The perils of being overconnected
When I bought this, I thought the book was about the people who are over-connected on Facebook, LinkedIn, twitter, etc. Boy was I wrong. It is about the perils of the overconnected world as a system. Read it after I had just finished after a new novel by Robert Harris called the “The fear index”. How AI, hedging, mathematics and algorithms impact on trading. In this case, the programme takes over and created the right events to ensure profit.
Digital contagion
Overconnected follows in that vain and is about chaos theory, the unintended consequences of everything being connected on the world by exacerbating the effect of what is digital contagion.
The digital butterfly effect
What Shallows and future mind say about the effect of the internet on the brain, this explains the effects on the world. And it is not good. Touches upon “The world is flat”, how cultural lag becomes a serious issue when technology changes too fast and when we no longer understand cause and effect. The digital version of the butterfly effect. Yep, chaos theory and the internet.
Boom and bust
How feedback systems propagate and creates huge booms and bust effects. How in highly complex and tightly connected systems accidents are normal and there is no way to avoid them. Adding more safeguards increases the probability of a horrible accident.
Security is an illusion
Remember the movie Jurassic Park how secure the safety systems were supposed to be. Imagine an electronic Jurassic park on the internet with your money, with a nuclear plant, with a country (Iceland for example) or with a bank. Exactly.
The lesson?
Plan for volatility. A lot of volatility.
