Dominiek.com

There’s something happening to the Human Race, something big. This change is not as big as ‘the Singularity’, but it might be related to it. How? I don’t know. The observed changes I will discuss manifest them in many fields of human participation. My perspective is mainly that of a Software Engineer who likes to write down what he thinks.

Let me tell you something about the Agile Manifesto. In Software Engineering there have always been many guidelines and methods for structuring the process of building software. A few years ago, some great software engineers sat together and swept away all these procedures and rules. Instead they defined 4 ground principles:

• Individuals and interactions over processes and tools
• Working software over comprehensive documentation
• Customer collaboration over contract negotiation
• Responding to change over following a plan

Principle one and three say that building software should be more social. Principle two says that building software should be more pragmatic. Principle four indicates the need for more flexibility and adaptability. Processes based on these principles are more flexible and more adaptive to their environment. Examples of agile-methods are Extreme Programming and Scrum. I was surprised to see that Scrum, named after a rugby-scrum, is actually used in fields outside software engineering. Notable users are: Honda, Xerox and NEC. So even manufacturing industries are harvesting this power of adaptivity.

I think this phenomenon holds a lot of potential. The phenomenon can be seen as changing linear rules to non-linear principles that can be converted to guidelines that respect the environment and their social/human nature. In a sense we are advancing our Dualism -oriented minds to a new era of Pluralism, hence the name Neo-Pluralism. There are two main elements in this phenomenon: vagueness and adaptivity.

Vagueness, a common term in philosophy and linguistics. When can something be true or false? How many grains of sand do you need in order to call something ‘a heap of sand’? In the upcoming science ‘quantum computing’, a quantum computer bit, qubit, is neither true nor false. This trend of vagueness can be seen everywhere. An up-to-date example might be the way you get annoyed when you hear George W. Bush say ‘The Evil Terrorists’. When is something evil, when is something good? Do the Koran/Bible really say what you think they say? Humans are starting to realize that everything is contextual and subjective.

Adaptivity, a common term in biology and business. Darwin’s theory of natural selection relates to this phenomenon in an elegant way. Natural selection and genetic algorithms depend on chaos and mutations in order to adapt to the environment over many generations. Also, in some self-help books, we are toughed how we can live an adaptive principle-centered life in order to achieve success (7 Habits… by Covey ).

The substitution of rules and procedures with principles can also result in values on social responsibility rather then anonymous irresponsibility. A nice example of this is the recent removal of traffic signs and road lines in seven European cities. The project is already showing good results.

One might also wonder how the Internet, nicknamed, the Global Village, can have it’s role in all of this. I think her role will be very big. It could assist us in distributing opinions, relating information and contextualizing the chaos. These things aren’t new, the most basic example of this development is the current Folksonomy phenomenon in Web Land. In general I think the digital world will be a catalyst for many changes in our lives, pluralism is one of them.

As to summarize all of these brain farts, the observed changes can be ‘tagged’ as follows:

• importance of contextualizing and opinions
• embracing vagueness and chaos
• increase of adaptivity and flexibility
• more social responsibility
• things will be more informal (in all social, mathematical, philosophical and linguistic disciplines)