We are all concerned about technology and innovation. We want to get a sense of how things will develop and to hope that we can anticipate the developments to come. The offerings by Kevin Kelly and W. Brian Arthur aim to help people get a sense of how technology develops. Kelly would know – he is the founding editor for Wired magazine. From him, the sense is that technology is fast becoming a branch of life by itself. There is first the observation that technology is developing in the trajectory of life; that as it is possible to think about the speciation of life into many diverse niches, so technology continues to specialise into smaller and smaller niches, becoming more ubiquitous. W. Brian Arthur describes the process of technological development – how new technology has to come from old technology; solutions to existing problems become the bases for new solutions. There isn’t a straightforward process as to how innovation comes about – old parts can become re-adapted for entirely new purposes unforeseen. The interesting details are in the individual processes where this has happened.

The two titles are related in how they talk about ideas. Gleick writes about the history of information and how information came to be understood. Gleick goes through the usual pantheon of heroes in information science – Shannon, Watson and Crick (the discovery of DNA and how it compresses the information needed for life), Vannevar Bush, von Neumann, up to the study of networks and the typology of information. Johnson writes about the history of innovation. Johnson notes how innovation comes from networked environments without any clear market incentive. There are numerous case studies of the discovery of the serendipitous discovery of the microwave background radiation and the conceptualisation of GPS.

Taking all 4 together, what do we get? There is unlikely to be a straightforward way to predict or foretell the future of technology/innovation. There is only the possibility of creating the conditions for innovation. Technological development is non-linear, and here the hope is that non-linear trajectories are precisely what one would hope for for the unexpected technological solutions to present issues.

A single idea by itself doesn’t stand for much, but one often finds a series of ideas, that when brought together, have powerful implications.

The 4 books above, when brought together, represent a compelling story about the trajectory of the world that we are on. Tainter’s Collapse of Complex Societies tells of the fundamental reasons why civilisations rise and fall. The main reason is simply that social organisations can become too complex that they collapse under their own weight when they can’t find new resources to solve new problems. Hence the western Roman Empire could not always tax the population while fighting the barbarians and improve food output in the context of changing climatic conditions. In this post, Collapse serves as the main meta-narrative – how the story of the world’s collapse might be told.

Systems Thinking, as represented by Donella Meadow’s Systems Thinking: A Primer, and the Limits to Growth: A 30-Year Update (LTG) represent another crucial element in understanding the processes through which a plausible environmental and socio-political collapse of the world might occur. While the words might sound abstract, these processes have real consequence. LTG belongs to the category of ideas that ought to be proven wrong. To cut the story short; LTG notes that the world is already in overshoot in the drawing of resources from the planet – renewable resources are being extracted without thought of their capabilities to regenerate; non-renewable resources are being extracted without thought of how they might be substituted with renewable sources; and the actual improvement of human welfare is being undermined by the increase in pollution and eventually by their actual health consequences. LTG’s example of CFC’s ban and the preservation of the ozone hole represents a positive example of how action is possible to avert a global catastrophe. Not all is lost, but the window for change before collapse is imminent is narrowing very quickly. With every year of inaction, we hurtle towards our own collapse in our interconnected world.

Annie Leonard’s The Story of Stuff is an illustrative example of systems and processes. Without explicitly using the language of systems thinking, Leonard nonetheless illustrates the flows and stocks of natural and human resources that come together to create the products that we take for granted. Plastics and the trace compounds used in their production present as-yet unknown health hazards, and preliminary findings of their role as hormone disruptors and as carcinogens are extremely worrying. The costs to human welfare in developing countries are tragic in all the sense of the word – from irresponsible toxic dumping to the horrid conditions of work – these represent a moral case against the excesses of the lifestyle of those in the developed countries. The entire system that creates the stuff in the first place is also clearly presented: the kind of economic system that believes in the unadulterated power of markets to bring about human welfare and the creation of demand via advertising and the grafting of status upon material goods at the expense of other expressions of human dignity.

