Maya on Interaction

I’m preoccupied with location. There’s a quality of *being here* that just doesn’t creep into virtual representations or maps of physical space. In order to be meaningful, maps or other virtual representations need to be annotated by people capable of expressing a rich contextual appreciation of a space.In all this, my friends are expressing concern about my competence with regard to spatial navigation.

I submit some ridicule from Dionisis:

“Maya jogged me to death after waking me up with an sms at 9.15am on this brisk Sunday morning. I hope I will live to make it to our next relaxing event. It’s a good thing that we were running in a straight line but she lost her way for approximately 20 minutes so I got some rest walking. I drunk two Lucozades and got a taxi back home but have yet to recover fully”

When I was 9, workers at my Mum’s library went on strike or on vacation, and I stepped in to cope with the extra workload. She put some blank stickers, a rubber stamp and a stack of books in front of me and demonstrated the procedure: peel - stick - stamp. I repeated a million times until an innovative - which means a desperate - impulse kicked in and I changed the procedure: stamp all stickers first - iterate [peel and stick.] Procedure 2 is better because it’s quicker (about 50%) and tidier (no ink bleed on book). My mum was floored and procedure 2 was the talk of the community for a week.

What do you make of this scenario from a knowledge management point of view? Is there some knowledge I exhibited that the regularly scheduled masters of library and information science didn’t have? Uhhh… Is it worth investigating what organisational structure or what lucky confluence of circumstances in the library’s environment prompted the inspired change of procedure? Duhhhh…

No. Unlike the regularly scheduled crowd, whose job it was to follow a procedure, my job was to solve a problem. Being 9, unpaid, unsupervised, and ‘in’ with the management, my circumstances afforded me the audacity to suppose that my insight was valuable and the license to design my work.

Managers inclined to nurture knowledge work in a mum-like way, are strongly supported by management theory since the 50’s. The Japanese production industry is buzzing with methods for coaxing luscious and lucrative ideas out of the cogs. Meanwhile, Amazon, like anyone with any sense, is clawing the walls to see what new modes of exploitation are enabled by service-oriented software.

Artificial artificial inteligence. What’s artificial about Amazon’s brand of artificial intelligence? It uses humans.

This makes good exploitative sense. Turing, Gödel, Chomsky, etc. prove that there are some things that humans can know but that computers can’t. Things that are uniquely knowable to people often represent inspired discoveries or feats of creativity - like the double helix or a symphony. There are other things that people can know but computers can’t that are dull and low-level, like CAPCHA tests - when you have to decipher letters and numbers from those images that online services use to prevent automated subscriptions. So guess which kind of knowledge Amazon’s leveraging?

Right! It’s the “Is there a pizza parlour in this photograph?” sort of knowledge that you can aspire to cultivate if you want to join Amazon and its customers in the neurotic scurry map and serve location-specific information.

While spacial coordinates are fixed and bounded, their coffee-serving, film-projecting and petrol-dispensing occupants are not. To maintain its status of trusted referrer, Google maps doesn’t really have a margin of error - if it buggers you with enough, or even one false positive (yessiree, there’s a circus right over yonder. Round up the kids and get the engine croaking…) they compromise the credibility of every single bit of information they have about what’s where. And while machinery can monitor fluctuations in space, only its human components can tell you weather some conglomorate of matter in a space constitutes a pizza parlour.