Why, in addition to greed, it hasn’t worked out the way Bucky hoped…

In pursuit of deeper “sustainability” understanding, I recently read “The Spell of the Sensuous” by David Abram (highly recommended), and started “Natural Capitalism.” Early on in NC was a mention of Buckminster Fuller’s concept of “ephemeralization,” the tendency of new technology to achieve ever more, using less and less resources.

In 1939, Bucky pointed out that there really are enough resources for all of humanity to live successfully on this planet, and that we could design our way to reasonable prosperity for all.

Indeed technology has produced more and more using less and less resources, and we have made some progress toward providing a decent standard of living for more humans, but we are clearly still far from the goal. And most of us continue to believe there is not enough for everyone, thus somehow justifying our drive to get more and more for ourselves.

In addition to a short discussion of ephemeralizaiton in Wikipedia, was this:

Consequences [of ephemeralization] to society

Heyligen[2] , Alvin Toffler, and others have written about how ephemeralization, though it may increase our power to solve physical problems, can make non-physical problems much worse. Increasing system complexity and information overload make it difficult and stressful for the people who must control the ephemeralized systems. This can negate the advantages of ephemeralization.

Heyligen speaks about the development of the “Global Brain” and the “economy of attention” needed to cope effectively with the incredible explosion of information and connections resulting from ephemeralization.

Following are several relevant excerpts from the paper:

“Goldhaber (1997) suggests that the traditional economy, based on the exchange of material wealth, is being replaced by an economy based on the exchange of attention.
“This view of the attention economy has a basic flaw, though: attention is not a tradeable good. While attention is valuable both when spending it and when receiving it, the one cannot compensate for the other. All the attention that is focused on a famous person’s private and public life will not help that person tackling information overload…..

“One reason why attention is so difficult to allocate rationally is that people have very little control over the emotional drives, such as sex, status, and danger, that focus their attention on one subject rather than another.

“Yet, several authors (e.g. Stewart, 2000; Czikszentmihalyi, 1990), building on centuries-old spiritual traditions such as yoga, meditation and Zen Buddhism, have argued that it is both possible and desirable for people to learn to control these drives.”

“The present drive therefore is not so much for independently intelligent programs, but for systems that support or “augment” human intelligence (IA, that is, Intelligence Amplification, rather than AI).”

“The solution proposed in this paper is the integration of the three basic resources: human intelligence, computer intelligence, and coordination mechanisms that direct an issue to the cognitive resource (document, person, or computer program) most fit to address it. This requires a distributed, self-organizing system, formed by all individuals, computers and the communication links that connect them. The self-organization can be achieved by algorithms similar to those underlying the learning of associations in the brain, the laying of trails by ants, or the invisible hand of the market. The effect is to superpose the contributions of many different human and computer agents into a collective “mental map” that links all cognitive and physical resources in the most efficient way possible.”

“The resulting information system would be available always and everywhere, reacting immediately to any request for guidance or any change in the situation. It would constantly be fed with new information, from its myriad human users and computer agents, which it would take into account to find the best possible ways to achieve any task it is confronted with. Optimization would take place both at the level of the individual who makes the request, and at the level of society which tries to minimize the conflicts between the desires of its different members and to aim at long term, global progress while as much as possible protecting individual freedom and privacy. Such an intelligent, adaptive, “omniscient” system can perhaps be best understood through the metaphor of the global brain.”

This is the beauty of carefully crafted social networks. The global brain is growing!

NEXT

Information Anxiety ?? – Not Me!

Where’s the Tofu

The best communication strategy is a good reputation.

References

1. ^ R Buckminster Fuller, Nine Chains to the Moon, Anchor Books 1938, 1971 pp 252- 259
2. ^ Heyligen, Complexity and Information Overload in Society: why increasing efficiency leads to decreasing control http://web.archive.org/web/20070103091059/http://pespmc1.vub.ac.be/papers/Info-overload.pdf
Draft paper, version: April 12, 2002, to be submitted to: The Information Society Complexity and Information Overload in Society: why increasing efficiency leads to decreasing control –
Francis HEYLIGHEN
CLEA, Free University of Brussels, Pleinlaan 2, B-1050 Brussels, Belgium
http://pcp.vub.ac.be/HEYL.html