What is the synthesis then? The only way to avoid collapse, as far as the books seem to indicate, is to embark on a lifestyle that reduces the emphasis on the material goods.To want less stuff, and to find contentment in the many other ways beauty and wonder are expressed. If the end goal is human happiness and dignity, these qualities can be attained through other creative means other than to demand more stuff in our lives. The slackening of this demand ultimately reduces the extraction of resources from the planet and the accompanying pollution; in the pursuit of being less centred on stuff, we can become more connected to the social milieu around us, and find the happiness that we so crave.

There are a couple of arguments to justify the compensation:

1. Singapore has a limited talent pool of capable people. Good salaries in the public sector should be good but not the best to attract/retain people who would otherwise leave for better opportunities in the private sector.

2. Singapore’s unique circumstances mean that comparisons with other countries might not be appropriate.

3. The commitment to clean wages mean that salaries should be transparent – there should be no hidden perks attached.

I have no issues with points (2) and (3). I find that they are reasonably defensible. The avenues for corruption and the erosion of public trust have to remain few and far between. The main problem that people have regarding salaries would then be (1).

In fact, there are 2 components for the arguments in (1):

(a): There is a limited talent pool in Singapore.

(b): People should be compensated well when compared with the private sector.

First of all, I should say that I am not a fan of the “small population” argument. Finland and Denmark have roughly the same population as Singapore. Israel has a population of less than 10M. The Netherlands has a population of about 15M. To say that these countries are bereft of talent would be an insult. To say that small population = small talent pool is simply a failure of imagination. Besides, I’m not a fan of the ‘talent’ argument – the view that there are some people with ‘it’, and others don’t – that to me, is a very impoverished view that fails to see people as having the capacity for ceaseless growth.

Then, there is the argument that people should be well compensated with respect to the private sector.The assumption here is that people are enticed by high salaries, or that high salaries are responsible for good performance.

There are 2 counter-arguments for the above view:

1. Wall Street and the near-collapse of the financial system – an empirical observation;

2. Behavioural economics – and the emerging view that above a certain amount of compensation, the performance level for cognitive tasks does not improve, but degrades.

In other words, paying people lots of money does not necessarily mean good performance.

Why should ministers have their own cars and own landed property anyway? Why can’t ministers stay in HDB flats and take the public transport, like most Singaporeans do? I find this hierarchical mental perspective extremely jarring, especially when these leaders are the ones who say that Singaporeans shouldn’t feel entitled to anything.

Yet, these are the myths that most of us live by, and accept at least subconsciously. I would rather these myths/assumptions be exposed in public spheres, and debated.

The above are the motivating questions to this post. To begin thinking about our what needs to change in SG, and what needs to stay the same, I hope that telling and acknowledging Singapore’s dominating narrative could help.

• We are a vulnerable country, and we must do what we can to survive and stay prosperous in the world.

Immediately after 1965, the only aim was to survive. And survive meant having a working economy. ‘Survive’ these days also means to stay rich and prosperous.

This ‘survive’ narrative has always been the overarching narrative behind our society and our political dynamics. Hence, the election manifestos offer differing views on how to continue surviving.

One interpretation of ‘survive’ is to have a dim view of human nature. This to say that people cannot be inherently trusted – large amounts of social controls and sanctions need to be established to restrict the freedom and the abuse that would otherwise happen. This could also refer to a perspective that a small minority of people will have extra intellectual capacities that the large majority would not have. There is a need to identify and ‘capture’ that small minority of people with extra intellectual capacities and put them to use in administering the country to ‘survive’.

To identify that small minority, construct an education system that streams people according to different ‘capacities’. This  creates a small minority of people that are deemed to have that capacity. Where possible, incorporated them into an ‘inner circle’ of elites and privilege.

In this narrative, economic rationality is the single biggest driver. To ‘survive’ meant a strong military, and a strong military in itself requires a growing economy. By not trusting the capabilities of the local population, the self-selected group of administrators turn outwards to attract the MNCs. Economic rationality becomes also the main measure of material well-being, which becomes the main indicator for well-being on the whole.

