News for hackers. Stuff that matters.

A comment on Childhood's End: The digital revolution has turned into something else. Parent comment

Re:Childhood's End: The digital revolution has turned into s... by Joeri on Saturday January 05, 2019 @03:39AM (#18830613)
about the emergent properties of systems made up of independnt entities in a rigid form and how this is a type of computing that differs from what we usually think of as computing

A way of viewing it is inversion of control between emergent behavior and programmed behavior. When the number of interactions between discrete units of programmed behavior exceeds a certain threshold the programmed logic responds to the emergent interactions instead of dictating it. The system as a whole starts obeying its own logic instead of one programmed into it.

I suppose you need to see such systems more like ecologies to be studied with techniques not far off from those used to study natural ecologies.

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Childhood's End: The digital revolution has turned into s... by zwkrt on Saturday January 05, 2019 @06:21AM (#18831113)
Daniel Dennet would phrase it as "people don't design boats, the ocean designs boats". Our technology doesn't just serve our requirements, it is also built to satisfy the inherent requirements of our physical world. However as our world becomes more filled with technology, the requirements start being altered by other technologies we would like to keep around. In this sense technology evolves and is selected in ways very similar to life itself.
[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Childhood's End: The digital revolution has turned into s... by emmanueloga_ on Saturday January 05, 2019 @05:26AM (#18830931)
re: emergent behavior. Funny I first heard about this concept this very week from a random SMBC comic. [1]

1: http://www.smbc-comics.com/?id=3637

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Childhood's End: The digital revolution has turned into s... by diydsp on Saturday January 05, 2019 @04:28AM (#18830738)
ah, almost like when we have robots building so many products, but the robots are limited in what they can fashion, so we end up mostly using products which are reflections of machine-capabilities?
[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Childhood's End: The digital revolution has turned into s... by lotsofpulp on Saturday January 05, 2019 @07:02AM (#18831236)
The buyers in the market choose to purchase products which reflect machine capabilities. No one is being stopped from using products that machine capable, but people seem to prioritize other qualities such as less expensive.
[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Childhood's End: The digital revolution has turned into s... by coldtea on Saturday January 05, 2019 @09:11AM (#18831706)
>The buyers in the market choose to purchase products which reflect machine capabilities.

The buyers are limited by: (a) what's cheap so they can afford, (b) what's available, (c) what's advertised -- among other things.

There's no "perfect market" where people perfectly "vote with their wallets".

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Childhood's End: The digital revolution has turned into s... by api on Saturday January 05, 2019 @09:44AM (#18831864)
None of these ideas are new if you've studied evolution, ecology, economics, complexity, game theory, etc. All those fields are inter-related and study emergent behaviors like these.

Unfortunately few CS people or other engineers have touched these areas.

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Childhood's End: The digital revolution has turned into s... by james_s_tayler on Saturday January 05, 2019 @03:04PM (#18833881)
It really starts to blow you away how hard it is to have an original thought the more disciplines you dive into because as you're going through the material they constantly put a name to all the things you've thought about before but didn't realize were actually a thing.

Getting across a multitude of disciplines is highly underrated.

[ Parent | on HN ]