THE THIRD WAVE
Worse yet, each group of experts typically insists on the primal importance of “its own” causes, to the exclusion of others. Faced with the staggering problems of urban decay, the Housing Expert traces it to congestion and a declining housing stock; the Transportation Expert points to the lack of mass transit; the Welfare Expert shows the inadequacy of budgets for day-care centers or social work; the Crime Expert points a finger at the infrequency of police patrols; the Economics Expert shows that high taxes are discouraging business investment; and so on. Everyone high-mindedly agrees that all these problems are somehow interconnected — that they form a self-reinforcing system. But no one can keep the many complexities in mind while trying to think through a solution to the problem.
Urban decay is only one of a large number of what Peter Ritner, in The Society of Space, once felicitously termed “weave problems.” He warned that we would increasingly face crises that were “not susceptible to ’cause and effect analysis’ but would require ‘mutual dependence analysis’; not composed of easily detachable elements but of hundreds of cooperating influences from dozens of independent, overlapping sources.”
Because it can remember and interrelate large numbers of causal forces, the computer can help us cope with such problems at a deeper than customary level. It can sift vast masses of data to find subtle patterns. It can help assemble “blips’* into larger, more meaningful wholes. Given a set of assumptions or a model, it can trace out the consequences of alternative decisions, and do it more systematically and completely than any individual normally could. It can even suggest imaginative solutions to certain problems by identifying novel or hitherto unnoticed relationships among people and resources.
Human intelligence, imagination, and intuition will continue in the foreseeable decades to be far more important than the machine. Nevertheless, computers can be expected to deepen the entire culture’s view of causality, heightening our understanding of the interrelatedness of things, and helping us to synthesize meaningful “wholes” out of the disconnected data whirling around us. The computer is one antidote to blip culture.
* While we may deal with many factors simultaneously on a subconscious or intuitive level, systematic, conscious thinking about a great many variables is damnably difficult, as anyone who has tried it knows.
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