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Our book proceeds from the conviction that any given period of human development is characterized by a set of commonly held systems of assumptions and beliefs.
Instead our book is intended to help correct that incongruity by laying out nine principles that bring our brains into the modern era, and could be used to help individuals and institutions alike navigate a challenging and uncertain future.
“periods of speciation”
The first is Moore’s law. Everything digital gets faster, cheaper, and smaller at an exponential rate.14 The second is the Internet. When these two revolutions—one in technology, the other in communications—joined together, an explosive force was unleashed that changed the very nature of innovation,
“The future,” science-fiction writer William Gibson once said, “is already here. It’s just not evenly distributed.”
Change outpaced humans sometime late in the last century. These are exponential times. And they have given rise to three conditions that define our era.
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.
one could easily sense that neither Bernie Sanders nor Donald Trump “led” their respective movements so much as surfed them,
We are now in the midst of that phase transition—the point at which a solid, say, suddenly melts into liquid, or airborne moisture cools just enough to become a rainstorm.
Comparing the shifting of authority from the Encyclopedia Britannica to Wikipedia—an authoritative collection of experts vs a self-organizing community of bookworms for the common good—is a great indicator of this phase change.
episteme,
speciation,
“Our acquaintances—not our friends—are our greatest source of new ideas and information.”27
“Uniqueness, Impact, and Magic.”
“We want to be less a solid mass and more like a liquid or a gas.”
Leading the Media Lab is more like being a gardener than being a CEO—watering the plants, tending to the compost, trimming hedges, and getting out of the way so that the explosion of creativity and life of all of the plants and wildlife in the garden are allowed to flourish.
Internet freed—and in some cases forced—software companies to abandon the risk-averse, bureaucratically approved protocols of their predecessors in favor of an agile, permissionless approach to innovation.
“They are doing to hardware what the Web did for rip/mix/burn,”
Metrics are important for measuring your progress when you know exactly what you want to do, but they can also stifle innovation.
In the process they’ve remade the boundary that has traditionally separated the producers of a thing from the consumers of that thing. It is now a permeable layer, in which ideas and creativity and even control over such crucial aspects as determining long-term strategy are a collaborative effort.
Race, gender, socioeconomic background, and disciplinary training are all important, but only inasmuch as they are ciphers for the kinds of life experiences that produce cognitive diversity.
In other words, they have valued safety over risk, push over pull, authority over emergence, compliance over obedience, maps over compasses, and objects over systems.
how to lose in a way that allows you to continue fighting, which is as neat a definition of resilience
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.
It also requires a constant focus on the overall impact of new technologies, and an understanding of the connections between people, their communities, and their environments.
Journal of Design and Science (JoDS)
Design has become what many of us call a suitcase word.
As participant designers, we focus on changing ourselves and the way we do things in order to change the world.
we are seeking to redesign our very way of thinking to impact the world by impacting ourselves.
the pattern of long periods of stability interrupted by brief intervals of explosive change usually called “punctuated equilibrium”—is
“myoshu”—moves
Then, as the game began to enter its middle phase, AlphaGo did something unusual: it instructed its human attendant to place a black stone in a largely unoccupied area to the right of the board. This might have made sense in another context, but on that board at that moment AlphaGo seemed to be abandoning the developing play in the lower half of the board. This historic move was something that no human would have feasibly played—AlphaGo calculated the probability that a human would play that move at 1 in 10,000.9 It produced instant shock and confusion among the spectators. Lee Sedol paled,
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nothing in the 2,500 years of collected Go knowledge and understanding prepared anyone for move 37 of the second game in the series.
By the end of the day the big news wasn’t that AlphaGo had won a second game, but that it had displayed such deeply human qualities—improvisation, creativity, even a kind of grace—in doing so. The machine, we learned, had a soul.
Humans, he noted, have to contend with the psychological game as well as the one played out in wood and stone. “I was,” he said sadly, “incapable of overcoming the pressure.”
It could, rather, contain a society in which humans and machines work together, inspiring each other and augmenting a growing collective intelligence.
many people didn’t believe you could get to symbolic reasoning from deep learning.
One promising approach is what Iyad Rahwan, head of the Scalable Cooperation group at the Media Lab, calls “society in the loop” machine learning, which
It’s difficult to believe that in 1894 the Nobel Prize–winning physicist Albert Michelson could say that “it seems probable that most of the grand underlying [scientific] principles have been firmly established.”15 All that remained, he seemed to believe, would be to tie up a few loose ends. Within thirty years the theory of relativity would render all such statements absurd displays of hubris.
