Law of Unexpected Change

J. Roughan

10 September 2009

Honiara

 

Often we humans do things thinking that the outcome of our actions will produce only what we originally intended. But more often than we would like to think about, something entirely new comes from our action which had never entered into our minds in the first place. This happens so often that it's got its own name: the Law of Unexpected Change.

 

For instance when humans started doing more and more gardening and less and less hunting and gathering to secure their daily food, something new happened. Not quickly, of course, but over time it became clear. Gardening for food took a whole lot less time than searching for it, hunting and then killing it, But this new way of getting one's foot meant people had extra time on their hands to do other things like making better spears, stronger axes, newer tools, making music, etc. etc. 

 

This new ability to produce more and better food allowed people to heap up in one place and stay for longer periods of time. That meant the beginnings of village life which later grew bigger until small towns emerged. This great change would later on be called the Agriculture Revolution and would see human beings creating towns and then, cities.

 

But there were other revolutions as great as the agriculture one. When Mr. Gutenberg of Germany invented a printing press in the 1500s, everyone knew that more and more bibles would be printed and quickly so. Few people, however, realized that not only would more and more bibles be printed but other types of literature would explode in numbers as well. Novels, plays, literature, and all kinds of printed stuff could be massed produced as well. Here was another case of human beings intending one thing and the Law of Unexpected Change working overtime 

producing something else again.

 

All around us at this very moment we are living through another REVOLUTION. It is called the Information Revolution. The computer has forced us into a new kind of world and like revolutions before, some things happen which we expect--the production of faster and more accurate information--as well as things we never thought about--games, films, music, etc. Preparing for the unexpected change is just as important as knowing about the things we intended would happen. 

 

The Industrial Revolution of the 19th century caught many off guard. Factory work, for instance, took the husband out of the home for long periods of time. Women's role began to shift from more than cooking and caring for children but managing the whole household for the good of the family. Even today we are still trying to catch our breath what this deep change has done to society, some of it good and solid, others filled with problems.

 

But our most recent Information Revolution is only beginning to take hold among us. Wait until the cell phone culture--Honiara's children already walk the streets with cell phones glued to their ears--starts to really take hold when it will be possible to contact any part of the Solomons with the flick of a few fingers on a cell phone. We will be able to speak to our distant relatives, friends and others while sitting at home and think such a luxury quite ordinary. But such a revolution brings ways of acting which we have never known and we hardly understand.

 

Just like other revolutions what we intend by this technology will be one thing and what really happens along side what we intended will press society in new ways. Nations in East Africa, for instance, already use cell phone to by pass commercial banks--a person can safely, securely and reliably transfer money from one end of the country to another.

 

Commercial banking firmsin East Africa had given the cell phone technology little concern and certainly never thought it could be used to transfer money.  But now these same banks are clamoring for government to limit cell phones from transferring money since such a practice is eating into bank profits. No one had thought a cell phone could do such a thing but ordinary people stretched the cell phone's ability. What else will the cell phone, part of the Information Revolution, bring to our own people in the next few years?