[FRIAM] ** this Wednesday** Lecture May 31 12:30p - Carlos Gershenson: A General Methodology for Designing Self-Organizing Systems

[Bill Eldridge]

Phil wrote:
>
>     There's a good amount of growth these days based on trying to
>     improve efficiency,
>     workflow, best practices, processes, etc. Part of the quality
>     movement is about gains
>     made in eliminating waste and eliminating reviews, and instead
>     having quality as an
>     up-front and intrinsic effort.
>     [PH] That's good and bad.   Refinement is wonderful in itself in
>     lots of ways, but it's inherently a diminishing return endeavor,
>     like polishing.   You do the easy gains first and then
>     successively smaller gains take increasing work.
>
Wow, that's a pretty low expectation for efficiency and quality. In some 
ways it sounds like
the complaints about Total Quality Management from the Six Sigma crowd -
that the former focused on the easy gains in a localized area (technical 
only, say),
while ignoring the organizational needs as a whole. So you might have a 
spruced
up assembly line that runs really well but the organization needs a 
better sales force.
Combine this with an approach that gets IT focused on business processes 
with
enterprise systems, improved supply chain, better mobile access to sales 
support in
the field, better customer ability to configure and order...

Certainly the progress from dragging a hoe, letting a yak do it, letting 
a machine do it
has been more than "diminishing returns". It's been exponential returns. 
If you extend
the refinement to across-the-board: getting the crops to market (Kenyan 
roses through Amsterdam to the
US and Britain), improved crop survivability through fertilizer and 
genetic modification, etc.,
better handling of the company's finances through other methods, better 
user service
through automated info & purchases via the Internet, etc., you get 
something completely
opposite of "smaller gains taking increasing work". Now, at some point 
maybe that
efficiency process hits a wall, but 10 years ago that wall would have 
been predicted
as much closer.

Watch microprocessor development. Yes, its current way of improvement 
has some
expected diminishing returns, but combining those with hybrid 
techniques, going off
into nanotech, biocomputing, etc., there are still a few tricks up their 
sleeves. Progress
may stop being linear - it may become much more discrete as we shuffle 
around looking
for disruptive methods vs. enhancements - but it will quite likely continue.

I remember hand-soldering shops 25 years ago, which were completely 
replaced by
wave soldering, which is now being replaced by reflow soldering. Aside 
from the little
issue of inhaling lead fumes, it makes the electronics business much 
more flexible and
affordable.

Steel was one area where we'd supposedly hit technological peaks. During 
the 1980's
world production levelled off at 40 million tons/month, in the 1990's at 
a bit over 60 million tons,
and now we've jumped to 100 million tons. But often the old players 
aren't set up to take
advantage of new methods and technologies - they have too much invested 
in the older tech
and too many relationships, so that innovation would be cannibalizing 
their own profits.
Instead, it's the new players that are often able to reach new levels of 
efficiency that allow
them to compete with the entrenched leaders. If they didn't, they'd 
never get off the ground.
But improvement can mean efficient in production, size, location, 
response, quality, diversity, etc.
>
>      Major layoffs by large companies these days are often
>     a sign of improved efficiency (and sometimes go hand-in-hand with
>     additional hiring
>     of different types of positions).
>     [PH] That's the magic of the serendipitous growth we've had for
>     the past 500 years, that putting people out of work by innovation
>     has had an net effect of putting everyone to work at higher
>     wages.   That stopped in 1970.   Check the charts.
>
I've checked the charts - computer wages are rising even as offshoring 
continues.
I won't say it's all roses, but in general, it's producing wealth and 
more better-paying
jobs. We're also putting the rest of the world to work at better wages. 
Maybe we'd
rather be sending them charity checks, but this version is more 
sustainable, and they
get to grow their own economies as well. But it's not evenly spread.

>     The US has been doing a pretty good job of adapting to that
>     change, and getting more used to
>     continual obsolescence. In some ways we're reaching a
>     philosophical outlook antithetical
>     to traditional Amero-European society, in that stability becomes a
>     barrier to progress.
>     [PH] yes sort of, if it were an infinitely extendable game.  Only
>     our images of it are purely a game, however.   For example, the US
>     is presently transferring the ownership of our productive assets
>     overseas in exchange for current consumption at an accelerating
>     rate now my rough guess around 3% a year (a state and a
>     half).   It's bringing us a lot of prosperity.   Is that good?
>
This is more a political issue that's separate from the complexity issue 
(IMHO), so I'll leave it to the side.
>
>      
>>     Yes, but only half way.   One of the fascinating aspects of our societal
>>     response lags failure is the 'stop fixing it' movement of the new right
>>     over the past 40 years.  People had the choice and were drawn into the
>>     illusion that the intrusiveness of government response to the complexity
>>     of the world we're building would be solved by dismantling the
>>     government response, rather than finding a better way to address our
>>     growing problems.  My observation is that every complaint has some
>>     validity and should be constructively combined rather than separated.
>>
>>       
>     We've done a better job at dampening economic cycles than we have
>     at dampening political
>     cycles. I think we're farther away from over-idealistic
>     impressions of what government can do,
>     which is good, but now we have idealistic impressions of what
>     government can't do. Instead
>     it would be better to have good models of what factors make for
>     effective government in the
>     real world, including the recurring motions of balances and
>     corruption of power, .
>     [PH] Little will help if the complex systems we're driving ever
>     harder to perform miracles go turbulent.   No doubt better
>     government would result from combining the insights into common
>     problems from different points of view.   I think it's directly
>     symptomatic of our being pushed over the edge mentally by the
>     collision of growth and earth that we've settled on a government
>     that builds grand fantasies from a single view instead of
>     investing in research and planning.   The business cycles of the
>     past were irritating but they gave us pause and a chance for
>     change.   The fact that now we can go ever faster without
>     interruption has a hidden drawback in that it lets things get much
>     further out of whack before the correction.
>
One of the most stressful things you can do to a machine is stop it and 
start it again,
unless it needs repair or particular maintenance.
I would think we'd want less cross-coupling of different parts, and 
instead to have
some pieces changing while others are quiescent. Do we all have to take 
off on
Sunday for society to function? Or do we all simply need a day or two of 
rest every
week or so, and stagger the particular days? Is there an innate problem 
with the world
going faster? The earth is spinning some 1000 miles/hour, and yet I 
hardly notice it
except when the sun goes down.
>
>     I imagine it would also fall into the "sky continually falling"
>     motif, and without too much
>     stasis or unilateral motion. If that's true, a biparty system
>     tends to drift off into the extremes too
>     often in the cycle, whereas a multiparty system would be better at
>     balancing and instead of a heavy
>     pendulum, the weight stays towards the center of the zone. But
>     then maybe that's our odd advantage vs.
>     Europe, where we tack radically left and right and move much
>     faster than if stayed a center
>     course.
>     [PH] I haven't had a lot of chance to observe those systems but,
>     didn't Germany have a parliament and get a little carried away a
>     while back?   I think the core problem is not entirely solved by
>     having an open hearing of diverse points of view.    If social
>     movements develop with a winner-take-all attitude powered by a
>     long term campaign of character assassination for its opposition,
>     no structure will protect.  
>
Re: Germany, I think I was referring to modern Western-like 
non-critical-crisis governments, i.e. since 1952 or so. As far as 
modeling governments,
I think it has less to do with open expression and more to do with 
competing sets of beliefs or even power-bases and how they align, and 
how the system
allows them to align.

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