Supermortality: Oscillating senescence

In the series of posts I've been writing where I couch my analysis of the developing age of genetics in the form of hypothetical stories. I always wanted to create an illustration of precisely what it would be like for the people who become the first super mortals. What will the pattern of their chronological age or years of life look versus their genetic age as it is defined by the quality of their genetic information as it undergoes the degradation that is associated with the aging process? I always had the image in my mind but wanted to take some time to create an info graphic defining what most peoples lives will proceed as.

Often the question has been asked "Will we be immortal" and that is ultimately the wrong question. Immortality inherently implies not only that one is impervious to death but that one is impervious to death precisely via the mechanisms of aging. This will never be the case for any human being living today and it is safe to say, that even for those that pine to be uploaded into artificial bodies that it will likely never be the case for them either so long as they do not repair and replace those artificial bodies and the key here is repair and replace. Until we get to the point where we can completely move our consciousness to artificial substrates we are stuck with the biology and while we have it it seems inevitable that we will be able to indefinitely push out the end date on our existing frame by replacing decrepit systems in place as they degrade. I described this process as *revigoration* over a decade ago, it involves a set of methods for en mass replacing senescent cells and tissues in a living host. This is not Science fiction, in fact it has already been done in several target organisms to limited degrees...restoring the youthful vigor and energetic function as well as extending life for worms and providing a much longer youthful state of life for mice. As the underlying genetic mystery continues to be unraveled we should expect these results to quickly translate into the human population. I detailed what will result of this technology in several posts linked below.

Still the question remains of how is it we will age once we are able to revigorate ourselves at our will? The graph below illustrates a general example. I will explain it's features below:




What does this show us:

1) The Y axis indicates the "Genetic Age" of the individual. This is basically correlated with their state of degradation as they get older, the greater your genetic age the older you look and the less fit you are. Today we have no choice but to follow a constantly increasing genetic age. This will change however once revigoration technologies are available for human beings as described in this post.

2) The X axis indicates the "Years of Life" simply a count of the number of years that the individual is alive, independent of their state of vigor as described by their genetic age. Today, most human don't achieve maxi um fitness until their early 20's and then from their lose vigor, most never make it to 70 and the octogenerian and nonagenarian and centarians on the planet can be counted in the thousands. This will change as revigoration technologies across the spectrum come online. As we discover methods for restoring mitochondrial energy stores and reversing key degrading pathways in their processing of ions this will increase vigor and possibly years of life, as we repair and restore other systems that are due to the accumulation of waste products and junk we will see continued extensions both in vigor into old age and as well the average end of life age...but even if we succeed in eliminating all the pathologies that are associated with age today using some treatment we will still be subject to slow systemic genetic age which will be a result of the constant low level attack we all suffer from mutations induced by the sun and other environmental factors. Hence, genetic revigoration will emerge as the optimal method for systemic restoration of youthful state across multiple systems using vector targeted delivery of genetic modifications to restore aged dna in key cells by pristine dna (possibly synthesized from stored or generated compliment of an individuals known pristine dna sequence) by the 2030's computing power given current trends will be more than sufficient to allow for instant or near instant sequencing of entire human genomes and sequencing and synthesis could be a process that takes hours.


3) The black line growing from the origin indicates the standard aging process with years of life that we currently enjoy. Illustrating the life line of a given individual. It grows upward until just about the late 20's for this persons life and then takes a sharp down tick back to a genetic age in the low 20's, this first down tick indicates the first revigoration event for this person. As indicated above some type of advanced vector targeted whole genome replacement is done where the persons genetic code is restored. It is believed that methylation of genes over time is a key factor in the general degrading process of multiple systems that is associated with age, it is also known that other pathways of directed aging (like telemore length modification) are in place but these stand apart from the constant slow process of accrued methylations. Repairing these to the an earlier state of youth may reverse entire systems fitness.

