2019-04-11
Thinking about speculative civic sci-fi related to smart cities. Wondering if maybe human culture is best thought of as a probability cloud, not a state machine. Just as the lightbulb was invented in several different places near the same time, a specific arriving of a future is not a singular event, but an potentially inevitable field of moments evoked. And if this consideration of society as a probabibility space is correct, then it’s less of question of are these people doing this good thing or this bad thing, but can they. If they can do the bad thing, then that future is more adjacent.
Or considering through a social physics lens. Through that lens, we think about possibilities through how many hops away an idea is between people. Maybe we can consider the world we want by how many hops away it might be — good or bad — from a desireable or undesirable possible reality.
Metaphor: We’re perhaps moving through the part of the marble tilt maze where the holes run thick and the steel ball drifts lazily across narrow surfaces in parabolic arcs.