The managerial technocratic aristocracy

So according to these citigroup memos there is a Managerial Technocratic Aristocracy in the Anglosphere paying itself massive salaries and making zillions from start-ups. The anglosphere countries function as Plutonomies, while other western nations are more egalitarian.

Characterizing the U.S. Plutonomy: Based on the Consumer Finance Survey, the Top 1% Accounted For 20% of Income, 40% of Financial Wealth and 33% of Net Worth in the U.S. (More Than the Net Worth of the Bottom 95% Households Put Together) in 2001

In addition the nature of the economic elite has changed from more of a feudal model of deriving income from owning land and capital to one of high salaried executives and billionaire entrepreneurs:

The Metamorphosis of the Highest 1% of Income Earners in the U.S.: from Rentier Rich to a Managerial Technocratic Aristocracy


Now fundamentally as a species we are egalitarian by nature, is what is happening unnatural or even immoral or is it just the pareto principle playing out along with suitable financial incentives for business leaders and technological innovators? I don't know myself, however I do think most individuals don't need millions / billions of dollars as motivation to be productive.


In saying that,having a lot of wealth in the hands of a few may seem unfair, but I would argue, only if it adversely affects the human condition of the 99%. Keep in mind 99% of tennis grand slams are won by 1% of tennis players, 99% of blog entries are produced by 1% of bloggers (I'm making the numbers up), etc, etc. My point is it is natural to have an elite dominating any given domain due to specialisation.

This isn't something trivial as tennis however, our wealth has a large impact on our quality of life. We in the west aren't that bad off, sure you could have more toys but I would argue as long as we retain open access to the internet & information goods then the quality of human experience will remain comparable across the board. As information goods/services consumption continues to grow as a proportion of GDP then as long as we all have open access to a large chunk of them, inequality wont be as bad as the numbers look. Yes their will be material good inequality but not huge inequalities in terms of the human experience / quality of life which will shift more and more to the consumption of information, bypassing tangible goods. Given the marginal cost of propagating information goods/services for consumption is near zero, in the long run this material imbalance will cease to matter (as much), provided patents / intellectual property law is reformed.

The real worry then is if these Anglo Plutonomies manage to block access to information goods/services in order to further enrich the financial elite. The system is trying to clamp down on intellectual property & internet access (SOPA) but even if it does, the capital creation fluctuations introduced by newly patented technology will grow to a point where the markets will lose their ability to accurately measure value and capital will become meaningless. If Google can create 200 billion of market cap mainly down to a patented PageRank algorithm, then things are going to get out of control when some real information goods/services start appearing. So this may be the 'last gasp' of the financial elite.


On a tangent to finish off, from the same Citigroup report:

But the balance of power between right (generally pro-plutonomy) and left (generally pro-equality) is on a knife-edge in many countries.... A collapse in wealth in the plutonomies, felt by the masses, and/or prolonged recession could easily raise the prospects of anti-plutonomy policy.



This report came out in 2006 before the GFC.. Oh the irony (Occupy Wall St, we are the 99%)... No wonder Citigroup lawyers fought so hard to suppress this report.

An argument against Chinese economic collapse

Investment in telecommunications & information technology will prevent the economic collapse of the modern Chinese state.  

George Friedman, stratfor founder, has long argued that China is doomed in the long run due to the wealth disparity between the coastal region and the interior. He believes this wealth disparity will lead to political instability and the collapse of China.

His argument: The cost of transporting goods determines how wealthy a region can be, coastal regions on ocean trade routes can be rich while internal regions with no river transportation network will be poor (water is the most cost effective way of transporting goods). He sees the growing wealth disparity leading to political instability (as it has in the past) which can only be resolved with a Maoist type equalisation of wealth, In Mao's case he made everyone equally poor with his bad policies but maintained China's political integrity against western encroachment.

