The CatBot project has two strands of activity - the practical development and the theory.  Both matter, but the theory is the one that needs lots of work for my PhD... One of the things that has been important to my work is framing paradigm shifts.  What I mean by this is, that to understand what is happening around us, we need to take a step back from how we are used to seeing things and reconsider.  For example;

"Eben Moglen [of the Free Software Foundation] wants to destroy the Federal Communications Commission. Not as some kind of terrorist act, but because technology is rapidly making it irrelevant.  The agency might have made sense in the 1920s, Moglen says, when it was formed to assign specific frequencies to broadcasters so they wouldn’t try to drown each other out by cranking up the transmitter power. But a new generation of intelligent radios, combined with equally clever computer networks, is making it possible for anybody to use the airwaves without interfering with anybody else." (link)

To me, this quote is a classic example of the paradigm shift in action. We are used to media such as TV and radio existing on channels – but why? They exist in this form because that is what the technology was limited to. When you realise that changes in technology mean that the concept of a channel is will soon be redundant, it will only exist as a social or psychological construct. This not only applies to TV and radio – but any medium – why does an album have 10 or 20 tracks on it? Because that is how many you could fit on two sides of a vinyl LP. Then you think – why an album? Because we had to distribute the music and it makes sense to put a chunk of tracks before shipping. In the digital world, none of these restrictions apply - they exist in this form because that is what the technology was limited to and now it will only really exists as a social or psychological construct.