Re: [FRIAM] Are your skills obsolete?

[Steve Smith]

Phil Henshaw wrote:   I recognize much of your experience of a rush toward a vanishing point and sense of expectation about that.    My question is how can you tell the difference between the usual kind and the unusual kind? I agree that this is the essential question.   I vary, depending on mood and recent experience, as to how I answer this question.  I also wanted to show the tension that I (and others?) feel of being completely grounded in the "old ways".   For example, my saws and axes and woodstove can easily outlast me by another generation or more with only a modicum of care.       We’ve had exploding economic change for a couple hundred years, doubling in size every 20 years and radically transforming everything everywhere all the time.  Yes, My grandfather was born before internal combustion, automobile and airplane, but lived to see the moon landing and more.   Look at how vastly each generations life experience has been from the last, going back as many generations as we have any personal knowledge of.   People have declared the “sky is falling” and the “end is near” endlessly it seems too. There are plenty of other times and places when the sky WAS/IS falling compared to today.  I am usually in the position of arguing your point.   I think when I set about to find the answer to that question, to see if I could validate some of feelings of expectation, I asked some of the useful questions and narrowed it down quite a bit.   The question though, is what question would you ask to tell if a feeling of impending grand transformation was real or not? There are two key, qualitative differences having to do with human scale.   One is that by having longer productive periods in life, under accelerated change, most adults have to endure several important changes in their lifetime.  The other is that much of our technology is becoming life-extending and personal capability enhancing.   There may be thresholds we have already crossed or on the verge of crossing which are pivotal.   I don’t think “magic” is what we’re talking about.     One would not have any way of confirming a “premonition” of magic.  I don't know that "magic" is relevant, if I understand your point.   What I think is important is positive feedback loops and time constants dropping below certain thresholds.   What I don't know I can agree with is  the following:   I do think quite sincerely and confidently that foresight about real complex system transformations, approaching ‘water shed moments’ is very likely to be verifiable if they’re real. I think that precisely the opposite is true.  I think the best we can do is avoid regimes where such change is likely to be precipitated, not precisely when the system will go through a phase transition or what the phase it is transitioning to looks like. - Steve

============================================================
FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org