FOLLOWING UP: SINGULARITIES AND RESILIENCE [ UPDATED II ]

is at Phatic Communion has begun a resiliency symposium and his synthesis and horizontal thinking has gone into maximum overdrive:

“Singularities and Resilience

I have been surprised and slightly awed by a new post at Responsible Nanotechnology. After responding at ZenPundit a few days ago, I’ve had my own thoughts, Federalist X’s thoughts, Vonny’s thoughts, and Mark’s in mind, and have been contemplating the subject without yet being prepared to blog about resiliency. Then, today, I read Mark Treder’s report of the audience response at a recent Singularity Summit, reproduced here in its entirety:

Based on audience response to the ideas presented at today’s Singularity Summit, here are some general observations:

1. Humans are, by nature, conservative. In an auditorium filled with people attending an event focused on techno-change — and in a university set in the middle of Silicon Valley, no less — still the largest applause was reserved for those with the most reactionary views.

2. We fear change. That’s normal and even healthy. In fact, it’s a survival mechanism, hard-wired in through thousands of generations of natural selection. When taken to excess, obviously, it can be paralyzing. Moreover, those who challenge the human tendency toward caution are those who most often make the greatest discoveries (or die trying).

3. Progress — technological and social — continues to occur and eventually is accepted by nearly everyone. I call this phenomenon “Unconscious Confirmation.” It’s like the wonderful quote from John Lennon, “Life is what happens to you while you’re busy making other plans.” Seemingly unacceptable change is what happens while we’re busy doing other things.

4. Truly disruptive global change on a rapid timescale is something we have never experienced. We are thus unprepared for it, and it could even be argued that we are incapable of adequately preparing. I hope that’s not true.

His last point describes the motivation behind my play as Devil’s advocate to Mark Safranski’s post: The more dynamic the world (disaster, disruption, whathaveya), the less likely that kind of resiliency is going to obtain. But every point, and the four observations considered as a whole, represent a succinct outline of the problem facing any human network in a dynamic world. For those unfamiliar with the subject of Singularity, I suggest reading the Wikipedia article. [update: see also The Great Singularity Debate.] Some detractors of singularity theory scoff at futurists (e.g., at Ray Kurzweil) from a belief that now is then, whether the then is past or future. I.e., detractors cannot easily see a future outside the framework of present world views, and some may even be the type of conservative that believes present dynamics are the same as past dynamics: “nothing new under the sun.”

Singularity theorists, however, are attempting to anticipate future disruption — usually, as influenced by technology — in the standard flow we call humanity. Futurists like Mike Treder have given much thought about “proactive resiliency,” even if that is not the term they have used to describe this aspect of their

thought. “

Treder’s fourth point quoted by Curtis is describing a System Perturbation – which by definition overcomes systemic resiliency and leaves an aftermath that is so ” rewired” that a

” rule-set reset” is required to adapt global society to the changed environment.

Curtis also pulls off a neat comparison of the operational tension between the meta-principles of resiliency and consiliency:

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