Lawrence Lessig on Charlie Rose
This is long but I promise its worth it. For a long time I've looked at all the problems and all the great things and saw that how they became great or how they will be solved were the same process. Great things are usually the creation of many people, though its usually the last guy who adds the last critical piece that gets the credit. Big problems are so complex that its beyond any one person to understand it all and come up with a solution. So people working together is very important ... duh :). The trick is how do you get people together in a deliberate organized way. Not just kind of random or with huge efforts like knocking on doors or buying expensive commercials. So this last week has gotten me really excited in that I see one way it could work and its simple and powerful. So here it is.
How do ideas happen ? Think of all the things that you think are great. Did you make them yourself from scratch ? Probably not. You heard them somewhere and mixed in your own ideas. And you think that the way you see them is better and more meaningful, at least to you. If you look at everyone doing this everywhere. Some one hears something, thinks about it, and shares it, there is a kind of idea evolution. Richard Dawkins calls it meme evolution. Its kind of a free-speech market-place-of-ideas kind of thought and its the basis of people getting together to socialize since the beginning of time.
Now for some science that will blow your mind. So there is the theory of evolution. Basically it states that there is variation in a population and some in that population are better suited to their environment and they have more offspring and increase in number in the next generation. This simple little process over a long long long time made all life everywhere. But there is an odd thing about that life. It was unaware of what it was doing. It acquired competence in dealing with the environment without cognition of what, why, how, or anything. Ants for example don't think. They just follow some simple rules that implement a near optimal search algorithm based on scent trails. So evolution produces competence without cognition.
So I promised some mind bending stuff so here it comes. Ideas that go between people evolve like life. They have variation. Some are better suited for their environment, i.e. people like them more, and they pass on to the next generation of ideas i.e. people talk about what they like. But, and here is where it gets good, this process has always been limited to the people around you, the dozen or so people you see in everyday conversations. But now there is the Internet. You could talk to the whole world if you could filter out all the crap and get what you like, the whole world. Let me say that again, the whole world, all 6,692,030,277 people as of 2008. Somewhere out there, there is one guy that is going to have an idea and he is going to share it and it will spread and change and adapt and change the world forever, for the better hopefully. And the people that work on that idea won't even realize how big it is, just like the ants who have competence but not cognition until its there, done, and someone steps back and sees the forest for the first time when all they have been looking at are trees.
So where is this happening ? Take a look at Twitter and Facebook. Not the "my-dog-just-farted I'm-going-to-sleep-now" conversations, but the moments when someone finds something really neat. Something special and they share it and someone else sees it and goes wow I see the world a little differently now. And the number of people sharing and learning and working on what they have discovered grows and grows and grows till people start talking about a fundamental shift in culture. A shift from mass produced ideas to grassroots ideas, from read culture to read-write culture.
This type of culture is different. New things don't come from a big R&D Lab and then sold to the masses each one exactly the same. They come from semi-professional amateurs laboring away at what they love, getting together, and sharing ideas, each unique, just for fun. Trying really audacious things that have a high risk of failure but huge returns. And they don't care if it fails. Its fun. Something a R&D Lab in a big company with established products would rarely try.
So get ready. Its is going to be a wild ride.
Here are all the sources that got me thinking:
Lawrence Lessig on the next big idea
http://www.charlierose.com/view/clip/9648
Competance without Cognition
DARWIN AND THE EVOLUTION OF REASONS By Daniel C. Dennett on http://edge.org/ (no direct link)
The Origin of the Mountain Bike
TED talk "Charles Leadbeater on innovation" http://on.ted.com/67W
Cloud Super Intelligence (Slides are hard to follow but possible to get the gist)
http://www.slideshare.net/AndersSandberg/cloud-superintelligence
2 comments:
So, if, via the internet, everyone on the planet is exposed to every idea on the planet that they care about, then you can be certain that every possible mutation of every idea is being tested against every possible obstacle. Which means that every idea will necessarily evolve to become the best it could possibly be, and then compete on equal footing against every other idea. Thus, the "winning ideas" at any given moment in time will always be the most highly evolved.
I agree. This is similar to how the actions of buyers and sellers in a marketplace implements a distributed system for the allocation of resources, putting raw materials and skills to the best possible use. But this ideal is not reached in practice, since there are barriers to entry into the marketplace, and not everything is easily monetized.
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