Pentland's work truly improves the human condition and revolutionizes the way we live and relat to one another ( Award citation, Future of Health Technology Institute, 2008 )
Pentland and his research group: (from http://web.media.mit.edu/~sandy/ )
Professor Alex (“Sandy”) Pentland is a pioneer in organizational engineering, mobile information systems, and computational social science. Sandy's focus is the development of human-centered technology, and the creation of ventures that take this technology into the real world.
He directs the Digital Life Consortium, a group of more than twenty multinational corporations exploring new ways to innovate, and oversees the Next Billion Network, established to support aspiring entrepreneurs in emerging markets, and the EPROM entrepreneurship program in Africa. He is among the most-cited computer scientists in the world, and in 1997 Newsweek magazine named him one of the 100 Americans likely to shape this century.
(video - http://web.media.mit.edu/~sandy/pentland-2007-10-18-web.mov )
Other videos: (BBC, etc. )
http://web.media.mit.edu/~sandy/videos.html
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The book:
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Review from New Scientist (10-28-08)
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His message, in terms of the other concepts
in this weblog (feedback, emergent synthesis,
consultation, theory Y, etc.)
Pentland joins many others in the rising tide of evidence that humans are not nearly as separate, rational, and in control of their own destiny as we have been taught.
He and his research team, using fancy electronics, have tracked a variety of actions and non-verbal behaviors of humans, and discovered that a large fraction of human decisions seem to be made, and in fact visible to these devices, long before the humans themselves are aware of making a decision.
Though pairwise and even more complicated signalling feedback "circuits", humans as a group can process information and make decisions far better than any single group member can, and entirely nonverbally. They, collectively, form a sort of meta-brain (my term.)
This is good news, and the exact type of behavior I was suggesting in many earlier posts where I first published this graphic of humankind's dilemma:
In short - the graphic says that, once our social problems get beyond the ability of our smartest person to track, it only gets worse from there. No amount of education of humans-acting-alone will catch us up. We need to get into the world of synergy, and learn how to be humans-acting-together.
Pentland's research, in my reading, further supports the idea that much of the "emotions" and "bugs" that scientists have disdained as messy and irrational are, in fact, from a collective social brain point of view, very necessary and valuable.
If we attempt to throw out all the emotional and human side of humans and make ourselves "rational", we only handcuff ourselves to the sinking Titanic model of humans as mini-gods.
Further reading in this weblog:
Active strength through emergent synthesis
How many are we?
Houston, we have a problem
Institute of Medicine - Crossing the Quality Chasm and microsystems (small group teamwork)
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