Are we in con­trol of finan­cial mar­kets, our land­scapes, com­mu­ni­ca­tion and ulti­mately of our uni­verse? Accord­ing to Kevin Slavin, as algo­rithms are increas­ingly used to break out ‘big things into small things’ and build ‘small things back into big things’ we have less and less con­trol over our uni­verse. In this Ted­G­lobal talk, he shows how these com­plex com­puter pro­grams deter­mine: espi­onage tac­tics, stock prices, movie scripts, and architecture.

‘We are rid­ing these things that we can no longer read’ and we lost sense of our world. You can find those algo­rithms every­where, in finan­cial mar­kets, but every­where else. Algo­rithms lock in loops with each other with­out human super­vi­sion. Net­flix “prag­matic chaos’ for exam­ple is try­ing to under­stand what movie you want to watch in order to present it to you. ‘Epa­gogix’ is an algo­rithm that movie moguls use to deter­mine whether a movie will be a hit or not. Clean­ing robots are algo­rithm based. Have you ever been in a button-free lift (one of those where you have to select your floor before you enter the lift).

We are increas­ingly design­ing our world with algo­rithms. ‘If you are a wall street algo­rithm and you are 5 micro-seconds late, you are a loser’. The closer you are from the place that the inter­net is dis­trib­uted from, the more advan­tage you have. So algo­rithms trad­ing com­pa­nies hol­low out build­ing next to the build­ing where the inter­net orig­i­nate to close the deal 3 micro sec­onds faster, and gain that com­pet­i­tive advan­tage and squeeze rev­enue out of that space.

We are now writ­ing code we can’t under­stand, with impli­ca­tions we can’t con­trol. Which leads to a ques­tion that has been at the cen­tre of philoso­phers and sci­en­tists atten­tion for a few decades now: do we have enough wis­dom to han­dle the com­plex­ity that we have cre­ated in the world? The answer so far has been negative.

Wis­dom is not taught as a skill, but can be devel­opped in many ways. At The Mas­ter­Minds, we hope to make a con­tri­bu­tion through the train­ings and the expe­ri­ences we facil­i­tate for the pub­lic (check the sched­ule of courses here).

Devel­op­ping the abil­ity to think sys­tem­i­cally is one of the require­ments for the lead­ers of the 21st Cen­tury who will be faced with a world that is increas­ingly com­plex and uncer­tain. We address this spe­cific issue dur­ing the Col­lec­tive Val­ues mod­ule of the NLP Mas­ter Prac­ti­tioner Cer­ti­fi­ca­tion course, based on the work of Clare Graves (next course in Novem­ber 2011).

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