This is why "the objects of the future" have to be ambassadors that can negotiate with other objects they've never seen.
Think about this as one of the consequences of massive scaling ...
Think about this as one of the consequences of massive scaling ...
The association between "patterns" and interpretation becomes an "object" when this is part of the larger scheme. When you've just got bits and you send them somewhere, you don't even have "data" anymore.
Even with something like EDI or XML, think about what kinds of knowledge and process are actually needed to even do the simplest things.
I don't really know anything at all about microbiology, but maybe climbing the ladder of abstraction to small insects like ants. There is clearly negotiation and communication happening there, but I have to think it's pretty well bounded. Even if one ant encountered another ant, and needed to communicate where food was, it's with a fixed set of semantics that are already understood by both parties.
Or with honeybees, doing the communication dance. I have no idea if the communication goes beyond "food here" or if it's "we need to decide who to send out."
It seems like you have to have learning in the object to really negotiate with something it hasn't encountered before. Maybe I'm making things too hard.
Maybe "can we communicate" is the first negotiation, and if not, give up.
Another technique that occurs to me is from type theory ... here, instead of objects we'll talk in terms of values and functions, which have types. So e.g. a function a encountering a new function b will examine b's type and thereby figure out if it can/should call it or not. E.g., b might be called toJson and have type (in Haskell notation) ToJson a => a -> Text, so the function a knows that if it can give toJson any value which has a ToJson typeclass instance, it'll get back a Text value, or in other words toJson is a JSON encoder function, and thus it may want to call it.