Thinking about complexity in the world we live in today

A few decades ago, I read a book called AI: The Tumultous History of The Search for Artificial Intelligence, by Daniel Crevier. In it, the late and brilliant Donald Michie is quoted as saying something like this:

AI is about making machines more fathomable and more under the control of human beings, not less. Conventional technology has indeed been making our environment more complex and more incomprehensible, and if it continues as it is doing now the only conceivable outcome is disaster.

More recently, when I wrote about complex adaptive systems, a colleague of mine, Reza Mohsin, pointed me towards another Michie quote:

If a machine becomes very complicated, it becomes pointless to argue whether it has a mind of its own or not. It so obviously does that you had better get on good terms with it and shut up about the metaphysics.

Last month’s tragedy involving the Air France flight over the Atlantic really brought this into stark relief, as I began to understand the implications of what may have happened. I quote from a Wall Street Journal article a few weeks ago:

A theory is that ice from the storm built up unusually quickly on the tubes and could have led to the malfunction whether or not the heat was working properly. If the tubes iced up, the pilots could have quickly seen sharp and rapid drops in their airspeed indicators, according to industry officials.

According to people familiar with the details, an international team of crash investigators as well as safety experts at Airbus are focused on a theory that malfunctioning airspeed indicators touched off a series of events that apparently made some flight controls, onboard computers and electrical systems go haywire.

The potentially faulty readings could have prompted the crew of the Air France flight to mistakenly boost thrust from the plane’s engines and increase speed as they went through possibly extreme turbulence, according to people familiar with investigators’ thinking. As a result, the pilots may inadvertently have subjected the plane to increased structural stress.

I stress that investigations are continuing, that the comments above are nothing more than theories at this stage.

Thankfully, not all events arising from the behaviour of complex adaptive systems are as tragic as the Air France crash. Some of them are downright comic. Take the accidental ‘takedown’ of YouTube by Pakistan early last year, where much of the world’s YouTube traffic was directed towards a page from the Pakistani ISP saying that YouTube access had been blocked; or the Skype meltdown in August 2007, where a large number of Skype supernodes were rebooted, after downloading Vista patches, at a time of very high activity. Others range from the Northeast Blackout to more recent gmail outages.

I spent some time yesterday evening with Dave Winer, Stowe Boyd and @defrag_ami, after the end of reboot11. The evening’s valedictory keynote had been given by Bruce Sterling, and I’d found it somewhat darker and more cynical than I would have preferred. Stowe felt that I should have seen it in a more satirical light, and he’s right. He reminded me that he himself taken a similar tack the previous year at reboot10, suggesting to the Utopians in the crowd that not all problems have solutions.

[Incidentally, I will always remember the Bruce Sterling talk as the one where he introduced the comic device of “my dead grandfather”, exhorting us not to concentrate solely on climate change ideas where our efforts will always be beaten by the relative performance of our dead ancestors.]

Understanding when and why a problem becomes intractable is an art not a science, something that two close friends (and erstwhile colleagues) Malcolm Dick and Sean Park have managed to teach me over the years. Neil Gershenfeld, alluded to something similar in his book When Things Start to Think. While discussing the work of Ed Lorenz, Neil says:

The modern study of chaos arguably grew out of Ed Lorenz’s striking discovery at MIT in the 1960s of equations that have solutions that appear to be random. He was using the newly available computers with graphical displays to study the weather. The equations that govern it are much too complex to be solved exactly, so he had the computer find an approximate solution to a simplified model of the motion of the atmosphere. When he plotted the results he thought he had made a mistake, because the graphs looked like random scribbling. He didn’t believe that his equations could be responsible for such disorder. But, hard as he tried, he couldn’t make the results go away. He eventually concluded that the solution was correct; the problem was with his expectations. He had found that apparently innocuous equations can contain solutions of unimaginable complexity. This raised the striking possibility that weather forecasts are so bad because it’s fundamentally not possible to predict the weather, rather than because the forecasters are not clever enough.

Which brings me to the kernel for this post. Tunguska. For those of you who’ve never heard the word, the Tunguska event is something that happened over a hundred years ago, in a part of the Tunguska river region in Krasnoyarsk Krai, Siberia, Russia. There was a massive explosion, a large swathe of forest was destroyed, trees were reduced to matchsticks.

