Ming the Mechanic
The NewsLog of Flemming Funch
Tuesday, January 27, 2004day link 
 Mind Ecosystems
picture Some words from Bala Pillai:
"Imagine a world where each of us can telepathically find and match with our complements instantly. Any moment we have a want or a have.

Call that point downstream, in the flowing river of our and our childrens' lives, "N". Work backwards, upstream, from N. What is N-1?, What is N-2? Let us say N-5= us being able to find and match our complements very quickly using the Internet and through minds that bridge the wired with the unwired. In short N-5 = Halls Without Walls, Metrics-Rich Automated Matchmaking & Human Bridges

What stands in the way of super-conductivity between minds for frictionless synchronization? What are the problems (for which there are rewards to those who solve them), that we have to address to reach N-5? Insentience? Readiness to reveal our complementaries? Knowing what it is that we really want and have? Hierarchy of values dissonance? Semantic dissonance? Cognition dissonance? Valuation (of our respective traits and talents) dissonance? Distrust? Commitment (Unconditional love) dissonance? Ethos dissonance? Interfacing our minds with the tools, protocols and processes that find, search and bridge us with our complements?

How do we swim with the current more, in finding the metrics for the answers, as we head towards N-5?

If we have put Man on the Moon, can't we make it to N-5?

Can we try Ecosystems Thinking? Can we try "reverse engineering" Nature for clues?"
His writing is dense, but very inspiring. And I often find myself thinking in similar paths.

A big reason the world isn't working better is that we're having a hard time matching needs with haves. We're bad at connecting resources up with where they would do the most good. It is hard for people to find out who they would accomplish the most by working with. Hard to find *complements*. And the problem is primarily informational. We don't really know. We don't have good information, so we go by crude and artificial constructs, like what is advertised for sale on TV, or who we run into at a party.

To imagine a world where we all had a high level of telepathy is an excellent starting point for a lot of revolutionary possibilities. Lies would no longer have any manipulative value if everybody could see right through them and know the truth without bias. You'd have to really do good things to be seen as doing something valuable. Duh. Same with hypocritical morals. You can't get away with applying different rules to others than what you live by. If you're a smuck, everybody will know it.

And then the point Bala is getting at. If you somehow could perceive directly and instantly what everybody in the world needed and wanted, and what resources were available, there'd of course be no reason to waste time and energy on all the stuff that doesn't fit and doesn't work. If you really KNEW, you'd of course do the things you most want to do, where they make the most difference, and with the people who're most suited and interested in doing it with you. No need to do useless activities in a job you don't like, for a company that produces some junk that people wouldn't really want if they knew what it was and what the alternatives were.

And you'd help others do what they want to do when it is easy for you to do so. If you happened to know your neighbor also needs a bag of sugar from the market and that he's currently busy, you can just bring it for him, instead of you both having to go. If you're done with that book you're reading, you can just toss it to a guy on the street who also want to read it, rather than taking it home and hide it in the garage.

And, yes, maybe we can work towards that kind of world, and maybe ways we can organize ourselves, technologies we might employ, and ways we might think about it can take us a great deal of the way. Even short of a global evolutionary leap that gives us all holographic telepathy and clairvoyance. And, yes, nature probably is one of our best teachers in that. After all, ecosystems quite masterfully manage to ensure that nothing really is wasted, even though it all can seem a bit chaotic. No used paperbacks and nuclear waste gets stacked up forever in nature's ecosystems. Whatever one sector needs might well be a waste product from another sector. Whatever you leave behind probably gets eaten up by something else. And telepathy probably has nothing to do with it, so we ought to easily be able learn from what trees and ants and bacteria are doing. And maybe find better ways of synchronizing our work with less friction.
[ | 2004-01-27 16:44 | 5 comments | PermaLink ]  More >

 No Demand for Messages
Jay Rosen from Davos: "There is No Demand for Messages" via Doc Searls, who's been saying that kind of thing for some time:
Beginning in the mid 19th century, and all through the 20th, seeing people as masses could be industrially sustained. There were only so many channels, so many ways or reaching people en masse, and this convinced the message senders that there was an audience out there. But now being a bulk message sender via the media is like the guy in the street trying to get you to take a handbill. He may have motivation for delivering the message, you have none to take it.

They are the people formerly known as the audience. And they do not want your message.
They're right. If you're thinking in terms of "getting your message out" to as many people as possible, chances are that a lot of them will consider it unwanted spam, whatever the medium might be. Better think about what you can do together WITH all those individuals, that they're likely to voluntarily want to participate in.
[ | 2004-01-27 17:15 | 2 comments | PermaLink ]  More >

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