4) Note, after the revigoration process is complete aging continues again on the same slope of growth as degrading processes continue. This shows why immortality is not ever possible...degrading always happens and the best we can hope for is to dial back the clock periodically. In this example the individual gets into a cycle of aging about 10 years into  their mid 30's and then revigorating back down to the "BRGA" which stands for the Base Revigoration Genetic Age. For all intents and purposes they would be that age genetically assuming revigoration technology works with the same efficiency every time but this is not guaranteed. It should be expected that depending on the level of revigoration that must be done there may be a need to perform multiple revigorations to allow an individual to revert to their BRGA and restore the vigor of an early 20 something across their tissues.

5) The process continues for several decades as this person virtually never ages more than 10 years and never genetically appears to look or achieve the fitness any lower than a 35 year old before being revigorated back to BRGA that is until the sudden fall off in the cliff at about 118 years old which marks the SDE, a sudden death event. An SDE can be marked by many things, it could be a stroke caused by a condition not previously genetically identified and unable to be treated before the individual is discovered. It could be an accident that catastrophically destroys the persons body...like being hit by a car or being trapped in a fire, many candidates exist for SDE's and we will still be subject to them even as we are *supermortals* oscillating our senescence about OUR desired levels of fitness as we see fit.


"As we see fit" being the key here, this particular graph had an individual suffer an SDE at nearly 120 years old while they were genetically about 24 years old, the quality of life that we will be able to experience when such technologies exist and many aspects of how the new reality will shape our behavior socially was described in this post. It is important to realize that immortality though technically not ever possible is virtually possible once we are able to live as super mortals...oscillating our senescence and living our lives to as full an extent as we wish until the inevitable SDE unmakes us.

AI, robots, Action sensation....all in the same solution stew.

The image above, a plastinated human brain and central nervous system along with distributed nerves. It fascinates me that so many researcher or thinkers in the areas of machine learning and artificial intelligence are factoring out the importance of this distributed sensation and memory network in attempting to create highly agile and responsive intelligence's.

We can see in fact hints at the need for externalized sensory capability in an intelligence when we look at the cutting edge techniques in robotics. In robotics the problem was approached for nearly 40 years with the idea that you can computationally determine all the necessary motions of external limbs in order to dynamically balance and ambulate walking robots...but it turned out that doing that top down approach was not only extremely difficult, requiring massive amounts of computational power...but it was also doomed to always be less efficient from a power utilization stand point as well as simply not nearly as dexterous for free flowing motions (once where a precise path of motion is not followed).

The keys started coming together in the mid 80's and came out of the work of people at MIT who started thinking seriously about asking how nature does these things. The Leg lab was famous for producing attempts at ambulation that mimicked animals and insects in various ways to reduce the necessary degrees of freedom and thus enable reduced  computation for ambulation with steady balance but these were still not getting it right.

The key insight came from Marc Raibert then at the Leg Lab, he reasoned quite obviously that if it  is true that ants and roaches can ambulate their limbs at astonishing speed while having barely a few thousand neurons for brains, there must be something else to how they do it.

He went to work building distributed sensation into his robots, allowing the limbs to meter the degrees of freedom and thus reduce the complexity of the ambulation calculations....however the real innovation came when the application of statistical learning algorithms combined with these distributed sensors on limbs made it's debut.

These methods allow for a massive collapse in computational requirements by simply training the limbs to "replay" previously stored successful movements for a priori sensed positions of body and limb positioning. This allows the robot to "remember how to walk" rather than "computer how to walk" for every ambulation cycle. In the early 2000's many teams applied genetic programming to train mechanical robots in virtual environments ...allowing them to build the statistical maps of successful ambulation for given terrain encountered....and here we are...2013 and seeing the fruit of these advanced methods in the work of Raibert (now head of Boston Dynamics).

Big Dog

PetMan

Little Dog

Atlas

:All use these critical insights of distributed sensation and statistical learning to reduce computational complexity by orders of magnitude BUT all the proof we need to know that current method still have lots wrong is that no robots currently are as fast or agile on uneven or mixed terrain as a roach.

