BT Technology Journal: Networked stupidity
Various articles about the possible future.
Excerpt: "One of the drawbacks of democracy is that people have an equal say regardless of their level of understanding of an issue. Most countries have circumvented this problem by using representational democracy, underlaid by armies of expert advisors. However, the growing Internet is a platform on which a more direct form of democracy can flourish. Instead of decisions being made by our representatives, they can be made by networked communities. Groups of people of like mind can link together on the Net and flex their economic muscle effectively and very quickly. While some of these communities will be acting for the greater good, many will not; neither will they all be run by elite minds. We may thus have a form of networked stupidity, with enormous potential power but little collective brain — the power of the mob on a global scale!

Another form of networked stupidity results from the network itself and the installation of some, but not enough, intelligence. This is the opposite problem to too much AI —I am not sure which presents the bigger problem. A dumb network is just that, but one that has been given some autonomy and can make decisions, but only has a small amount of information and intelligence to process it, is potentially more of a threat than an asset; and yet we are building it. With only a small array of sensors and data inputs, networks are starved of information about their environment. The knowledge that the computers connected to them possess is infinitesimally small, a tiny fraction of what humans would consider ‘common sense’. In spite of this, we entrust ever-more decision making to them. Provided that the field they have jurisdiction over is limited to their area of expertise, there is little problem — but this is almost impossible to arrange even today. Systems are increasingly interconnected, so the effects of decisions are no longer local. Totally innocent pieces of software on different systems can interact in unforeseen ways and cause problems. No-one knew how much of a problem Y2K would be because of the interconnection of systems. It was just one of an infinite family of potential problems resulting from system interaction. Another class of problem results from correlated traffic, where resonance and overloads can easily occur. The more complex our systems become, the worse the potential problems can be; but at the same time, we become more dependent on them. Until system components have enough intelligence and awareness to ‘feel there is something wrong’, figure out what is happening, and find a solution all by themselves, we must accept that system unreliability goes hand in hand with technology progress."