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Recent research suggests that “clouds that form at the poles after shuttle launches are due to the turbulent transport of water from shuttle exhaust”. The ‘two-dimensional turbulence” model put forward by Michael Kelley and his team at Cornell is fascinating, insofar as it suggests a plausible reason for the Tunguska event.

I’d already been intrigued by the connection between aviation and clouds. I’ve had the privilege of spending time with Doc Searls, who has taken pains to try and educate me on the relationships between some of the cloud formations I see today and the contrails of aircraft.

So I did some personal research. Nothing significant, just a little digging around, mainly through Wikipedia. In the Tunguska event article, there’s alist of ten other events in the last 100 years where the symptoms suggested significant meteorite airburst. Of the ten, two had an explosive yield in excess of 10 kilotons.

We had the “Eastern Mediterranean Event” on June 5, 2002, and the Lugo, Northern Italy event on January 19, 1993. So I tried to correlate this with any significant space activity. And this is what I found. STS-111 was launched on June 5, 2002, with a UTS time remarkably close, and on the right side of, the eastern Med event. Earlier, STS-54 splashed down on January 19, 1993, again remarkably close to, and on the right side of, the Lugo incident.

Intriguing. Not conclusive, but intriguing nevertheless.

We live in a world where things seem to be getting more and more complex, as we represent physical things as virtual abstracts, then use software to operate and manipulate the virtual models.

We live in a world where things seem to be getting more and more connected, as devices and sensors proliferate while being reduced to nothing more than nodes on a network.

We live in a world where people are happy making snap decisions on limited and superficial information, where conclusions are drawn and propagated on the flimsiest of bases.

We need to be careful. Careful to make sure we do our root cause analysis correctly. Careful to ensure we have the right feedback loops in place for learning, so that recurrence is properly and sustainably prevented.

For all this we need patience and tolerance like we’ve never had before, and an avoidance of judgmental behaviour.

Maybe the continuing advance of complex adaptive systems means that we need to increase our understanding of the Serenity Prayer:

God grant me the serenity
To accept the things I cannot change;
Courage to change the things I can;
And wisdom to know the difference.

[While reading the wikipedia article on the prayer, I could not help but enjoy the reference to a Mother Goose rhyme with similar sentiments:

For every ailment under the sun
There is a remedy, or there is none;
If there be one, try to find it;
If there be none, never mind it.

Mother of Invention

I met an old colleague, Malcolm Dick, for a cup of tea this morning, and he pointed me towards a story that’s been going around for about five years or so.

It’s about Frank Zappa, and about an article he is apparently credited with writing in 1983, headlined A Proposal For a System to Replace Ordinary Record Merchandising. You can see a copy of the article here.

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Did he write it? I don’t know. I’ve ordered a copy of the book it is meant to be included in, so that I can tell for sure. In the meantime, whether he wrote it or not, it’s worth reading just for the sentiments in the article.

It matters to me because I’m intrigued by all manner of things to do with piracy: the arguments, the characters, the rumours, the downright lies, the posturing and gaming.

Take Rolex watches for example. Not the ones you buy from Rolex, but the ones available in China and Hong Kong and Singapore. The ones that cost you maybe $20.

Let’s figure this out. First, let’s take the person that pays $20 for a “Rolex”. Does he think he’s really buying a Rolex? Come on. So now think about Rolex the company. Does Rolex think that a buyer of a $20 “Rolex” is really in the market for a Rolex? I hope they’re smarter than that. So a person buys a product which he knows is not a Rolex, at a price which he knows is not a Rolex price, from someone who is not Rolex, and all the time Rolex knows that the buyer is not ever ever ever likely to become a customer for a real Rolex.

There’s even a replica Rolex market, selling stuff like this, for pretty stiff prices:

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The kind of fakes sold by Fancy Fakes retail at around 3-4 iPhones; that’s real money in any language. But it’s not Rolex money.

Sometimes I’ve thought that people like Rolex should take a leaf out of Paolo Coelho’s book (pun intended):

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Paolo is a great guy. Not just a great read, a great guy. The first time I met him, he told me all about Pirate Coelho, the “pirate” site for his blog. How he got into trouble for helping people run the site, and for recommending the site to people. In fact, he goes so far as to link to pirate download sites from his official site.

