Zillions

An interesting insight from Kevin Kelly about why today is actually different than yesterday:

We know from mathematics that systems containing very, very large numbers of parts behave significantly different from systems with fewer than a million parts. Zillionics is the state of supreme abundance, of parts in the many millions. The network economy promises zillions of parts, zillions of artifacts, zillions of documents, zillions of bots, zillions of network nodes, zillions of connections, and zillions of combinations. Zillionics is a realm much more at home in biology–where there have been zillions of genes and organisms for a long time–than in our recent manufactured world. Living systems know how to handle zillionics. Our own methods of dealing with zillionic plentitude will mimic biology.

I often get in arguments about how some new thing is actually not any different than some old thing. This seems like a major distinction and a good explanation for the extreme interest in networks and other biological systems.

August 21, 2009