I think Friedman's argument may have overlooked information networks. The internet is a very low cost way of transporting information, furthermore the percentage of GDP which is made up of information goods and services is increasing and will continue to increase. I think the consumption of information goods and services will reach a point where it accounts for over 80% of GDP in the next 20-30 years. I can't back this up with hard facts and this prediction is reliant on an exponential growth in information technology as postulated by Vernor Vinge (accelerating change) and  Ray Kurzweil (law of accelerating returns). These predictions are both to a large part based of Moore's law. My basic argument would be, with the exponential growth in computing power, the proportion of GDP that would be made up of information goods will increase.

China will have 1.3 billion people all speaking the same language as their 'base network' for information creation and propagation, giving them the critical mass to compete with the English speaking west. Metcalfe's law states that the value of a telecommunications network is proportional to the square of the number of connected users of the system meaning the number of human minds generating information on China.Net will become the primary measure of economic strength. In this case, provided China has a solid internet infrastructure, the quality of life of its inland citizens should not be that much worse than those in the coastal regions. It will be worse in terms of the consumption of tangible goods, but the information goods and services should help alleviate this (at least enough to prevent political upheaval).

China invested a total of 4.3 trillion yuan (630 billion U.S. dollars) in Internet infrastructure construction from 1997 to 2009 (see here), By the end of 2009 the number of netizens in China had reached 384 million, 618 times that of 1997 with an annual increase of 31.95 million users. Furthermore the Chinese white paper on internet policy issued last year states China intends to make the internet accessible to 45% of its population by 2015.

As you can see, provided English continues its colonization of the European Union, West.Net and China.Net will have approximately the same number of people interacting in the same language. A side question: will India.Net be dominated by English or Hindi?

US targeted killings: Osama - Yamamoto comparison

Given the recent media fire-storm over the killing of Osama bin Laden, I thought it would be interesting to compare and contrast the operation to the killing of Admiral Yamamoto, a historic American ‘enemy number one’, during WWII. Both operations involved the targeted killing of a figurehead/leader responsible for an 'unprovoked' attack on the United States. Both killings were for home front propaganda,  and both showcase the exceptional intelligence gathering capabilities of the United States.

 

 

Edit: It turns out US Attorney General, Eric Holder has used the same comparison as a legal justification of Osama's assassination (see here). To misquote Voltaire, "God is always on the side of the big battalions."

Similarities

Isoroku Yamamoto was commander-in-chief of the Japanese Navy and was responsible for planning and executing the Japanese attack on Pearl Habour, which brought America into the WWII. Osama bin Laden was the  founder of al-Qaeda and held overall responsibility for the September 11 attacks, which unleashed America's War on Terror.

Both targeted killings were largely for propaganda / moral boosting purposes, not for any tactical reason. Osama had been so far removed from Al Qaeda command and control he no longer had any tactical significance to the organisation, while in Admiral Yamamoto’s case, the Japanese had already lost the crucial Battle of Midway in which the allies had destroyed a majority of Japan’s carrier fleet, eliminating a large chunk of their capability in the pacific, which lead to Japan’s eventual capitulation. 


Both attacks were executed using an exceptional military intelligence gathering apparatus, which made the tactical execution of both missions as difficult as shooting fish in a barrel:

With Yamamoto, allied code breakers had deciphered a Japanese radio message of the scheduled tour Yamamoto was planning to make to the Solomon Islands and New Guinea, which included his scheduled destinations and flight times. President Roosevelt ordered the Navy to "get Yamamoto.”  and it was only a matter of sending a bunch of fighters to intercept his aircraft and shoot him down.

With Osama, the interrogation of a terrorist got the name of one of Osama’s courier’s. Next a Pakistani spy saw him in Abottabad, spy satellites used facial recognition technology to identify Osama exercising in the back yard [Edit: That might be a load of BS, latest take was it was Osama's oldest wife who snitched, pissed off he only banged his youngest wife]. President Obama ordered the Navy to “get Osama.” once again, the rest was timing. Navy SEALs had been practising the operation over a month before the raid took place, using a custom built replica of his compound! The date chosen had more to do with Obama’s re-election campaign then anything else.

Differences

The main difference between the two operations relates again to the desired propaganda / public relations outcomes of the killings. 

