Why the Net Matters by David Eagleman

Author:David Eagleman [Eagleman, David]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
Tags: General Fiction
Publisher: Canongate Books
Published: 2011-04-04T04:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER SIX

Cultivating Human Capital

In The Collapse of Complex Societies, anthropologist Joseph Tainter suggests that societies fail because they do not change their fixed designs for solving problems. Or, as Arnold Toynbee put it in A Study of History, ‘they find problems that they cannot solve’.

Can the internet help us tackle the previously unsolvable?

We have every reason to be optimistic here, as the net naturally inspires crowdsourcing. In crowdsourcing, large groups of people throw their collective weight into solving a problem.

Take the website Fold.it, which attempts to tackle the computationally difficult problem of protein folding by turning it into a game played by thousands. Registrants try out different ways of shaping a protein (a series of amino acids) and earn points for finding the conformation that adds up the lowest potential energy – that is, that contains the fewest places where repulsive charges are close to one another.

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