The most profound problem facing survivors is that human knowledge is collective, distributed across the population. No one individual knows enough to keep the vital processes of society going. Even if a skilled technician from a steel foundry survived, he would only know the details of his job, not the subsets of knowledge possessed by other workers at the foundry that are vital for keeping it running—let alone how to mine iron ore or provide electricity to keep the plant operating.
Collective Brain
Why isolated groups lose knowledge and capabilities.
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The most striking case of technological regress is Tasmania. Isolated on an island at the end of the world, a population of less than 5,000 hunter-gatherers divided into nine tribes did not just stagnate, or fail to progress. They fell steadily and gradually back into a simpler toolkit and lifestyle, purely because they lacked the numbers to sustain their existing technology.
In addition, Australia’s aridity, infertility, and climatic unpredictability limited its hunter-gatherer population to only a few hundred thousand people. Compared with the tens of millions of people in ancient China or Mesoamerica, that meant that Australia had far fewer potential inventors, and far fewer societies to experiment with adopting innovations.
To appreciate the importance the new computer-aided communication can have, one must consider the dynamics of “critical mass,” as it applies to cooperation in creative endeavor. Take any problem worthy of the name, and you find only a few people who can contribute effectively to its solution. Those people must be brought into close intellectual partnership so that their ideas can come into contact with one another.
For evolution to function, knowledge must be transmittable (and therefore able to be codified in some form). If Larry has some tacit knowledge about how to make particularly beautifully formed hand axes, but he cannot encode or transmit the knowledge in any way, then that knowledge will, sadly, die with Larry and not be a part of future hand ax PT evolution.
Mētis knowledge is often so implicit and automatic that its bearer is at a loss to explain it. ... Any experienced practitioner of a skill or craft will develop a large repertoire of moves, visual judgments, a sense of touch, or a discriminating gestalt for assessing the work as well as a range of accurate intuitions born of experience that defy being communicated apart from practice.
From a company’s perspective, sharing ownership increases the bus factor to more than one. The quirky term refers to the number of key people who can be incapacitated (for example, by getting hit by a bus) before the rest of the team is no longer able to keep the project going. A bus factor of one means that if any member of the team gets sick, goes on vacation, or leaves the company, the rest of the team suffers.
As a mathematical consultant to the project, he was allowed to travel freely outside Los Alamos, a privilege denied most participants, who were required to bring their families and remain sequestered for the duration of the war. “Progress elsewhere in computing was carried to Los Alamos by von Neumann,” says Nicholas Metropolis, “who consulted for several government projects at such a pace that he seemed to be in many places at the same time.”
But knowledge in the network is different from group decision making based on copying and parroting. It seems to develop by accretion; it can give full weight to quirks and exceptions; the challenge is to recognize it and gain access to it.