Somehow, I don’t think that Rolex will try and quantify each fake Rolex sold as Rolex revenue lost. I think the same is true for a lot of “pirate” films. People pay for quality. Does someone who pays $5 for a pirate DVD really count as being in the market for a $40 version. Perhaps, but I’m not that sure. I’ve never bought a pirate DVD. Nor do I intend to. I can afford to pay the going rate, and if I don’t like the rate I won’t buy it. Full stop.

When film piracy takes place in the Far East and in India, at least part of the reason for the piracy may be the economic one; a false market created by a false price. But I tend to think there’s a deeper reason, one of “artificial abundance”. I have maintained for some time that every artificial scarcity will be met by an equal and opposite artificial abundance. I have, similarly, maintained that the most retrograde and fundamentally stupid invention I have seen in recent years is the region code on a DVD. Which customer was that for? Which customer finds that useful? Puh-leese. Nothing more than a futile attempt to extend the life of a yesterday geographical business model at the expense of the customer.

Which brings me to the kernel for this post. A few days ago, I read an unusual article on BBC. Headlined Top 40 faces new digital shake-up, it contained the following chart:

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30.89m singles sold in 2003. 115.14m singles sold in 2008. This, despite recession and despite alleged piracy on gargantuan levels. Such levels that people are prepared to criminalise large swathes of humanity to stop the “crimes”. Intriguing, no?
I’ve seen some interesting stats for book publishing as well, stats that suggest that we would all do well to absorb Kevin Kelly’s majestic Better Than Free article.
There’s a lot of hype out there about “piracy”. There are a lot of people out there who are not pirates. There are a lot of people who spend a lot of money buying legitimate goods; there are some people who don’t. There are also a lot of broken business models out there, and the dialogue needs to change. People like Terry Fisher have been trying to change that dialogue for a while now, and need to be read and understood.

There’s an ant on your southeast leg

I’ve just finished reading Lera Boroditsky’s recent Edge essay “How does our language shape the way we think?”.

Absolutely riveting. Just the sort of thing I like reading on a Sunday night, get my brain into a different kind of gear altogether before I set off into the normal week. Professor Boroditsky seeks to resolve an age-old question: Does language play any part in the way we view things, analyse things, think about things? Are linguistic differences alone enough to drive a difference in the way we are?

As is often the case with such questions, we’ve had people come up with angels-dancing-on-heads-of-pins answers forever and a day; there’s been no shortage of hypotheses, the problem is with proof. Or, more precisely, the lack of proof. In that respect, the empirical tests devised by Professor Boroditsky and her team are fascinating in their simplicity and elegance: the tests appear to concentrate on how a particular language deals with descriptions of space and of time.

The case of the Kuuk Thaayorre, briefly detailed in the essay, struck me as wonderful. It’s interesting enough to have a community that speaks of direction strictly on a north-south-east-west basis, as in the case of “There’s an ant on your south-east leg”. What makes it move from interesting to spellbinding is when they apply the same principle when describing time. They show temporal motion on an east-west basis, so much so that the “direction” of time depends on the way they are facing at that particular instant. Fascinating.

Read the rest of the essay, it’s worth it. I’m elated because I’ve found one more thing to interest me, one more thing to delve deeper into.

Instinctively I think that while space and time are valuable starting positions for such analysis, there are actually two more. Relationships. And food.

On a strictly amateur basis, I’ve been consistently intrigued by how different languages describe relationships. For example, in many Indian languages, there isn’t a word for “uncle”. Well, there isn’t one word for “uncle”. Instead, you have words that describe “father’s younger brother”, “mother’s elder brother” and so on. So you don’t just say uncle, the word you use describes the position of the person in the family pecking order. I’ve just given a couple of examples, the entire spectrum of relationship is covered in terms of age and sex.

I tend to think that the detailing of the relationship in this way is indicative of something deep within the culture and represented by the language, similar to the way Eskimos have 12-20 words for snow. Why 12-20? Because Steven Pinker says so and I trust his work in this regard. In fact it was through reading Steven Pinker that I first started dabbling in this question of language and thinking.

Space and direction. Time. Relationships. And food.

