Serendipity

The tech guru sees a "new economic system" in the unconscious cooperation embodied by Google links and Amazon lists.

Howard Rheingold is on the hunt again. With his last book, Smart Mobs: The Next Social Revolution, in 2001, the longtime observer of technology trends made a persuasive case that pervasive mobile communications, combined with always-on Internet connections, will produce new kinds of ad-hoc social groups. Now, he's starting to take the leap beyond smart mobs, trying to weave some threads out of such seemingly disparate developments as Web logs, open-source software development, and Google.

At the same time, Rheingold is worried that established companies could quash such nascent innovations as file-sharing -- and potentially put the U.S. at risk of falling behind the rest of the world. He recently spoke with Robert D. Hof, BusinessWeek's Silicon Valley bureau chief. Here are excerpts from their conversation:

Q: Where do you see the social revolution you've been talking about going next?

A: It's too early to say. The question is: What does it point toward? Some kind of collective action...in which the individuals aren't consciously cooperating. A market is a great example as a mechanism for determining price based on demand. People aren't saying, "I'm contributing to the market," they say they're just selling something. But it adds up.

The discovery of Nylon, like so many other things, was almost entirely by pure chance. Nylon itself is a synthetic material with a structure very similar to silk. The discovery was made by a team of chemists working for the Du Pont company under the supervision of Wallace Hume Carothers. The team of chemists had been working to create a synthetic product much like silk, cellulose or rubber and eventually stumbled upon what they called Nylon. After it's discovery, Nylon would eventually become the single most important product that the Du Pont company had ever put on the market.

After opening the canister and seeing the waxy substance inside, Roy J. Plunkett immediately realized what had happened. The exact combination of pressure and cold temperature, along with the age of the gas in the cylinder, had allowed the TFE gas molecules to polymerize, or bond together in long chains. This newly formed compound was called polytetrafluoroethylene, or PTFE.

Source

(DANNY HILLIS:) I have always envied Alexander the Great, because he had Aristotle as a personal tutor. In those days, Aristotle knew pretty much everything there was to know. Even better, Aristotle understood the mind of Alexander. He understood which topics interested Alexander, what Alexander knew and did not know, and what kinds of explanations Alexander preferred. Aristotle had been a student of Plato, and he was himself a great teacher. We know from his writings that he was full of examples, explanations, arguments, and stories. Through Aristotle, Alexander had the knowledge of the world at his command.

Of course no one today knows all that is known, in the sense that Aristotle did. Now there is far too much knowledge for that to be possible. The scientific revolution, and the technological revolution that followed it, led to a self-reinforcing explosion of knowledge. The explosion continues. Today not even the most highly trained scientist, the most scholarly historian, or the most competent engineer can hope to have more than a general overview of what is known. Only specialists understand most of the new discoveries in science, and even the specialists have trouble keeping up.

This problem isn't new. In 1945, Vannevar Bush wrote an essay for Atlantic Monthly about out the problem of too much knowledge. He wrote,

Technically, Stephen Thaler has written more music than any composer in the world. He also invented the Oral-B CrossAction toothbrush and devices that search the Internet for messages from terrorists. He has discovered substances harder than diamonds, coined 1.5 million new English words, and trained robotic cockroaches. Technically.

Thaler, the president and chief executive of Imagination Engines Inc. in Maryland Heights, Mo., gets credit for all those things, but he's really just ``the man behind the curtain,'' he said. The real inventor is a computer program called a Creativity Machine.

What Thaler has created is essentially ``Thomas Edison in a box,'' said Rusty Miller, a government contractor at General Dynamics and one of Thaler's chief cheerleaders.

``His first patent was for a Device for the Autonomous Generation of Useful Information,'' the official name of the Creativity Machine, Miller said. ``His second patent was for the Self-Training Neural Network Object. Patent Number Two was invented by Patent Number One. Think about that. Patent Number Two was invented by Patent Number One!''

Supporters say the technology is the best simulation of what goes on in human brains, and the first truly thinking machine.

Others say it is something far more sinister -- the beginning of ``Terminator'' technology, in which self-aware machines could take over the world.

In the fields of observation, chance favours only the prepared mind.
- Louis Pasteur

Inventing the future requires giving up control. No one with a compelling purpose and a great vision knows how it will be achieved. One has to be willing to follow an unknown path, allowing the road to take you where it will. Surprise, serendipity, uncertainty and the unexpected are guaranteed on the way to the future.
- George Land

One aspect of serendipity to bear in mind is that you have to be looking for something in order to find something else.
- Lawrence Block

"Beautiful accidents can happen that you can take advantage of. Serendipity occurs all the time and you've got to move in the direction that feels right."
- David Lynch

The faculty of making fortunate discoveries by accident.

Word History: We are indebted to the English author Horace Walpole for the word serendipity, which he coined in one of the 3,000 or more letters on which his literary reputation primarily rests. In a letter of January 28, 1754, Walpole says that “this discovery, indeed, is almost of that kind which I call Serendipity, a very expressive word.” Walpole formed the word on an old name for Sri Lanka, Serendip. He explained that this name was part of the title of “a silly fairy tale, called The Three Princes of Serendip: as their highnesses traveled, they were always making discoveries, by accidents and sagacity, of things which they were not in quest of....”

I say unto you; one must still have chaos in oneself to be able to give birth to a dancing star.
- Nietzsche