Sentient CEP and the Rights of Algorithms

I have just returned from the UK where, as part of my duties for the week, I spoke at a conference on Fixed Income and another on Foreign Exchange. At both these events, the delegates were interested to hear of the latest trends in the industry – which include aggregating multiple market data streams from disparate trading venues into a single view and using rules-based trading techniques to rapidly detect complex patterns and make and execute trading decisions. In these areas and beyond, Complex Event Processing is being successfully used by Investment Banks and Hedge Funds to enable such complex and low latency requirements.

While I was in the UK, one of the items in the news was the marking of the 200^th anniversary of the abolition of the slave trade by Britain with a service in Westminster Abbey, attended by the Queen. I hope none of my comments seem to in any way belittle this significant incident, but it did rekindle some thoughts about “will algorithms ever have rights?”. We look back on the past and find it inconceivable that any class of people could be considered as less human than others. Society has adopted that principle, quite rightly, as part of our programming. However, we’re quite happy to turn a blind eye to the suffering of animals in unnecessary cosmetic testing and in horrific factory farm conditions. In the same way that most people in the 18^th Century were quite happy to receive cheap cotton and sugar, now we are quite happy to receive cheap cosmetics and food. History suggests, however, that this will change eventually.

So what of the rights of the algorithm? Now you may think this is totally mad – and you’d probably be right. However, consider for a moment the field of algorithmic trading. While speaking at both of the conferences this week, I illustrated the changing role of the trader. Rather than the trader watching the markets for key trading opportunities and then manually executing, he/she now can deploy an army of algorithms to look for and respond to the key opportunities. The algorithms are the trader’s slaves. As a customer of Apama’s, Lou Morgan of HG Trading, put it recently – “…. They don’t need a lunch-break and they don’t need a bonus…!”. Of course these algorithms are not sentient, and therefore they don’t have any rights – but what if they were!?

Together with my colleague and mentor at Cambridge - Professor Andy Hopper, I ran a research group that looked into what we termed “Sentient Computing”. This is a very grandiose title for what Gartner might describe in commercial terms as the “Enterprise Nervous System”. It was all about how complex asynchronous stimuli in a wide-area computing environment could be detected and used to automate responses. There were lots of fun hardware in this environment, like “Active Badges” - that could detect your location to within 2 centimeters in 3 dimensions, “Active surfaces” – that provided a high bandwidth network to your wearable computers when in contact with the surface, and a variety of other ubiquitously deployed sensors, actuators, compute terminals and devices.

But the whole glue that made Sentient Computing possible was Complex Event Processing and Event-Driven Architectures – as they are called today. Sensors generated events – that needed to be analyzed; Actuators could be triggered – but needed something to do the triggering. Event-based rules provided the glue to enable complex circumstances to be modeled. For example “When John Trigg and Chris Martins are within 10 feet of each other  and there is a video terminal in their view, then play message ‘good morning’ on the nearest video terminal”. Some people described this kind of environment as an “Exploded Robot” – because rather than a single object having various sensors and actuators attached to it, the network cloud is the medium to which they are attached – and CEP and EDA are the mechanism through which the “neuron firing” is wired together. Nowadays, we are familiar with how CEP and EDA are enabling all sorts of “exploded robot” applications – such as logistics companies that monitor the wide-area movements of their fleets of trucks, and optimize based on the perishability of their goods, weather, traffic conditions etc.

Although we are at an early stage with Sentient Computing, the technology approaches of CEP and EDA definitely provide a great framework. An event is a nerve impulse from the body. CEP provides the brain – which can be changed with new rules (new thinking?) at any time – rather than being hardwired. The next stage of course is rules that are written and refined by the system itself. But the exciting thing is that there doesn’t have to be one brain; the powerful thing about events is they can flow on to another brain that can be processed and analyzed in a different way (a different perspective on the information; a different opinion?). And then events resulting from decisions can be routed to actuators/services/humans to ultimately cause things to happen – the resulting nerve impulse. All the time, EDA is providing a framework to bring these various nerve inputs, brains and nerve outputs together. Clearly we’re not there yet with EDA – and CEP is being used mainly in individual systems unconnected – but it is coming to offer an exciting “event cloud”, enabling various CEP systems to interoperate.

So should algorithms have rights? Well of course not – and it is April 1^st as I’m writing this. But I do ask you to think about what you would have been like it you’d be alive in the 18^th Century and enjoyed cheap tobacco, sugar and cotton. Would you have “thought differently”? I remember an episode of “Star Trek – The Next Generation” in which a scientist wanted to take Mr Data apart to see how he worked. Captain Picard successfully proved to Star Fleet that Mr Data was sentient and thus an individual, rather than being property. I don’t think you necessarily have to be sentient to have rights – there’s no reason to pull the wings off a butterfly just because it isn’t familiar with Descartes. I used to comment to one of my friends – who is a Maths Professors – that his computer programs were so badly written that they were like strange mutated creatures that probably suffered. Of course this is very silly!

Anyway, I leave you with the thoughts that perhaps Event-driven Architectures offer us the ability to have a truly global “information nervous system”. We are asynchronous; the world is asynchronous – so computing paradigms should support this. Of course realistically this is just a set of inputs, rules and outputs. However, as we add more intelligence to the “brains” then we must be careful this system doesn’t become too autonomous. After all – you know what happened with "Skynet" in Terminator!