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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