Juan Orbea

Complicated – Complicated systems require expertise in their management, but as long as the proper expertise is available and used, the attractiveness of complicated systems is that they generally can be successfully managed.

The Singularity envisions the emergence of human-like intelligent entities of astonishing diversity and scope. Although I anticipate that the most common application of the knowledge gained from reverse engineering the human brain will be creating more intelligent machines that are not necessarily modeled on specific biological human individuals,... See more

At the end of high school, most graduating seniors are given their diplomas with a heaping side of platitudes, many of them patently preposterous. Such as, “If you can dream it, you can do it.” Or “You can be anything you want to be.” And especially, “With grit and determination, there’s nothing you can’t do."

FLAG, a fiber-optic cable now being built from England to Japan, is a skinny little cuss (about an inch in diameter), but it is 28,000 kilometers long, which is long even compared to really big things like the planet Earth. When it is finished in September 1997, it arguably will be the longest engineering project in history. Writing about it... See more

If governance ideas are regularly implemented in network states, then we would move from an extrovert-privileging "talker liberalism" to a more balanced "doer liberalism" where ideas rise and fall based on how well they actually do on a small scale. 

Do you relate to the other students naturally? Will they relate to you? Do the students represent the type of aspirations, lifestyle, and interests you want for yourself? There’s no point in joining a network where you won’t actually bond with the other nodes, no matter how prestigious that network is.

When the niche shifts from being just nature, to being consciousness and culture itself, wild type groups start to have a conflict. What emerges from this transition is the Domesticated type.