Why food? I think that the words for food quite often show themselves to be singular or plural, to be individual or shareable. Like there’s a difference between “stew” and “chops” when it comes to lamb. Stew you can share easily, just add water or some vegetables. Chops you can’t, they’re designed to be counted out. The language of food used by a community quite often shows whether the basis of the community is an individual or a group. My gut tells me that a person’s ability to share or not-share is itself a cultural thing. Language is often a window into culture and values, so much so it can shape them. There’s a Chandler’s Law in there somewhere, in terms of the relationship between language and culture.

There’s probably a line to be drawn into Chomskyist debate at this stage, but I’m not going to go there. Not yet anyway. Nor am I ready to walk the Lakoff plank as yet, despite its obvious relevance. For now, I just want to play around with my instinctive reaction, to add “relationships” and “food” to the “space” and “time” put forward by Professor Boroditsky, whom I must thank for waking me up this evening.

Ignore Hugh MacLeod

When I was at university, one of the topics that fascinated me was that of long-term business cycles. I was held in thrall by the theories of people like Kitchin, Juglar and Kondratieff. Particularly Kondratieff, whose Halley’s Comet-like long business cycles mystified and haunted me.

In turn, that passion for Kondratieff led to my spending some time reading the works of Joseph Schumpeter; I was introduced to the concept of creative destruction and, almost as a corollary, to the essays of Ronald Coase and his views on transaction costs. All of which really formed the foundation of my views on the theory of the firm, a lifelong passion of mine.

Many years later, it was with that perspective that I read Clayton Christensen’s The Innovator’s Dilemma, and found similar themes playing out: the impossibility and yet the inevitability of creative destruction in the face of the established, the status quo.The idea wasn’t new, but the treatment was.

Some time before Schumpeter, Albert Einstein is reputed to have said “If at first an idea is not absurd, then there is no hope for it”. A fine sentiment, serving to encourage many entering, with trepidation, their personal infernos of creativity, striving not to abandon hope.

This notion of creativity as lonely and transient absurdity is at the heart of Hugh MacLeod’s latest book, Ignore Everybody, due out later this week.

It’s a punchy, concise book, containing 40 simple lessons, expertly articulated and deftly illustrated by Hugh’s trademark back-of-business-card cartoons. I’m loath to quote too much from it, I don’t want to spoil it for you. But here are some tasters:

“`Of course it was stupid. Of course it was not commercial. Of course it wasn’t going to go anywhere. Of course it was a complete waste of time. But in retrospect, it was this built-in futility that gave it its edge.”

…

“Your business card format is very simple. Aren’t you worried about somebody ripping it off?” “Only if they can draw more of them than me, better than me”.

…

“Your wee voice doesn’t want you to sell something. Your wee voice wants you to make something. Your wee voice doesn’t give a damn about publishers, venture capitalists or Hollywood producers. Go ahead and make something.”

There are a host of other gems: the warning that corporations attract “nonautonomous thinkers” who wander around in infinite loops of what-do-you-think, Baldrick-like in their lack of originality, their family brain cell paucity; the futility of trying to stand out in a crowd, the preference to avoid crowds altogether, evoking memories of Yogi Berra’s “Nobody goes there any more, it’s too crowded”.

And the powerful, powerful exhortation towards the end: “There is no silver bullet. There is only the love God gave you”.

Hooked? It’s a great little book, covering a lot of ground in a short space, applicable to a whole slew of professions: artist, writer, software developer, filmmaker, photographer….. and cubicle warrior. As long as there’s a creative urge in you, there’s good advice to be found in the book. A lovely little read, easy to absorb all the way through in a single sitting, yet suitable for delving into for little tidbits later.

So go ahead and buy the book, it’s due out Thursday.

And ignore Hugh Macleod. At your peril.

[Disclosure: I’ve known Hugh for a long time, I’m delighted to count him as a friend, and I am completely unashamed at giving the book such a glowing review. The book deserves it. Hugh deserves it.]

Thinking about innovation and business models

I’ve always maintained that people who “think opensource” work on useful things, solve problems, create value; they don’t focus on the business model at the outset but instead concentrate on the value they create.

In Peter Drucker’s words, “people make shoes, not money”. Make something that is worth while and people will pay you for it. Figure out what shoes you’re good at making and then make them well. You will make money as a result.

