Living Systems, the Internet and the Human Future
Elisabet Sahtouris, Ph.D.
Talk presented 13 May 2000 at
Planetwork, Global Ecology and Information Technology
a conference held at the San Francisco Presidio
Good morning everybody. I just heard part of Kevin Kelly's talk in the other room, and he made a couple of very interesting statements. I identify Kevin as Mr. Technology because of his editorship at Wired Magazine, and one of the things he said was "I hate computers, they're so stupid." Then he put up a slide that said, "Technology wants to be like life." Note well his distinction between "stupid" technology and the natural living systems we aspire to make it more like, presumably because they are not stupid, but intelligent. Towards the end of his talk he said, "Any individual species is a bigger idea than most human ideas," another hint of nature's superiority over our understanding and ability to emulate it thus far.
He was talking about the Information Age as an age of ideas -- ideas exchanged in conversation. To me, life is nothing but a big conversation. It always has been. It always will be. One of my very favorite books at present is The Clue Train Manifesto. It's a wonderful book about the Internet as a conversation, describing the Internet's ability for lifting the clamp on conversation that humans have imposed on themselves over the past few hundred years by creating our human organizations as mechanical models.
Most of the jobs of management in these top-down, command-and-control corporations are about keeping people in boxes so they won't talk to the wrong people; about suppressing innovations because they're not part of the plan. And now the Internet comes along and is changing all that because, as The Clue Train Manifesto points out, the people inside the corporations are talking to their markets, and markets are thus reverting to the conversations they were historically before the industrial age.
for the full article click the link below
Living Systems, the Internet and the Human Future by Elisabet Sahtouris
