Word: complexity
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Dates: during 2000-2000
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Function is out? Say it isn't so! The nouveaux contours and colors of products merely top off the vast improvements that have been made in the underlying functional design. Moreover, consumers demand that products function conveniently, safely, ecologically and obviously. We scoff at a microwave oven with a complex 50-button console. If you can't figure out how to heat a cup of cocoa without reading the instructions, it's the manufacturer who is stupid. A fuchsia cell phone might be pretty, but a cell phone that does not require a manual--now that's truly beautiful. KATRINA...
...human brain is the most complex object in the known universe, with billions of chattering neurons connected by trillions of synapses. No scientific problem compares to it. (The Human Genome Project, which is trying to read a long molecular sentence composed of billions of letters, is simple by comparison.) Cognitive neuroscience is arming so many brilliant minds with such high technology that it would be foolish to predict that we will never understand how the brain gives rise to the mind. But the problem is so hard that it would be just as foolish to predict that we will...
...brains will be twice again as large, housed in the huge globular heads familiar from innumerable sci-fi images. Conversely, our immediate forebears were robustly boned and, we think, more heavily muscled than we are today. What could be more natural than to conclude that supported by increasingly complex labor-saving technologies, our bodies will in future be frailer and shorn of such frivolities as the little...
...reality is that natural selection can vote up or down only on entire organisms, warts and all. Individual organisms are mind-bogglingly complex and integrated mechanisms; they succeed or fail, economically and reproductively, as the sum of their parts...
...Wallace right about this? No one yet knows. We are tampering with systems that are so complex that scientists are struggling to understand them. Climatologist Tom Wigley of the National Center for Atmospheric Research, for one, fervently believes the answer to our problems lies not just in improved knowledge of the climate system but in technological advances that could counter--and perhaps reverse--present trends. In other words, the farfetched dreams that prominent scientists like Von Neumann once harbored have not died. Rather they have been transformed and, in the process, become more urgent...