Edge | I'm thinking about collective awareness, which I think of as the
models we use to collectively process information about the world, to
understand the world and ourselves. It's worth distinguishing our
collective awareness at three levels. The first level is our models of
the environment, the second level is our models of how we affect the
environment, and the third level is our models of how we think about our
collective effect on ourselves.
Understanding the environment is something we've been doing better
and better for many centuries now. Celestial mechanics allows us to
understand the solar system. It means that if we spot an asteroid, we
can calculate its trajectory and determine whether it's going to hit the
Earth, and if it is, send a rocket to it and deflect it.
Another example of collective awareness at level one is weather
prediction. It's an amazing success story. Since 1980, weather
prediction has steadily improved, so that every ten years the accuracy
of weather prediction gets better by a day, meaning that if this
continues, ten years from now the accuracy for a two-day weather
forecast will be the same as that of a one-day weather forecast now.
This means that the accuracy of weather prediction has gotten
dramatically better. We spend $5 billon a year to make weather
predictions and we get $30 billion a year back in terms of economic
benefit.
The best example of collective consciousness at level two is climate
change. Climate change is in the news, it's controversial, etc., but
most scientists believe that the models of climate change are telling us
something that we need to pay serious attention to. The mere fact that
we're even thinking about it is remarkable, because climate change is
something whose real effects are going to be felt fifty to 100 years
from now. We're making a strong prediction about what we're doing to the
Earth and what's going to happen. It's not surprising that there's some
controversy about exactly what the outcome is, but we intelligent
people know it's really serious. We are going to be increasingly
redirecting our efforts to deal with it through time.
The hardest problem is collective awareness at level
three—understanding our own effects on ourselves. This is because we're
complicated animals. The social sciences try to solve this problem, but
they have not been successful in the dramatic way that the physical and
natural sciences have. This doesn’t mean the job is impossible, however.
