Profil
-
(Andrej's post) The future role of randomness in our lifes
pred 353 dnevi | Komentar
I had a meditation on the role of randomness in our life and it goes like this:
throughout the history of mankind new technologies helped eliminate pure serendipitous events for smarter coincidences: mobile transportation (wheel) or airlines - many things wouldn't have happened without them. You wouldn't meet you wife, you would discover a new artist..without even counting the spillover effect when the entire populus starts sharing new memes emerge. I guess even the discovery of tools and fire helped people making smarter choices for themsleves.NEW TECH means not just less randomness but a smarter one.
with the mobile communication this has just intensified (now you can easily control the frame of randomness by being ON/OFFLINE, tapping into places of desire etc.) and connecting the mobile to our social graph will bring it to the next level. "what are all you guys doing here, how did we end up all together in this place?" will become an everyday question.
RECOMMENDATION ENGINES are going to take it to the next level.it will be mining our social graph and its proximity and mapping our (and social graphs) preferences for even better accuracy. You wont be even able to sit next to a complete stranger at events for instance.
SINGULARITY MELTS into familiarity (but it still feels like serendipity)
this is all great BUT where does it all end up? when we are suddenly engaged it this beautiful flow of wonderful engineered coincidences that happen every minute, every second, they are not coincidences anymore! they become habits. and.....HABITS become coincidences.
Habits, plans, structures will live a disconnected life until somebody will not re-engineer them. You will again start to make appointments with the 'usual suspects', go to places of your own 'declared interests' and rely on the old wisdom "what you don't know can't hurt you". it will all come back 360 degrees. the technology will be around be we won't use it much or only at our own discretion / or for a good cause (e.g. nuclear).
