[FRIAM] Civilizations and complexity

[Sunny Fugate]

This sounds very much like the Isaac Asimov Foundation series'  
psychohistory. And, just like Hari Seldon, we might have something our  
ancestral civilizations did not; insight into our past, our present,  
and our problem.

-Sunny

BTW. This is my first post to the list.  I am a Computer Science PhD  
student at UNM and a Navy researcher working for Space and Naval  
Warfare Systems Center out of San Diego, CA.  My primary research  
interests are the human-machine interface, machine-mediated  
communication, language representation, cognition, and visual language  
linguistics.   More about our language research is at http://cs.unm.edu/~vail

I hope to make it up to a Friday morning meeting soon!



On Apr 10, 2008, at 11:01 AM, Jack Stafurik wrote:
> Here is an interesting article from the New Scientist applying some  
> complexity concepts to civilizations. The depressing thesis is that  
> civilizations are inherently unstable, and will collapse. This is  
> due to the fact that over time they evolve from simple hierarchic  
> systems (hunter gathers, tribes) with centralized decisionmaking to  
> large nation states and empires where decisionmaking is dispersed  
> and the evolving network is highly interconnected. Initially, this  
> may make the system (civilization) more robust and better able to  
> weather disruptions, but eventually the disconnected decisions (with  
> no entity responsible for or able to optimize the entire system  
> dynamics) result in a situation where shocks are amplified and  
> transmitted rather than absorbed. Scary.
> It would be interesting to see if a quantitative measure of network  
> complexity could be developed and applied to civilizations or parts  
> of civilizations, to identify danger points where the system must be  
> "balanced" to prevent or mitigate the effects of major shocks.
>
>
> Why the demise of civilisation may be inevitable
> 	• 02 April 2008
> 	• From New Scientist Print Edition. Subscribe and get 4 free issues.
> 	• Debora MacKenzie
>
> DOOMSDAY. The end of civilisation. Literature and film abound with  
> tales of plague, famine and wars which ravage the planet, leaving a  
> few survivors scratching out a primitive existence amid the ruins.  
> Every civilisation in history has collapsed, after all. Why should  
> ours be any different?
> Doomsday scenarios typically feature a knockout blow: a massive  
> asteroid, all-out nuclear war or a catastrophic pandemic (see "Will  
> a pandemic bring down civilisation?"). Yet there is another chilling  
> possibility: what if the very nature of civilisation means that  
> ours, like all the others, is destined to collapse sooner or later?
>
> A few researchers have been making such claims for years.  
> Disturbingly, recent insights from fields such as complexity theory  
> suggest that they are right. It appears that once a society develops  
> beyond a certain level of complexity it becomes increasingly  
> fragile. Eventually, it reaches a point at which even a relatively  
> minor disturbance can bring everything crashing down.
>
> Some say we have already reached this point, and that it is time to  
> start thinking about how we might manage collapse. Others insist it  
> is not yet too late, and that we can - we must - act now to keep  
> disaster at bay.
>
> Environmental mismanagement
> History is not on our side. Think of Sumeria, of ancient Egypt and  
> of the Maya. In his 2005 best-seller Collapse, Jared Diamond of the  
> University of California, Los Angeles, blamed environmental  
> mismanagement for the fall of the Mayan civilisation and others, and  
> warned that we might be heading the same way unless we choose to  
> stop destroying our environmental support systems.
>
> Lester Brown of the Earth Policy Institute in Washington DC agrees.  
> He has long argued that governments must pay more attention to vital  
> environmental resources. "It's not about saving the planet. It's  
> about saving civilisation," he says.
>
> Others think our problems run deeper. From the moment our ancestors  
> started to settle down and build cities, we have had to find  
> solutions to the problems that success brings. "For the past 10,000  
> years, problem solving has produced increasing complexity in human  
> societies," says Joseph Tainter, an archaeologist at Utah State  
> University, Logan, and author of the 1988 book The Collapse of  
> Complex Societies.
