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CoinDesk Podcast Network

SOB: Emergent Complexity and Building Systems We Don’t Understand

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4.8689 Ratings

🗓️ 24 July 2021

⏱️ 38 minutes

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

If you landed in medieval times, could you build a phone? Or something even simpler, a pencil?

Join hosts Adam B. Levine, Andreas M. Antonopoulos, Stephanie Murphy & Jonathan Mohan for a deep dive into the wildly empowering, complex and terrifyingly automated world we live in. This wide ranging, philosophical discussion touches on such topics as the Suez Canal, Douglas Adams, combat drones, the Fourth Industrial Revolution and more.

The world’s complexity exponentially increases by the decade. A gradual systemization has led to the automation of specialized tasks, affording people free time to perform other, even more complex tasks. For example, consider navigation apps reducing the decision-making process from driving, or the rise of autonomous cars that will eventually remove human interaction altogether.

As the world depends more on an unimaginable web of logistics, what happens when something breaks? The evolution of automation from simple, rules-based systems to incredibly complex machine learning algorithms has diminished the ability to understand or predict these structures.

As much as we love decentralization and technological advancement, where do these aims fail us? Are we creating more problems than solving them?

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Today's show featured Andreas M. Antonopoulos, Stephanie Murphy, Jonathan Mohan and Adam B. Levine. This episode was edited by Jonas, with music by Jared Rubens and Gurty Beats.

Image credit: Luca Carrà/Unsplash, modified by Speaking of Bitcoin

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Transcript

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0:00.0

I think the truth is we understand a lot less about how the things around us work.

0:05.0

And understanding them does not mean you can replicate them.

0:12.0

It goes without saying, but let me do it anyways, that the world is an incredibly and increasingly complex place.

0:17.0

Modern life is built on a fragile web of technologies that make things easier by

0:21.6

taking the need for expertise out of our hands, allowing each of us to use more of our time the way

0:25.9

that we want to. Think about navigation, the simple act of getting where we want to go. Throughout

0:30.6

history, this has been a substantial challenge, whether you're talking about navigating by the

0:34.6

stars or even just reading a map. But today, most of us are using

0:38.2

Google or Apple to do that for us. We tell it where we want to go and they give us step-by-step

0:42.6

directions to get there. On today's show, we're going to talk about that reality on a grand scale,

0:47.8

and what it really means when we say, and we didn't coin this phrase, no one's driving. But before that, let me introduce myself. I'm Adam B. Levine,

0:55.1

and this is speaking of Bitcoin. As always, I'm joined by the other host of the show, Stephanie

0:59.2

Murphy. Hi there. Jonathan Mohan. Hey, hey. And Andreas M. Antonopoulos. Hello. So, Stephanie, you and I

1:08.4

have been talking about this a pretty decent amount. Once you get us started here, what are we talking about?

1:13.7

So I was reading a series of articles a while back by Tim Mon, who's a tech writer on Medium,

1:20.0

and it's called No One's Driving.

1:21.4

That's like his phrase.

1:22.9

And I just thought it was like an interesting thing to talk about because he's talking about

1:27.0

the kind

1:27.7

of systematization of the world that frees up individuals time, but it ends up building

1:34.5

these networks of systems in some cases that are interconnected and layered on top of each other

1:39.4

that are just too complex for any one person to understand, really. And so if something breaks,

...

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