The next significant evolutionary advance for cognitive life forms is
more likely to be in the area of sharing information (and raising
confidence and integrity levels) rather than in having smarter
individuals. This may require a collateral increase in a tendency
(and appetite) for compassion.
To paraphrase W.H. Auden, our species must evolve to love one another
more, or we will merely die.
-- Pat Reilly
On Apr 10, 2008, at 12:24 PM, Sunny Fugate wrote:
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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============================================================
FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org
============================================================
FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org