Amazon.com:
In
Global
Brain, you amass considerable evidence that intelligent systems
exist everywhere at all scales from the microscopic to the cosmic. What do we
know about the kind of large-scale intelligence that humans create through our
networking?
Howard Bloom:
Quite a bit and very little. We call some of the large-scale
patterns humans make our history. We examine them in anthropology, archaeology,
and sociology. But we can't sit Elizabethan England or Tokugawa Era Japan down
at a desk and have it take an IQ test.
Often the collective intelligence works in ways we bump into all
the time but never see. There's an example in my previous book,
The Lucifer
Principle, of the Balinese, who had an elaborate system of
holidays so heavily crowded onto the calendar that almost every single day
called for its own ritual. In the 1970s modern agricultural experts came along,
looked at the Balinese system, were convinced it was a lot of superstitious
bosh, and replaced it with up-to-date Western techniques. After a few years,
the number of mice shot up and the productivity of the rice harvests dove.
It turned out that the old system of appeasing the gods had
accomplished something the Balinese farmers were utterly unaware of. All their
rice plots were on terraces cut into the sides of Bali's mountains like steps
on a staircase. At each mountain's top was a large dam that supplied all of the
terraces below. The outer wall of each terrace was a low dam that held in water
draining from the terrace above and kept it from flooding the terrace beneath
it. The rituals were a timing mechanism--telling the farmers on one terrace
when to clear the land, when to plant, when to allow water to come down from
the terrace above, when to allow the water to drain down to the terrace below,
and when to harvest. If you threw that timing out of whack, the whole system
broke down. By 1979, the Western experts threw up their hands and let the
Balinese go back to doing things the old-fashioned way. Humans networked in
groups and wired to mobs of ancestors by tradition, literature, tools, toys,
and culture accomplish things that the individual, for all his or her billions
of brain cells, doesn't even know s/he's accomplishing.
This kind of networking has been going on for a very long time. It
was a matter of biology long before it entered the realm of technology. Our
first ancestors on this planet, the bacterial colonies of 3.5 billion years
ago, had literally no brain power whatsoever. There isn't room in the single
cell of a bacterium for even an inkling of a neuron. But individual bacteria do
have computational abilities built into their genome. More important, no
bacterium is an island. Bacteria live in groups--usually in groups of
trillions. Put a trillion bacteria with primitive computing power together,
allow them to communicate using a chemical language, and you get a
supercomputer, or what Eshel Ben-Jacob at the University of Tel Aviv calls "a
creative web." Put a trillion colonies in touch with each other via chemical
cues and bits of DNA, and all hell breaks loose.
Bacterial colonies are whizzes at research and development, and
brilliant at genetic engineering. They're so good at it that the collective
cleverness of bacterial networks has managed to trump the brainpower of human
worldwide webs over and over again. When bacteria outwit human networks, we
call the result "drug resistance," an "epidemic," a "pandemic," or a "plague."
In reality, it's the World Wide Web of bacteria outsmarting the collective IQ
of the entire human race. And they manage it without a single silicon chip.
Amazon.com:
As far as we know, neurons aren't cognizant of their role within
the brain. Does our recently acquired self-awareness as components of larger
systems merit any changes in our behavior? How would these changes affect our
global intelligence?
Bloom:
The rational brain is such a newcomer to the game of networked
intelligence that its most ambitious efforts to guide the process have gone
way, way off track. Conscious minds put themselves to work reassembling and
upgrading societies most dramatically in the 20th century. Lenin and Stalin
tried social engineering in Russia, and Mao tried it in China. The result was
the death of 80 million humans. Russia went from being one of the
fastest-growing economies of 1913 to one of the slowest-growing economies of
the 1920s, not to mention of the 1980s. What's worse, both societies
disempowered their individual citizens ferociously. We've had our greatest
successes tinkering with the edges of social systems, not redesigning their
cores from scratch.
