9  Mutation

I know who I was when I got up this morning,
but I think I must have been changed several times since then.

Alice in Alice in Wonderland
by Lewis Carroll

The Uncertainty Principle of Faith

Predicting the end point or even assessing the way stations of human evolutionary progression is something of a religious exercise. It entails the search for trust through both causality and process in an environment shaped by unknown concepts of social ecosystem formation and interaction. It’s not that we don’t understand them. The point is that we don’t have an appreciation of their possibility or their importance until they arrive on our doorstep. As we noted back in our first chapter, such was the situation the Incas found themselves in when the Spanish arrived. An unknown social order, superior technology and devastating physiological manifestations struck at the very basis in trust of the Inca Civilization. In relatively short order, the central features of the civilization were supplanted.

When the entities contained within an ecosystem can significantly shape the structure of the ecosystem itself, one is at least two levels of indirection away from a stable platform from which to assess, let alone to act. First, driven by stimuli derived from the human needs hierarchy the social order seeks the means to sate the collective appetite. This requires an evaluation of trust at the first level of indirection. Does the collective societal stimulus point toward content that satisfies the collective need? The second level of indirection is more subtle. It derives from a characteristic fundamental to the physical ecosystem that was given rigorous expression by Werner Heisenberg. Known as the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle, this maxim suggests that we cannot know exactly both the position and the momentum of a particle because there is always at least a minimal level of uncertainty in the product of the two. Thus, the act of measuring either momentum or position affects the level of our understanding of the other. To exactly determine position we must abrogate momentum. To exactly measure momentum we have to sacrifice position. If we measure both simultaneously then there must be a degree of uncertainty in the product of the two. Applied to social orders as examples of dynamic systems, the corollary suggests that we cannot know exactly both the direction of societal change (momentum) and the effective policy (position) of the social order. Put more succinctly, when through our social systems we unleash the technological engines of change, it is purely through an act of faith that we attempt to assess where those engines will take us and, in fact, exactly where we are at any point along the way.

Such is the case with anticipating the future development of computer systems and their networks within the realm of human social orders. The social order impacts the network which in turn influences the social order. To illustrate this concept, let us consider the impact wrought from the

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