The Gentle Seduction (30 page)
Items in hypermedia should generally omit even
more
words. In linear literature, one must occasionally summarize terms and ideas from other chapters to guarantee that the reader has the proper context for the current discussion. In hypermedia, however, the author would simply plunk down a button linked to the explanation, leaving the reader the choice of plunging ahead or getting a refresher.
Bold writing, another major thrust of
Elements of Style
, also becomes easier. In linear writing, how can one address complex problems that demand complex analysis? Throughout history, speakers who have strived for accuracy have labored at a disadvantage: Men of reason find that true statements require so many qualifiers that their sentences turn to quicksand—and their audiences turn to stone. Meanwhile the short-sighted sloganeer can stir the soul with his quick, simple, wrong answers.
Given hypermedia, reasonable men can make bold, powerful statements, slugging it out slogan for slogan with fanatics—with one telltale difference. Numerous buttons will surround the reasonable man's bold statement, allowing skeptics to branch to more careful supporting arguments.
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Writers will thus discourse in a way similar to the way we teach physics to children. All of our early education, about little electron and proton spheres whirling around,
is a pack of lies
—but the lies are eminently satisfactory unless you need that deeper understanding, easily achieved in later courses.
This hypermedia approach to bold writing, incidentally, could create a new legal problem if widely used. We might want to consider laws prohibiting the paper printing of hypertext without the author's explicit permission: such printing, which would rip the bold statement from its supporting links, could supply the unscrupulous opponent with the ultimate tool for quoting out of context.
Critics repeatedly cite two fears of hypermedia. First, they fear that you won't be able to find things, i.e., that the information will be "hidden" someplace. A related fear is that you won't be able to find
yourself
, i.e., that you will become lost in the maze of buttons. The sense of disorientation I felt upon first witnessing hypermedia, that sense of "Star Trek Warp Speed," is only pleasant for people on a lighthearted romp; it is catastrophic for people trying to do their work.
The worries about hidden information are probably overblown. There are two causes for this fear. First, one can make legitimate complaints about hidden information in most of today's hypermedia documents. All of today's hypermedia authors are necessarily novices; they are still experimenting with what works and what doesn't. Hiding information behind concealed buttons is cute, fun, and alluring for the beginning writer; but those writers that respect their readers will quickly outgrow the urge to play games. Hidden buttons may have a place in hypermysteries, but nowhere else.
The second cause of hidden information phobia is that people compare hypermedia to a hypothetical
perfect
system, rather than to an everyday
paper
system. Even with hypermedia assistance you'll occasionally lose items. You'll know that a critical datum resides
somewhere
in that information space, but you'll know you'll never find it.
But you'll find it more often in information space than in paper space. In my office, with two huge filing cabinets bursting with linear paper, information loss occurs
every day
(my file cabinets are organized a lot like Heinlein's future history). If I could reduce the loss rate to once a month, it would transform my life (of course, people who organize their file cabinets more carefully have fewer problems in paper space. But people who arrange their buttons more carefully will also have fewer problems in information space; they will literally retrieve items in the blink of an eye).
The other oft-cited fear, of losing
yourself
, is considerably more serious. Disorientation is virtually universal for people encountering a hypermedia document for the first time. A key to successful hypermedia construction will be the creation of the
road map
that shows the reader how the pieces are interconnected. The road map will be the visual presentation of the link architecture mentioned earlier. A sample road map can be seen in Figure 5.
Novices in hypermedia design often predict that the road mapping problem will be solved automatically, that future hypermedia presentation systems will magically build the maps themselves. After all, the computer knows where all the links are, why not let the computer build a composite picture of them all? Of course, the computer
can
build such a picture, and automatic map-building will supply a useful tool to the developer of an information space. But there are thousands of possible map designs for a given information space, based on different graphic arrangements of the objects in the database. Only a human being with a talent for extracting order from chaos can draw an
understandable
map, with subject-oriented symbology, with straight paths for the "main highways" that readers will often take, and with meandering branches for the links that are less traveled.
In large information spaces, the maps themselves will have maps showing their interconnections, in a manner analogous to maps in an ordinary atlas. The best road maps will never be more than one button away, no matter where you are in the information space. They will always have a small dot inside, showing YOU ARE HERE. And these maps, unlike ordinary geographic maps, will support
teleportation
—if you see a place you d like to go, just point, click, and prepare for landing.
These map buttons, and all the buttons binding the information space together, will give the reader unprecedented control over his own exploration. Because the reader will have choices of what to read next, hypermedia literature will be
interactive
in a way that no current form of art can equal (with the exception of computer games, which have not yet been recognized as art).
Earlier, I mentioned an analogy between hypermedia links and the suggested reading lists in the encyclopedia. Anyone who has run such a series of links knows that it can be fun, even with slow, finger-based indexing. But it can also be frustrating. Hypermedia will bring the fun back into learning again.
I hope I’ve succeeded in defining hypermedia. Our next topic, as you may recall from the road map at the beginning of this article, is the technological Singularity.
"Singularity” is the term first used by_Vernor Vinge
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to describe the result of an exponential increase in technological sophistication. As the rate of technological advance rises beyond the point where normal human beings can comprehend it, mankind will encounter problems and solutions that cannot even be understood, much less described, in today's context. The people who enter the epoch of the Singularity will find all their material needs fulfilled. Thgey will be effectively immortal. Looking back from their present, they will consider the concerns of our generation (such as wars, environmental pollution, and bureacracies) to be appalling yet quaint, just as we might view the concerns of stone-age hunters. By analogy, we, today, can understand the problems beyond Singularity to the same extent as the prehistoric hunter can understand our problems: how would you explain the idea of "cutting red tape" to a Cro-Magnon?
