There is only one Watson - and Siri is its prophet

There is only one traffic and Google is driving it.
The Cloud is everywhere, in everything.

E.O Wilson - Evolution selects on both group and individual level

E.O Wilson, the grand old biologist, has a new book out - The Social conquest of earth.
While I'm waiting for the mail man to bring me the book, I've listened to a few presentations online.
Wilson just did a Seminar of long term thinking - talk for the Long now foundation. If you are interested in evolution, you should listen to it.
One of his main points is that evolution in fact selects at both group and individual level - not just at the individual level, which has been the orthodoxy for many years.

In his recap of the talk, Steward Brand writes:
Wilson’s alternative he calls “multi-level selection,” where individual selection and group selection proceed together (with kin selection a continuing bit player). In our eusocial species, that mix of traits makes us “permanently unstable, permanently conflicted” between selfish impulses and cooperative impulses. We negotiate these conflicts endlessly within ourselves and with each other. Wilson sees inherent adaptive value in that constant negotiation."

Another good introduction to Wilsons book is this interview with Charlie Rose. At 19 minutes, it's amazingly comprehensive.

Economics as complex evolutionary systems

Eric Beinhocker by blindwatcher


A meeting of two great minds: Richard Dawkins interviews Eric Beinhocker, the author of “The Origin of Wealth”. The 15 minutes interview is a great introduction to the idea of seeing economics as complex systems.

A few quotes from Beinhocker's responses:

…Evolution is a recipe, an algorithm that’s at play in economic systems, just as it is in biological system. And that recipe values cooperation just as much as it favors competition

…We can think of businesses as designs, for instance a design for running a bank, and each of the banks along the high street will have a slightly different way of running a bank – a different design. And the evolutionary competition is a competition for you walking down the high street to determine which bank wil serve you best, which design will suit your needs better than the others.
Where cooperation plays a role, is that you can deliver on a better design if you have strong cooperation, so a bank where the employees work together as a team and cooperate can maek better service than a bank that doesn’t. And large companies with lots of employees cooperating, often have great advantages over much smaller organisations.

…Companies that engender large scale cooperation will tend to be – on average - more successful.

…We often talk of evolution as design without a designer, but in economic systems we have lots of designers - human beings who sit and think of things. And the key role, that plays is that it is a source of variety. When an entrepreneur comes up with a new idea in their garage, that’s adding variety to the system. We can’t predict whether that will work or not untill it’s actually tried, but it creates this teaming variety in the system.

Converging interests - individual and community

I just wrote a review of Robert H. Frank’s book, The Darwin Economy, for the Danish Newspaper Politiken, and it gave me a reason to re-consider some of the mechanisms behind the never-ending quest for growth, which seems to be driving our civilization into the ground.

Why do we always want more? Why can’t we just enjoy the stuff we have already acquired, rather than racing on without even taking the time to fully savor what we have?

As Robert Frank points out, it’s due to Darwinism. We are always in a battle with each other for position; the one with the highest position gets to reproduce. The crucial point is that position is relative, not absolute. Even though we are wealthy and have no objective needs, it’s not enough if those around us have even more. Even though a company makes a decent profit, it needs to make the most profits in order to attract investors. …And so the race is on.

It continues, even if pursuing our individual wealth means that we start to undermine the foundation for the entire community – as evident in the environmental degradation and depleting of natural resources. Apparently, as individuals we can’t help pushing our consumption to the absolute limit of what’s available.

On the one hands this is a great mechanism to keep humans evolving, and not growing complacent. We are always under pressure, and it keeps us fit. It’s a drive deep within us. We’re programmed to be ambitious rather than content.

But, it creates a growing conflict between the individuals’ immediate goals and the long-term good of the community. We may become stronger as individuals, but as a species, we can end up very vulnerable.

Robert Frank argues that we need the state to tend to the interest of the community as a whole. The state can tax harmful activities and thus steer individuals towards types of growth that don’t undermine the community. Furthermore, the state can invest the taxes in projects that create benefits for the entire society, but which we don’t have sufficient incentive to spend money on as individuals.

I’d like to go a bit further with the Darwinian perspective. The problem, as outlined, is that evolutionary pressure works on the individual, rather than at the species level – and this leads to conflicting interests.

One solution would be if we moved up a level, becoming a global organism.

We would continue to be individuals that act and think independently, but we would be much more conscious of how our actions fit in relation to the interests of the whole of mankind. We would - almost as second nature – have a clear understanding of our role in the community, and it would affect how we act as individuals.