To me this means quite simply that either the type or amount of distributed sensation necessary to achieve that level of dexterity is not yet discovered. I don't think it has anything to do with the computational muscle...which at this point is quite overkill for the problem by orders of magnitude.

The work I've been doing with the Action Oriented Workflow algorithm is very much related to these ideas, AOW is a generalized algorithm for defining arbitrary "action" attributes these are then sampled in as dense or sparse a set as necessary to gather data on when those actions are performed. The Action Delta Assessment algorithm is the underlying statistical learning function for the algorithm, allowing historical information for action execution to be compared in real time in a distributed fashion...precisely as what is needed to refine ambulation in robotic limbs.  It is quite simple to see that mechanical ambulation of limbs is directly analogous to this  , I have some ideas on how I can apply the algorithm to discover and learn these patterns but am focused on applying AOW to the abstract action space of interacting human and business objects in software (to learn and refine). The fractal nature of the algorithm makes it ideal for solving problems of very messy data sets once the sufficient level of resolution to the "action" points are made.

Links:

http://sent2null.blogspot.com/2009/04/agilentity-architecture-action-oriented.html

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Statistical_learning_theory

http://www.bostondynamics.com/

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marc_Raibert

http://sent2null.blogspot.com/2012/02/with-completion-of-ada-action-delta.html

Podcast recordings on the brain and artificial intelligence and how we get there.

I had a great session with Wai Tsang ,  moderated by Ben Thomas talking about artificial intelligence, how we go about creating artificial minds. Building on the ideas I've expressed in this blog for several years regarding the importance of autonomics, emotion and the fractal process to building a multi dimensional learning dynamic cognition. The talk was done in two parts which you can take in below:

http://theconnecto.me/2013/04/podcast-6-roundtable-with-david-saintloth-and-wai-tsang-part-1/


http://theconnecto.me/2013/04/podcast-7-roundtable-with-david-saintloth-and-wai-tsang-part-2/

Enjoy!

Autism, Astrocytes and Attention...a possible driving hypothesis.

"I take over a thousand pictures of a person's face when I look at them. That's why we have a hard time looking at people" ~ Carly Fleischmann


I actually like that self report because it indicates some very important hypothesis about how the brain is self connected in an autistic person different from a "normal" person.

Namely, I'd propose that the reason there is sensory over load is because the normal mechanism for encapsulating and possibly shifting attention to different cognitive aspects under consideration is short circuited in some way...such that there is a bias toward external stimuli.

Our cognitive dynamics involves a balance, an equilibrium between the external sensation and the internal sensation dimension, I assert (in many of my blog posts from the last few years) that consciousness is nothing more than the time variant dance of this interplay between what  the world is presenting to us across those "extrasensory" inputs and what our "insensory" inputs are demanding.

Extrasensory inputs are your standard senses, Visual, Auditory, Gustatory, Somtatsensory, Olfactory...your Insensory inputs are the autonomic drivers that demand your attention....boil down basically to food and sex.

I hypothesize that everything you do, everything you think is in some way guided by the continuous attempt to balance the extrasensory against the insensory drives.

That said, there needs to be a filtering mechanism in place to ensure that there is no over stimulation (in both directions) which delays convergence to "action" once sensation and processing have concluded...in fact, switching attention is a precisely necessary function to keep the dynamic cognitive drive moving forward.

Last year research for the first time identified how attention is performed as a key aspect of the function of Astrocytes (glial cells)...the "other" major cell type (in fact the most numerous) in the brain beside neurons. Up until this study their full role was not known...now it appears their purpose is to serve as attentional switches...they store a short term representation of a currently sensed signal in a given dimension of experience and resonate that back at a given rate to enable it to persist LONG ENOUGH to be processed...but this begs the question of what happens if they persist the signal TOO LONG?

