Dear All,

I find this conversation interesting. I did remember the car commercial so I appreciated the reference.

 

I disagree that our ancestors did not have information created as machine speeds and managed at human speed. It is called the human brain. We can think faster than we can write or speak. The Greeks first understood this problem and we have been trying to make that understanding a reality ever since. In other words, there is no computer system yet that can react as quickly to a human’s intuitive leaps and provide the information.

 

To put it another way, I have yet to meet computer that can speak. I do not mean follows a programme or can mimic a human or appear to be a human, the well-meaning but ultimately non applicable Turning test. I mean one that can use language. (Any about this limit please read Dreyfus on Heidegger and why there is no AI.) http://leidlmair.at/doc/WhyHeideggerianAIFailed.pdf  (this is a critique of this point of view of AI as thinking http://web.media.mit.edu/~minsky/papers/ComputersCantThink.txt )

 

Also consider the Meno, which set out the first records management system. What is happening is that the Meno system hierarchical is being challenged by a horizontal linking system.  (no I do not mean hyperlinks subvert hierarchy (although that idea is related). I mean it allows for spontaneous and serendipitous connection can be made in a way that was labour intensive to demonstrate in the hierarchic system. Thus, we are at the very primitive stages of what a young child can do already i.e. make inferences and connections and leaps of learning. (No. Algorithms do not “learn” because they do not think.) Even an inference engine is a basic attempt to understand the essence of human cognition.

 

The real change from the technological tsunami is that organisations are structured on the meno system not the horizontal system. (No I do not mean networked or matrix management.) I mean that the structure of society (the state) is on the hierarchy and is only coming to grips with the horizontal linking opportunities. (We have more information but we are not wiser because we are no longer training people for wisdom only to process information. Therein lies the tension as the current web builds mud towers but forgets that the rain may come (nature) to wash it all away. (This is a rather loose way of a lot of “experts” touting themselves on the web and publishing books that have no foundation in the previous knowledge already discovered. Like someone writing about reducing fear and improving security but never mentioning or even knowing about Thomas Hobbes. (One could suggest that we are at a point of flux just like the fall of Athens as new ideas exploded into the city and changed it and history.)

 

Thus, it is not so much a tsunami so much as the response that is required. In this we are moving from a system of analogue to digital in that organisations will act as organisms and interact with each other in that way rather than in a binary way based upon the powerful potential of people using the system not to build mud towers but concrete structures like the Ancient Greeks did.

 

I tried to sketch some of these ideas especially the tension between the Meno system and the Web system for memory and accountability here. http://lawrenceserewicz.wordpress.com/2013/06/28/private-memories-public-accountability/

In particular I was interested in what this means for political structures and organisations as they deal with this new reality of individuals being like artificial mortal gods in the way hobbes imaged the Leviathan as a mortal god.

 

The original paper on Meno which is worth a read for its potential applications is here: http://hhs.sagepub.com/content/12/2/1.full.pdf

 

Best,

 

Lawrence