Open data and the Sciences of the Artificial
Herbert A Simon’s classic work guides us on how to work in a new age
Herbert A Simon won the Nobel Economics Prize in 1978 for his ‘pioneering research into the decision-making process within economic organisations’ and is known for his work on bounded rationality. But his book, The Sciences of the Artificial, is his grand theory of everything. It’s the type of work that pulls the world together, explaining lots of things at once and establishing itself as almost axiomatic.
Simon makes one basic point in The Sciences of the Artificial: that the universe is unbelievably difficult to understand and we gradually categorise our knowledge of it into ever smaller pieces of information until we can use it. He put artists at the front line in that process: they take a first stab at picturing the wild changes going on around us, risking years of work on interpreting the human condition for the small chance of producing a useful idea that the rest of us can use. Think of LS Lowry revealing that the buildings of urban life had come to dominate the human form for the first time; and Mark Rothko’s murals for the Four Seasons restaurant in New York, telling us that modernity had created vast canvases for us to colour.
Once the artists are done, Simon describes how everyone else gets involved: academics categorising knowledge by specialisation, engineers putting it into systems, designers creating products with it, managers organising production, with markets regularly testing the value of the use we get from that knowledge. In that process, Rothko’s swathes of simple paint become blocks of colour in advertisements and minimal colouring in our furniture — his searching for knowledge and understanding becomes quotidian as we use and practice it every day.
That process of searching followed by optimisation helps with something new that we are struggling to understand: the vast amounts of digitised information — data — that we have begun to create. We create it across the world while we’re travelling, eating, sleeping, talking, and for any purpose that we can imagine. It’s often held by large companies such as Google, but because data seems to be nearly everything all at once it’s not obvious who controls it and how it should be used.
I joined the Open Data Institute six months ago and I’ve been struck by its range of activities, from art, to technology, to ethics. And Simon gives us a simple explanation of why it does them: if your purpose is to understand the vastness of data and how it could change the world in decades to come, you’re going to need to search a lot for understanding until you can concentrate on what works. With much less elegance than Simon, here’s how I think the Open Data Institute’s activities fit the process in The Sciences of the Artificial, in a data world that’s new to all of us.
We start with searching for ways to understand data…
- The universe is big and complex.
2. Data is digitised information on the universe.
3. Humans want to flourish in the universe, which is why the ODI does user design to understand what humans want to do.
4. We need to understand the universe, which is why the ODI has an art programme to create abstract representations of it.
5. We need to act in the universe and affect others when we do so, which is why the ODI has an ethics canvas.
6. We need to organise knowledge of the universe, which is why the ODI uses multi-model thinking and has an agent-based model.
7. We need to coordinate around knowledge of the universe, which is why the ODI has a data infrastructure framework.
8. We need to use knowledge of the universe, which is why the ODI has a technology programme.
9. We need to share knowledge of the universe, which is why the ODI uses design and communication.
10. We need others to share their knowledge of the universe with us, which is why the ODI works internationally.
11. We need to set rules for human conduct in the universe, which is why the ODI responds to government consultations on potential legislation.
12. We need to create better ways to act in the universe, which is why the ODI has an innovation programme.
13. We need to capitalise new ways to act in the universe, which is why the ODI works with startups.
14. We need to improve once we know how to better act in the universe, which is why the ODI creates private sector business models.
15. We need to regularly test how we act in the universe, which is why the ODI favours competitive markets.
16. We need to achieve things in the universe in groups when we cannot do so alone, which is why the ODI supports public projects.
17. We need to improve how we do public projects in the universe, which is why the ODI creates public sector business models.
18. We need to raise skills for innovating and improving in the universe, which is why the ODI does training and consultancy.
…and end when we have optimised what we understand about data.
And that’s how we get from Ceiling Cat to immense knowledge and wealth that will change the universe.