It would seem they'd be re-echoing cues for continued attention when there is no need (beyond the processing time frame) this could very well be the source of the sensory over load that Carly reports in her experience and that seems to be a hallmark of all the autistic. In electronic and computer design the master beat of the dynamism of computational functions are set by a device called a clock which is stepped in various ways so that different systems can be invoked in a precise way as needed to provide synchrony critical to the function of the overall system, it is reasonable to wonder if the brain requires a similar set of stepped timing signals that are applied to different aspects of cognitive processing so as to effect a smooth and convergent dynamism as the possessing agent interacts with the world, doing so efficiently would be key to be able to focus on events in the world for just the right period of time necessary to optimize the achieving of all goals.

Also, it could be at work in a differential way across the brain...with some sensations being more sensitive to attention than others (say vision over sound, or smell over touch)...there is no reason to presume the pathology is homogeneous across astrocyte tissue though that is also possible.

Links:

http://www.cnn.com/2012/11/14/tech/mobile/carly-fleischmann-mobile-autism

http://sent2null.blogspot.com/2012/03/integrated-information-does-not-equate.html

http://sent2null.blogspot.com/2013/02/emotions-identity-crisis-in-our-brain.html

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/dr-douglas-fields/unusual-brain-cell-astroc_b_2810871.html

When the crazy and the stupid can build monsters in their basements...

Never leave out  insanity or stupidity....both are amazing motivating factors for people with seeming bounty to do incredibly horrendous things. I am saddened on a *daily basis* by the ignorance that I come across on any given outing into NYC. If I speak to enough people on enough subjects I will encounter multiple people that believe things which can't even be termed as being wrong...they are simply in the wrong universe.



With that element out there in the human population I am yet more pessimistic about our chances once more and more powerful ways to change the world drastically are democratized (like building your own living organisms as synthetic biology enables us to do).

When I was a 13 year old writing BASIC programs....I couldn't write a program that could go to my neighbors pc and erase his hard drive because a) well I didn't know enough BASIC and networking code then and b)  neither of us had a modem so even if I did know how to write the code there was no network or viable vector for me to convey that code to his computer clandestinely. Sure I might have been able to sneak into his place with a floppy and download the code directly but that would require greater risk of being discovered.

That code, computer code moreover could only at most erase the data on his drive...which would for him have been painful but his life would be in tact.

Fast forward to a summer day in Pakistan in the year 2037. Synthetic biology at this point has long gotten to the stage where we have programming language for writing living things (something I predicted in 2008 but see this article:

http://www.wired.com/wiredenterprise/2013/04/bio-fab-open-source-language/

 if you don't believe they already are being planned)  and such programming languages along with cheap genetic creation kits will allow ....zealots...of all stripes to create not computer code but real animals. Super pathogens....imagine what happens when the code the kid creates instead of infecting the hard drive is targeted to infect *the neighbor* and say...I don't know....change his hair color gene from black to red...ha ha so funny.

Except it's not so funny, it could be to do anything....as we pretty much now know we can change anything if we have the right vector and we know the sequences that need to be modified.

If you aren't afraid yet, you simply don't understand the gravity of the situation.

We are in deep shit...if people fueled with zealotry (of religious kind ..of political kind of CRAZY kind!) get their hands on such technology and that technology is coming FAST...in fact it's really here....just kind of expensive, but it won't stay that way.

Either we change the collective tendency for zealotry in all people (there should be about 11 billion of us by then) or we are going to be facing all types of crazy biological and genetic attacks to make the current error of computer viruses and worms seem like school yard taunts.

The sad reality is, is that even if we succeed in a miracle of eliminating completely the desire for those of different views from wanting to take existential efforts to eliminate their opposition using some bio/genetic weapon there will be the crazy and the stupid, they are a silent sample of all those born....and fueled by their *interpretation* of what ever beliefs are out there a fraction of them will be inspired to take action using the then readily available and powerful techniques for creating living things and that doesn't give us a high probability of avoiding some serious situations on a continuous basis when those technologies are available....it's just a probabilistic reality and that is depressing.