The killing of Yamamoto was quite impersonal, fighters shoot down his plane, it crashes, and he dies. The Japanese navy reports he is dead and this cannot easily be hidden as he is not in hiding like Osama was.

Obama wanted proof that Osama he was dead, using a B2 bomber to flatten his house would have achieved the same tactical purpose of killing Osama, but this was a PR campaign and it would not have achieved the right results as it may have been impossible to identify his body,  in which case his death could be denied by Al Qaeda. So instead a hit squad was sent to kill him and bring the body back as evidence.

The problem with the hit squad approach is it can make America seem like the bad guy, when you send 25 SEAL’s in to kill an unarmed man in cold blood in front of his daughter and wife, it doesn’t look right, even if it is Osama.

So that’s when your press spin doctor’s make up a ‘fire fight’ (which didn’t happen), Osama being armed (not true) and using his wife as a human shield (also not true) in order to vilify the man and make a point blank cold blooded execution palatable to the public.

Washington spin doctors probably would have got away with it, if it hadn’t been for the fact one of the SEAL’s helicopters had a technical malfunction and could not take off. The plan had been to use that helicopter to transport the woman and children left behind away so that they could not tell the true story of what happened to the Pakistani intelligence service. The reason the story changed from what was originally told by the US administration to what actually happened has nothing to do with 'fog of war' but is because Osama’s daughter was an eye witness in his execution.

What this means for the future

 

The irony is if a B2 bomber had flattened the compound, Osama would be dead along with all the women and children (as unfortunate collateral damage) and yet it would sit more cleanly on our collective conscience then if we go in a shoot someone at point blank range. The bombing de-personalises the killing but achieves the same purpose, in the same way Yamamoto's killing was depersonalised by being in a plane that was shot down.

The implications of this are scary, hunter-killer robotic drones such as the MQ-9 Reaper are being used with great tactical success in the Pakistan / Afghanistan region to target militant leaders, and no one bats an eyelid about it. But if you were to think about it in reference to say - The Terminator - as http://xkcd.com does:

Once we can make humanoid robotic soldiers like the terminator to do our dirty-work we will. If a robot had gone into the compound and mown down Osama and his family you again depersonalise what is happening. Killing of the family could be an ‘unfortunate programming error’. Not only that, you no longer need highly trained troops that while brainwashed into efficient killing machines, still need to believe what they are doing is right. If the governing elite control both the media and the robotic killing machines they can pretty much do anything they want. All the human rights we think we have won can be lost to the doublespeak of the state (espousing human rights and freedoms while taking them away). Human life once again could be on track to being worthless.

Unrest in Middle East - history repeating

While looking at Stratfor's map of social unrest in the middle east today, it struck me that ALL of the Arab portions (Iraq and Palestine-Israel are US clients) of the former Ottoman Empire are experiencing unrest:

 

Former territories of the Ottoman Empire

 

The Arab portion of the Ottoman Empire was split into nation states by the Allies after World War One. Puppet monarchs friendly to western interests were installed, some of which are still around.

Lets look at the similarities between the Ottoman Empire and the nation states of today:

The Ottoman Empire was divided into a number of administrative units called Eyalets, which are similar to the nation states that now exist, each Eyalet was ruled by a governor appointed by the sultan. These governors were notoriously corrupt as was the rest of the government sector. Bribes were required for everything. Government officials would spend their career building up vast ill-gotten fortunes, often used to 'buy' their next promotion.

So what about social unrest in the Ottoman Empire? From Britannica:

Social Unrest
These conditions were exacerbated by large population growth during the 16th and 17th centuries, part of the general population rise that occurred in much of Europe at this time. The amount of subsistence available not only failed to expand to meet the needs of the rising population but in fact fell as the result of the anarchic political and economic conditions. Social distress increased and disorder resulted.

We have exactly the same conditions in the contemporary Arab states - massive population growth, very high unemployment (especially amongst  the young), stagnating economies and very corrupt governments with leaders amassing vast fortunes from corruption. The recently deposed president of Egypt - Hosni Mubarak - is estimated to be worth between 40 and 70 billion US dollars.

