Sublime

“Life’s too short to hang out with people who aren’t resourceful,” Bezos once said.

MIT’s Centre for Collective Intelligence for an overview of thinking in this area, www.cci.mit.edu

Human effort is bounded

The Geeks, or computer science experts, have developed the tools to analyze ever larger sets of data in ever more illuminating ways. The Wonks, on the policy side, have come up with creative ways to use this computing power for better government, smarter business policy, and faster innovation.

Control of data and ownership of the models learned from it is what many of the twenty-first century’s battles will be about—between governments, corporations, unions, and individuals.

Bigger and more connected populations are more potent crucibles for tinkering, experimentation, and serendipitous discovery, a more powerful “collective brain” for making new things. Large populations give rise to greater levels of specialization,

Corporations and governments, empowered by increasingly sophisticated algorithms, know us better than we know ourselves—leaving us vulnerable to control and manipulation.

subjects all agents in the city to a cost-benefit logic where positive-sum gains between advantaged and disadvantaged populations become the norm.