Twitter Fabric

I did not get beyond my first of 4 or 5 websites rounds that start my every day like the coffee I drink at the keyboard.

Twitter seemed to be a frivolous thing  many years ago.  I have a twitter screen name but I never use it.  When I learned about the Twitter feed I sat up and took notice.

This link at Wired examines Twitter Fabric.  Twitter has grown fast.  Going back to 2011 and look at this link and the front page cover of New York magazine.  The feature story then was also a visit to the Twitter hive in San Francisco.   2011 was a time when the big question was: "Will Twitter become Profitable?  A long time ago in the increasingly faster framing of "tech time" that goes beyond the normal "real time' that is the metronome of the the plodding real world that tweets, eats and thinks in real seconds, minutes, hours, etc.  Twitter moves ahead in time based on Tweets per second dictating pace, not the seconds.

Suddenly the Wired link to where Twitter is at now....I see, like Rip Van Winkle waking up from a long sleep that Twitter  is so far ahead of the progression of Information Engineering that I am amazed.  Amazed to a great extent not only by its progress but that I did not see it coming by reading the real writing on the wall back when I thought it was meaningless graffiti.

Recently I read something about IBM Watson, the Twitter Feed and Artificial Intelligence.  It caught my interest and has sat in the back of my mind where a little independent detective sits and tries to figure out stuff that comes its way to examine and come back later with a report.  Often the report comes at 2 am.  "Twitter Fabric" is a excellent moniker for the new Twitter product.  It does indeed weave so many things together.  The writing on the wall in this case is written by the weaving.

The weaving on the wall is writ large and presents many different and related graphics to explore.  I will do that as they pop out at me.

The first to pop out was beta testing.  It used to be that beta testers had to sign up, actually sign things, register, etc.  Testing usually was preceded by the warning to back up all systems first.  Now we have all become beta testers, even for 1.0 releases but don't know it until the screen asks if it can report a problem with a program.  Beta testing has now become something else:  A learning process.  That is what it always was but the problem was handed to a tech person to examine and do something applying their intelligence to the problem.  Maybe that person performing that job became relocated to India.   Now it is handed to a machine to apply its Artificial Intelligence (AI) like IBM Watson for cheaper, better, faster solutions.

Even millions of techs in India can't keep up with AI like Watson.  Neither can any of us.  That is why we have smart phones.  We think it is a big joke when we can point at our smart phones and laugh because they are really dumb, dumber than us, but the real joke is on us.  The phone is a smart edge device.  It operates at the edge of an entire system that is smarter than all of us and getting smarter than all of us all the time.  Not smarter than an extremely small number of extremely smart people that are creatively designing it, feeding it, giving it life.  I have been watching the "Manhattan Project" recently on Netflix.  It tells the story of the creation of the atom bomb, it was called "the device" then, by a small number of genius physicists working at an isolated secret center in the desert.  Kind of like the secrecy and security described by the link at Wired that examines the nature and meaning of Twitter Fabric.

Twitter Fabric.  I wonder if the geniuses at Twitter called it "Device".  Once created it takes on a life of its own.  The power to shape the lives of people.  Some of those involved in the Manhattan project recognize the magnitude of what they had created and questioned its existence and their participation.  Nevertheless, it was born for better or for worse.  For better if we could control it.  For worse if it controlled us.  Kind of like the birth of the banking system but I am sure that the creators of that entity had no scruples and the lack of that genetic trait was passed on to their inheritors.

My hope is that somewhere, in total secrecy, a dedicated core of genius intelligence is creating a new monetary system for the world designed to save us, not destroy us.  What they create will arrive not with a big band but with a compression wave that will contain the big bang not initiate it.  Kind of like fusion money compared to fission money.  That is a concept I will tuck in the back of my mind and let that detective that sits in the background there work on it.

Back to Fabric and Artificial Intelligence.  Fabric and IBM Watson.  Watson has a voracious appetite for learning that is fed with quantity like the Twitter Feed.  Mostly junk food but just like cows eat grass, it produces some excellent beef once it is digested and the waste eliminated.  IBM Watson is not the only machine consumer of the Twitter Feed.  Many cows are eating the same grass.  That is not possible in the a real world pasture of cows but the conceptual world is built on the ability of intelligence to separate physical attributes from their associated logical attributes and process them separately from what would otherwise be an unbreakable binding in the real world dictated by the laws of nature.  Our conceptual world goes beyond the natural world implementation where the binding of a physical nature implementation is dictated by a logic and language of implementation are inseparable.   That is the fundamental computational trinity of Logic, Language and Structure.

What is human intelligence all about?  It is about taking the natural world created  by  the Computational Trinity and splitting it like the atom to release its power.  The splitting is accomplished by separating a tight binding of natural world rules of logic and the structure that created the universe into conceptual world rules to create conceptual universes.  Each universe depends on the validity of its logic rules.  The natural world cannot go wrong.  It is self perpetuating by virtue of its ability to learn expressed over long periods of application time we call evolution.  The conceptual world can go right or wrong.  We created it.  It however is not self perpetuating if we do not learn and correct its crashes.  Evolution in our conceptual world is moving so fast we need concept processing machines to learn about our conceptual world and manage it intelligently. 

Twitter is employing machine intelligence learning to manage something intelligently.  Intelligent management is however a matter of definition.  So was the intelligent management of a monetary system by designing it based on debt creation to serve its creators first and those that used it secondarily but it could not exist without feeding on and dominating those that used it.

IBM is a big commercial entity that has been given access to the twitter feed.  There are big Academic Entities that have also been given access to the twitter feed for social science research as that research becomes more science than whatever has historically driven the development of the product we call the society it studies today.  Access to the live feed is one thing.  Access to the historical feed, every tweet that has ever been made in the Twitter archive is another thing.  This is the Library of Congress 2013 update on the status of Twitter Feed access: "The Library’s focus now is on addressing the significant technology challenges to making the archive accessible to researchers in a comprehensive, useful way. These efforts are ongoing and a priority for the Library."

The Twitter archive has great commercial value as well as academic value.  Making it available for pubic research also makes it available for commercial objectives.  Twitter therefore has some commercial protection interest.  That is how it makes money to monetize its big data.  How it goes about extracting that is a problem domain that I am sure has a corporate solution as well as a long range plan..  That plan apparently is Twitter Fabric.  Exactly what long range picture is....???   It is something that is a work in progress.  The big picture of where that work in progress is going by design is the big question and is that design going according to guided human intelligence dominating machine development of machine intelligence for the common good or dominant control of society in general at the expense of society for the benefit of the few.

Where is it all going?

Twitter is a lot of junk in a massive big data record.  It is (generally) so much junk on a tweet level but on a meta data level there is real value.  Just get billions of people tweeting and something on a higher level is revealed.  Fabric is going to do that.  Twitter Fabric roll out date seems to be 22 Oct. 2014.