Links:

http://sent2null.blogspot.com/2012/04/humans-surviving-extinction-little-less.html

Get your code tighter....make sure TCr is on its way down over time.

Here by defines the TC ratio, "tight code":

If the ratio of the total lines of code in your project over the number of  unique features added with those lines of code goes down over time, then your project is getting progressively tight and is efficient across all metrics....otherwise, you need to re-evaluate your architecture, re-evaluate the skill of your coders and re-evaluate the features you're adding.

TCr = total lines of code / total features user or admin facing

TCr ~ 0 = GOOD!


:In my development of AgilEntity, TCr has been going down for quite some time now. Over the history of a project the TCr curve should look like a rapidly rising curve from f(eatures)=0  on the horizontal axis and with total lines of code on the vertical axis, as features are added, the curve should  hump as the architectural code is completed and then if the architecture is hyper efficient new additions to code should be swamped by features that accrue with their addition, bringing the curve down toward zero as more and more features can be added with less and less code or additions
to the architecture.

You can do several things to bring TCr down, refactoring existing code is a quick and dirty way. The best way though is to make sure you have a very efficient architecture to begin with including lots of polymorphism, lots of abstraction via reflection...finding the symmetries where having such features reduce code complexity is itself an art that comes from truly understanding the power of object orientation for large projects.

Workforce automation, old ideas with new implementation is not the answer.

This article was originally written and published at H+ Magazine online


A recent article in the Wall Street Journal covers the topic of increasing interest by corporations to gain high resolution into the activities that workers are performing on the job. On the face of it this article may seem as if it is presenting a new paradigm to the workforce. Using new technologies like RFID tracking sensors coupled with electronic systems to meter and monitor the vagaries of workers in the office to try and extract more efficient and productive work by reshaping either the work place itself or the business processes that workers engage.

On it's face this is an admirable goal but unfortunately it is not really new, it is essentially an attempt to replicate ideas that were rampant in business during the 50's and 60's and 70's using current technology, to see why we need to first take a walk down memory lane to see what automation and productivity was back in the 60's.

Cogs in the Machine

As a child one of my favorite cartoons was the Hanna Barbera produced Jetson's, this cartoon was a hilarious take on a future as told from the minds of an age where the United States was asserting the power of it's developing industrial might to achieve great gains in GDP in post world war II Cold War era. The emergence of the micro-electronic age, the formation of the first efficient transistors and the rapid miniaturization power of the computers and electronics this technology made possible. Enabled businesses to think differently about how they could get their workforce's to achieve computer like efficiency. The writings on the matter of efficiency that were being produced by economists and mathematicians in a way informed what would emerge as apparently the right way to solve the problems of efficiency and productivity in the work force.

The foundation was laid in the late 30's and 40's as the US embarked upon the atomic bomb program, the need to think about the scenario's that could give rise to atomic attacks and how to avoid Armageddon were discussed and debated by the principle founders of a branch of mathematics called game theory. One of the pioneers of this area was John Von Neumann, Von Neumann did critical work in analyzing the behavior of individuals involved in group dynamics regarding differential resource needs. This work was also part of the play ground that economists like John Nash played in and his Nash equilibrium famous from the movie A Beautiful Mind,  is in essence a game theoretic result.

In the 40's and 50's the work on the limits of computing systems by Alan Turing set the stage for some thinking about human agents as cogs in the machine of a functioning dynamic system. Like real cogs, their efficiency was seen as being correlated to highly metered performance. If you can measure how it behaves you can track and improve it's performance. It was believed that tracking a workers time and ensuring that the worker was on task as often as possible was the best way to get high productivity out of that worker. However, the fundamental flaw in this idea...is that like a real cog...workers would and do get worn down by the monotony of the work they are performing. Unlike computer programs, real workers also have inspiration and creativity as factors in how well they perform their work, particularly in knowledge work.

