I’m teaching “Digital Society” this semester, and as fate would have it, over my holiday break I decided to read Michael Crichton’s The Lost World, a novel I’d never read before even though I love Michael Crichton and have probably read everything else he’s written.

I said “as fate would have it,” because if I’d read this book when it came out thirty (30!!!) years ago, I might not have paid as much attention to Ian Malcolm’s monologue/lecture on chaos and evolution. Crichton manages to insert this lengthy “idea” passage pretty effectively plotwise during a convenient breather in the otherwise nonstop action. Instead of pedantic background narrative, Crichton positions this “rant” as a rather endearing one-sided stream of consciousness “conversation” Malcolm has with Sarah Harding arising from the morphine haze she’s put him into while she’s fixing his injured leg (broken, I think, but that was a couple weeks ago, and there’s a lot of action, injury, and death in this book—hard to keep it all straight 🙂 ).

Ian Malcolm’s ideas seem chillingly prescient considering the massive sway the internet holds over human society today and particularly given the hyper-fast cycles of AI development we’ve seen in the past couple of years. Much to think about here, especially as we (collectively, as humans) have a vested interest in extending the duration of human existence and human reign over the planet as long as possible.

Here’s the quote that caught my eye. This passage may seem long, but it is just a fraction of Malcolm’s entire speech. Fascinating stuff. I love how Crichton can deliver such intellectual ideas in a way that feels natural and makes learning and thinking about complex topics so easy!

“[…P] ersonally, I think cyberspace means the end of our species.”

“Yes? Why is that?”

“Because it means the end of innovation,” Malcolm said. “This idea that the whole world is wired together is mass death. Every biologist knows that small groups in isolation evolve fastest. You put a thousand birds on an ocean island and they’ll evolve very fast. You put ten thousand on a big continent, and their evolution slows down. Now, for our own species, evolution occurs mostly through our behavior. We innovate new behavior to adapt. And everybody on earth knows that innovation only occurs in small groups. Put three people on a committee and they may get something done. Ten people, and it gets harder. Thirty people, and nothing happens. Thirty million, it becomes impossible. That’s the effect of mass media—it keeps anything from happening. Mass media swamps diversity. It makes every place the same. Bangkok or Tokyo or London: there’s a McDonald’s on one corner, a Benetton on another, a Gap across the street. Regional differences vanish. All differences vanish. In a mass-media world, there’s less of everything except the top ten books, records, movies, ideas. People worry about losing species diversity in the rain forest. But what about intellectual diversity – our most necessary resource? That’s disappearing faster than trees. But we haven’t figured that out, so now we’re planning to put five billion people together in cyberspace. And it’ll freeze the entire species. Everything will stop dead in its tracks. Everyone will think the same thing at the same time. Global uniformity. [..]”

― Michael Crichton, The Lost World, published in 1995

‘The Lost World’ – Michael Crichton