The goal of a book like Global Brain
is to help us
understand how we and other creatures act as unknowing components in a mass
intelligence. Frankly, I work in this area because I find it fascinating. But
there's a practical goal somewhere down the line… to help us get a better
handle on who and what we are so that someday we CAN tweak and reengineer
societies, upgrading their creativity and flushing out their violence. There's
another practical goal as well--to help us understand our depressions, our
elations, and even nitty-gritty things like the mood swings in our love
affairs. Very often, we're hit with undertows of strange emotions, emotions we
suspect are abnormal. But most of these feelings are very normal indeed.
They're part of the bio-wiring that knits us together in mass learning
machines. Global Brain
and The Lucifer Principle
explain different aspects of how and why we've evolved these emotional swirls
and flows.
Amazon.com:
You show time and again through human and natural history the
debilitating effects of insulation from new sources of information. How will
the advent of relatively inexpensive, high-speed communications media affect
conformity enforcement?
Bloom:
It'll still be there, but it may take on new forms. It already
has. Thanks to the Internet you can ignore some of the conformity enforcers in
your own neighborhood and plunge into mind-tribes--groups of people scattered
all over the globe who share your feelings and your points of view. But even
cyber mind-tribes use conformity enforcement on their members. I've been
running my own international science organizations on the Web since roughly
1995--first a group called The Group Selection Squad, and now The International
Paleopsychology Project. But I also belong to a few others. A while back I got
an invitation to join a philosophy of history group founded by an academic in
Siberia. The group had an extremely interesting mix of members, including
scholars from Hungary, Brazil, Australia, and lord knows where all else. You'd
think that the tolerance of diversity in such a cross-cultural bunch would have
been high. It wasn't. One week there was a flurry of postings with the title
"Good old Edward." I wondered which Edward they meant and opened a few of the
emails to find out. Turns out it was Edward Said, the literary and cultural
critic.
At the time, Edward Said was churning out articles saying that
Western fears of militant Islamic Fundamentalists were all "phony" (the word he
used in a New York Times Sunday Magazine feature headline). He said point blank
that warnings about the dangers of militant, fundamentalist Islam were
paranoid--or malicious--"searches for a post-Soviet foreign devil" (his phrase
in a book review he wrote for The Nation
). I'd been researching and
battling Christian and Islamic fundamentalists since 1981, and disagreed with
Said's assessment. So I answered with a posting that criticized his position.
Half a dozen group members emailed me saying that if I didn't share their love
for Edward Said, I didn't belong in their group. They were serious. That's
conformity enforcement.
Amazon.com:
You write "Nothing grows a subculture faster than opposition to
assault...Give humans a sense that death is in the air and their
individualistic views will ebb in favor of the creeds clasped by the
collectivity." This could hardly be timelier; how do you see American cultures
changing in the wake of terrorist attacks?
Bloom:
This is a test for each of us, and it's a test for our society.
First off, we have to realize that we don't always make up enemies. Sometimes
they're there whether we want to believe in their existence or not.
Some of my friends are complacent. They've lived all their lives
with freedoms our great-grandparents would have given all they had for. They
imagine that the best aspects of our way of life will go on forever, whether we
fight for them or not.
This simply isn't true. The freedom to march in peace protests and
to have women founding their own businesses doesn't come easily. Nor do a lot
of our other liberties. My grandparents died before I was born--which means
they had relatively short lives. They died of things antibiotics could have
easily cured, but there were no antibiotics to save them. Medicine hadn't
progressed that far. If my father's great-grandparents had wanted to see
California, they'd have been forced to go on an eighteen-month-long schlep by
sailing ship or a year-long trek by wagon train. When my father was young and
had to go from San Francisco to my hometown, Buffalo, New York, he traveled for
four days and nights by train. When I used to commute weekly from New York to
LA, the trip only took me five hours. And the percentage of the population who
could afford to fly had skyrocketed.
Osama and his fellow fundamentalist militants--the Islamic
fundamentalists of Africa, Asia, and the Middle East--want to dial the clock
back to our great-grandparents' day. They're very determined, very willing to
give up their lives, and are very sophisticated in their use of technology.