The history of the middle east is that of governors and despots being cyclically overthrown by stronger strongmen. Alexander the Great took over a corrupt Persian state apparatus from Darius. Hannibal got dealt to by Scipio, Mark Antony and Cleopatra got dealt to by Octavian. The Romans held the middle east until they were dealt to by Vandals, Arabs and Turks, who were just as bad. Perhaps geopolitical theory would argue the geography of the middle east favours corrupt dictatorships?

Trade-off between quality of dream and level of lucidity?

I've been having a number of semi-lucid dreams. These are dreams in which I am aware I am dreaming but still play along with the plot of the dream. I have been wondering why I do this, as opposed to performing experiments on my dream scape.


Dreams can be fun: the have intense plots where you can do outrageous things that you can't do in real life. This I am beginning to believe, is the reason I remain semi-lucid. When thinking about my dream experiences I am beginning to notice the more lucid I am, the less activity there is in the dream. As my lucidity increases the stimulus in my dream environment decreases. I stay only semi-lucid because I want to 'ride the wave' of my dream.


This leads me to think that perhaps as the lucid conscious process ramps up it starves resources from the dream construct, almost like there is a trade-off between the two - only so many brain resources. As in a sense reality is a constructed story, perhaps when we don't have a majority of reality construction outsourced to the real world there has to be a trade-off of what can be achieved with the brains finite resources.


Its almost like the high level constructs the reality and the reptilian experiences it.

Lucid Dreaming: reality construct flaws & useful reality check cues

A reality test is a method of determining if you are awake or dreaming by noticing differences between the dream world and the real world. Here is a brief guide to some reality tests I perform.


Dreams are generally pretty different to real life and lots of strange things happen and yet most of the time you wont notice. The main reason you don't notice is because your consciousness doesn't seem to operate too many critical thinking processes while you dream, making you very likely not to notice something unrealistic that is occurring. You might think something is a bit odd but you will either explain it away or not even think about it.


In a majority of my dreams I never become lucid but here are some reality checks I perform once I suspect that my current stream of consciousness might be processing 'dream' as opposed to 'real' stimuli.


General:

Wrong things that sometimes occur. You can't do these things in every dream, some dreams seem to be more 'real' than others. Generally if you can do a bunch of these or none at all.

• I can fly
• I can will things to move
• I can walk / float through walls / ceilings.
• I can flick a light switch and the light level doesn't change (sometimes the light level does change, waking life got this wrong)
• I can will things to disappear
• I can will things to appear
• I am walking / driving in a familiar area but roads, street signs are wrong / missing.

Mirrors: 
My dream construct has a big problems generating proper looking reflections in mirrors. If I 'glance' at a mirror for an instant it will probably look fine, but if I start moving around things start getting interesting:

• My image becomes distorted, does not look like me.
• My image isn't 'mirroring' me properly, if I wave my hand etc, although it generally does a good job at this
• My image distorts and takes on a life of its own, suddenly it is another person.

Gravity: 
The dream construct doesn't seem to have any idea that when you fall you should accelerate (I guess it's kinda counting on your inbuilt instinct to not jump off high things), when falling or even descending stairs things are sluggish. Falling is just floating at a moderate pace in a downwards direction. If you try in run down stairs quickly you will often start floating in a forward/downward motion, slowly.


People:
Dream characters are a rather simple bunch. Crowds seem to act as a single entity, moving as a mob and exhibiting the same kinds of behaviour. Most people seem unable to interact with each other or me. Generally there is 1-3 'interactive' people that will change their behaviour based on what you do, talk to you etc. They generally can't interact with each other or even notice each other. Occasionally when the dream construct stuffs up you will get two people talking to you at the same time oblivious to the fact the other is talking. For a majority of other people in a crowd, they wont respond to you talking to them etc, unless you grab them and then some kind of behavioural pattern will kick in, which could involving them speaking gobbledygook, exhibiting a behaviour - eg hostility, happiness, or even flirting with you, but they wont hold a conversation.


