While I would not concur with the statement
> The concern is that technology changes rapidly, while people do not.
The implications of the challenges below have nothing to do with my
disagreement.
Tony asks,
> How can technology change by itself? How can technology change independent
> of the people who create build, maintain, and use the technology?
Technology CAN "change by itself" to the extent (significant) that it is a
complex adaptive system in its own right, controlled by nobody
(individually).
How it can change "independent of the people who create it" is by the
principles of emergence. That is, beyond a threshold of control, new
properties emerge that cannot be traced to the individual elements (or
agents).
This is the field of emergence and complex adaptive systems. It was
stated well 2,500 years ago by Heraclitus and expounded more explicitly
about 100 years ago by the "emergent evolutionists" and is now being
developed in detail at the Santa Fe Institute and by many others.
--
Michael McMaster : Michael@kbdworld.com
web:http://www.vision-nest.com/BTBookCafe/TIA/TIAmap.html
"I don't give a fig for the simplicity this side of complexity
but I'd die for the simplicity on the other side of complexity."
attributed to Oliver Wendell Holmes
Learning-org -- An Internet Dialog on Learning Organizations
For info: <rkarash@karash.com> -or- <http://world.std.com/~lo/>