Whiplash: How to Survive Our Faster Future

by Joichi Ito

“Our journey so far has been pleasant, the roads have been good, and food plentiful.… Indeed, if I do not experience something far worse than I have yet done, I shall say the trouble is all in getting started.” —Tamsen Donner, June 16, 1846

education is something done to you; learning is something you do for yourself.

In a world where real robots are taking over many menial tasks, perhaps we need to embrace neurodiversity and encourage collaborative learning through passion, play, and projects—in other words, to start teaching kids to learn in ways that machines can’t.

Papert inspired others at the Media Lab including Mitchel Resnick, who argues for cultivating creative learning through “projects, passion, peers, and play.” Resnick developed the Scratch programming language to empower children to “code to learn” instead of “learning to code.”

On December 28, 1895, a crowd milled outside the Grand Café in Paris for a mysterious exhibition. For one franc, promoters promised, the audience would witness the first “living photographs” in the history of mankind.

humans are perpetually failing to grasp the significance of their own creations.

we are all blinkered by prevailing systems of thought.

any given period of human development is characterized by a set of commonly held systems of assumptions and beliefs.

Our technologies have outpaced our ability, as a society, to understand them. Now we need to catch up.

technologies are just tools—useless, static objects until they are animated by human ideas.

Internet and rapidly improving digital technologies have leveled the field in ways that can be used for good as well as nefarious purposes.

The point is that you can no longer assume that costs and benefits will be proportional to size. If anything, the opposite of that assumption is probably true: Today, the biggest threats to the status quo come from the smallest of places, from start-ups and rogues, breakaways and indie labs.

The quantity, or level, of complexity is influenced by four inputs: heterogeneity, a network, interdependency, and adaptation.

Learning, we argue, is something you do for yourself. Education is something done to you.

The market, in Hayek’s view, is the accidental aggregation machine that humans created in order to “conquer intelligence.”

An individual can have a breakthrough, but an entire system of ideas, what we called an episteme, these emerge from the multitude, none of them conscious of the act.

We are naturally disposed to believe that behind every Oz lies a wizard, a single entity that directs the action.

Emergent systems presume that every individual within that system possesses unique intelligence that would benefit the group. This information is shared when people make choices about what ideas or projects to support, or, crucially, take that information and use it to innovate.

All of these advances are creating a de facto system in which people worldwide are empowered to learn, design, develop, and participate in acts of creative disobedience. Unlike authoritarian systems, which enable only incremental change, emergent systems foster the kind of nonlinear innovation that can react quickly to the kind of rapid changes that characterize the network age.

Is it even possible to plan for so-called black swan events (incidents whose very rarity lull people into the false belief that the terminal disease will never strike their family, the market will never fail, and the government will not be overthrown)?

The best use of human resources is to pull them into a project, using just what’s needed, when it’s needed most.

intrinsic rewards lead to higher levels of motivation and performance than extrinsic motivators do.

Focusing too much on the past—or the future—narrows your vision and makes you less able to respond to changes, opportunities, and threats.

A great many of the objects in our life, exceptional and mundane, obey a precise set of instructions that determine their behavior.

“Everything interesting happens because one field has crashed into another.”

Children should—and do, intuitively—want to learn. It’s up to us, the blundering, wrongheaded adults, to frame the lessons correctly.

We have to become comfortable with the idea that we are not in control, that we can’t anticipate or even know everything that is going on, but we can still be confident and courageous. This also allows us to embrace a diversity in thinking, approach, and timescales, and not force everything to be oversynchronized.

Instead of rules or even strategy, the key to success is culture. Whether we are talking about our moral compass, our world view, or our sensibility and taste, the way that we set these compasses is through the culture that we create and how we communicate that culture through events, e-mail, meetings, blog posts, the rules that we make, and even the music that we play. It is more of a system of mythologies than some sort of mission statement or slogan.

It’s natural for people to want to work on things that they know aren’t going to fail. But incremental improvement is guaranteed to be obsolete over time.

Disobedience, especially in crucial realms like problem solving, often pays greater dividends than compliance. Innovation requires creativity, and creativity—to the great frustration of well-meaning (and not so well-meaning) managers—often requires freedom from constraints. We can actually go further.

The people who will be most successful in this environment will be the ones who ask questions, trust their instincts, and refuse to follow the rules when the rules get in their way.

It’s also important to note that disobedience is different from criticism. There is, for example, a very important design movement called critical design—a perspective that provides a critique of modern techno-utopianism that we technologists often find ourselves espousing. However, criticism is about our work, where disobedience is the work.

Society and institutions in general tend to lean toward order and away from chaos. In the process this stifles disobedience. It can also stifle creativity, flexibility, and productive change, and in the long run, society’s health and sustainability.

Putting practice over theory means recognizing that in a faster future, in which change has become a new constant, there is often a higher cost to waiting and planning than there is to doing and then improvising.

As the pace of technological and social change continues to accelerate, students who merely absorb the education offered to them, without also developing the capacity for interest-driven, self-directed, lifelong learning, will be at a perpetual disadvantage. Students with a passion for learning will always be able to teach themselves the things they need to know, long after their formal education ends.

The best way to match talent to task, at least in the world of nanobiotechnology, isn’t to assign the fanciest degrees to the toughest jobs, but rather to observe the behavior of thousands of people and identify those who show the greatest aptitude for the cognitive skills that the task requires.

the less exposed a given solver is to the discipline in which the problem resides, the more likely he or she is to solve it.

A bigger circle benefits us all.

By trying to win, I’ll always lose. Only when I accept that there will be no winning or losing, just events unfolding and the way I chose to react to them, do I succeed.

Resilience doesn’t necessarily mean anticipating failure; it means anticipating that you can’t anticipate what’s next, and working instead on a sort of situational awareness.

acceptance is its own brand of courage.

Intervening responsibly meant understanding the role any innovation would play in a much larger system.

In the future, the drive toward innovation must be tempered with a deep consideration of its potential systemic effects. By fully embracing this principle, we can help to ensure that future innovations have either a positive or, at worst, neutral impact on the various natural systems in which we exist.

the future doesn’t have to hold Terminator-like intelligences that will decide that humans are a bad idea and eliminate them. It could, rather, contain a society in which humans and machines work together, inspiring each other and augmenting a growing collective intelligence.

It’s not just technology that’s moving at an exponential pace, but change itself.

The world is in the midst of a fundamental structural change. We have to be able to hardwire an ability to adapt and see things that we’d otherwise ignore because they don’t fit our old conditioning.