Hence, a national compulsory savings scheme is implemented. The material pursuit becomes ingrained in society, and becomes the main measure for individual status. The national narrative becomes ingrained in the personal – the measure of the person boils down to material gains, and pretty much nothing else. One gets educated to ‘survive and prosper’ – to hold their own in a world that recognises only material results.

Since there is no trust of the majority of the population, there are little social safety nets. People end up not trusting each other much, although they trust the administrators because of the recognised divide in the difference in people’s intellectual capacities. What they do must be right for the rest of us. The family becomes the only social unit (and one that is fraying); civil society is restrained in part also because people are too busy pursuing material gains. Religions become one conduit that legitimises the pursuit of material gains.

Not all of is bad or unjustified. Conflicts and riots remind us of the grim reality that others experience – safe in our air-conditioned buildings, away from danger and poverty (largely).

I do think there are alternative expressions of ‘survive’. I hope to write about them in future posts.

Joel Garreau’s Radical Evolution is probably the best nuanced book on technological developments. Garreau examines four spheres of technology evolution:

1. G – genetics;

2. R – robotics and artificial intelligence;

3. I – information – the ongoing developments in “cyber” space;

4. N – nanotechnology – the increasing miniaturization of components down to the molecular development.

Garreau takes cue from Kurzweil’s Singularity but goes deeper than that, in acknowledging other patterns of human development. For Garreau, Kurzweil’s exponential curves are not deterministic – we should not take for granted that these curves can go on forever. Yet, there is a case for the argument that human evolution is becoming engineered, as opposed to being driven by biological or cultural evolution, as has happened through human history. I think the term evolution should not be interpreted in the deterministic sense – there is no single pathway that the human race is proceeding towards. The term to use here is muddling, and muddling through is what is likely to happen despite the exponential curves. This picture of humanity muddling through these GRIN development is best represented through Garreau’s Prevail scenario, a sort of middle-of-the-road picture in contrast to Kurzweil’s overly-optimistic Heaven, and Bill Joy’s overly-pessimistic Hell scenario, where a single mistake can become catastrophic for much of life, human or otherwise.

The point of discussing all of these technological development can be described in the context of the larger question of how technology is going to change human nature irrevocably. Garreau references Fukuyama’s Our Posthuman Nature and Jaron Lanier’s thoughts on technology, and together they paint an ambivalent picture of GRIN developments. The consequences of these technologies together challenge many of our existing notions of what it means to be human, especially when these technologies disrupt the very deep equality that people still share with each other. The adoption of many of these technologies will mean a qualitative leap in human capabilities – watching the movie Gattaca gives a picture of what biotech enhancements could bring about, if not dealt with equitably. These questions are undoubtedly ethical in nature, and Garreau is able to weave these threads in a coherent fashion.

The Prevail scenario looks likely to be the picture that we will be dealing with, and these will be real questions that we will be addressing a few decades down the road. The development of the exponential curve is another question altogether. I want to differentiate between capability and capacity. Japan has the capacity/potential to start a nuclear weapons program if it wanted to, although as yet, it does not have a capability for it. The end results of the exponential curve in performance are likely to provide us with the capacity and potential to do all sorts of things, but the capabilities we will actually have is likely to be context drive. Studies in Science-Technology-Studies have revealed all sorts of path-dependence in the development of many of the technologies we take for granted, and it is the rare occasion that technical premises were the main drivers of the outcome. Nuclear power was one example, as is the QWERTY keyboard, and there are others. The translation from capacity to capability is a separate question.

My guess? We are likely to see Singularity-type developments in the timeline that Kurzweil demonstrates, but the outcome will be so different from what he envisions, that we won’t recognise it as such. Super-capable computing abilities will be ubiquitous, as are our mobiles today, and we won’t notice it. All sorts of intelligence will be available to us, including super-human contextual intelligence, but won’t be recognised as such. Self-aware systems will become one feature, but not the main feature. As for brain-computer interfaces – I don’t know. The futures are too far out for this post, although this topic is something I suspect I will get back to.

