Consciousness & Social IQ – Page 49 – Public Intelligence Blog

2000/04/172009/12/04

Review: Out of Control–The New Biology of Machines, Social Systems, & the Economic World

5 Star, Change & Innovation, Consciousness & Social IQ, Culture, Research, Economics, Environment (Solutions), Information Operations, Information Society, Information Technology, Intelligence (Collective & Quantum), Intelligence (Commercial), Intelligence (Extra-Terrestrial), Intelligence (Government/Secret), Intelligence (Public), Intelligence (Wealth of Networks), Technology (Bio-Mimicry, Clean), Values, Ethics, Sustainable Evolution

Co-Evolution of Man and Machine,

April 17, 2000

Kevin Kelly

Kevin has produced what I regard as one of the top five books of this decade. A very tough read but worth the effort. I had not understood the entire theory of co-evolution developed by Stewart Brand and represented in the Co-Evolution Quarterly and The Whole Earth until I read this book. Kevin introduces the concept of the “hive mind”, addresses how biological systems handle complexity, moves over into industrial ecology and network economics, and concludes with many inspiring reflections on the convergence of biological and technical systems. He was easily a decade if not two ahead of his time.

2000/04/082009/12/04

Review: Searching for the Spirit of Enterprise–Dismantling the Twentieth-Century Corporation Lessons from Asian, European,

4 Star, Best Practices in Management, Consciousness & Social IQ

Useful thoughts on deconstructing companies into cells,

April 8, 2000

Larry C. Farrell

Excellent airplane book. Articulates concerns about business schools that disdain real business, for managers that count money instead of making it, and for governments that are complacent about the lack of an entrepreneurial culture within their business ranks. His general approach is to deconstruct companies into smaller units where the management can be close to the actual value-creation, there are simpler more honest relationships, and there is a combined sense of pride and urgency that increases the momentum and productivity of the group.

2000/04/082009/11/01

Review: The exemplar–The exemplary performer in the age of productivity

6 Star Top 10%, Best Practices in Management, Change & Innovation, Complexity & Resilience, Consciousness & Social IQ, Culture, Research, Democracy, Economics, Environment (Solutions), Information Society, Intelligence (Public), Leadership

Productivity Primer–One of Five Basic Books for InfoAge,

April 8, 2000

Robert R Carkhuff

This book had a profound influence on me, helping me to understand that the functions fulfilled by an employee dealing with “things” are completely distinct from the functions fulfilled by an employee dealing with “ideas”, and that completely different educational, training, management, and compensation models are needed for the new “Gold Collar” worker. From this book I realized that virtually everything we are doing in U.S. education and U.S. personnel management and training today is way off the mark and at least a decade if not two or three decades behind where we could be in human productivity management.

2000/04/072009/11/01

Review: The Second Self–Computers and the Human Spirit

5 Star, Asymmetric, Cyber, Hacking, Odd War, Best Practices in Management, Change & Innovation, Complexity & Resilience, Consciousness & Social IQ, Culture, Research, Information Operations, Information Society, Information Technology

Priceless Early Look at Hackers with “The Right Stuff”,

April 7, 2000

Sherry Turkle

This is “the” book that described the true origin of “hacking” as in “pushing the edge of the envelope” by writing a complex program in six lines of code instead of ten. This is a really superior piece of work about computer cultures and the people that belong to them. It is a wonderfully readable book with magnificent insights into the psychology of the young people at the bleeding edge of the computer frontier.

Update of 31 May 08 to add links:
THE HACKER CRACKDOWN: LAW AND DISORDER ON THE ELECTRONIC FRONTIER
Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution
Information Payoff: The Transformation of Work in the Electronic Age
Collective Intelligence: Mankind's Emerging World in Cyberspace (Helix Books)
The Unfinished Revolution: Human-Centered Computers and What They Can Do For Us
The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom
Collective Intelligence: Creating a Prosperous World at Peace

2000/04/072009/09/26

Review: Consilience–the Unity of Knowledge

5 Star, Change & Innovation, Civil Society, Complexity & Resilience, Consciousness & Social IQ, Decision-Making & Decision-Support, Education (General), Environment (Solutions), Information Operations, Nature, Diet, Memetics, Design, Science & Politics of Science, Values, Ethics, Sustainable Evolution, Voices Lost (Indigenous, Gender, Poor, Marginalized)

Creating World Brain and the Virtual Intelligence Community

April 7, 2000

E. O. Wilson

EDITED 9 July 2007 to add comment and links to other books.

