Now What?
Living with perpetual evolution

Mark Hopkins Inter-Continental
San Francisco
November 13-15, 1997

Although we find such rapid change disorienting, natural selection has had billions of years to shape systems that can cope with flux. Nature therefore has much to teach us about the evolution of markets. The speakers at this conference will bring biology and economics together in an eye-opening, cross-disciplinary conversation. Together with the audience, our experts will explore the latest theories, and tackle the hardest puzzles, of our increasingly interlinked and intelligent economy.

The lessons that we draw from nature will prove more and more useful as our economy grows in complexity, wealth, and diversity. No honest biologist can claim to foretell the future of a thriving rainforest. After all, even a farmer's closely monitored, uniform fields can deliver disappointment. In the economic sphere, by extension, business leaders, lawmakers, and policy analysts will find five-year plans increasingly futile. Conference speaker Virginia Postrel thus advises us to stop trying to nail down market trends and instead learn to answer change with resilience.

As speaker Peter Huber observes, change has already bypassed central planning in the computer and telecommunications sector. The extinction of such dinosaurs as mainframe computing and state-sanctioned phone monopolies cleared the way for an age of technological evolution. Regulators can control such innovation only by killing it off, and even in this they seem likely to fail. In the view of speaker Gregory Benford, moreover, this explosion of creativity will pale before the advances that the biological sciences will soon bring. If so, the bionomic metaphor--economy as ecosystem--will have still greater relevance in coming years.

For a complete schedule in Adobe PDF format, click here (186k).