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

[Bill Eldridge]

Title: Message

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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