Brief posting, on the biggest issues: what are the most powerful machines in our lives? For Kevin Kelly, it is the bottom-up collective play of the Web - the way our net activities are building a world consciousness:
Three thousand years from now when keen minds review the past, I believe that our ancient time, here at the cusp of the third millennium, will be seen as another such era. In the years roughly coincidental with the Netscape IPO, humans began animating inert objects with tiny slivers of intelligence, connecting them into a global field, and linking their own minds into a single thing. This will be recognized as the largest, most complex, and most surprising event on the planet. Weaving nerves out of glass and radio waves, our species began wiring up all regions, all processes, all facts and notions into a grand network. From this embryonic neural net was born a collaborative interface for our civilization, a sensing, cognitive device with power that exceeded any previous invention. The Machine provided a new way of thinking (perfect search, total recall) and a new mind for an old species. It was the Beginning.
But for Robert Macnamara, grizzled old Vietnam warrior turned anti-nuclear crusader, the global machine that won't go away - and threatens to resurge - is the nuclear bomb. The ultimate top-down power play:
The whole situation seems so bizarre as to be beyond belief. On any given day, as we go about our business, the president is prepared to make a decision within 20 minutes that could launch one of the most devastating weapons in the world. To declare war requires an act of congress, but to launch a nuclear holocaust requires 20 minutes’ deliberation by the president and his advisors. But that is what we have lived with for 40 years. With very few changes, this system remains largely intact, including the “football,” the president’s constant companion.
Macnamara's hope is that "debate" - local, national, international, global - will encourage a change in US policy from nuclear proliferation (see Chomsky on this) to "the elimination—or near elimination—of all nuclear weapons". So the democratic activism enabled by the first Machine might, possibly, disarm and dismantle the frightening realpolitik enabled by the second Machine. At stake in their mutual interplay is global survival. How play-ethical can it get?