Comment: This is still one of the best books for someone who wants to think deeply about knowledge. Below are links to some others I recommend.

Our answer to Levy, but an order of magnitude more practical and steeped in some of the best endnotes I've ever enjoyed. Consilience is the “jumping together” of knowledge across boundaries, and the greatest enterprise of the mind. He begins with an example, showing how biology, ethics, social science, and environmental policy must all come together to properly resolve a global environmental issue, but actually do not-the learned individuals are fragmented into four separate communities, and within those communities further fragmented into nationalities and cliques and jobs, and it is our greater loss for we cannot arrive at the best policy without being able to integrate the knowledge across all these boundaries. He emphasizes that the public must be educated and have access to this unified knowledge, not just the policymakers. He poses, and then answers across the book, this question: “What is the relation between science and the humanities, and how is it important to human welfare?” In my own mind, Edward O. Wilson has defined both national and global intelligence writ large, and done so in way that suggests the “virtual intelligence community” is a very practical and achievable vision.

The Future of Life
The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom
The Wealth of Knowledge: Intellectual Capital and the Twenty-first Century Organization
Revolutionary Wealth: How it will be created and how it will change our lives
Powershift: Knowledge, Wealth, and Power at the Edge of the 21st Century
Infinite Wealth: A New World of Collaboration and Abundance in the Knowledge Era
The Age of Missing Information
Forbidden Knowledge: From Prometheus to Pornography
Smart Mobs: The Next Social Revolution
Information Productivity: Assessing Information Management Costs of U. S. Corporations

2000/04/072009/11/01

Review: Power/Knowledge–Selected Interviews and Other Writings, 1972-1977

5 Star, Consciousness & Social IQ, Culture, Research, Economics, Executive (Partisan Failure, Reform), Information Society, Intelligence (Government/Secret), Intelligence (Public), Misinformation & Propaganda, Power (Pathologies & Utilization)

Tough Read, Worth the Trouble,

April 7, 2000

Michel Foucault

Some serious food for thought here. Not only is the power to define madness, criminality, and sexuality addressed, but also the active use of criminals, and sex, to suppress and subjugate the populace. Somewhat more difficult to wade through but similar to Norman Cousins, it helped provoke my thinking on how top-down unilateral command based on secrets is inevitably going to give way to bottom-up multicultural decision-making by the people based on open sources evenly shared across networks. This is really very heavy stuff, and it helps call into question the “rationality” of both the Washington-based national security policymaking process, and the “rationality” of spending $30 billion a year on secrets in contrast to what that $30 billion a year might buy in terms of openly-available insights and overt information peacekeeping.

2000/04/072009/11/01

Review: Out of Control–The Rise of Neo-Biological Civilization

5 Star, Asymmetric, Cyber, Hacking, Odd War, Best Practices in Management, Change & Innovation, Complexity & Resilience, Consciousness & Social IQ, Culture, Research, Economics, Environment (Solutions), Future, Information Operations, Information Society, Information Technology

Decade Ahead of His Time–Absolutely Brilliant,

April 7, 2000

Kevin Kelly

Kevin, a WIRED Magazine editor who spoke, with Stewart Brand, at OSS '94, has produced what I regard as one of the top five books of this decade. A very tough read but worth the effort. I had not understood the entire theory of co-evolution developed by Stewart Brand and represented in the Co-Evolution Quarterly and The Whole Earth until I read this book. Kevin introduces the concept of the “hive mind”, addresses how biological systems handle complexity, moves over into industrial ecology and network economics, and concludes with many inspiring reflections on the convergence of biological and technical systems. He was easily a decade if not two ahead of his time.