Someone vague familiar with systems thinking might think this to be a warning. Systems thinking must be some very big academic subject with a lot of information to plough through. Not so. The primer is a cute little book, barely over 200 pages, in a comfortable font size with straight writing.

Donella Meadows writes clearly and simply to illustrate the principles and power of systems thinking. The concepts of stocks and flows, reinforcing and balancing loops are all illustrated with great clarity. Reinforcing loops – that’s the technical term for what we term as vicious or virtuous cycles - the spirals. Balancing loops refer to a system or sub-systems that tend to check their own growth – so predator-prey relationships are a class of balancing loops.

The most important nuggets for someone interested in introducing changes in systems would be in the last chapter, where she lists out 12 ways to change the behaviour of a system. I won’t go through all 12 here, although a list is available on Wikipedia.

I’ll just list a few that I think are crucial:

6. The structure of information flow – how information is received, , perceived, and acted on;

4. Self-organisation – allowing for systems to change.

3. Goals – what is a system for?

2. Paradigms – what are the assumptions that underly the premises of a system?

Actually, chapter 7 is also important, because of its prescriptive nature, and it offers the following:

- Get the beat, watch how a system behaves;

- Expose mental models, and test them;

- Honour, respect and distribute information;

- Language matters – so use systems-terms such as loops, feedback, self-organisation; (but don’t abuse them!)

- Pay attention to the important, not just quantifiable;

- Make feedback policies for feedback systems (create feedback loops for feedback loops);

- Aim to enhance the system as a whole;

- Use a current system’s capabilities to grow itself;

- Locate responsibility in the system – design for intrinsic responsibility.

I can imagine these things be applied to all sorts of systems, especially socio-political cultures. Systems thinking is undoubtedly an important mental toolkit to figure out how the world works and how to enact change in it.

When we think about the things we want to change, the usual linear logic is to identify problems and figure out the individual factors that contribute to a particular problem. Systems thinking re-frames the entire trajectory of change, and examines the whole ecosystem behind the problem. Anything, from the economy to poverty to transportation issues are usually amenable to systems-thinking analysis, although they present us with the issue of how to isolate the specific issue. Unfortunately, bounding the system is something that’s not discussed as much – I can guess that can only come about with actual experience and practice in doing systems-thinking.

I had recently come across Joseph Tainter’s Collapse of Complex Societies. As the title suggests, the book explores how past civilizations (and ours?) were unable to cope with certain pressures of their environment and collapsed. The book qualifies the term “collapse” – in Tainter’s view, collapse is a justifiable choice when a society is unable to solve the various problems with greater complexity in their socio-political configurations.

Tainter offers the following points:

1. Human societies are problem-solving organizations;
2. Sociopolitical systems require energy for their maintenance;
3. Increased complexities carries with it costs per capita;
4. Investment in sociopolitical complexity as a problem solving response often reaches a point of declining marginal returns.

(p. 194)

Collapse then, is the reduction of sociopolitical complexity. This is manifested in the breakdown of a central administrative authority. Collapse can only occur in the absence of a political vacuum. Hence, the book describes the case of the collapse of the Western Roman Empire, and not the Eastern Roman Empire, which would have caused the expansion of peer empires in the immediate region.

Tainter goes on to explore whether the world might be on the verge of collapse. According to Tainter, there are “patterns of declining marginal returns” in several areas, including:

1. Agriculture;
2. Minerals and energy production;
3. Government, military and industrial management;

(p. 211)

and several others. The only way out of this is to seek energy subsidies – to seek a new source of energy that is abundant, and therefore, cheap.

Overall, whether or not the whole world is on the verge of collapse is difficult to say. An individual country can no longer collapse because of the inter-linkages between countries. The collapse of one country these days typically results in an intervention by the global community of some sort, either through a UN mission, or by a group of countries.

There is another way out of collapse. Collapse can be put off by the discovery of new resources. On Earth, the production of minerals and energy could soon be entering a phase of declining returns, and the only other way left seems to be the prospect of mining asteroids in space.

