Biological versus Mechanistic determinism

In the last two weeks I have been traveling a lot. On the east coast a couple of times and then in LA. For two Saturdays in a row I was able to come home, change clothes and then go right back out on the Sunday morning - this morning to Puebla and then back on Wednesday to Prescott Arizona. One of the ways I keep myself sane on this type of travel is my iPod but the other is with reading. In the last two weeks I have polished off four books. I am currently in the middle of one by Ray Kurzweil - who has written a lot about technology. The new one is called the Singularity. It suggests that the convergence of biological and computing technologies will soon sweep us up in some profound changes - in all things that we do.

Concidentially, last weekend I was thinking about Peter Drucker. I met him in 2001 at a symposium we created for the new staff of President Vicente Fox. We did the seminar at Claremont and Drucker agreed to be the opening presentation. I introduced him (briefly - what can you say about someone who has had such a profound effect on people's thinking) and then he began to speak. Our focus was making the office of the president and therefore Mexican government better so he had a wide area to talk about. I was at once captured by his seemingly ponderous speech. He spoke very deliberately. But as I listened I thought about the points he was making. In the hour he was with us he offered at least a dozen insights. Like that, in an article in the Atlantic several years before, he wrote about how the (then) coming internet bubble was just like a series of other technological jumps in history. He described in detail, in that article how each succeeding technology had followed a fairly predictable path of innovation, excitement, over-promise, but then integration. Drucker showed his understanding of both the trends in innovation and their ability to build on each other.

When he wrote about economics he had the same kind of sensitivity. He understood, as I think Keynes and many macroeconomists did not, that the economy is not a set of mechanistic processes.

When he wrote about organizations he did so without blandishment. I thought he was looney about the future of universities - he argued that they would not survive. But he looked critically at all sorts of things - from matrix organizations, to corporate pay (he thought it was often outrageous), to the effects of trade. In the same way I saw him at Claremont, he offered a long career of written insights.

Kurzweil argues that the convergence of biology and technology goes through a series of steps each building on the other and that ultimately these trends will begin to work together to change the way we do things. In the beginning of the book he offers a series of charts that explains the pace of change. He also argues that our basic tendency is to work from an assumption that change is linear rather than logrithmic. Kurzweil argues in the early part of the book that the rate of change in these two areas will be so profound that it will soon outrun our ability to comprehend them. That could be either nirvana or some hell on earth postulated by innumerable science fiction writers.

There is a lot to think about in his book. His description of how things change and how they interact sounds a lot to me like an idea I discussed in February (19) on a cycle of innovation first proposed by David Kessler. Regardless of whether Kurzweil has both the direction and the magnitude of the changes there is tons of interesting materials and charts in the book that would be worth the price - even without the provoking theory.

The Singularity can be found at Amazon.