One of my big hunches on how the world works is something I call the Human Information Machine. The idea is basically this: human society is functionally this big data network, the information machine, with each individual as this node of experience. Society adapts, innovates, and changes at the rate at which individual learning and experience permeate through the network.
We are all born knowing nothing. Everything from there on out has to be learned. Some of what we learn we acquire through our own direct experience. You touch a hot stove and in a visceral moment of pain learn to never do it again. Some you learn from your family and friends. You see your parents brushing their teeth and you copy. But unless you were born into a community of naval engineers, your parents can’t teach you how to build a nuclear submarine reactor. If you want to learn anything more than what you or the people around you can immediately experience you have to go read about the experiences of someone who did. The vast majority of what we know, we learn through language and culture, through the information machine.
I think that technological innovation is fundamentally the frontier of evolving individual experience. If you work with a new technology or innovation directly you gain firsthand experience with it. You “get it” in a way that people who do not have your experience cannot. In time others will “get it” as your experience is recorded and permeates throughout the larger network. An example I often think about is the almost 30 year lag between the fundamental discoveries of quantum mechanics at the beginning of the 20th century and the development of nuclear weapons in the middle. In the early days, outside of some visionaries like H.G. Wells, you would have to be an advanced physicist to fully understand the implications of E = mc2. It was a paradigm shift away from the previous 400 years or so of physics and it took a few decades for this knowledge to be digested by larger society and their military planners.
Being on the outside of this knowledge frontier does not relegate you to living in ignorance. You have experience to share as well. Your experience can provide additional context and this context synergistically creates new knowledge and discoveries that weren’t there before. I call this melding of experiences reprogramming and it is the conversation that drives the world.
The first generation of video games were effectively electronic gambling machines. Early game companies originally cut their teeth on pinball, pachinko, playing cards, and slot machines so everything in their experience indicated that arcade games were just going to be an electronic continuation of what they had been doing for decades. Over time people from outside the gambling industry worked their way into these organizations. They brought their experience from fields such as illustration and film, which they used to create things with the electronic game medium that simply could not be done with a pinball or slot machine. These second generation games brought about innovations like levels, narrative stories, and open worlds. It fundamentally reprogrammed our understanding of what a video game could be and the result has been the great art form of our time.
Video games, computers, nuclear energy, the internet, space travel, etc. Our society lauds the ideal of the lone visionary who steps in and reprograms the information machine in a new direction. This focus on the value of individual experience has gotten us very far but I feel that we often downplay the ways an individual reprogramming can go wrong. There is frankly a lot of junk data in the information machine. Assumed knowledge that either still exists out of ignorance or was deliberately put there with malicious intent.
We have created a few rudimentary error checking mechanisms; the scientific method, democracy, market economies, but the junk remains. Underpinning these systems is the philosophy that even the most intransient of people can be won over, reprogrammed to a different point of view, with a well-reasoned argument. But humanity is not a community of rational actors. We’re more like a series of storytelling animals with a strong internal narrative. Junk often stays in the system because people have constructed an entire identity around it. Changing your mind often means first admitting that you were wrong, something that we know is literally one of the hardest things for human beings to do.
My hope for the world is that we will see a reprogramming on reprogramming. I think that the era of hot takes, argument, and debate is over. The way forward is to reprogram the information machine on mutual respect, honest sharing of experiences, and a good faith desire to understand the truth, no matter how uncomfortable. Of not putting all our faith in the experience of a very talented individual but in the collective experience of very talented teams and societies. This big reprogramming is probably going to take a long time, frustratingly long, but I maintain a kind view of our civilization. This is literally the first time the information machine of this spaceship Earth has had to work through it. I remain optimistic that we are going to figure this out and that humanity will be around for a very long time.