>
> If crops fail because rain is patchy, build irrigation canals. When  
> they silt up, organise dredging crews. When the bigger crop yields  
> lead to a bigger population, build more canals. When there are too  
> many for ad hoc repairs, install a management bureaucracy, and tax  
> people to pay for it. When they complain, invent tax inspectors and  
> a system to record the sums paid. That much the Sumerians knew.
>
> Diminishing returns
> There is, however, a price to be paid. Every extra layer of  
> organisation imposes a cost in terms of energy, the common currency  
> of all human efforts, from building canals to educating scribes. And  
> increasing complexity, Tainter realised, produces diminishing  
> returns. The extra food produced by each extra hour of labour - or  
> joule of energy invested per farmed hectare - diminishes as that  
> investment mounts. We see the same thing today in a declining number  
> of patents per dollar invested in research as that research  
> investment mounts. This law of diminishing returns appears  
> everywhere, Tainter says.
>
> To keep growing, societies must keep solving problems as they arise.  
> Yet each problem solved means more complexity. Success generates a  
> larger population, more kinds of specialists, more resources to  
> manage, more information to juggle - and, ultimately, less bang for  
> your buck.
>
> Eventually, says Tainter, the point is reached when all the energy  
> and resources available to a society are required just to maintain  
> its existing level of complexity. Then when the climate changes or  
> barbarians invade, overstretched institutions break down and civil  
> order collapses. What emerges is a less complex society, which is  
> organised on a smaller scale or has been taken over by another group.
>
> Tainter sees diminishing returns as the underlying reason for the  
> collapse of all ancient civilisations, from the early Chinese  
> dynasties to the Greek city state of Mycenae. These civilisations  
> relied on the solar energy that could be harvested from food, fodder  
> and wood, and from wind. When this had been stretched to its limit,  
> things fell apart.
>
> An ineluctable process
> Western industrial civilisation has become bigger and more complex  
> than any before it by exploiting new sources of energy, notably coal  
> and oil, but these are limited. There are increasing signs of  
> diminishing returns: the energy required to get each new joule of  
> oil is mounting and although global food production is still  
> increasing, constant innovation is needed to cope with environmental  
> degradation and evolving pests and diseases - the yield boosts per  
> unit of investment in innovation are shrinking. "Since problems are  
> inevitable," Tainter warns, "this process is in part ineluctable."
>
> Is Tainter right? An analysis of complex systems has led Yaneer Bar- 
> Yam, head of the New England Complex Systems Institute in Cambridge,  
> Massachusetts, to the same conclusion that Tainter reached from  
> studying history. Social organisations become steadily more complex  
> as they are required to deal both with environmental problems and  
> with challenges from neighbouring societies that are also becoming  
> more complex, Bar-Yam says. This eventually leads to a fundamental  
> shift in the way the society is organised.
>
> "To run a hierarchy, managers cannot be less complex than the system  
> they are managing," Bar-Yam says. As complexity increases, societies  
> add ever more layers of management but, ultimately in a hierarchy,  
> one individual has to try and get their head around the whole thing,  
> and this starts to become impossible. At that point, hierarchies  
> give way to networks in which decision-making is distributed. We are  
> at this point.
>
> This shift to decentralised networks has led to a widespread belief  
> that modern society is more resilient than the old hierarchical  
> systems. "I don't foresee a collapse in society because of increased  
> complexity," says futurologist and industry consultant Ray Hammond.  
> "Our strength is in our highly distributed decision making." This,  
> he says, makes modern western societies more resilient than those  
> like the old Soviet Union, in which decision making was centralised.
>
> Increasing connectedness
> Things are not that simple, says Thomas Homer-Dixon, a political  
> scientist at the University of Toronto, Canada, and author of the  
> 2006 book The Upside of Down. "Initially, increasing connectedness  
> and diversity helps: if one village has a crop failure, it can get  
> food from another village that didn't."
