“The real challenge of innovation today is not technological innovation, it’s institutional innovation. We have to start inventing new types of institution that can stay in step with the information age.“ John Seely Brown, organisational pioneer.
"The future is already here, it's just not evenly distributed yet." William Gibson, sci-fi novelist.
David Grinspoon, astrobiologist.
“You never change something by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete.” Buckminster Fuller, systems theorist.
Article in Stanford Social Innovation Review: After Big Data: The Coming Age of “Big Indicators”.
“Once a DIY community gets going, it starts generating absolutely mind-blowing ideas of its own. Directions you would never even have considered, never even imagined. This happens so regularly that you can almost count on it. I think this is the reason DIY communities are such powerful tools for tackling bold challenges. You can go big because you don’t need to know how to pull something off ahead of time. The community shapes the path and accelerates the progression. It’s a shocking amount of leverage.” Gina Bianchini, community network specialist.
One of the most incredible stories we ever invented for the species was that of liberal democracy. A story suited to the 20th century and increasingly not suited to the new reality. So we currently have a gap. We are without a new story that tells of a desirable way forward. Taken from Yuval Noah Harari's conversation with Sam Harris.
“Technology now gives you access to big brains no matter where they live and without a host of traditional biases. ...Moreover, liberation from proximity and prejudice increases access to new ideas. Since creativity is recombinatory (i.e, breakthroughs result from new ideas bumping into old thoughts to produce novel insights) this increased access to ideas increases the rate of innovation in communities. In fact, if you combine this amplified rate of innovation with our newfound ability to tap any expert anywhere in world, the potency of technologies like 3D printing and cloud computing and the power of crowdfunding to capitalise such ventures...the scale of projects they (online DIY communities) can now undertake has grown exponentially.” Peter Diamandis, founder of Singularity University and XPrize.
In a nutshell, social physics is about using big data to support positive collective behaviour change.
Click here for a longer talk on social physics.