Total Information Awareness has both vast amounts of information (including, no doubt, Google itself), and a steep gradient: only a very few can access the fully assimilated picture. A few have a lot on TIA, where many have a lot on Google, which is to say that information gradients are a function of the number of observers, as well as the amount of information.

Steep gradients are opportunities for the few to profit at the expense of the many. It's like the difference between the stock market and venture capital market. Anyone can data on publicly traded companies and, presumably make informed investment decisions. In the VC's world, information about promising startups is closely guarded and available to very few people, which pretty much locks out all but the VCs in the know.

Put another way, the stock market is relatively efficient (it's hard for anyone to make a huge profit), while the VC market is very inefficient, and thus affords the opportunity for the huge returns VCs seek.

Ditto with flat vs. steep information gradients, except we're not talking just about our ability to make sound investments. Google, for all of the concerns expressed by thougtful observers is relatively 'flat'. Even more interesting might be the gradients that exist in peer networks, like blogs. Imagine a solitary genius publishing tremendously useful information with zero inbound links: there might be terrific advantage in being the first to discover her blog... again the gradient correlates to number of observers, not the amount of information...
Comments 3:35:01 PM    

Answer, is pretty much nowhere if you 'live' on the Web. And I think, in a networked world, that particular cat is out of the bag for good (short of some sort of draconian New World Order of the sort John Ashcroft and Co. seem to be bent upon imposing).

I do think that, increasingly, we'll all be interested in information strategies: for example, how much we reveal, when and where. We'll have to be mindful of scary things (e.g. Poindexter's 'Total Information Awareness') and things like the Media Lab's old Doppelganger (technology that can make predictions about your preferences - sexual, political etc. etc.) based on comparing known data points about you with large populations of other people - guilt by association, as adjudicated by 'bots. Yikes.

I personally believe that the more open systems are, and the more freely knowledge is shared, the more efficient and fair the system will be. Downside, people will know lots of potentially embarassing stuff about me; upside, I will be much more aware of opportunities that exist for me than I was in the pre-networked world.

Total Information Awareness is an attempt to build a very inefficient, closed system that can be manipulated by its owners. Historically, systems like these (everything from the court of Marie Antoinette to Richard Nixon's CREEP to Sadam Hussein's intelligence operations) are ripe for abuse and promote the interests of the few at the expense of the many.

Bruce Sterling's book Tomorrow Now talks about the difference of successful and failed nations and the lives of their respective citizens. One of the traits of 'successful' nations and peoples is a high degree of interconnectedness. In the future, we'll have to balance openess and connectedness with privacy and anonymity. I think we should vigorously oppose efforts by anyone constituency to manipulate the system for the benefit of a few.
Comments 1:32:30 PM    

Chris Gulker's view from Silicon Valley - in words and pictures