“The most exciting breakthroughs of the 21st century will not occur because of
technology but because of an expanding concept of what it means to be human”
-John Naisbitt
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This blog post about a paper comparing the structure of cities to the structure of the human mind has me wondering if a larger trend will soon unravel:
that the design of technology across the board is the reflection of existing internal structures within the human organism.
An excerpt from the study’s abstract:
Because both cities and brains are under selection pressures to make their connections efficiently, we investigate the hypothesis that the organization of city highway networks and the mammalian neocortex may be governed by common principles. Here we measure how city highway networks vary with city size and find that, consistent with the hypothesis, highway networks scale with exponents nearly identical to those found for the analogous quantities in the neocortex.
As we delve further into the logic of our own design and the logic of the technologies we create (computer software/hardware, cities, economic markets), I think it will be laid bare that technology exists within the same chain of evolving and increasing complexity that we find ourselves a part of.
That what we understand as Darwinian forces reach well beyond the biological domain and that the ‘common principles’ that animate our evolution are not fully understood.
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Related links:
-Link to article (pdf): “Common Scaling Laws for City Highway Systems and the Mammalian Neocortex”
-Evolution 2.0: On the origin of technologies (NewScientist)
-Jonah Lehrer on moving to Los Angeles
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