Dr. Id,
This fellow is using a shoe stretcher on my brain – does this pose any danger to my gyri?
[Excerpt from an interview with PH and JP of Red Herring, No. 84, Oct. 30, 2000]
PH: What’s the balance, then, between a pure democracy of ballots and representative democracy in an era of distributed intelligence?
AG: Well, it’s changing somewhat. I think we’re almost always better off with more information. But information is not the same as wisdom, and we have to create opportunities for the intentional transformation of data into wisdom.
<snip>
Using this metaphor, this is a dictatorship [points to first diagram of cpu], this is a representative democracy [points to second diagram showing massive parallelism]. But now, with networks, every PC is a server, and soon, as Moore’s law continues, every device will be a server.
JP: The network really does become a computer.
AG: Yes. Or to go further back to Nathaniel Hawthorne, 150 years ago, "The world is a great vibrating brain." What we’re witnessing now is a process of dynamic change that’s faster and more powerful that anything in the history of humankind. Actually, can I shift metaphors briefly?
PH: We love your metaphors.
AG: Around 25 years ago, the Nobel Prize in chemistry was awarded to a Belgian named Ilya Prigogine. This is not an arcane fact. He discovered what was in essence a new law of thermodynamics, and here’s how it operates. He studied what are called open systems, in which there is energy flowing in and energy flowing out, and the energy swirls in a recognizable pattern while inside the system. What he found was that when the flow of energy is increased, and increased again, at some point it crosses a threshold beyond which two things happen sequentially. No. 1, the pattern of the system breaks down.
JP: And becomes unpredictable?
AG: No, let me finish. The second consequence is that the energy spontaneously reorganizes itself at a higher level of complexity, and something new emerges, with a different persistent pattern. In some ways that was the birth of complexity theory. Now, if you look at political systems around the world, you can see this phenomenon taking place. You have patterns dramatically in flux because of the emergence of the Internet and networking. In many of the more brittle of the nation-states, you’re seeing an emotional and spiritual rejection of the nation-state and a simultaneous reinvestment into smaller regional identities, even tribal and ethnic identities. At the same time we are seeing a reinvestment in supranational identities, like the European Union.
Now, the United States is unique in its ability to absorb this creative dynamic because we were the first nation to adapt to distributed intelligence. Because of our trust in the people, our trust in representative democracy, our trust in distributed intelligence if you will, we have an inherent capacity to absorb and draw out the energy from these kinds of revolutions. In the United States we are the only nation bound together not by some common ethnicity or national heritage, but by a unifying vision, a set of goals, a set of values. "We believe these truths to be self evident."
This form of national identity is the seed for the new national aspirations everywhere on the globe. We are extremely fortunate at the moment of globalization to be living in the one nation that is seen by most as the model for the future. |
