And there is no control either.

We believe that an army of more or less evil programmers is still in control somewhere. But this is no longer the way the world now works. This is the thesis of a wonderful piece titled “Childhood’s End, and here are a few quotes as food for thought, and invitation to read it all.

Models are no longer models

Search engines, or social networks, are no longer models of human knowledge: they now are, define and control… human knowledge and networks.

No one is at the controls

If enough drivers subscribe to a real-time map, traffic is controlled, with no central model except the traffic itself.

The successful social network is no longer a model of the social graph, it is the social graph.

This is why it is a winner-take-all game [and why governments] are being left behind (or why, I would say, there can be no Big Tech / Governments “compact”).

Nature’s answer: you wanted control, you lose it

What deserves our full attention is not the success of a few companies: the next revolution will be the ascent of analog systems over which the dominion of digital programming comes to an end.

Nature’s answer to those who sought to control nature through programmable machines is to allow us to build machines whose nature is beyond programmable contro.