User:Joesydney
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Hi, I'm Joesydney (apparently - My name is Joe and I live in Sydney, so Joesydney will do) - total newcomer, but very interested.
I find myself using Wikipedia to look back at Wikipedia. I'm interested in the way Wikipedia specifically, and open-source software in general fits in with complex systems. Is Wikipedia similar to an organism, a brain, to an ecology, to culture or language? Is design and evolution in Wikipedia similar to design under natural selection, and are both similar to design and evolution in technology, culture and language?
In the 1990s I found myself excitedly reading authors like Stuart Kauffman, Steven Pinker, Matt Ridley, Richard Dawkins, Christopher Langton, Mitchell Waldrop, Stewart Brand, Robert Axelrod, James Lovelock, Jared Diamond and Tim Flannery. I programmed my computer to display the Mandelbrot set, Julia sets, Conway's Game of Life and Langton's ant. It seemed that a grand synthesis of complex systems was just around the corner, and we would be reading a theory that elucidated the deep structure of all these systems under one umbrella. The great centre of excellence in the field seemed to be the Santa Fe Institute.
And then ... not much. Was it just that I stopped reading, or did this line of research falter? Where is it now? Perhaps the promises were so grand that they were doomed to fall short. But now I feel that we have an ever more pressing need to know. James Lovelock uses a concept called Spaceship Earth to discuss a world where the Earth's naturally balancing systems have been replaced by humanity at the controls; flying through space on a ship with a (perhaps fatally) compromised set of subsystems.
Climate change illustrates that we will have to take hold of the controls of Spaceship Earth at least to some degree. But we're such bad fliers. And our efforts are compromised by the free rider problem, ie: If only all you bastards could clean up your environmental act, I could enjoy the benefits and blithely continute to pollute, safe in the knowledge that my contribution is small in the scheme of things.
But maybe there's a new brain on the planet. Maybe the beastie that is all the computer users plus the internet that links them is (or will be) smart enough to fly Spaceship Earth. Clearly Wikipedia is part of that brain. And because there is only one brain, there is no free rider problem. The internet brain has total ownership, and no one else to blame.
There's an answer here, too, to the old fear exemplified by everything from Frankenstein to The Terminator, The Matrix and the Artificial Intelligence debate: Will the machines ever become smarter or more powerful than humans? The question has been sidestepped. Computers plus humans are the smartest brain on the planet. And being part of that brain does not feel like insignificance, it does not feel like powerlessness and loss of autonomy; it feels like community, it feels like a wiki.
I'm planning to use a few contributions to Wikipedia as a focal point for a renewed attack on these questions, the authors I was reading in the 1990s and their successors. What's going on in 2007?
