preserved. But, also, we must move on. These people will never grasp the opportunity that lingers in front of us now.
This book is not, in any event, written for them. It is written for those of us who are inheriting the possibility of their inventions, the price of their errors. And it is aimed too at the people and the generation who are coming to power and who are - in some senses—already in power, even if they don’t appear to be just yet. By this | mean the cohort bred into the age of connected acceleration; the first generation of leaders and students and warfighters and entrepreneurs to not find the digital strange, but to find it natural and curious and wonderful in its power. It is written for those who will have to manage machines that are smarter than humans, networks that move faster than we can calculate, and cascades of chaos and conflict and creation as this new era settles in. It is for anyone too who has ever begun to speak about the strange tensions of our age, who has begun maybe with the lines, “Maybe I’m sensitive or something, but...” as they feel the tickle of their own lives, minds and cells increasingly intertwined, electrified. It is written for those afflicted with an aching feeling that we're being torn apart. Pulled into foolish conflicts and dangerous failures by old figures who don’t understand this age. Pulled into sacrifices of liberty and freedom by young technological wizards who can’t balance the miracle of their cold inventions with our hot, human needs for freedom and control.
But I should say too that this book is not, either, a full-throated endorsement of the technological elite. Yes, it’s wonderful that we are at the beginning of a new period. But it’s not quite right to say that where the network age begins, the old one ends. In fact, that's a dangerous conclusion. To begin with we're at an extremely primitive point in our understanding of networks, comparable to where economics was in the 1800s or medicine centuries ago. We have a small, modest collection of tools to analyze and think about and consider the complex physics of a networked world. We barely understand the operation and evolution of many single networks today - and really only sort of grasp one or two types of design with any real depth. But networks of networks? Instant networks? Artificially intelligent ones? We have basically no laws or experience with these yet.
The headlong rush ahead into a world of constant connection will, of course, be balanced, resisted, braced against, undermined, fought and manipulated. Networks touch everything, remember? The idea that such elemental control - of you, of me, of our finances or our nations - would move with anything less than a few explosions is naive. Revolutions don’t occur quietly. Consequently, the very thing that makes many of the greatest tech minds of our age magnificent - a sense of unstoppable determinism, a disregard for history, a slavish and instinctive urge to follow what we’ll come to know as a Seventh Sense - is a bit of a disadvantage at times. | know many of these men and women; their iron certainty is only a bit more dazzling than the success they have had in building something from nothing ina human instant. But that confidence in the new leads already to crushing collisions with the sorts of older ideas - privacy, localism, slowness - that echo throughout
30
HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_018262