Lecture Info

Personal introduction

I am Lorand Kedves, 40 years old system analyst, software architect and programmer. In spite of all odds, instead of Budapest, I work in Veszprém at Continental Automotive and live in Balatonalmádi with my wife and our three sons. This was a conscious and good decision for all of us so far.

I am a passionate thinker and analyst, I sometimes call what I do "applied philosophy", and I had great opportunities to test it. Among others I worked on data mining / artificial intelligence field around 2000 (until the dotcom crash); the national agriculture management systems for the Government at the time we joined the EU; telecommunication systems and enterprise solutions for Sun Ltd. until it was bought by Oracle; now on software quality assurance systems; and many smaller pilot projects. I saw the same tasks and problems in all these fields, and now I have a kind of overall vision about the internal structure and general role of all information systems. This is of course a boast statement, but parts of this concept prove their values in the past and present.

The passion for thinking does not stop when I turn to the real life. The human being, our history, economics and civilization are also systems that can and should be analyzed more efficiently if we really want to understand the present and consciously shape our future. I was a great fan of eastern philosophy and deeper science fiction from my teenage, later a spiritual community appeared for some years. Now I live and work as an exemplar of rationality, though my dreams help me when reasoning fails. I declare myself a believer – but only by my very rational definition of faith.

All what I see forms a coherent structure, and it says our race reached the end of its evolution path, and now this is time to decide whether to jump or fall. We, as a global civilization have too much power and too little self understanding, not to mention self control. To help in this, as a thinker, I translated important materials from English, wrote books, novels, participated in several talks about our present and past, chances and challenges. As a programmer, I search for my Holy Grail: a framework that can hold the IT replica of our physical world, together with our cumulative knowledge; and which allows all of us to access them and each other. These texts, and all source codes that were not private inside a company, can be accessed through my site, http://hajnalvilag.hu.

The lecture

I received the honorable invitation to the Rotary Club because of my open letter to the Prime Minister Viktor Orban. This letter is a serious criticism of his approach to developing new solutions in our changing world: being analyst and developer myself, I think I could point out several anti-patterns. However, this was one-sided, and did not contain the other part: our world, including our politics is a reflection of our own, community-level thinking and self acceptance. For any bad image it is not too efficient to blame the mirror. 

To balance this story, I first thought I should talk about how lucky we are to have an honest mirror, and that gives us not only chance but motivation to change. Later I thought to remove some of the mysticism, and be a bit more foretelling, so the title now is: Networks, Power and Motivation. It is still not far from the start, because the old proverb says luck is when preparation (network) meets opportunity (power); and it's only a chance that we can or can't live with, depending our true motivations.

Please be prepared for a really weird and dense rush from human brain, perception and reasoning, through global human knowledge and information/control network, to finally land at our individual motivations. The summary is that if we can understand and accept our real, deepest motivations, we can consciously shape them. This is the only way to change ourselves, and that is the only way to change our world. If we fail on this, and just let things go without forming and then acting on our best intentions, it leads to an accelerating erosion and only our nightmares can become true.

I plan to show some images from the film about John Nash: A Beautiful Mind. It might be beneficial to watch it beforehand to see the reason why.

[Edit: the formatted material of the lecture is here: Taste of Luck.]