People seem to be assigned roles which under normal circumstances you would never notice - if a person is programmed to just walk down a street past you and can't do much else, unless you realise you are dreaming you are unlikely to notice as you wouldn't normally approach a random person on the street and start trying to talk to them. I would say the AI in many modern computer games equals or exceeds my dream construct. A crowd can interact with you as a crowd - ie chase you run away from you, or most likely, ignore you.


Fight Flight Dream:
In saying all that, you could be able to do everything above and still not realise you're dreaming. Exactly how the critical reasoning processes get kicked off is still a mystery to me, but fight flight dreams trigger them regularly.


Fight / Flight is one of my common dream scenarios, common to many people, probably some kind of dream training programme, like a fire alarm drill. Either I am pursuing someone or being pursued, generally either on foot or in a car. Whenever some kind of monster / bad guy shows up I seem to immediately realise I'm dreaming. I haven't had a nightmare since I was a kid because whenever dreams are supposed to get scary I either realise it's a dream or I fly above them or will them to disappear etc without realising I am dreaming. A common situation is chasing / being chased up and down corridors, if I am chasing, gravity not working when I'm descending stairs generally gives the game away. If being chased quite interestingly bad guys often don't come within 1-2 meters of me even if I am motionless - they just kind of sit there looking menacing until you starting moving again.


Trade off between dream quality and lucidity:
I have noticed the more lucid I become, the harder it is to maintain the dream, perhaps there isn't enough brain processing power to go around, either your higher mind creates your environment, or it thinks rationally about things. I find I have to 'ride the wave' and try and stick to the 'dream script' in order to maintain the dream.

Reality construction: terminal - server analogy

Hawking and Mlodinow put out a book stating the obvious:


So I read this article: Stephen Hawking’s Radical Philosophy of Science Is Hawking right to claim that reality is dependent on the model used to describe it?. It annoyed me as I don't think Hawking is really adding any value to our collective knowledge. It is hardly breaking news that reality is a construct generated by our brains, Hawking by the looks is trying to make a buck. Here's an excerpt:


In his new book, The Grand Design, co-authored with the Caltech mathematician Leonard Mlodinow, Hawking presents a philosophy of science he calls “model-dependent realism,” which is based on the assumption that our brains form models of the world from sensory input, that we use the model most successful at explaining events and assume that the models match reality (even if they do not), and that when more than one model makes accurate predictions “we are free to use whichever model is most convenient.” Employing this method, Hawking and Mlodinow claim that “it is pointless to ask whether a model is real, only whether it agrees with observation.”


What our brains do in constructing a model of reality is the same thing that the scientific community does in order to prove a theory. Build the best model based on the raw data available. As an example, when I was four I thought Australia was in the clouds because that is where my grandmother's plane went on take off. Based on the raw data available to me at the time that model made perfect sense. Another excerpt:


Even when two models appear to be equally supported by observations, over time we accumulate more precise observations that tell us which model more closely matches reality. Historians of science contend that in the 16^th century, the newly introduced Copernican sun-centered model of the solar system was, in fact, no better at explaining the observations of the movement of the planets than was the Ptolemaic earth-centered model. As observations of the movement of planets increased in accuracy, the Copernican model won out.

Until I had a decent amount of proof that Australia was not in the clouds that reality construct stood. Once someone showed me a world map with Australia on it, the cloud model fell over.  So remember that for next time you roll your eyes at Maui snaring the sun to slow it down.


My Server - Terminal analogy:


I think your mind and the rest of the universe conform with a terminal - server architecture. While we construct a universe in our heads, we require a lot of external stimuli. We need a whole heap of data just to get our reality operating system booting up (think of this as a network download). Once we have a decent reality construct running which lets us walk talk eat and maybe do a bit of astrophysics, we require a steady stream of stimuli just to keep ticking.