Osama is the first wireless warrior. He uses cell phones, satellite
communications, the Internet, and international TV. He's figured out how to
turn our infrastructure into the weaponry with which he kills us off.
To survive, we have to stop picking at ourselves neurotically and
asking "what did we do to make Osama so angry." We have to face the fact that
this violent, overprivileged rich kid and his upper middle-class fundamentalist
buddies have a knife to our throat. Worse--if they could destroy every city in
America and plunge the few of us who survived into a Mad Max-style wasteland,
they'd do it happily.
We're going to have to take advantage of the instinctual
solidarity an attack by an enemy generates to come out of this with our
civilization intact. And we're going to have to do it in such a way that we
emerge with our democracy and our civil rights still in one piece.
We've got good examples of how to pull this off in our history.
Churchill and Roosevelt had to unite their countries, rouse the willingness of
their populations to fight, and had to do it in such a way that the Bill of
Rights in the U.S. and the traditional freedoms of England would reassert
themselves once the war was over. Winnie and FDR did a magnificent job. Now our
generation--one that's lived in relative peace all its life--has got to show
that we can do it too. It's time to resurrect an outmoded term--courage. We
have to be heroic. We can't let Osama destroy us. And we can't let our battle
against him destroy us either.
Amazon.com:
The past few years have seen an alarming (to some) growth in
extremist fundamentalist groups. You suggest that this is natural and
inevitable; what can we do to buffer our freedoms from those who might erode
them?
Bloom:
First off, we have to know the importance of what we've got. This
is a lot more than just a "capitalist, consumerist" society. It's a society of
perpetual reinvention of the species. When the telephone was introduced in the
1890s, it gave us powers far beyond the kind that evolution takes 50 million
years or more to crank out. Evolution has given the elephant the ability to
communicate subsonically over a distance of a mile and the elephant's distant
relative, the whale, the freedom to communicate over distances of 600 miles or
so. But those are biological rarities. With the cell phone and the Internet we
shot way past the communicative tools Mother Nature has managed to produce.
Then we extended the eye with TV and videocams, and outstripped the ability of
the limbs to transport us by accessorizing ourselves with autos, jets,
snowmobiles, space shuttles, and Harley-Davidsons.
More important is the freedom of speech and the pluralistic,
freewheeling society that puts choice in the hands of the individual instead of
the fist of a dictator, a religious mullah, or a potentate. Our society is
riddled with flaws and injustices--with Kafkaesque killer bureaucracies and
with special interests like the oil and tobacco lobby that manage to buy our
legislative machinery. But this is also a society where I can read Noam
Chomsky's critiques one day and Bill Buckley's right wing screeds the next then
make up my own mind. It's a society that allows dissent, a society with
self-correcting machinery.
Some people settle their debates with rocket propelled grenades or
Kalashnikovs. We argue out our differences with words. When those who use
violence to get their way want to replace democracy with a totalitarian
freedom-snatch, we have to fight them for all we're worth. It doesn't matter
whether the thieves of freedom, the users of violence, are street gangs, armies
of Holy Warriors, White Aryans out to purify the continent of the taint of
"alien" blood, or even the handful of eco-extremists who think this planet
should be purged of most of its human beings.
In most Islamic nations, the fundamentalist minority has silenced
the pluralistic, tolerant, modernist majority. They've done it by killing folks
like you and me…communicators, critics, and intellectuals. One result is
that Egypt, traditionally the intellectual center of Islam, publishes only 300
books a year. In the United States, we publish over 70,000. And Amazon.com
offers over a million.
Fighting for the right to read is fighting for the right to think
and for the right to speak. Those things are worth the battle. Like termites,
we've got a form of society that's bigger than just you and me. It empowers us
in ways the people of earlier centuries could barely even dream of. It's a
rarity on the face of this planet. And, in my opinion, it's a rarity worth
living--and dying for.