Those of you who have been reading
Analog
's editorials and fact articles have encountered the idea of Singularity several times. One of the transformational upcoming developments is nanotechnology. With trillions of self- replicating nanorobots scattered through the solar system, we can build machines and products sufficient to fulfill all imaginable material desires (though we will surely imagine outrageous new material desires once nanotechnology starts pouring forth this cornucopia).
Alas, there's one little problem: there are limits to growth in the rate of improvement in technology. People who predict exponential growth for systems are almost always wrong. In practice, systems tend to follow S curves: after a period of exponential growth, some limiting factor intercedes and constricts the growth to asymptomatically approach an upper bound (See Figure 6).
For technological progress, the limiting factor is the human mind. As the velocity of change increases, we humans, who are developing that technology, spend increasingly more time just learning recent technology, leaving us less time to create even better technology (I myself read twenty or more magazines a month, but I churn out about four articles a year). As the complexity of the tasks increases, there will be fewer of us who can understand it well enough to make the next improvement.
A nanotechnology spaceship factory will require the careful orchestration of thousands of kinds of nanorobots in a harmonious collusion. This problem is tantamount to building a complete ecosystem of organisms, with the constraint that the ecosystem not only sustain itself but also create a complex machine. Who among us— what thousand-man team among us—has the requisite set of skills to set up this extraordinary symphony?
We know the answer in a vague way. "Computers," we wave our hands, "will augment our minds in constructing these systems." Yes, they will—but how? Word processors won't make the difference. Not even the sophisticated simulation tools used to design aircraft today can make the whole difference—we need to be able to design something worth simulating before we can check it out.
Relationship Of Hypermedia and Singularity
Hypermedia is part of the answer. Hypermedia will give us an indexing system that is over a hundred times faster than traditional indexes such as tables of contents.
That suddenly sounds mundane: how big a deal is it to have an indexing system that is 100 times faster? Indexing, after all, is such a dull chore—of course it is, because it is so important to so many different activities.
Is doing the same old thing 100 times faster a big deal? Let me propose the Magnitude Theorem, about the consequences of orders of magnitude of change: If a process becomes ten times faster or ten times cheaper or ten times better, it is not the same process. If a process becomes 100 times better, it is no longer even
recognizable
. Airplanes are rarely thought of as horses that are 100 times faster. We can best demonstrate the meaning of the Magnitude Theorem with respect to hypermedia indexing with an example.
A Child Dying Of
Adrenoleukodystrophy
In November, 1987,
Newsweek
ran an article about a heroic couple. Their child had a very rare disease, adrenoleukodystrophy, known as ALD. The disease was characterized by the accumulation in the blood of very long-chain saturated fatty acids, known as VLCFAs. The VLCFAs attacked the nervous system, leading to death in a few years.
ALD had no known cure; the doctors threw up their hands and went on to assist others whom they knew how to treat. Most parents would have thrown up their hands at that point as well. But this couple did not surrender so easily.
They started their own research, and soon found that the scattered researchers on ALD had never met. So they convened a meeting of all the ALD researchers in the world. None of these men had any solutions either—at least, none that they could implement in less then ten years, using advanced genetic engineering. But one researcher had found, in test tube experiments, that monounsaturated fat, oleic acid, reduced VLCFA production.
So the couple gave up their jobs to pursue a cure for ALD. Their research became more intense, this time searching for a company that could produce oleic acid in a purified form.
After finding a company that could manufacture oleic acid, after testing it for toxicity, they started giving their son oleic acid. It reduced the levels of VLCFAs—but not enough. The couple realized that, to make further progress, they needed to understand
why
oleic acid helped, so they could develop something even better.
Again, research. With months of effort, including the finding of an article from a Polish medical journal, they developed a theory about oleic acid's success. Comparing and crosslinking accounts of animal experiment successes with the kinds of chemicals used in those experiments, it seemed that monounsaturated long-chain fatty acids monopolized the elongation process, blocking production of the toxic saturated VLCFAs.
Research! Now they needed the longest-chain mono- unsaturate they could identify—the longest one that was not toxic. Erucic acid, from rapeseed oil, was a long chain indeed. But it caused heart disease in animals. More research! Animals, they learned, metabolize erucic acid differently from humans; no heart disease or any other problem in humans had ever been identified.
And research. They had to find a company that could purify the oil sufficiently to make it useful. Again, after a long search, they found one.
When at last they could treat their son with erucic acid, his VLCFA levels dropped to normal in three weeks. Unfortunately, it had taken years for the couple to complete the long search—the long cross-indexing of existing information—to find the cure. Their son was already in a coma. At the time of this writing, it was unclear whether he could recover.
Is it obvious how hypermedia could have affected this effort? If databases on ALD, biochemistry, molecular structures, chemical manufacturers, and ongoing research activities had been interlinked in a hypermedia information space, the effort that took these people years could have been completed in a few months (See Figure 7 for a picture of a “Hypermall,” where future searches for such cures might begin).
Those parents could have saved the life of their child. Even more incredibly, they could have saved the life of their child
cheaply
—without sacrificing their own lives to the effort. Their search for a cure could have been a modest activity, rather than a heroic event.
With hyperrnedia information spaces, this could open up a breathtaking alternativive for those of us faced with seemingly insurmountable problems;
if no one else has a cure, OK, I'll invent one! It no one else has a device, OK, I'll invent one!
With hypernmedia information spaces at our disposal, our ability to keep up with the technology explosion will itself explode.