Have I Been Cloned?
It must have been 1995 when I first read Complexity: Life at the Edge of Chaos by Robert Lewin.
Okay, okay, I admit it, I am a science nerd! I spent days thinking about how I could be right at the very edge of perfection before moving one inch further and falling into chaos. Complexity is that single point of being the ULTIMATE before diving headfirst into Chaos.
Years later when I opened a book called “How Hits Happen,” by Winslow Farrell, I noticed the word COMPLEXITY. My eyes flew wide open and my ears began to wiggle.
The author described complexity as a mass of people interacting to produce something more than the addition of all their efforts. It is some type of emergent behavior that comes unexpectedly.
Where’s the cloning, this is boring, I am leaving.
No wait, listen. You see, it is about little people running around in computers. And… those little people are me and YOU. We have been “cloned.” We are now trapped inside a computer. They want us all to get together and come up with something “bigger” than what we are… some knowledge that is bigger than what we could all think together.
The book talked about a world of little people running around inside a computer making decisions. A company was actually doing that research. That company was predicting hits of musical songs, marketing trends, the stock market, movies, etc.
All those little people did not know what they were doing, but by following the reactions of everyone of them, some ideas emerged.
It seems that the little people, or not-really people, can collectively solve marketing problems. With each little person making a tiny decision the whole problem can be solved. Yes, Brittany Spears would be a hit (this was in the late 1990’s). They called this problem solving, EMERGENT BEHAVIOR.
AND where did the little people, who solved all kinds of problems for them, come from? They came from a business database. In other words each little person held a string of data that was given to them by me and YOU, the real people. All those data forms we fill out asking, “How old are you? What sex are you? What color is your hair?” This data is used for research. We are the unknowing guinea pigs.
So little people have MY information and YOUR information? There were 250,000 of these little people in that decision-making computer program. That means that 250,000 real people have unknowingly provided their personal information to these little people. I could be one of them. So could you.
Have I been cloned? Am I a little person running around in computer space? Am I in the real world and not in the real world at the same time? WHO AM I? And most important, if the computer gets enough data about me, does that mean that I am no longer necessary and I can be exterminated like a big furry bug with red antennas and 25 toes and no teeth?
Help! Help! I want out of the computer.
Written by Sandra ColleRain Copyright © 2008