One might assume that the stronger community would mean that we would build values that go beyond our own narrow and immediate interests, and that we would be more willing to subordinate our individual agenda and personal interest for the good of the whole system.

At a very general level, I believe that humanity may indeed be moving to a different level of Darwinian selection. We are becoming so tightly connected, so interdependent and our fates are so intertwined as a community, that we are, in effect, becoming a coherent organism. We are at a stage of evolution, where it is not only an issue of which persons get to survive, but whether we as a species can continue here on earth. Unless humanity proves fit for the current conditions, other types of life will take our place.

This sounds pretty far-fetched, but actually, it wouldn’t be the first incidence of such a Darwinian quantum leap. In their book The Major Transitions in Evolution the biologists John Maynard Smith and Szathmary Eörs described how living organisms have taken qualitative leaps upwards in complexity, when several separate but interacting organisms have become linked so closely that at some point they began to function as one.
Examples of this where when single cell organisms merged to former more advanced multicellular organisms, or when organs merged to former more advanced bodies.

As far as I can see, this movement towards larger levels of coordination is a constant trend throughout history – although there may be periodic setbacks.

So what does this imply?

It means that we will see more global coordination, global laws and decision-making.

It means that as conditions become tighter and tighter coupled, individual freedom and consumption will be much more contingent upon what the community can handle and accept.

It means that the distance from what is good for the individual and what is good for the community becomes shorter.

It means that we – as individuals, companies or nation states – will have to give up some sovereignty to the community we share our fate with. This requires trust and faith in the common project.

It means lots and lots of conflicts along the borders between those that we feel are inside the circle of our ”organism” and those outside it.

And it challenges us to define where we draw the circle of inclusion – although, in many cases, it’s doubtful whether we can decide who we share fate with, or if the lines simply emerge from necessity.

Economic bobbles are like traffic jams

I don’t usually listen to podcasts twice, but this one I did. 16 minutes.

One of the grand old men of complexity theory, Brian W. Arthur, gives a brief overview of why economics seen from a complexity point of view is different than neo-classic economics.

Brian Arthur mentions cars in traffic as an example of a complex, dynamic system.

“Traffic forms some sort of pattern at a given instant and the cars react locally to what ever that pattern is for them, and so in reacting they are recreating anew the pattern to which they further react. There is a beautiful causal loop”.

Arthur’s point is that the patterns and events in the economy arise in much the same way, but he argues that the models used in classic economic theory make a shortcut by assuming that the economy tends towards some equilibrium state as all players rationally adjust their behavior to balance demand and supply.

To Brian Arthur this type of top-down modeling is a simplification, which hides a lot of the important events and causes that determine how the economy actually develops.

As he explains it:

“In an equilibrium theory model of traffic flow, traffic would move along nicely, and settle at some equilibrium flow. But you can’t see phenomena in time, such as traffic jams. Traffic jams happen when there is a fair amount of density of traffic, and they happen spontaneously. Some small event, perhaps a dog running into the road causes a car to slow, that causes another car behind it to slow also, and very quickly you get this emergent structure of a traffic jam.

But you will not see it in an equilibrium model. And then the question arises; if we have put a massive filter in front of economic theory, if we took that filter away what else would we see? I think we would see something different and more realistic.

What you lose sight of, says Brian Arthur, are positive feedback, increasing returns, network effects, structure determined by accidents shaping the future as very small events will lock things in.

Complexity theory sees “an economy that is organic, one layer builds on top of what’s already there. It’s self constructing, the economy arises out of itself, forms of itself, gives new structures and new challenges, it's always boiling and roiling with change and opportunity. History matters, outcomes are historically contingent and that sets the scene for further outcomes that are historically contingent. It’s imperfect, it’s messy, but it’s realistic”

All copying is not the same

One of the crucial features of digital information is that the copy can be just as good as the original. This has opened the floodgates of copying and obviously made it a lot more complicated for anyone who has invested in creating digital content to charge money for access to it.

But what if the copy is even better than the original? If the one who copies does more than that – and actually adds to the original by adjusting, redesigning, tweaking, remixing…

At a system level, this is exactly what you want copying to lead to – enhancement, development, the emergence of new value.

This is the promise of a free exchange; to move beyond the original. Not always, but sometimes.

All copying is not alike. There are plain rip-offs, passive, even degrading copying. And there is copying as inspiration and re-combination.

It’s hard to draw the line exactly. The latter is a fundamental mechanism of evolution. We need it to stay fit for life. So you don’t want to stop the creative type of copying.