows to set up SOS – Social Operating Systems on top. Before we finally move to the details i like to define AI and the possibility to fool it.
Tesler’s theorem “AI is whatever hasn’t been done yet.” might be a weak introduction into AI and jet we have no exact definition. But we could handle this for a moment by looking at the promises of companies promoting AI as a cheap effective problem solving technology and a breakthrough in modern eGovernment.
Nearly 40 years ago i was coding a party planer simulation to predict the movement of the guests at my next party. The desired distance between one guest and all the other – given for all guests – was the data equals food for the simple algorithm, which calculated in every sequence for every guest avatar the possible best move. I would not go so far to define my 2000 line turbo pascal coded software as AI but i experienced in this private programming exercise what companies are promising today: efficient handling of big data, stunning un-expected results and at some level success in prediction.
But i experienced more. By magnitude the outcome became different if i played around with some parameters (like the rotation angle of the calculation of possible direction of movement, or the starting position of each guest at the beginning of the simulation).
Some constellations where attracted by a static final pattern of occupied places for all guest avatars, some other entered a never ending loop of movements.
In the process of understanding the capacity of my simulation i added some features like “furniture”, a chair to sit, a bar to have a drink, a table with tasty food (which want to be close to everybody but can not move by itself). I experienced that some data to start the simulation was easy to collect before, some other was more a guess and some unpredictable.
In fact i invited some friends to some parties and i wanted to proof and verify the simulation. The feedback was stimulating my effort to redesign the software again.
If we compare my little program with modern AI the Intelligence part was completely outsourced (into me) and a static code was running again and again. Now we focus in AI on a self programing algorithm able to learn and proof the output to optimize it’s predictability or problem solving capacity.
In 2020 the mainstream media is talking about a new feature coming out of silicon valley and they named it Artificial Intelligence. This narrative implies something arriving soon. But imho (in my humble opinion) its already here.
When search engines started to harvest the online available data and processed the content they started to use self optimization. At this time it was more based on handling and interpreting the raw data and less in changing the code but AI already started to play a major role in Big Data. At this time i designed a self organized online gallery for artworks, represented by photo and description. The gallery learned the favorite taste of its viewers and reconfigured dynamically the order of displayed artworks. I also discovered that most viewed art works correlated with most sold artworks. A lot of social media users are not aware about the huge benefit for companies when they click the like button. Even this article is delivered by AI algorithm predicting the Internet content you might prefer. If you follow my blog via social media you are the lucky one, to whom was shown the link to this article, decided by AI.
To bring all together we have to discover a little the meaning of “fooling” in this case. If you play poker it is a skill and you lift you social status by fooling better than your competitors. If you fool in your tax declaration depending on your social status you might loose or win social prestige. If you fool your kid for a short-term advantage you might get into deep trouble later on and loose forever. As a fly showing yellow stripes could be fooling your predator, very healthy.
In case of AI you could have a client that finances an implementation, a service provider that implements it and a targeted party to which results are applied. Many ways of fooling are thinkable. A right-wing party could order in a false-flag operation a left-wing service provider to implement an self-optimizing algorithm to discover strategies of left-wing parties to win the next election. The provider could manipulate data or hiding part of the result or deliver a misinterpretation of the result knowing that i was a false flag operation. Fooling AI in these cases could be manipulating the input data, manipulating the set of rules under with the AI system should discover a possible outcome or manipulating the output.
FamiliaFeliz is a decentralized living community with shared economy. It developed several social operating systems to define the interaction between its entities and the outside. It developed also several applications (named working units) to use the foundation of its SOS.
The charter is in this picture the basic input output system and defines the basic ruleset to interact with resources.
The initial motivation to publish the charter was driven by our friends and guests who wanted a clearly structured text – in the sense of a treaty or a statute – in order to better understand FamiliaFeliz and the rules we had given ourselves to achieve coexisting.
We – the three co-founder – decided to write a draft and to discuss it in public with our friends. One co-founder put it in this words:”We think and hope to make the real life situation easier when it occurs.” In fact we invited all our friends and nearly 50 people from different color, social background, nationality and profession contributed to the final draft.
On the way to formulate the basic procedures and rules we discovered that we implemented automatically our own values and visions in this paper. Also we experienced that it became more a protection for the members against wishes and dreams of candidates and people interested to join the community than a handout what and how to do for these new members. In one version i expressed it in an initial phrase: “This charter sets out how we have lived so far and does not describe how we will live together with you.” Later we erased this because we felt it was maybe to confusing for people to read this on their way to understand how we interact between each other. But nevertheless there is a deep meaning behind this sentence. Our goal was to describe our reality knowing that every new member might change this reality on his way to join us. And it was our explizite intention to welcome this new member and open this unknown space for him to develop beside and with us.
Some time before writing this article i discovered some folks in social media involved in deep discussions about communication, sense-making, and modern government. Some of them where involved inside the Game B – community. By listening these folks i realized that our approach to find a compelling SOS for our community was nothing else than finding a real manifestation of a Basic Input Output System to test Game B compatible Social Operating Systems.
In the first years of running our BIOS – without any reboot at all – we experienced another great output. Some research was made about our alternative living community because of it’s numerous unique selling points. Some visitors also used our charter as a blue print to redesign their own basic commitment.
In late August 2020 we will welcome some founders and co-founders to gather in a first edition of a festival (CFF2020). The main intention is to bring people together who really are on the way to found a community. One aspect will be to discover the different BIOS and SOS variations and to explore similarities, variations and differences.
Some people on the way to search for an alternative lifestyle are arguing that to fool the old system (armed by AI) Game A is ok. The end justifies the means. We disagree. We see our BIOS in an open infinite game with all competitors based on given resources.