Based on my experiments in lucid dreams I can assure you, our own brains do not have the capability to generate a perfectly realistic environment. It is very easy for a conscious mind to find flaws in the dream reality construct. The mind can't keep track of enough objects, people will change and warp because the brain is used to being supplied with the information and simply interpreting it - not generating it from memories. In a sense what that means is we are a 'terminal' with limited computational power and memory, and we outsource the computation to the 'cloud' (the rest of the universe) to perform the bulk of the computation for us and we interpret the data stream it sends us (via our senses) using the reality construct we have sitting on our wetware.


Therefore the ability for YOU to perceive a 'real' reality construct generated from external stimuli is limited by the amount of stimuli you can observe and by the complexity of the stimuli interpretation algorithms your brain uses to construct reality. I think we are already nearly at the point where it is impossible for anyone person - even a polymath to build a universal model which incorporates a majority of the collective understanding we have as a civilization. If only we could condense all of that knowledge into a single reality construct.

Lucid Dreaming: reality construction defects encountered

A bunch of reality defects I found while testing my dream reality construct during a Lucid dream a while back. The most interesting discovery was that your instincts don't know dreams aren't real, such as in a car accident, your subconscious will brace for impact and pump adrenalin even while your conscious knows it is just a dream.


I will begin half way through the dream - I am leaving a house with an unknown stranger which turns out to be my grandparents house in wattle downs (a recurring dream location). The stranger beckons me to hop into a red FWD that my parents used to own. He hops in the drivers door.... I think something about the change in the dream to fear/fight flight triggered me to realise it was a dream and gain lucidity now things start getting interesting:

I decide in a semi-lucid state I can't be bothered with a car chase run away dream... perhaps memory association triggered from remembering a similar state? I will the red fwd in the air, the car goes flying in the air, I will it to explode and it explodes in the sky (a trick I learned long ago in a previous dream). I turn around and stare back at my grandparents house and then look back to the road.. THE 4WD HAS REAPPEARED in exactly the same place it was in before! But I just destroyed it! Some how my dream reality creation processes is getting out of synch with my conscious over arching process.

Next I decide to hop in the car and just will it to start driving. I turn left and start driving down the road. I decide to perform a new test and this was incredibly interesting in terms of what it reveals about how your consciousness is made up of different brain 'processes':

1. I see a car coming down the road towards me on the correct side of the road (my right)
2. I decide to collide with the car head on at full speed, turning into a direct collision course with it.
3. First thing I notice the car doesn't swerve and the driver doesn't even blink - i am expecting the car to swerve (by I i mean some kind of predict process in my conscious)
4. When I am about to hit the car, I think my reptilian brain is scared and braces for impact, I feel fear, the instinct of an impending crash, my heart starts racing (adrenalin has been pumped into my blood)  
5. The car passes right through my car - almost like passing through a magic wall. My heart is pumping out of control - like if something had scared you I am almost worried about losing lucidity given how fast it is pumping.
6. I drive through a second car - this time there is less fear shown, my heart doesn't boost all of a sudden - maybe the reptilian is realising it can't be hurt?

Based off this chain of events I can highlight at least three different processes at work around the time of impact:

• The primordial 'reptilian' mind got scared and didn't realise what it was seeing wasn't real.
• One process was expecting the car to swerve out of my way. It didn't.
• The process governing my dream obviously doesn't do much AI, it expects me to react to external objects and not vice versa - a limitation of the dream world.

After a bit I hop out of the 4wd and try to do another test - look at how detailed my dream environment is - I walk up to a brown tree and move closer to it to see the detail - it seems just as details as a normal tree.. as I move my head in however my cheek catches a branch - intense in the sense it is showing that the dream process can recreate distinct sensory feelings - however i was sure there was not branch in my way when i had moved my head in, meaning the dream process 'fudges' the details a bit.

After staring at the tree for a bit i begin to lose the dream - pretty normal if you stare at a single spot in dream-world for too long. dream ends

In a later dream I gain lucidity in fight or flight moment - attacked by a guy, realise its a dream toy with him - he gets a knife and I am tempted to let him stab me with it to see what happens but my inner reptile just can't quite allow that to happen - instinctively wanting to prevent that.

