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He is basically the John Hammond character in Jurassic Park. He will continue to cling to his creation well after the power goes out, the kids are missing and
by hos234 7y ago
He is basically the John Hammond character in Jurassic Park.
He will continue to cling to his creation well after the power goes out, the kids are missing and the Raptors and T-Rex are loose. Only problem is he hasn't been running this experiment on an island but on 2 billion lab rats. Whether they are Generals, Janitors, Journalists or Teenagers everyone is effected in ways no one fully understands yet.
So now we wait for more and more unintended consequences to mount. Because it's not like a Zuckerberg replacement is going to do any better. This is a problem that has only one solution.
Eventually the park will be shut down and be rebuilt after we understand the psychological and sociological dynamics such networks produces at scale. Right now his answer to Harari is incoherent because no one knows what the answer is. And it's impossible to figure it out while watching the current experiment gone of the rails.
Micheal Crichton however, did provide a possible answer to Harari's question 20 years ago -
"I think cyberspace means the end of our species. It means the end of innovation. This idea that the whole world is wired together is mass death. Every biologist knows that small groups in isolation evolve fastest. You put a thousand birds on an ocean island and they'll evolve very fast. You put ten thousand on a big continent, and their evolution slows down. Now, for our own species, evolution occurs mostly through our behaviour. We innovate new behaviour to adapt. And everybody on earth knows that innovation only occurs in small groups. Put three people on a committee and they may get something done. Ten people, and it gets harder. Thirty people, and nothing happens. Thirty million, it becomes impossible. That's the effect of mass media - it keeps anything from happening. Mass media swamps diversity. It makes every place the same. Bangkok or Tokyo or London: there's a McDonald's on one corner, a Benetton on another, a Gap across the street. Regional differences vanish. All differences vanish. In a mass-media world, there's less of everything except the top ten books, records, movies, ideas. People worry about losing species diversity in the rain forest. But what about intellectual diversity - our most necessary resource? That's disappearing faster than trees. But we haven't figured that out, so now we're planning to put five billion people together in cyberspace. And it'll freeze the entire species. Everything will stop dead in its tracks. Everyone will think the same thing at the same time. Global uniformity"
- ryanmarsh 7y agoEveryone will think the same thing at the same time. Global uniformity This seems like it would be a dream come true for a totalitarian regime or modern aristocracy thriving on the control of its subjects.
- K0SM0S 7y agoI don't share your pessimism, but you do make a very interesting point, or diagnosis. There are other evolutionary traits to consider: bigger groups of animals do not necessarily correlate with better communication, hence economic/evolutionary friction (loss of efficiency). We're in a different situation where no one moved but everyone got connected, maybe this will let adaptation (good evolutionary traits and genes) spread faster across the species, or boost their completeness faster in time. Who knows. It's impossible to predict evolution at this stage, especially ours. These warnings should be considered and taken into account, but not impede our drive to improve. On a deeper political note, I and it seems more and more people seem to envision the idea of a much more granular organization and tiered, i.e. instead of 250 countries with average 30 million people, allow for much more diversity at a 1-10 million scale, and form meta blocks of ~1 billion to manage world affairs more easily. With a 'true' bottom-up democracy, this would allow much diversity at a local scale (geographically, but we can already imagine some of these few million-people groups being almost entirely online). That's 1 possible and desirable scenario for political evolution in this century IMHO (15 years of research in that domain lead me to this conclusion; there are other likely scenarios obviously).
- kthejoker2 7y agoI mean, how crazy wrong is this prediction though? The web has increased diversity (good and bad) through scale and virality and lower than ever barriers to entry to the market of mindshare. The monoculture is practically dead. Fringe media is rampant. Microinfluencers abound. Filter bubbles are omnipresent. The long tail has exploded thanks to global supply chains and the TFE.