I'm still thinking over Doug Engelbart's speech at Accelerating Change. Like the speech, his Bootstrap Institute website describes the greatest challenges the world now faces:

• Our world is a complex place with urgent problems of a global scale.
• The rate, scale, and complex nature of change is unprecedented and beyond the capability of any one person, organization, or even nation to comprehend and respond to.
• Challenges of an exponential scale require an evolutionary coping strategy of a commensurate scale at a cooperative cross-disciplinary, international, cross-cultural level.

If that didn't make sense to you, let me try to interpret. Engelbart is considering how innovation happens in response to large-scale problems. For some problems, a talented individual can figure out a solution—great. But other problems, those of a global scale, are too large for inventors to solve. Moving from the individual scale to the organizational or even national scale, there are still problems that are beyond the reach of these larger and larger institutions that might perhaps be solvable if additional entities could contribute.

The process for solving problems that cannot be solved by invention is evolution. In biology, the problem might be stated as "what form of life survives best?" But evolution happens in other environments too. In product markets, companies design products and compete with each other, some lasting and some failing. But the evolution metaphor doesn't end there. Evolution makes progress by chance—random mutations. A strand of DNA doesn't know whether a mutation is good or bad—it doesn't even have an opinion. But without even understanding the larger questions, its mutation contributes to the solution of an incredibly complex problem. Similarly, product developers don't always know how their product will be used, but leaving it out there for experiemental, even random combination with other objects and ideas permits it to participate in the evolution.

Furthermore, the mutations need not be random. The power still lies in the gradual overall progress despite potential individual failures. But with some cleverness, the individual "mutations" can do much better than random; if our attempts are vaguely in the right direction, they can accelerate useful evolution. On the other hand, if the agents of knowledge mutation—inventors—are overly constrained in their choices, they may actually do worse than random.

Solving problems in this fashion is what I think Engelbart means by the third bullet point above. He then sets out criteria for building and improving that mechanism:

• We need a new, co-evolutionary environment capable of handling simultaneous complex social, technical, and economic changes at an appropriate rate and scale.
• The grand challenge is to boost the collective IQ of organizations and of society. A successful effort brings about an improved capacity for addressing any other grand challenge.
• The improvements gained and applied in their own pursuit will accelerate the improvement of collective IQ. This is a bootstrapping strategy.
• Those organizations, communities, institutions, and nations that successfully bootstrap their collective IQ will achieve the highest levels of performance and success.

I don't feel I understand these points as well as the first batch. But I think when Engelbart writes "collective IQ", he is actually talking about a collective capacity for the execution of the evolutionary mechanisms. This is in part about building lots of clever inventors, but that part is severely overshadowed by the need to rapidly conceive and test lots and lots of mutations. But what about this bootstrapping business?

Well, perhaps this means that each solution reached by an evolutionary system produces not just an answer but also a new state of the evolutionary system itself. This indicates a different conception of problems and solutions: whereas an inventor might eliminate a problem by some clever invention, an evolutionary process connects the solution not only to previous solutions but to future problems and solutions. Therefore the process sets the course for its own increased productivity.

Are we witnessing the opening of a new frontier for evolution?