UXM Article · ArchiveOpen vs Closed · Republished for S7E1 cluster
Open vs Closed: a Critical Question for Designing and Building Experiences
Closed platforms can be as elegant as a sealed terrarium—and just as bounded. Organizational AGI asks for an architecture you can open, re-sequence, and grow without shattering the glass.
This piece first ran as a member story on uxmag.com in 2021. It is republished here in full for the Decentralized AI is the Future ideation alongside Ben Goertzel’s S7E1 conversation on Invisible Machines.
Maybe you’ve seen the meme knocking around the Internet: a photo of British octogenarian David Latimer, who bottled a handful of seeds in a glass carboy in 1960 and left it largely untouched for almost 50 years (uncorking it only once, in 1972, to add a little water). His 10-gallon garden created its own miniature ecosystem and has thrived for more than half a century.
In the realm of technology, closed platforms are a bit like Latimer’s terrarium: they can be highly functional, beautiful, and awe inspiring, but they can only grow as big as their bottles. For something like the original iPhone, a terrarium was just fine. Everything a user needed to enjoy its functionalities was baked right into the original version of iOS. Keeping the system closed ensured the quality of the apps and created a seamless overall experience, which contributed to its success, despite the fact that it didn’t have nearly as much functionality as other mobile devices at the time.
Apple was able to make updates to their mobile ecosystem with new versions of iOS—which usually coincided with a new product drop—but the three-month gap between the launch of the original iOS and its first update is an eternity. As businesses enter into the inevitable and ultra-complex realm of conversational AI and organizational AGI, they will require an architecture that breaks out well beyond these glass walls.
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Maybe you’ve seen the meme knocking around the Internet: a photo of British octogenarian David Latimer, who bottled a handful of seeds in a glass carboy in 1960 and left it largely untouched for almost 50 years (uncorking it only once, in 1972, to add a little water). His 10-gallon garden created its own miniature ecosystem and has thrived for more than half a century.
David Latimer’s sealed terrarium—a closed ecosystem that only grows as large as its bottle.
In the realm of technology, closed platforms are a bit like Latimer’s terrarium: they can be highly functional, beautiful, and awe inspiring, but they can only grow as big as their bottles. For something like the original iPhone, a terrarium was just fine. Everything a user needed to enjoy its functionalities was baked right into the original version of iOS. Keeping the system closed ensured the quality of the apps and created a seamless overall experience, which contributed to its success, despite the fact that it didn’t have nearly as much functionality as other mobile devices at the time.
Apple was able to make updates to their mobile ecosystem with new versions of iOS—which usually coincided with a new product drop—but the three-month gap between the launch of the original iOS and its first update is an eternity. As businesses enter into the inevitable and ultra-complex realm of conversational AI and organizational AGI, they will require an architecture that breaks out well beyond these glass walls.
An ecosystem for organizational AGI (OAGI)—one that has enough general intelligence about the inner-workings of its company—is going to be a vast ecosystem of interconnected elements working together in harmony. It will be large and complex like a forest. But OAGI is also a lot like a terrarium with a nice big lid for easy access—especially where the forest represents the much broader conquest of AGI. The general intelligence required for humans to be able to adapt and thrive in our planet’s harshest ecosystems is incredibly daunting to recreate. However, the level of general intelligence it takes to run a company is far easier to replicate. In this sense, you can think of organizational AGI like an open terrarium wherein the elements of the ecosystem can be adjusted and reconfigured until the environment is thriving.
An open architecture is difficult to create—especially for companies using established closed systems—but you can’t reach OAGI without it. As noted earlier, the race here isn’t toward adopting specific technologies, it’s about being flexible enough to integrate the best technologies as they emerge.
OAGI is about sequencing tasks and technologies in ways that reveal unseen potential and multiply outcomes. When you step back to consider the vast multitude of technologies and tasks that make up an organization and imagine the countless ways they might be sequenced together, the complexity of the situation can quickly overwhelm. With the right strategy and process, however, you can get everyone in your organization iterating on these sequences, creating a fertile ecosystem.
