What I find fascinating with this complex system of systems is that it negates the old science fiction movies where computers took over and made all the decisions. If something is unpredictable, the poor computer is unable to make a decision. All it can do is say "here is the damn information you make the decision. You are the human. I'm just a machine." So these complex systems and their unpredictability remind us that we humans have some very unique qualities and those qualities will be more important than ever in this very complex unpredictable world we are living in."

"When I think of today's very interconnected society I picture often as dominoes where everything is closely stacked and relies upon each other. The dominoes falling down doesn't mean the system is coming crashing down but it is that I can see the beautiful repercussions of my actions as they flow throughout the system and hopefully at the end of the day, the way I interact with these systems in the future, that knowledge and information comes back to me"

"The idea of the planet coming to be understood by us as a complex emergent system of systems is really exciting because it opens new possibilities of thoughts of what it means to be a human being and a new capacity to make these thoughts real"

Critically, the semantics here are in the users, not in the system. This is not a way to get computers to understand things. When del.icio.us is recommending tags to me, the system is not saying, "I know that OSX is an operating system. Therefore, I can use predicate logic to come up with recommendations -- users run software, software runs on operating systems, OSX is a type of operating system -- and then say 'Here Mr. User, you may like these links.'"

What it's doing instead is a lot simpler: "A lot of users tagging things foobar are also tagging them frobnitz. I'll tell the user foobar and frobnitz are related." It's up to the user to decide whether or not that recommendation is useful -- del.icio.us has no idea what the tags mean. The tag overlap is in the system, but the tag semantics are in the users. This is not a way to inject linguistic meaning into the machine.

It's all dependent on human context. This is what we're starting to see with del.icio.us, with Flickr, with systems that are allowing for and aggregating tags. The signal benefit of these systems is that they don't recreate the structured, hierarchical categorization so often forced onto us by our physical systems. Instead, we're dealing with a significant break -- by letting users tag URLs and then aggregating those tags, we're going to be able to build alternate organizational systems, systems that, like the Web itself, do a better job of letting individuals create value for one another, often without realizing it.

"Here's what a 4 year old knows. A screen that ships without a mouse ships broken. Media that's targeted at you but doesn't include you may not be worth sitting still for and that's what I think is a one way change because I think that the people that were soaking most deeply in the current environment, the people who don't have to go through the trauma of trying to unpack a childhood spent watching TV are reacting to the assumption that media includes consuming producing and sharing. It's also become my motto now when people ask me what we are doing and when I say we I mean the larger society trying to figure out how to deploy this cognitive surplus but I also mean we especially the people in this room, the people who are working hammer and tongs figuring out the next good idea, I am going to tell them were looking for the mouse, we are going to look in every place place a user or reader or listener or viewer has been a locked out, has been served up a passive or a fixed or a canned experience, and ask ourself if we carved out a little bit of the cognitive surplus we now recognize we can deploy, could we make an good thing happen? And I'm betting answers is yes."