>
> As connections increase, though, networked systems become  
> increasingly tightly coupled. This means the impacts of failures can  
> propagate: the more closely those two villages come to depend on  
> each other, the more both will suffer if either has a problem.  
> "Complexity leads to higher vulnerability in some ways," says Bar- 
> Yam. "This is not widely understood."
>
> The reason is that as networks become ever tighter, they start to  
> transmit shocks rather than absorb them. "The intricate networks  
> that tightly connect us together - and move people, materials,  
> information, money and energy - amplify and transmit any shock,"  
> says Homer-Dixon. "A financial crisis, a terrorist attack or a  
> disease outbreak has almost instant destabilising effects, from one  
> side of the world to the other."
>
> For instance, in 2003 large areas of North America and Europe  
> suffered blackouts when apparently insignificant nodes of their  
> respective electricity grids failed. And this year China suffered a  
> similar blackout after heavy snow hit power lines. Tightly coupled  
> networks like these create the potential for propagating failure  
> across many critical industries, says Charles Perrow of Yale  
> University, a leading authority on industrial accidents and disasters.
>
> Credit crunch
> Perrow says interconnectedness in the global production system has  
> now reached the point where "a breakdown anywhere increasingly means  
> a breakdown everywhere". This is especially true of the world's  
> financial systems, where the coupling is very tight. "Now we have a  
> debt crisis with the biggest player, the US. The consequences could  
> be enormous."
>
> "A networked society behaves like a multicellular organism," says  
> Bar-Yam, "random damage is like lopping a chunk off a sheep."  
> Whether or not the sheep survives depends on which chunk is lost.  
> And while we are pretty sure which chunks a sheep needs, it isn't  
> clear - it may not even be predictable - which chunks of our densely  
> networked civilisation are critical, until it's too late.
>
> "When we do the analysis, almost any part is critical if you lose  
> enough of it," says Bar-Yam. "Now that we can ask questions of such  
> systems in more sophisticated ways, we are discovering that they can  
> be very vulnerable. That means civilisation is very vulnerable."
>
> So what can we do? "The key issue is really whether we respond  
> successfully in the face of the new vulnerabilities we have," Bar- 
> Yam says. That means making sure our "global sheep" does not get  
> injured in the first place - something that may be hard to guarantee  
> as the climate shifts and the world's fuel and mineral resources  
> dwindle.
>
> Tightly coupled system
> Scientists in other fields are also warning that complex systems are  
> prone to collapse. Similar ideas have emerged from the study of  
> natural cycles in ecosystems, based on the work of ecologist Buzz  
> Holling, now at the University of Florida, Gainesville. Some  
> ecosystems become steadily more complex over time: as a patch of new  
> forest grows and matures, specialist species may replace more  
> generalist species, biomass builds up and the trees, beetles and  
> bacteria form an increasingly rigid and ever more tightly coupled  
> system.
>
> "It becomes an extremely efficient system for remaining constant in  
> the face of the normal range of conditions," says Homer-Dixon. But  
> unusual conditions - an insect outbreak, fire or drought - can  
> trigger dramatic changes as the impact cascades through the system.  
> The end result may be the collapse of the old ecosystem and its  
> replacement by a newer, simpler one.
>
> Globalisation is resulting in the same tight coupling and fine- 
> tuning of our systems to a narrow range of conditions, he says.  
> Redundancy is being systematically eliminated as companies maximise  
> profits. Some products are produced by only one factory worldwide.  
> Financially, it makes sense, as mass production maximises  
> efficiency. Unfortunately, it also minimises resilience. "We need to  
> be more selective about increasing the connectivity and speed of our  
> critical systems," says Homer-Dixon. "Sometimes the costs outweigh  
> the benefits."
>
> Is there an alternative? Could we heed these warnings and start  
> carefully climbing back down the complexity ladder? Tainter knows of  
> only one civilisation that managed to decline but not fall. "After  
> the Byzantine empire lost most of its territory to the Arabs, they  
> simplified their entire society. Cities mostly disappeared, literacy  
> and numeracy declined, their economy became less monetised, and they  
> switched from professional army to peasant militia."
