(2012-10-05) Rao Cyclical Abundance Motifs

Venkatesh Rao suggests the fruits of Technological Revolution-s cycle through "material, object, and cognitive" motifs. *Why is this cycling important? Well, for all you futurists out there who are stuck in a mental rut asking yourself, what’s the next big thing (Huge Invention)? the next big thing is almost certainly not going to be a thing at all (object motif). It’s going to be a material motif. So the right question is what’s the next new material?

That then, is the state of play. We’re basically in the last stages of learning to think with our new Silicon Mind. Hacking, relating, refactoring, these are the basic new literacy skills for the Silicon Mind. These skills will form the basis for a new education system and turn into a new Cognitive Abundance (Cognitive Surplus) within the next ten years.

• “Refactoring” as a cognitive motif is unfamiliar and hard to think about because it is so new, and there is no consensus yet on labels. Perhaps my terms will stick. Maybe “Insight Economics” will win out once the “Insight Porn” bubble collapses. I don’t particularly care, so long as we agree we are talking about the same mental faculty that a lot of people seem to be autodidactically developing at the same time: an ability to see things from lots of different angles in search of the best one. Programmers obviously lead the pack (hence the label, which is drawn from programming in case you didn’t know).

Returning to the motif cycling, it is clear that Something Is Up with a new material: DNA... But it is clearly not enough. Before we can get to engineering abundances, we need a few more material abundances to form a resource base. In the last cycle, we had six basic and complementary material abundances — oil, coal, steel, atoms, plastic and silicon — to work with.

What happens if we create an adequately complete resource base of complementary material abundances for a new era of engineering? We’ll enter another age of object motifs. The key here is that these motifs must represent ubiquity rather than novelty. Not Dolly the sheep. Not an artist with an ear grown on his arm. Something like the steam engine, touching the lives of nearly the entire population. If I had to bet, I’d bet on artificial, lab-grown meat being the first object motif.*