Sorry to keep harping back to this, but it seems to be a nodal-point right now.
Here’s Cory Doctorow:
“The amazing thing about evolved solutions is that they’re typically counter-intuitive. The Santa Fe institute will recommend that town planners reduce the number of lanes on certain roads (rather than building alternate routes) in order to reduce traffic congestion. Southwest Airlines’ jets fly seemingly nonsensical routes (“Announcing the arrival of Southwest Airlines flight 432 from Denver, continuing on to Los Angeles, Philadelphia, Phoenix and Orlando”). Autonomous cellular towers will choose spectrum via a complex negotiation that will not only be non-deterministic, but also utterly unpredictable.
I think this points to a world that is not human-readable. We will be surrounded by autonomous systems that pursue optimization by zigging and zagging in ways that we can’t make any sense of, at least not without serious and determined study (just as now, a compiled binary is nearly opaque to human comprehension). What a strange world that will be — our virus and anti-virus software will collaborate across networks to modify themselves and their behavior; our spamfilters will collaborate in much the same way; search-engine results based on network analysis (like Google) will grow even more magical and defy comprehension even further.”
What are our responsibilities as workers in the “meaning-construction industries”? Should we just wave our hands up and say “these things defy comprehension”?
I think not. It’s Clarke’s 3rd Law again. It’s not magic, just sufficiently-advanced technology.
If there’s one thing we as a species feel perpetually compelled to do, it’s explain things to ourselves and others. We’ll figure it out.
» Boingboing.net: Cory Doctorow on Fruit Flies and Evolving Technology
Petafloptimism 
random, gnomic thoughts on magic, belief, technology:
* how long did it take for the greeks to realised that columns had to be distorted in order to look right?
* then there’s the leap of faith that brought about the differential calculus in the 1680s, that’s to say, the presumption of instantaneous change.
* then there’s Planck’s argument that a theory only gains credence when all the supporters of opposing theories die off.
* which makes me think of revealed religion. and actually makes me think: what would it have been like to have been one of the second-generation Christians? The ones just a few years distant from being around the man himself? What kind of things would you take as given, no matter how incredible?
* oh, and when you say ‘I don’t believe in fairies’, a fairy dies.
But let me think some more about this.
here’s some more, plucked from the astonishingly erudite alamut:
“What does Spinoza mean when he invites us to take the body as a model? It is a matter of showing that the body surpasses the knowledge we have of it, and that thought likewise surpasses the consciousness we have of it.”
(Gilles Deleuze, Spinoza: Practical Philosophy)
Which means, in part, something that I suspected a couple of years ago, that we need to look to Spinoza. Which also means that you ought to discuss this with Stewart.