Knowing in advance how you’re going to make money from snake oil may sound like you have a business model; what you have is snake oil. And that’s the problem you need to concentrate on first, the fact that you’re not creating anything of value.

And sometimes the process of calculating and measuring benefits can come in the way. Many years ago, when I worked for Burroughs Corporation, I learnt this the hard way. This was the early 1980s, and software/services was just emerging as a business. Until then, all the margin was in hardware, so we ‘shifted tin”. We gave away the software and the services in order to sell the hardware. Then, as the cost of human capital rose, and investable capital became scarce, this equation began to shift. It became more and more important to understand the true cost of software projects before starting them.

So we instituted something called the Phase Review Process, borrowed from the US Navy if I remember correctly, and implemented it within the firm. Every project had to undergo a phase review at inception and then at each phase.

Which was all fine and dandy. Unless you were just about to start a project that would cost a total of £25,000 inclusive of everything. Which was less than the lowest possible total cost of the phase review process. But I was lucky, my management understood this issue, and it was mandated that projects had to exceed £100,000 in total planned cost before they needed to be put through the Phase Review Process.

Why am I writing all this? Well, some years ago I remember reading about something called the polypill; the newspaper articles referred to this paper which had been published in the BMJ in 2003.

The principle was simple. Six tried and tested medications to be combined into one pill that could cut potentially reduce cardiovascular disease by 80%.

When I first read the articles, I was intrigued. But I didn’t know much about the drugs involved. I knew nothing about statins, other than some vague notion that they were wonder drugs that combated high cholesterol with some wonder side effects. I knew even less about ACE inhibitors and beta-blockers, though I may have come across the beta-blockers as something to do with performance enhancement. Folic acid was something pregnant women took; and diuretics meant you had plumbing problems.

Aspirin I knew about, although I had no idea it could be obtained in cardio doses.

But that was in 2003. Since then, as many of you will know, I have had reason to get to know this particular cocktail of pharmacology quite intimately. Nevertheless, I’d forgotten all about the polypill.

Until a few weeks ago, when I read this on the BBC web site. The polypill could become reality in five years’ time, it said. And then I remembered what i’d read all those years ago, when they said … that the polypill could become reality in five years’ time.

And that made me think. Slowly. Very slowly. And my thoughts went a little like this:

One, cardiovascular disease is the single biggest cause of death facing humans.

Two, people had come up with a cheap and effective way of reducing the risk of cardiovascular disease by 80%.

Three, this had happened six or seven years ago.

Four, with a little bit of luck and a following wind, we may see something happen in five years.

Of course I’m oversimplifying, but I don’t believe I’m exaggerating. A strange world we live in.

I’m not by nature a conspiracy theorist. I believe man landed on the moon nearly forty years ago. I don’t believe in little green men or UFOs. Neither do I believe that Big Oil makes sure that substitutes for gasoline never surface.

But here is what I believe. I believe there is some evidence that the polypill does not exist today because it’s hard to make money from it.

Why? Because the ingredients in the polypill are all out of patent, all “generic”. Because the way drugs are trialled, it’s prohibitively expensive to bring a new drug to market unless you have some monopoly rents to come, patents to exploit and exhaust.

So it is possible that the cost of trialling a cocktail of generic drugs exceeds the potential income from selling the cocktail. And so no polypill.

No mention of the number of lives potentially saved and minor stuff like that.

Now I take statins, beta blockers, ACE inhibitors, diuretics, blood thinners and anti coagulants daily. You could say I have an amateur interest in all this. A passion, even, given that the medication has worked wonders on my heart and on my life expectancy.

This is not meant to be a diatribe against doctors or the medical profession or even the pharmaceutical industry: they have all treated me really well, and I owe them a debt of gratitude.

What I am trying to do is to point out that sometimes we hold up innovation by concentrating on the wrong thing at the start. And sometimes it’s because of the anchors and frames of the way we do things.

So I was thinking. Opensource people solve generic problems. Is there a way to opensource the trials of generic drugs, to change the mechanics and dynamics of drug trials for generics? Is there a way to adopt the opensource principle of “privatising losses and socialising gains”, the exact opposite of what happened during the credit crunch?

I wonder.

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