Every generation discovers sex and imagines that they are the first to grasp its power, wonder and beauty. There is simply no way that their withered parents could ever understand what every child now knows. Yes, they obviously procreated, but they didn't get it. In time they come to understand at least in part that their ever more withered parents had in fact had a better grasp of the issues than had initially been assumed, but it is usually only a partial and grudging admission of naivety.

This is the same type of intellectual error discussed in the previous post that disputed the claim that the Internet does not like a playful delight in confusion, and a willingness to make mistakes while floundering about in a 'don't know' mindset that leads to creative insights or breakthroughs. It's a common confusion.

Tom Wolfe in Hooking Up:

I hate to be the one who brings this news to the tribe, to the magic Digikingdom, but the simple truth is that the Web, the Internet, does one thing. It speeds up the retrieval and dissemination of information, partially eliminating such chores as going outdoors to the mailbox or the adult bookstore, or having to pick up the phone to get hold of your stock broker or some buddies to shoot the breeze with. That one thing the Internet does and only that. The rest is Digibabble.

This confusion between the network and the services that it first enabled is a natural mistake. Most early customers of electricity believed that they were buying electric lighting. That first application was so compelling that it blinded them to the bigger picture of what was possible. A few dreamers speculated that electricity would change the world, but one can imagine a nineteenth-century curmudgeon attempting to dampen their enthusiasm: "Electricity is a convenient means to light a room. That one thing the electricity does and only that. The rest is Electrobabble." . . .

More and more decisions are made by the emergent interaction of multiple communicating systems, and these component systems themselves are constantly adapting, changing the way they work. This is the real impact of the Internet: by allowing adaptive complex systems to interoperate, the Internet has changed the way we make decisions. More and more, it is not individual humans who decide, but an entangled, adaptive network of humans and machines.

Like kids and sex. It has always been the case that decisions were made in the emergent interaction of multiple communicating systems that were each complex adaptive systems that no one understood in detail. It is an illusion that individual humans ever decided things, a dumbed down abstraction of how social systems function. That such interactions of complex adaptive systems is becoming faster helps the dim and halt to see what has been going on all along, but careful thinkers need to apply such novel insights to their hoary old certainties about how things were as well as how they will be.

To understand how the Internet encourages this interweaving of complex systems, you need to appreciate how it has changed the nature of computer programming. Back in the twentieth century, a programmer had the opportunity to exercise absolute control within a bounded world with precisely defined rules.

No, they did not, except in trivial cases where the bounds were so tightly drawn that there were no real world applications.

Today, programming usually involves linking together complex systems developed by others, without understanding exactly how they work. In fact, depending upon the methods of other systems is considered poor programming practice, because it is expected that they will change.

This has always been so. What can be said is that there have always been individuals who did not understand these things and who had poor programming habits, but that doesn't mean that the ideas weren't grasped by anyone. You should not select a poor example and use that to define a whole system.

You will begin to perceive the entangled system that makes so many of our day-to-day decisions. Although we created it, we did not exactly design it. It evolved. Our relationship to it is similar to our relationship to our biological ecosystem. We are co-dependent, and not entirely in control.

Duh. This is such an 18th century notion. What can be said as a corollary to the idea that ICT speeds up information flows is that this makes it easier to recognize patterns that have been there all along but took shape so slowly that humans had a harder time noticing them since their lives are so short and their attention so fleeting.

IMV casual thinkers - in this case Danny Hillis - would benefit from learning to use a more sophisticated intellectual practice: when you have a new insight you would profit from applying it backwards as well as forwards in time. It isn't only a way to understand the present and anticipate futures, it is also a way to better understand the past. You thought you knew. You didn't. You still don't. You never will. But you can improve.