As I have examined in earlier blogs, information overload, exceeding the brain's plasticity, induces individual insanity and collective chaos. Plasticity stress is a function of the speed and degree of innovation and individual contexts; paradigms, databases, and narratives. The only brake on the locomotive of 'progress' is cultural inhibition to the adoption of new technology.
Early adopters, who fall in the autistic stage of the brain plasticity range, have little cultural inhibition. The slowest to adopt, the schizophrenic stage of the brain plasticity range, are singularly culture bound. Our present method of working out the speed of adoption operationally, progress to social breakdown, is social suicide. It is dystopian.
We absolutely must manage innovation. As discussed earlier, the nature of the universe and the limits of human intelligence preclude any pretense of being 'real'. We all live in distorted realities of filter bubbles. Reality can no longer be an argument for progress. We are generally exceeding the plasticity of the human brain and must manage change. We must increase cultural inhibition to the deployment of new technology while increasing the range and complexity of our personal contexts in order to adequately integrate new technology in humane social schema, a process of some 20 to 40 years.
That is my postmodern mantra and my prescription for dealing with our present chaos.
Do well and be well.
Tuesday, February 7, 2017
Saturday, February 4, 2017
Modern Innovation
Modern innovation begins arbitrarily with Einstein's 1905 paper on relativity. This, following on the heels of the Long Depression and a general increase in the capability and employment of machine tools, and preceding the Great War and a general collapse of civilization and its narratives, fueled a truly incomprehensible flood of innovation that became intense and socially pernicious after 1945.
The list of innovations introduced into society in the period, 1905 to 1945, is significant but the list of the period, post 1945, is mind boggling, atomic power, television, the integrated circuit and its transistors, the internet, robots, and, now, gadgets that are organized as the IoT, all of them pushing the limits of the human brain and culture and increasingly going beyond those limits into functional insanity and social chaos.
When an innovation is subject to inclusion into a culture that innovation is accomplished individual by individual. Yes, there are protocols for dealing with technology that are circulated among populations. These do not imply comprehension and they are temporary to task completion. They are a part of machine culture, not human culture. Social acculturation means integrating new ideas into neural networks so that behavior becomes meaningful. If one's behavior is a repertoire of such protocols, a machine culture, then one is a minion of the machines and the only meaning is the machine. That is intolerably inhumane. Thus, the eternal drive to comprehend, to integrate new ideas into a coherent brain mass.
With relativity and quantum mechanics and their esoteric and difficult concepts we find this drive, the drive to meaning, frustrated by the individual limits of the ability to understand, a function of talent and plasticity. Culture moves ahead, semper ad Lucem, incorporating new technology and ideas into humane behavioral systems but it moves slowly in filter bubbles and approximate realities. Compounding this are absolute theoretical limits of comprehension, the universe consists of scalar fields decaying into particles and scalar fields are unknowable, and the absolute limit of general comprehension, as Feynmann once said, nobody understands entropy.
Only with artificial intelligence and IoT gadgets do we see the possibility of a meaningful existence obtained within the comfort zone of the average human being, without performance enhancing drugs, without elitist exclusion. There is, at the logical terminus of technological development, more day to dawn, as Thoreau put it. We may be in sight of that dawn, the dawn of machines adjusting to human beings, the dawn of the truly humane society, but we still have to reach that point of technological development and acculturate it. We are not there yet.
The list of innovations introduced into society in the period, 1905 to 1945, is significant but the list of the period, post 1945, is mind boggling, atomic power, television, the integrated circuit and its transistors, the internet, robots, and, now, gadgets that are organized as the IoT, all of them pushing the limits of the human brain and culture and increasingly going beyond those limits into functional insanity and social chaos.
When an innovation is subject to inclusion into a culture that innovation is accomplished individual by individual. Yes, there are protocols for dealing with technology that are circulated among populations. These do not imply comprehension and they are temporary to task completion. They are a part of machine culture, not human culture. Social acculturation means integrating new ideas into neural networks so that behavior becomes meaningful. If one's behavior is a repertoire of such protocols, a machine culture, then one is a minion of the machines and the only meaning is the machine. That is intolerably inhumane. Thus, the eternal drive to comprehend, to integrate new ideas into a coherent brain mass.
With relativity and quantum mechanics and their esoteric and difficult concepts we find this drive, the drive to meaning, frustrated by the individual limits of the ability to understand, a function of talent and plasticity. Culture moves ahead, semper ad Lucem, incorporating new technology and ideas into humane behavioral systems but it moves slowly in filter bubbles and approximate realities. Compounding this are absolute theoretical limits of comprehension, the universe consists of scalar fields decaying into particles and scalar fields are unknowable, and the absolute limit of general comprehension, as Feynmann once said, nobody understands entropy.
Only with artificial intelligence and IoT gadgets do we see the possibility of a meaningful existence obtained within the comfort zone of the average human being, without performance enhancing drugs, without elitist exclusion. There is, at the logical terminus of technological development, more day to dawn, as Thoreau put it. We may be in sight of that dawn, the dawn of machines adjusting to human beings, the dawn of the truly humane society, but we still have to reach that point of technological development and acculturate it. We are not there yet.
Wednesday, February 1, 2017
Brain Plasticity and Innovation: A Model
Prerequisite to any examination of the consequences of innovation on human behavior is a working model of brain plasticity. I define this arbitrarily as the ratio of dendrite connectivity over pruning which, at one end of the spectrum, defines aspects of autism, hyperconnectivity, and at the other defines aspects of schizophrenia, excessive pruning according to recent genetic studies. This model excludes the formation of new neurons in adults, which does occur, for purposes of simplification and concentrates on the formation and destruction of dendrite connections in a phenomena of the constant rewiring of the brain, plasticity.
Armed with this model, a larger model of response to innovation becomes possible. Positing an aggregate learning curve to adopting a specific technology, there are five characteristic states to that adjustment in behavior. There is the prophet state, well ahead of the curve. There is the autistic state, ahead of the curve. There is the normal state, even with the aggregate curve. There is the laggard state, behind the curve, and there is the schizophrenic state, off the back of the curve. Please keep in mind that these are characterizations of brain plasticity, not value statements nor epithets.
This model implies aggregate states of efficient task performance in the deployment of new technology, the productivity curve, in which the five states occur as a specific population in relation to that curve as a function of brain plasticity.
To be continued.....
Armed with this model, a larger model of response to innovation becomes possible. Positing an aggregate learning curve to adopting a specific technology, there are five characteristic states to that adjustment in behavior. There is the prophet state, well ahead of the curve. There is the autistic state, ahead of the curve. There is the normal state, even with the aggregate curve. There is the laggard state, behind the curve, and there is the schizophrenic state, off the back of the curve. Please keep in mind that these are characterizations of brain plasticity, not value statements nor epithets.
This model implies aggregate states of efficient task performance in the deployment of new technology, the productivity curve, in which the five states occur as a specific population in relation to that curve as a function of brain plasticity.
To be continued.....
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