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« Play is not always cheerful | Main | We're talking about... »
Monday
Jul192010

Idea sex

I love TED.

The TEDGlobal 2010 conference just ended and, low and behold, one of the talks was about how our ideas develop via a "sexual selection" mechanism.  See??  If it's in a TED talk it has to be true...

All jokes aside, this is a facinating lecture.  Check it out.

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Reader Comments (2)

I like the first part...reminds me of a book I just put on my wishlist:


But his finale leaves me befuddled. The "cloud" or network-brain method of technology-making is also extremely fragile. Yes, it creates "innovation" (this question later). But it creates innovation that no one person can recreate if a part of that innovation gets lost.

We used to joke, when I worked at Apple, about what might happen if John Ive (the guy who designed the iMac, iPod, and about everything "i" since) dropped dead. Or worse still, if Steve Jobs did!

We got an inkling of what would happen if Steve Jobs left Apple back in the 90's, when he was fired from the company. It tanked. And another inkling when he revealed that he had been diagnosed with a rare form of pancreatic cancer. The stock tanked!

So, though the head may be good at running the company - the company that coordinates the "hive-brain" that makes the products - if the head dies, the body dies as well.

Question two is about "innovation." People always tout "innovation," and "creative solutions" to our "problems."

However, most "innovation" only creates more problems. It is innovation built upon a problematic foundation.

That is, our "problems" are based on a dysfunctional relationship with ourselves and with ourselves-in-the-world. We feel the need to meddle in things all the time, when sensitive awareness would be much more effective at increasing efficiency, or effectiveness, or whatever it is we think we need to increase (which is also questionable).

Once we've created these "solutions," we have to justify our efforts. When the "solutions" cause more problems (see our "petroleum solution"), we have to create "alternative fuels," and chemicals that can clean up the messes we've made.

Do we really? Is that really helpful? Or should we instead question the path we're on entirely? Should we question the depths of our consumption? Should we question the notion of "progress" and "innovation," that has driven us (further and further from interconnection with the natural world that is our home) since the industrial revolution?

I don't know. I know the Acheulean toolkit was supposedly our mainstay for 1.5 million years.

For how long will the iPhone be useful?

July 20, 2010 | Unregistered CommenterJosh

Josh,

I think you’re missing a key element of the network model - and the reason why it is extremely robust.

True, no one person knows how to create a piece of technology. But let’s look at it from a systems level. If one person dies, someone else with the same knowledge can fill the gap. Maybe it’s not the exact same knowledge - maybe it’s an equivalent or a parallel - but point is the system will “rewire” and accomplish the same task. The system is massively parallel and it’s not so much the individual nodes that matter so much as the connections between them.

You know what this sounds like, of course... the brain. Massive parallelism. Constant routing and rerouting. The system as a whole is incredibly resilient - knock out one node, or several nodes, and the system compensates.

To me, this suggests some very important questions. First, while the individual nodes are not important to the system, we need to make sure they stay healthy on the whole. Let’s stay with the brain/neuron analogy. We could try to regulate the health of neurons with a constant stream of drugs and procedures, or we could step back, let the body achieve homeostasis, and take care of itself. In our human network, the “nodes,” or people, need to be in their natural environment to function optimally. This means natural movement outdoors, connection to the land and the environment etc.

Second, the true value of such a network is in its connections and its ability for LTP. Specialization is required for the system to work, but overspecialization at the expense of connectivity is useless. We need the specialists to be sure, but we also need the transmitters - the people who have the multidisciplinary skills to move between fields and make these connections. We need lots of them. Without them, the system crashes. So how do we encourage human LTP?

July 21, 2010 | Unregistered CommenterColin

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