Showing posts with label technology. Show all posts
Showing posts with label technology. Show all posts

23 January 2009

Change in How Change Happens

Another cracking post from Kevin Kelly:

Of all the tricks that evolution came up for increasing its evolvability none compare to minds. Minds – and not just human minds – bestow on life a greatly accelerated way to learn and adapt. This should not be surprising because minds are built to find answers, and one of the key things to answer might be how to learn better, quicker. If what minds are good for is learning and adaptation, then learning how to learn will accelerate your learning. Even though most of the learning a mind does is not transferred directly into biological evolution, there are several ways in which minds accelerate evolution (see the Baldwin Effect), even in the lower animal kingdom. So the presence of minds in life has increased its evolvability; the discovery of mindness has driven evolution in many new directions while also creating a new territory to explore – the territory of possible minds.

The most recent extension of this expansion is technology. Technology is how human minds explore the space of possibilities. We power our minds via science and technology to make possible things real. More so technology is how our society learns and introduces change. It is almost a cliché to point out that technology has brought as much change on this planet in the last 100 years as life has in the last billion years.

Ray Kurzweil can provide you with dozens of graphs charting the accelerating change brought about by technology in the last 100 years or so. From the speed of computers, the bandwidth of communications, the power of engines, the yield of crops – all are accelerating in performance. Change is this century's middle name.

But meta-change is not about acceleration itself; it is not about faster change. Rather, the acceleration of evolution or increased evolvability is about the change in the nature of change. The basic mechanism by which our collective minds – as expressed by technology – adapt and produce change is undergoing a shift. In fact the most important change at work in our world right now is "the change in how change happens."

"Change in how change happens": that's a pretty good description of what openness is doing. It has changed *how* we change. It's also what we need to achieve on a *planetary* scale if was are going to save much of the world as we know it. It doesn't get much more profound than that.

25 February 2007

Someting is Open in the State of Denmark

Good news from Denmark:

On Friday, the Danish Minister of Science, Technology and Innovation, Helge Sander, made a press announcement (Danish) about his plan for following up on the Parliament Resolution 8 months ago.

The implementation plan is presented in a report which suggests that “open standards should be implemented gradually by making it mandatory for the public sector to use a number of open standards when this becomes technically feasible”.

The report identifies an initial sets of open standards as candidates for mandatory use from 1 January 2008 “if an economic impact assessment shows that this will not involve additional costs to the public sector”.

21 December 2006

Scanning the Big Delta

"Delta Scan" sounds like one of those appalling airport potboilers involving mad scientists, terrorists and implausibly durable secret agents, but it's actually something much more exciting: an attempt to peek into the future of our science and technology. A hopeless task, clearly, but worth attempting if only as a five-neuron exercise.

The results are remarkably rich; considerable credit must go to the UK's Office of Science and Innovation for commissioning the report and - particularly - making it freely available. I was glad to see that there are plenty of links in the documents, which are short and to the point. Great for, er, scanning.

12 December 2005

...and Went Down to the Sea

"Open": it's such a small word (and a strange one at that: stare at it long enough and it begins to look like something from another tongue). It's much used, and very abused these days. But that's to be expected, since it's fast becoming where so many other currents and trends are heading. Everyone, it seems, wants to be open.

That's what these pages are all about: how "openness" - as manifested in open source, open genomics, open content and all the other opens – lies at the heart of most of what's interesting in technology today. And not only. Just as technology is making its presence felt in so many other areas of life, so the open movements and their philosophies are feeding through there, too.