The impressive prediction of the trajectory of an arrow or a guided missile proves the superiority of ballistics or computer and sensor technology over traditional voodoo practices. One can consider the Gulf war as the Grand Finale of traditional strategies of war fighting with well defined and geographically separated actors, clear missions and a clearly designed machinery. Today there exist detailed procedures about how to stop a massive attack by a thousand tanks anywhere in the world but it seems to create great difficulties to protect a civilian population from shelling with heavy weapons. These developments provide a basis to solve global problems in a complex world that is not viewed as a complicated but fixed machine whose mechanisms can be understood in a similar way as the workings of the fundamental forces in nature can be eventually understood. The paradigm that we want to discuss is that of a GlobalBrain which is constantly adapting and for which we never will find a stationary, mathematical model.
Observations have to be continuously updated as well as models and assumptions.
Quantitative predictions will play a very limited role compared to complex qualitative, empirical, and conceptual models. In the same way as expert knowledge of gravitational theory will not be very helpful in solving the problem of riding a bicycle the development of fundamental theoretical models of international relations will not be very helpful in improving the situation of civilians in a violent conflict. In the same way as the brain will use its sensory, memory, and learning functions to come up with a continuously improving implicit model of bicycle-riding we believe that a global network of highly connected and powerful computational nodes will eventually emerge solutions to many problems that could not be solved in any other way. When the connectivity between computers on a global scale is well enough developed that the round-trip time of a signal is below, say, 250ms, then for the user it does not make any difference where the data that are displayed or used for a simulation are located geographically. The time constants involved in this communication constitutes a critical parameter that will lead to qualitatively new types of behavior when a certain threshold level is crossed.