Sixth, seventh, and eighth senses...

Would be nice:

NEXT UP: MACHINES THAT UNDERSTAND YOU AND EVERYTHING YOU CARE ABOUT, ANTICIPATE YOUR BEHAVIOR AND EMOTIONS, ABSORB YOUR SOCIAL GRAPH, INTERPRET YOUR INTENTIONS, AND MAKE LIFE, UM, "EASIER."

Reminds me of Vonnegut's Player Piano for some reason. You can mimic the actions, replace the actor, but the soul is still missing....

Was that in Vonnegut? I thought that was part of _Godel, Escher, Bach_ ...

There are four graphs?!

At Jump, we’ve identified four data graphs essential to the rise of contextual computing: social, interest, behavior, and personal. Some are well-established and others have emerged seemingly out of thin air in the last few years. By mastering all four of these graphs, players seeking to dominate the next era of the web will be wildly successful.

There are legitimate ethical concerns about each of these graphs. They throw into relief the larger questions of privacy policy we’re currently wrestling with as a culture: Too much disclosure of the social graph can lead to friends feeling that you’re tattling on them to a corporation. The interest graph can turn your passions into a marketing campaign. The behavior graph can allow people who wish you harm to know where you are and what you’re doing. And revealing the personal graph can make it feel like an outside entity is quite literally reading your mind. We’re all trying to understand what to do about this from an individual standpoint, let alone a legal one.

Despite the ethical ambiguity around contextual computing, what matters is that companies are actively constructing these graphs already. These products and services are in the market today, but most in existence target only one or two of these graphs. Few are pursuing all four, both given the immaturity of the space and a lack of clear targets to shoot for. This has the unintentional effect of highlighting the risks of using such services, without demonstrating their benefits. For the potential of contextual computing to be realized, these data sets must be integrated.

I love thinking about Interest Graph:

Your tastes and preferences are largely organized around the subjects that tend to correlate with one another. It’s also about the overlaps in taste between the individuals whose lives closely resemble your own. Many companies have made early bets in this arena; Twitter is a fan and believes it’s well on its way to fully charting how all subjects connect to all others.

For now, such applications are notoriously narrow. For example, a book site like Goodreads.com is capable of predicting what other books you might read based on your expressed interests. What’s problematic is that the interest graph falls far short of depicting your real interests and tastes. It cannot yet tackle the way your curiosity might lead you to new directions. And it could never effectively recommend a restaurant or a vacation spot based on what it knows you read.

Well, I guess there are N-graphs.  0, 1, countable.....

The real question is how the graphs map onto open source projects, we have mysql for relational, hadoop and hbase for key-value, and neo4j for graph.  Do we need a new open source project now to map onto? 

To paraphrase Butler Lampson, there's no social problem that can't be solved by another layer of indirection, either up or down through abstraction layers.  

"Welcome to the Layer Cake, son"

So the last graph isn't personal, it'd the predictive graph.  Or else it's the personal preference graph (personal A/B testing??) as exploited by a predictive graph.

So the bottom line is, can a system of computer systems and graphs truly know you better than yourself?  I think at some point in the near future it might just....

I think so, too. Also, it feels like there's a layer above political. Not sure.