There is also a darker side to this discussion about collapse, and that is collapse might not be such a bad thing. Collapse occurs when the cost of sustaining otherwise complex socio-political arrangements becomes difficult in the face of stresses. Collapse is an option, and an entirely valid and rational option to boot. The natural question to ask is: how can we stave off collapse?

To stave off collapse, one could begin thinking about how to develop alternative and abundant sources of energy. Can we wait for the market to solve that out? In principle, the carbon-based energy supplies are not going to run out anytime soon, although they might become economically unfeasible to extract (and depending on the environment costs attached to their usage). The other solution has to do with how we can reduce the complexity of our various socio-political systems. The nation-state as manifest in our present day might as well represent an “optimum” complexity – and that means that the EU experiment might break down simply because of the costs associated with maintaining the current regime. Translation services for the 23 official languages in the EU costs up to 300M euros per year in the DGs alone. (http://ec.europa.eu/dgs/translation/faq/index_en.htm)

The nation-state could be an optimum arrangement when the people are fairly homogenous and when they share similar values and history. In this respect, nationalism becomes an entirely rational course of action. To reduce transaction costs between the people and the state, there should be congruence in the values and perception of the nation in the first place. Energy (both physical and administrative) would then not be needlessly expended trying to get the values of people in line with the state for every administrative action.

Yet there are sub-state actors as well. Beneath the state, there can be regional bodies with the attendant departments. Cities can be broken down into districts, and districts into sub-districts and zones and sub-zones and finally into neighborhoods. From this perspective, socio-political organization can be thought of as being fractal in nature; self-similar at every level of abstraction, but not quite the same. An appropriate imagery would be the branches of a tree. When socio-political collapse happens, the break down need not be total chaos – autonomy and allocative decisions devolve down the hierarchy. This also means a prior allocation of administrative resources to levels of authority below the hierarchy. At some point, some of these resources might be thought of as wasteful, but in the management of a crisis, power needs to be vested in the lower levels of hierarchy before higher levels of authority can take stock and take charge of the situation.

The sharp reader will note another conundrum here. In times of crises, the devolution of power might be useful, but in normal operating conditions, the investment of power in lower levels of hierarchy can be threatening to the higher levels of hierarchy. Hence separatist movements can happen, as with civil wars, when high levels of autonomy can be granted to regions. This issue depends on the relative levels of power between the central administration and the regional administration. The balance of power between the various sub-national polities is likely to be the result of historical trajectories. There is no clear answer. Singapore, as with all countries, will have to find their own solutions.

In case you didn’t notice, but our knowledge has changed, and along with that, some very widely-held notions of how people are.

We have gained new understandings in the idea of networks – how elements interact together in a system, and how some elements, by virtue of their position, can have disproportionate impact on the entire system. We have gained new understandings in complex phenomenon, of how simple laws can lead to phenomena thought too complex to be understood.

These new understandings apply to both human and non-human systems, from biology, to cellular organization, to the behaviour of ants and bees, or the flocks of birds and the schools of fish.

            We have gained new understandings into ourselves. Fields related to the cognition and the processes of the mind are creating a different conception of the human being, one that suggests the human mind is more complex than we have ever thought before. The human mind at birth is not a blank slate, nor is it infinitely plastic. The brain/mind question is not a simple hardware/software issue.

Our logic is flawed, and shaped by the millennia of selection processes, and cognitive biases are sometimes, manifestation of those processes, sometimes ill-suited to present circumstances. We are only beginning to understand the conception of creativity and how human structures either undermine creativity or allow it to flourish.

We are beginning to realize that monetary incentives will not always motivate people towards desirable behaviour, and how intrinsic motivations are often more powerful than material, extrinsic ones. We are beginning to realize, and look seriously again at the meaning of happiness and how we might arrive there, and how to shape the economic, social and political systems toward that end.

We are only beginning to tap the potential of the very small to the very large and everywhere in between. We are exploring the manipulation of atoms and the individual forces; we are tapping into the potential of microbes for the human ends, to fulfill human needs, of energy, and food. We are continually asking the biggest questions – what is the universe, and we are getting better at asking those questions.

We live in exciting times.