>
> Staving off collapse
> Pulling off the same trick will be harder for our more advanced  
> society. Nevertheless, Homer-Dixon thinks we should be taking action  
> now. "First, we need to encourage distributed and decentralised  
> production of vital goods like energy and food," he says. "Second,  
> we need to remember that slack isn't always waste. A manufacturing  
> company with a large inventory may lose some money on warehousing,  
> but it can keep running even if its suppliers are temporarily out of  
> action."
>
> The electricity industry in the US has already started identifying  
> hubs in the grid with no redundancy available and is putting some  
> back in, Homer-Dixon points out. Governments could encourage other  
> sectors to follow suit. The trouble is that in a world of fierce  
> competition, private companies will always increase efficiency  
> unless governments subsidise inefficiency in the public interest.
>
> Homer-Dixon doubts we can stave off collapse completely. He points  
> to what he calls "tectonic" stresses that will shove our rigid,  
> tightly coupled system outside the range of conditions it is  
> becoming ever more finely tuned to. These include population growth,  
> the growing divide between the world's rich and poor, financial  
> instability, weapons proliferation, disappearing forests and  
> fisheries, and climate change. In imposing new complex solutions we  
> will run into the problem of diminishing returns - just as we are  
> running out of cheap and plentiful energy.
>
> "This is the fundamental challenge humankind faces. We need to allow  
> for the healthy breakdown in natural function in our societies in a  
> way that doesn't produce catastrophic collapse, but instead leads to  
> healthy renewal," Homer-Dixon says. This is what happens in forests,  
> which are a patchy mix of old growth and newer areas created by  
> disease or fire. If the ecosystem in one patch collapses, it is  
> recolonised and renewed by younger forest elsewhere. We must allow  
> partial breakdown here and there, followed by renewal, he says,  
> rather than trying so hard to avert breakdown by increasing  
> complexity that any resulting crisis is actually worse.
>
> Tipping points
> Lester Brown thinks we are fast running out of time. "The world can  
> no longer afford to waste a day. We need a Great Mobilisation, as we  
> had in wartime," he says. "There has been tremendous progress in  
> just the past few years. For the first time, I am starting to see  
> how an alternative economy might emerge. But it's now a race between  
> tipping points - which will come first, a switch to sustainable  
> technology, or collapse?"
>
> Tainter is not convinced that even new technology will save  
> civilisation in the long run. "I sometimes think of this as a 'faith- 
> based' approach to the future," he says. Even a society  
> reinvigorated by cheap new energy sources will eventually face the  
> problem of diminishing returns once more. Innovation itself might be  
> subject to diminishing returns, or perhaps absolute limits.
>
> Studies of the way cities grow by Luis Bettencourt of the Los Alamos  
> National Laboratory, New Mexico, support this idea. His team's work  
> suggests that an ever-faster rate of innovation is required to keep  
> cities growing and prevent stagnation or collapse, and in the long  
> run this cannot be sustainable.
>
> The stakes are high. Historically, collapse always led to a fall in  
> population. "Today's population levels depend on fossil fuels and  
> industrial agriculture," says Tainter. "Take those away and there  
> would be a reduction in the Earth's population that is too gruesome  
> to think about."
>
> If industrialised civilisation does fall, the urban masses - half  
> the world's population - will be most vulnerable. Much of our hard- 
> won knowledge could be lost, too. "The people with the least to lose  
> are subsistence farmers," Bar-Yam observes, and for some who  
> survive, conditions might actually improve. Perhaps the meek really  
> will inherit the Earth.
>
> Read the companion article about pandemics
>
> Related Articles
> 	• Could a pandemic bring down civilisation?
> 	• http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=mg19826501.400
> 	• 05 April 2008
> From issue 2650 of New Scientist magazine, 02 April 2008, page 32-35
> ============================================================
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