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

[Bill Eldridge]

Phil wrote:
>
>     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.
>     [PH] Well, yes, that's related to my mention that historically it
>     has always appeared that the new system taking over the old one
>     was on shaky foundations.   I fully accept that there are deep
>     perceptual problems in judging where the limits to explosive
>     change actually are.   I'm just quite convinced from what I think
>     is an set of principles that completely avoid the perceptual
>     problems, that pushing a growth system as a whole to a point of
>     failure is highly dangerous.   
>
>     [PH] Can you say that pushing exponential growth to failure is
>     a benign means of approaching our limits on earth? 
>
>     [PH] As I understand it there is still considerable room for
>     increases in raw computational power, even without the radical
>     increases some talk about conceptually.    That may facilitate a
>     greater ability to respond the the exploding side effects of
>     growth, or just help explode the side effects leaving everyone in
>     the dark as to how to respond.    It really depends on our intent.
>
>     [PH] Think about what limits the growth of living things.   An
>     animal's organs don't stop growing because they grow till the
>     animal starves or can't walk, or because the skin gets so tight it
>     prevents animals from eating.   It's not from outside causes. 
>      Living systems very largely stop their growth at some internal
>     point of completing the design, when they do in fact switch from
>     explosive growth to maturation and refinement.   It's that 2nd
>     step after the 1st that our global system is built to be unable to
>     take.   The unified world master plan is to encourage investors to
>     build whatever they think maximizes their profits, compounding
>     returns to build their wealth exponentially.   It's that magical
>     trick for creating revolutionary change, the compounding of
>     returns, that I think is truly dangerous to push to it's natural
>     failure limit.
>
>     [PH] yes, we can see long chains of positive sign exponential
>     increases in productivity from emergent new systems.   It's been
>     going on for 5-600 years  ( with an accumulative productivity
>     increase on the order of 1 billion!! ) and we're kind of used
>     to it.   Still, I think I can build a case of physical necessity
>     as strong as the ones for entropy or conservation of energy that
>     it's a dead end into an impenitrable wall of complexity if we
>     pursue it to failure. 
>
>     [PH] all absolutely correct, but we still can't find peace as the
>     sorcerer's apprentice.   We've got to know when to cool it.
>
There are different definitions of "failure". You seem to take it that 
we're trying to
grow until we explode. Many would think of growing until it stops pleasing.
I like a big car but I hate finding parking. I like a big house but I 
hate cleaning.
I see us as growing, refining, culling. I don't see problems on the 
horizon as
"failure" - I see them as more issues to deal with in normal 
progression. Nuclear
war between governments is less a problem, global warming is more of one.
But if we run out of fossil fuels, global warming's not a problem. In 
any case,
possibly half the world's population understands that fuel supply and global
warming are important issues, which should be enough to get something useful
happening.

Other than that, I'm not convinced fast growth is a problem. I'm waiting for
digital paper to make my books more portable (I'm halfway there, half my
books are digital, but my laptop's too bulky). I'm looking forward to the
next more usable wave of search engines, Web 2.0 features, mobile
devices and electronics. Cheaper, better color printing - that would be 
good.
Banking is solved, I have ATM's and on-line banking. Secure, honest digital
voting with a paper trail - that will help. Faster, more modern trains would
help (mag-lev in every pot?). Other than that, needs are basic, and little
more rushed than those of 100 years ago. When I want to walk or go
to the country, I go. When I want a city scene, I stay here.

>>          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.
>     [PH] It's the average wages I was thinking of.   Women's wages,
>     though still lower than men's, have a mildly positive exponential
>     shape over the past 35 years, but real men's wages are virtually
>     flat.   Of course an aggregate figure hides many stories, but the
>     lofty theory that making investors rich by putting people out of
>     work actually makes everyone richer was only true before 1970.  
>     We've continued to pour money into the hands of investors for them
>     to fix the problem, ignoring that they seem not to be investing in
>     that way anymore...
>
So are men subsidizing women in the workplace? Cool. Are more women 
choosing to stay home
in a return to 1960's norms? Are we prospering not through pay but 
through more lifestyle choices,
better access to health care, more gadgets and information? I remember 
having about 1-2 pairs of
shoes at a time in a middle class family. Now my kids have 8 or 9, 
though it's affordable (okay,
a lot come from second hand shops, but that's wealth as well). My, kids 
now have skateboards, snowboards,
ice skates, roller blades, bikes. Every house has 2-3 TVs, a hundred 
channels, walkmans with large
music collections, DVD & VHS players, computer games, etc. There are 
even large health food
supermarkets now, much more affordable than the small vitamin-focused 
shops of 20 years ago.
Ain't progress grand? Wages may be flat, real purchasing power isn't. A 
2006 van blows away a
1970 van in so many ways. And while we may not appreciate it, the work 
that we do in 2006 is
a lot less sweaty.