In a later dream i am explaining to my flatmates about the lucid dreams I had been having - a false awakening.... oh the irony. I am beginning to think that dream character conversations are simply different thought patterns bouncing ideas around. the receiver is the conscious process but the dialogue emerges from subconscious processes. 

Idea creation and propagation: Good TED talks

TED (Technology Entertainment and Design), a global set of conferences hosted free on the internet has been the most influential force on my thinking this year. The foundation’s logo is “Ideas worth spreading” and interestingly enough it has been the talks about ideas – what they are, how they are born and how they spread that has most intrigued me. TED.com has been incredibly influential on me in terms of changing my perception on how new ideas are formulated and the underlying creative process. In this discussion I will refer to four specific TED talks around idea creation, propagation and formulation; I will summarise the main point I took away from each talk and then discuss why I feel they are important.

The first talk that sparked my interest was a TED talk Susan Blackmore on memes and “temes”. In it she defines a ‘meme’ to be a unit of cultural information, a proposition first postulated in Richard Dawkins book The Selfish Gene. What memetics does is it treats information in a similar way to how Darwin treats species in that a successful idea or meme is one which gets itself replicated and distributed in as many people as possible, forming a symbiotic relationship with the 'host'.

Dan Dennett, a philosopher and cognitive scientist expands on this in his talk on dangerous memes. In it he talks about how a collection of memes can be collectively viewed as an ideology which using the same analogue is an information organism. A successful ideology is one that spreads to as many hosts as possible, removes competing ideologies from a host and then uses its host to carry out its purpose. An individual can be infected and ‘hijacked’ to carry out an extreme purpose, for example the suicide bomber who seeks martyrdom for a cause.

In Matt Ridley’s talk, When ideas have sex, he explains his thoughts on human creativity. In it he argues that our minds act as the breeding ground for ideas – we absorb massive amounts of ideas and process them to produce new ideas of greater complexity. A new idea occurs by taking two or more ideas and noticing an underlying pattern tying them together. In a sense the best bits of different ideas are combined to create a new one in a similar fashion to how our DNA combines when we mate to produce offspring.

The talk by Steven Johnson, Where good ideas come from expands on this theory of mixing ideas driving innovation. He suggests that we have the wrong concept of a ‘eureka’ moment for idea creation, such as Newton seeing the apple fall to the ground and discovering gravity. He argues that all new ideas and innovation are driven by social discourse between networks of people, with each individual contributing a set of ideas which collectively leads to innovation. If you think of any of the great thinkers of the modern era, say Einstein or Darwin they each had a network of like minded people with who they exchanged the ideas that helped drive their discoveries. We in the West have a tendency to over-emphasise the contribution of an individual over the collaborative nature of idea creation.

My takeout from a aforementioned talks is that to be creative and innovative is a matter of ‘plugging in’ to individuals and networks which propagate the ideas I find the most interesting. My mind will act as the evaluator, creator and replicator of ideas. First I determine the ‘fitness’ of an idea and if it passes my evaluation I will endeavour to build it into my world view and propagate it to other people. TED acts as such an idea feed, almost as an online university – spreading the latest ideas and insights on a number of different topics to whoever is interested.

What is exciting about the time we live in is that it is now possible to share ideas with anyone on the globe – instantaneously. Social networking through twitter, facebook and blogging now allows anyone to have a global audience for their ideas. I can read articles, blogs and status updates, ponder over them and come up with an insightful thought about them and share it with my network – immediately.

The speed at which information and ideas are spreading is accelerating. New information is being propagated faster now than it ever has before. If we think about the invention of writing, the printing press, the telegraph, radio, television and now the internet. Each new technology allowed for a more efficient distribution of information in order to drive innovation. But while we have harnessed the internet to share audio, visual and written information, this is still limiting. Much work must be taken into preparing a speech, or film, or even writing this essay, and whatever the result it can never quite convey exactly what we are thinking.

I see neural interface technology as the next leap forward in terms of accelerating idea innovation. I think that in time neural interface technology will allow us to share our thoughts almost instantaneously and that this will lead to a level of creativity which can barely be imagined.