Prediction 88
Duration 23 years (02002-02025)
Predictor
Judah Thornewill
Challenger
TBA
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Economists estimate that over 33% of today's Gross World Product of $43 Trillion is spent on interaction costs - the costs of people interacting in order to exchange goods, services and ideas across the economy.
The 1996 - 2000 euphoria about information technology was driven by the idea that information technology would dramatically reduce these costs. The actual cost reductions were much lower then anticipated.
Why? Because most of the technology solutions (including the web itself) were incorrectly engineered as an extension of television. They were not engineered in a way to take full advantage of the two-way interactive nature of the medium.
So how should the medium of electronic communications be engineered? The simplest, most elegant possible way to engineer a true two-way communications network is by using a branch of science called quadrant theory. Marshall and Eric McLuhan, in 1988, called their version of this - their Four-Laws of Media - "the biggest intellectual discovery of the last two centuries". Ken Wilber calls his four-quadrant "Holon" model the key to understanding and building an integrated global society. R. Buckminster Fuller provides the same insight in his final book Synergetics: The Geometry of Thinking.
A web-based graphical user interface can be used to make quadrant theory models manageable by ordinary people in businesses and organizations. Once implemented, the quadrant theory model provides a way to most rapidly lower interaction costs for organizations. The lower interaction costs go (as a percentage of revenue) the closer the global economy will get to Adam Smith's perfect market.
Once the market catches on to the profit potential of organizing organizations around the way nature, people and our brains actually work, there will be an explosion of re-engineering, and the potential of the web and information technology will begin to be realized. The first Quadrant Theory based business application is being launched in October, 2002 by Four-Leaf Clover Foundation after four years of development. Four-Leaf Clover Foundation is structured to drive this next generation of technology development into the marketplace.
The full technology platform is available upon request at www.cloverfoundation.com
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Major online internet useage research firms will record that over 3 billion people in 2025 managed their incoming and outgoing digital information using a graphical user interface based on Quadrant Theory - as described in Marshall McLuhan's "Tetrad" model in Laws of Media, Ken Wilber's Holon in Sex, Ecology Spirituality, and R Buckminster Fuller's Tetrahedral structures in Synergetics.
Not meaning this in a nasty way, but this bet might well be categorised as a nice bit of publicity for $1,000 :-)
If Long Bets really takes off, that web-link in the bet details might produce rather more than $1,000 bits of business.
But it *is* phrased as a testable bet, so I'm not one to complain.
That said, it doesn't seem to invite a lot of popular debate. It doesn't actually describe "Quadrant Theory", and most of what it says about this theory sounds a lot like what futurists claimed radio would do, but, apparently, has still not done.
I'm also more than a little suspicious of the claim that the web was "incorrectly engineered as an extension of television".
This generalization -- which I think is desperately wrong -- may have been intended only to apply to a fraction of the technology involved in the web. That could be a perfectly reasonable argument, but not necessarily relevant.
Anyhow, the bettor has made an assertion, but not, I feel, a case to support it. I can't be too impressed by the mere citation of experts who claim their own ideas are great. The McLuhans, et al, may very well be sure that they're onto something, but they have a vested interest in saying so.
www.cloverfoundation.com doesn't seem to say anything about quadrant theory anymore. I think this one's a lost cause.
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