Clouds, Crowds, and Complexipacity: How We Are Reinventing Science and Education for an Increasingly Complex World

Over the past decade, scholarly journals and the popular press have voiced growing concern that the explosion of new knowledge made possible by computers is making everything more complex, while the flood of data produced by computers threatens to overwhelm our decision-making processes. This has led many to argue that, in the future, all significant problems will become so complex that only computers will be able to resolve them.

However, recent research in neuroscience, mathematics, and cybernetics has raised serious doubts about our ability to create an artificial intelligence that equals human intelligence. At the same time, a confluence of economic necessity and mature technology is leading to the spontaneous reinvention of our basic Industrial Era institutions — starting (appropriately) with science and education — in ways that will enable us to make more intelligent choices in our increasingly complex world without ceding human destiny to the control of computerized decision makers.

This presentation spells out the increasingly complex realities of modern life and describes how a growing number of our basic institutions are using the power of cloud computing and “big data” to reinvent themselves in order to manage that complexity.