Informatic Middle Age

Are we entering the informatic middle age? In 1971 Giorgio Vacca, a member of the Club of Rome and an engineer that involved in the first, pionieristic attempts at computer modeling of complex itnerrelationship when computer power was ridiculously small – published “The Forthcoming Middle Age”. In this book he says that the systems we have build and on which depend the life of people will become so complex that we will lose the ability to understand and manage them. I remember this old book when I browse the web, and I find a sort of new religion, intolerant exactly like the Christianity of IV-V century a.C., when I see that books or at least reading are disappearing, like at the fall of the Roman Empire, and even when I see that in many branches of science the rigorous logical-mathematical way of thinking that was developed by scientists like Euclid or Archimedes is replaced by simple, intuitite thinking based on computer modeling. And also the economic system seems to be in deep crisis; true, BRICS and many other developing countries are growing exponentially, yet this growth is driven by the difference of costs between developed and developing countries, and it is difficult that it will last more than 20-30 years.


Middle Age lasted 1000 years. The Reinessance was largely a rediscovery of the wisdom and techniques of the ancients, but this rediscovery gave new life to the undoubtedly innovative ideas of Christianity. For instance, the idea of equality was substantially alien to the Ancient, that could not put on the same plane an aristocrat, a plebeian, or a slave, and was introduced into the estern Civilization by Christianism, and yet it became a leading idea only in XVIII century, almost two thousaad years after the “Tale of the Mountain”. We are entering in an era of regression, must we await after 1000 years a Reinessance where the power of informatic turns from regressive to progressive?