The Jetson's already was telling a tale of the monotony of the type of work that was performed by white collar workers in the mid 60's. George Jetson worked for "Spacely's Sprockets" a generic name combining the founder of the company with a "sprocket" a generic device that is never fully explained in the series. This underscores the bland and monotonous nature of the type of work that George was doing and mirrored the cog in machine concept that connected workers to corporations in the 50's and 60.

Another aspect of this time was also subtly touched on, that corporate competition necessitated that businesses push on their workers in unusual ways to demand that they perform. In the Jetson's this was symbolized by the competition that existed between Spacely's Sprockets and Cogswell Cogs. Often in the mix for corporations to endlessly pursue the profit motive the workers....the gears, are pushed to be worn out...artificial deadlines are created to have work pushed out of the door when it was not ready, the creative innovation was rushed and thus in many cases missed. The bias for a short term profit motive was baked into the culture of the business and innovation became stagnant. This was seen in the evaporation of many innovative R&D departments that had formerly been a part of corporations prior to world war two. As the people as cogs processes metered lives away innovation took a hit well save for some places where it was seen different (Silicon Valley).

The failure of this type of system could be seen also in the Twilight Zone series of the late 50's and 60's. Rod Serling's views on office life during those decades portrayed it as a monotonous experience, of workers "clocking in" at designated times in the morning and then "clocking out" in an exhausted stupor at night...only to get up the next day to do the same again. The corporate application of rules for nameless computing or task performing agents simply didn't allow for continuously productive workers...nor did it make any room for an embrace of independent streaks of creativity. This would change ironically with the birth of silicon valley which had as it's reason d'etre originally the job of building the very transistors built on the computing ideas that led to the work ideas of humans as cogs in the machine in the first place.

Silicon Valley breaks the mold

The rapid development of the transistor industry in the late 50's inspired innovators like Robert Noyce, Gordon Moore and other brilliant engineers of the time to embrace a new approach to conducting business. Rather than be married to the efficiency driven ethos of a dominant corporation, these men sought to strike out and build their own agile corporations. Robert Noyce along with a team of engineers had been working in Shockley semiconductor under the stewardship of co-inventor of the silicon transistor and Nobel Laureate William Shockley when they, pressed with the over bearing dominance of Shockley as boss were moved to quit the company and start their own company Fairchild Semiconductor. At Fairchild the rigid management style that Shockley enforced was done away with, instead *innovation* was prized above conformance to corporate rules and peak worker efficiency as metered by time on task. Noyce realized that engineers are creative people, and creative people must have the relaxation to be creative on their own schedule in order to produce novel and potentially revolutionary invention. This ethos would spread through out the business world but mostly was a hallmark of silicon valley companies (many subsequently founded by former Shockley and Fairchild workers) to this day...the embrace of this type of work environment by more traditional businesses is a relatively new phenomena but rather than embrace the freedom of enabled creativity the solution has been to give a patina of new to old.

Why metering people over metering work is not maximally productive

The last few weeks have seen the reigniting of the debate of productivity and worker performance by the controversial email sent out by Marissa Mayer, CEO of Yahoo. The email specifies an ultimatum to workers in the companies HR department regarding the need for the workers to begin working in the office again or be fired. The company explained that they wanted to ensure that the workers were more productive by having them commune with their coworkers in a physical office. The directive was met by mixed reaction in Yahoo but shed light on the wider question. Is it possible to generally improve productivity by enabling workers to work remotely and if so how? The Wall Street Journal article highlights the new attempts when it describes the recent results allegedly achieved by Bank of America:

"So, to get more employees mingling, the bank scheduled workers for group breaks, rather than solo ones. Productivity rose by at least 10%, says former Bank of America human-resources executive Michael Arena, who helped conduct its study."

