#HoloChats: Living and Learning Systems
Decentralized is cool. But living and learning ecosystems — Symmathesy — is hot.
We can move away from what doesn’t work (centralization) or we can focus on moving in a specific direction — toward what we want (symmathesy).
What does it mean to create learning ecosystems? First, let’s distinguish between networks and ecosystems. Networks are a set of interrelated (and mostly a monoculture of) things. The focus is on the how they connect and qualities of connection. Ecosystems are about the flows between a wide variety of interdependent living organisms and the nonliving components of their environment.
Now we are moving beyond mechanistic models of our technology into interdependent and evolving entities. Entities that can learn and adapt to their context and comrades. Start with the assumption that an entity has agency and autonomy, then create conditions for acting, reacting, and adapting.
For Holochats this week, let’s explore:
- Philosophically, what does it even mean to talk about learning systems? How is that different from non-living systems? What mental shifts are needed to move from a data-centric machine-based model to an agent-centric living system model?
- For a business, let’s consider how the Social Era is already more about fostering the ecology for a business to thrive with a “get mine by growing ours” approach by leaders like Amazon.
- Technically, how do you get to software that is agent-centric so you can have autonomous entities interacting? What applications become possible in an agent-centric platform, and what the blazes does that do to UI?
For us at Holo, learning systems (and symmathesy) means making software that enables the ecosystem (and those within it) to learn together. With Holo we can help each other evolve because innovation risk is small and at the edges but improvements and breakthroughs then propagate through the ecosystem.
We invite you into our community, #HoloChats, a distributed conversation! Each of our weekly topics include philosophical inquiry into the nature of the theme as well as business and technical applications around the theme. Collectively, our wisdom together can emerge.
To participate, include #Holochats and #theme tags.
Holochats are distributed explorations of themes with several steps:
- A blog post stating the #theme for the week posing questions, creating shared context, and considerations up for debate. (This one!)
- An interview around the theme {and we encourage you to do so as well!}
- You join in with your own blog, video, and links (new or pre-existing) using the tags #holochats and #theme to be included in the distributed dialogue!
- Each week we can collect together the juicy evolution of responses to the theme and share back through the tags, re-post on our medium, and share our favorite insights.
We hope you join in! This is about distributed awareness and growing our collective intelligence together!
Post your own interviews, blog posts, and other content with the #Holochats #Symmathesy tags so we can learn from and with you!
Everything is linked for this week by #HoloChats #Symmathesy.