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exceptional. The big institutional investors were using the same new fore–
casting technologies to predict the market. And, when their computers
told them that they were about to lose money, they changed their behav–
ior.
In
other words the predictions were actually changing the system.
Human decision-making is a process of changing behavior based
upon predictions.
If
people don't like the predictions, they change their
behavior in ways which they think will produce a better future. This is
a process which can kill promising, as well as undesirable, new tech–
nologies. The true thinking machines that we have been talking about
might well go the way of nuclear power, the SST, and, perhaps, the
increasingly controversial field of genetic engineering.
As a social scientist, my principal interest is in taming one of the most
destructive forces on the planet-human conflict. When I think about
the astonishing pace of technological progress (as evidenced by the pre–
ceding presentations) I am struck by the incredible mismatch between
the rate of technological advance and social progress. Conflict problems
which today threaten human welfare have changed remarkably little
over the centuries. The tragic and destructive mistakes that lead to war
and personal folly are repeated again and again. Proven strategies for
reducing the destructiveness of these conflicts are often not imple–
mented, leaving the parties to relive a predictable and tragic chain of
events. My interest in rapidly expanding computing and communication
technologies focuses upon their ability to limit destructive conflict and
not their ability to produce dazzling new technological gadgets. I'm also
not very interested in developing new forms of intelligence. I'd like to do
a better job perfecting the one form of intelligence that we already have.
The inventions that I think might really do this surround the Internet
and the World Wide Web. These inventions are changing the structure
of the human knowledge base as profoundly as Gutenberg'S Bible and
the printing press.
In
my work we've found that the Web is reducing the
cost of printing and distributing specialized information by roughly a
factor of ten thousand, with similar increases in the speed of distribu–
tion. This is an enormous change. Four orders of magnitude is compa–
rable to the difference between conventional and nuclear weapons, or
the difference between walking and traveling by space shuttle. Quanti–
tative change on this scale produces enormous qualitative change.
Gutenberg'S printing press transformed civilization by dramatically
lowering the costs of books and thereby providing far more people with
access to them. Previously, books had to be hand-copied, which made
them extremely expensive and rare. By making expanded literacy possi–
ble, Gutenberg dramatically increased the number of people who could