Leaving potential bias from the study conductor aside, worker productivity inside the context of the office says nothing about how efficiently the same workers could perform if given greater freedoms beyond the walls of the office. The study is performing the equivalent of asking the question inside a building of how tall is the sky. Rooms in buildings have ceilings not sky...the question is category invalid, the same is true here IMO. It is known that group interactions also tend to highly bias for workers personality playing a strong role  in determining what ideas get implemented. Thus the most creative and possibly innovative ideas are often ignored in favor of the first and most forcefully argued idea. An in company group study that measures "productivity" without measuring *quality of work* will simply miss this important fact. However, companies are going beyond such measures, as the article continues:



"As Big Data becomes a fixture of office life, companies are turning to tracking devices to gather real-time information on how teams of employees work and interact. Sensors, worn on lanyards or placed on office furniture, record how often staffers get up from their desks, consult other teams and hold meetings. "

Again, this movement though well intention-ed is again category invalid. It may be the case that within the office such efforts can incrementally boost productivity by identifying where worker interaction hits bottlenecks it tells nothing about if the smoother work flows enabled by physical metering of worker * behavior* translates to liberation of creative production...which ultimately is the most valuable for the business long term. This makes such thinking easily of the type that hearkens to the 60's and the monotony of the Jetson's. I posit that worker behavior in the office should never be the important criteria to meter, instead worker *results* should be and those should be gathered agnostic to the needs of the business. The global network has now enabled businesses to provide always on access to all their potential workers no matter where they are in the world and on multiple devices.

The holy grail of achieving both maximum worker freedom and maximum worker productivity is achievable by performing a very simple act, simply freeing any single worker completely from the *requirement* of needing to perform any work at all. This seems counter intuitive, but in a potential work force that is global and which enforces integrity of workers with the use of social oversight such a system can utilize the talents of an emancipated workforce of fluid workers that can be on and off boarded at their own behest but to purposes set by the organization. The freedom provided to the work force enables the workers to chose when they wish to contribute which highly correlates with high productivity and high creativity, it also means that when the corporation searches the organization for workers it finds those that are available by virtue of the aforementioned freedom. Finally, the ability to reject work received allows the dissolving of any bottlenecks to the completion of any unit of work by providing incentives for workers to route work onward to the system if they do not wish to commit it.

How this works is deceptively simple and can be realized by a simple thought experiment. In a traditional workflow the last stop on a task path is the usually single person delegated and/or permitted to perform it. Delegation refers to the fact that they are part of the business process, either explicitly added into the workflow or tied into the workflow by extended communication media like email attachments or IM. Permission refers to weather or not once the worker receives work they've been delegated if they actually have the permissions, the rights to actually perform them. The key was in realizing that the traditional coupling of the ability to receive some work with the ability to perform that work is actually inefficient for the smooth convergence of that action on an agent who can actually perform it. In a system where the agents are decoupled, it is possible for agents to receive work that they can not perform (do not have the right) but by allowing all such workers to be able to always re-delegate the work (and some other subtle enablers indicated in the full description of the paradigm linked later) the requested action never gets stuck at a particular workers cue this is the key to hyper convergence of all work actions. When the user space is larger than, there is an increased probability that the work will find some one who is able to do it...despite a lose web of delegations across the interacting workflows over which the action requested might hop which could span building floors to be done by those in adjacent but parallel groups (again permission restricts any necessary eyes from performance), or span building to be done by parallel departments, or span countries to be done by parallel divisions in a global company or even *leave* the company to be done by mobile contractors.

This combination of ideas are a hallmark of the Action Oriented Workflow work paradigm that I invented in 2004. At the time the technology was used internally but the power of such a system to spur new types of efficiency into all types of workforces became present to me as an opportunity. The future of a telepresent workforce is something I wrote about in 2006 and is enabled by such systems. Ultimately, the applicability of automation to the issues of worker productively will vary over the work in question but for the vast majority of knowledge workers the *need* to work in an office is simply no longer present and when coupled with the right technology provided emancipation to the workforce will lead to hyper efficiency.