Part of our wealth went into security. I'm here in Prague, there's no 
worry about Russian troops
from the east, and there's little need to worry about a general 
all-encompassing conflict.
Any terrorist attack is pretty well assured to be small potatoes in the 
scheme of things - painful
for those affected, but much less than an Indian Ocean tsunami in both 
intensity and duration.
A Russian invasion or similar wouldn't have been.


>>         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.
>     [PH] I don't think the trade deficit is that political.   No one
>     is rooting for it, for sure, and no one seems to know what to
>     really say about it either except it is very strange to have
>     something so fundamental go so suddenly lopsided.   It doesn't
>     seem like a fluctuation that'll flip back the other way, but
>     something that reverses as a consequence of major events.   It's
>     just odd that we're balancing the books by giving away assets and
>     not doing much to stop it. 
>
I meant that I don't see it as having to do with complexity theory or 
technology growth, that it has more to do with politics in DC,
and I don't really want to talk politics of that sort.
>
>>          
>>
>     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.
>     [PH] Well, an explosively expanding machine being run by rather
>     short sighted humans may be a special case.    Our machine
>     is essentially blind and groping along.   At the moment were about
>     50 years behind in responding to global warming.   It's not
>     because the problem wasn't understandable from a 20's 30's 40's
>     50's or 60's point of view, but because we just were not thinking
>     that we might need to look anywhere near the horizon of our
>     impacts.  That concept was surely well within the sophistication
>     of business planners even well before that.   We just didn't do it.
>      
>     [PH] The marvelous thing to me about natural systems is their
>     flexibility and resilience and how they work so smoothly even
>     while networking vast collections of disconnected parts.   They
>     mostly work with an 'any ol time' delivery schedule and use it
>     with amazing efficiency where every last thing gets used.   We
>     don't know how to do that yet, but the potential is there.    Our
>     approach tends to be to focus on a single output and pull out all
>     the stops, use it up and build something else.   I guess I'm
>     making both a kind of aesthetic value judgment and just a simple
>     practical observation.   If you're not in a hurry, everything's
>     relaxed, but most humans are always in a big hurry,...   How that
>     tendency translates into our having built a life support system
>     designed to change ever faster until we make enough mistakes to
>     stop it is very concretely traceable.   It could, if anyone
>     wanted, be redesigned with some free market complex systems design
>     to work in new ways that would be both more creative and actually
>     sustainable.  
>
>     We get back to Al Gore's question.   We've got the knowledge and a
>     clear mission with otherwise unacceptable consequences.   Why does
>     that not provide us with the information we need?   I think it's
>     partly that no one is yet saying we should also correct the
>     underlying.   Investing for sustainability is not an investment
>     objective. 
>

First, Al's focused on 1 problem - good for him, but...
1) If you're in the Congo, you've got more pressing problems than global 
warming - you have
a war that's killed more than 3 million people in the last 6 years, 
rapes every day, literally backbreaking
work, extreme poverty, etc. Global warming also might help most of 
Africa's climate if it brings more
rain, which it seems to be doing. And you might have little to change to 
effect Global Warming.
2) If you're in Europe, Global Warming seems to be bringing more rain 
and more cold. Kind of odd,
but seems to be not the most beneficial change for the economy (as well 
as people's comfort, including mine).
But if you use mostly public transportation and recycle and pay 
$6/gallon of gas, what else are you supposed to do?
3) If you're in Indonesia, even though rising waters would be a big 
problem, earthquakes and tsunamis
are more pressing, as well as economic development.
4) If you're in China, you're spewing out gasses but you've got a mostly 
backwards undereducated poor
population to deal with. Cut back on growth and you might easily get 
revolution, and not necessarily
a pro-democracy everybody-happy-now one that leaves people more 
prosperous. And you already
cut back on number of children.

I'm also not sure why you place this at the investor's feet. That's only 
one part of the cycle.
Who's the buyer? How about "sustainable buying"? If your liver were 
failing, you'd stop buying alcohol.
A free market is not the only "institution". John Dunning notes that 
it's expensive to maintain a proper
free market, and that there are structural and endemic problems in 
markets to deal with. Structural
problems should be solved if possible, whereas endemic ones should be 
fixed only if the costs of
fixing are less than the cost of the problem. An externality like global 
warming is an endemic problem,
but the issue with fixing it is that you incur costs in other areas. The 
solution is non-obvious and painful
even if the problem is pressing. Sometimes the government should step 
in, sometimes not.

What are the market costs and market gains of Sarbanes-Oxley? What are 
the costs vs. gains on
the new hazardous substance law (RHoS) that's now in place in the EU? 
Was that the right thing to
do for an economy that's been plagued with slow growth? How many jobs 
will be lost, how many
products will be denied, how will that decrease competitiveness and 
lifestyle - these are the real questions
that have to be answered in formulating policy.


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