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We are products of complexity,
but our evolution has focused our
understanding on the situation of hunter gatherers on the
African savanna.
As humanity has become more powerful we can significantly impact
the systems we depend on. But we struggle to comprehend
them. So this web frame
explores significant real world complex
adaptive systems (CAS):
- Assumptions of randomness & equilibrium allowed the
wealthy & powerful to expand the size and leverage of
stock markets, by placing at risk the insurance and
retirement savings of the working class. The
assumptions are wrong but remain entrenched.
- The US nation was built
from two divergent political
views of: Jefferson and Hamilton. It also
reflects the development
of competing ancient ideas of Epicurus and
Cyril. But the collapse of Bretton Woods forced Wall
Street into a position of power, while the middle and
working class were abandoned by the elites. Housing
financed with cash from oil and derivative transactions
helped hide the shift.
- Most US health care is still
operating the way cars built in the 1940s did.
Geisinger is an example of better solution. But
transforming the whole network is a challenge. And
public health investment has proved far more
beneficial.
- Helping our children learn to be
effective adults is part of our humanity, but we have
created a robust but deeply flawed education system.
Better alternatives have emerged.
- Spoken language, reading and writing emerged allowing our
good ideas to
become a second genetic material.
- The emergence
of the global economy in the 1600s and its subsequent
development;
It explains how the examples relate to each other, why we all
have trouble effectively comprehending these systems and
explains how our inexperience with CAS can lead to catastrophe. It
outlines the items we see as key to the system and why.
Example systems frame |
Dietrich Dorner argues complex adaptive systems (CAS) are hard to understand and
manage. He provides examples of how this feature of these
systems can have disastrous consequences for their human
managers. Dorner suggests this is due to CAS properties
psychological impact on our otherwise successful mental
strategic toolkit. To prepare to more effectively manage
CAS, Dorner recommends use of:
- Effective iterative planning and
- Practice with complex scenario simulations; tools which he
reviews.
Complexity catastrophes |
E. O. Wilson reviews the effect of man on the natural world to
date and explains how the two systems can coexist most
effectively.
Adaptive ecology |
Barton Gellman details the strategies used by Vice President
Cheney to align the global system with his economics, defense, and
energy goals.
US vds alignment |
Kevin Kruse argues that from 1930 onwards the corporate elite
and the Republican party have developed and relentlessly
executed strategies to undermine Franklin Roosevelt and the New Deal. Their
successful strategy used the credibility of conservative
religious leaders to:
- Demonstrate religious issues
with the New Deal.
- Integrate the corporate
elite and evangelicals.
- Use the power of corporate
advertising and Hollywood to reeducate the American
people to view the US as historically religious and
the New Deal and liberalism as anti-religious
socialism.
- Focus the message through evangelicals including Vereide and Graham.
- Centralize the strategy through President Eisenhower.
- Add religious elements to
mainstream American symbols: money, pledge;
- Push for prayer in
public school
- Push Congress to promote prayer
- Make elections more
about religious positions.
Following our summary of his arguments RSS frames them from the
perspective of complex adaptive system (CAS) theory.
Strategy is the art of the possible. But it also depends
on persistence.
Inventing Christian America |
Charles Ferguson argues that the US power structure has become
highly corrupt.
Ferguson identifies key events which contributed to the
transformation:
- Junk bonds,
- Derivative
deregulation,
- CMOs,
ABS and analyst fraud,
- Financial network deregulation,
- Financial network consolidation,
- Short term incentives
Subsequently the George W. Bush administration used the
situation to build
a global bubble, which Wall Street
leveraged. The bursting of the
bubble: managed
by the Bush Administration and Bernanke Federal Reserve;
was advantageous to some.
Ferguson concludes that the restructured and deregulated
financial services industry is damaging to
the American economy. And it is supported by powerful, incentive aligned academics.
He sees the result being a rigged system.
Ferguson offers his proposals
for change and offers hope that a charismatic young FDR will appear.
Following our summary of his arguments, RSS comments on them framed by
complex adaptive system (CAS)
theory. Once the constraints are removed from CAS
amplifiers, it becomes advantageous to leverage the increased flows. And it is often
relatively damaging not to participate. Corruption and parasitism can become
entrenched.
Financial WMD |
Matt Taibbi describes the phenotypic
alignment of the American justice system. The result
he explains relentlessly grinds the poor and undocumented into
resources to be constrained, consumed and ejected. Even as
it supports and aligns the financial infrastructure into a
potent weapon capable of targeting any company or nation to
extract profits and leave the victim deflated.
Taibbi uses five scenarios to provide a broad picture of the:
activities, crimes, policing, prosecutions, court processes,
prisons and deportation network. The scenarios are:
Undocumented people's neighborhoods, Poor neighborhoods, Welfare
recipients, Credit card debtors and Financial institutions.
Following our summary of his arguments, RSS comments on them framed by
complex adaptive system (CAS) theory. The alignment of the
justice system reflects a set of long term strategies and
responses to a powerful global arms race that the US leadership intends to
win.
Aligned justice |
Jonathan Powell describes how the government of, the former UK Prime Minister, Tony Blair,
actually operated. Powell was Blair's only chief of
staff.
Mechanics of power |
H. A. Hayek compares and contrasts collectivism and
libertarianism.
Libertarianism |
John Doerr argues that company leaders and their
organizations, hugely benefit from Andy Grove's OKRs.
He promotes strategies
that help OKR success: Focus,
Align, Track, Stretch; replaces yearly performance
reviews, and provides illustrative success
stories.
Doerr stresses Dov Seidman's
view that employees are adaptive and will
respond to what they see being measured. He asserts culturally supported OKRs/CFR processes will be transformative.
Following our summary of his arguments, RSS comments on them
framed by complex adaptive system (CAS) theory. Doerr's architecture
is tailored for the startups KPCB
invests in. It is a subset of the general case of schematic plans, genetic operators and Shewhart cycles that drive all
CAS. Doerr's approach limits support of learning and deemphasizes the
association to planning.
Startup PDCA |
David Bodanis illustrates how disruptive effects can take
hold. While the French revolution had many driving forces
including famine and
oppression the emergence of a new philosophical vision ensured
that thoughtful leaders
were constrained and conflicted in their responses to the
crisis.
Voltaire's disruptive network |
An epistatic meme suppressed for a thousand years reemerges
during the enlightenment.
It was a poem
encapsulating the ideas of Epicurus rediscovered by a
humanist book hunter.
Greenblatt describes the process of suppression and
reemergence. He argues that the rediscovery was the
foundation of the modern world.
Complex adaptive system (CAS) models of the memetic mechanisms
are discussed.
Constraining happiness |
Isaacson uses the historic development of the global cloud of
web services to explore Ada
Lovelace's ideas about thinking
machines and poetic
science. He highlights the value of computer
augmented human creativity and the need for liberal arts to
fulfill the process.
Complex adaptive system (CAS) models of agent networks and
collaboration are discussed.
Arts technology & intelligence |
Haikonen juxtaposes the philosophy and psychology of
consciousness with engineering practice to refine the debate on
the hard problem of consciousness. During the journey he
describes the architecture of a robot that highlights the
potential and challenges of associative neural
networks.
Complex adaptive system (CAS) theory is then used to illustrate the
additional requirements and constraints of self-assembling
evolved conscious animals. It will be seen that
Haikonen's neural
architecture, Smiley's Copycat
architecture and molecular biology's intracellular
architecture leverage the same associative properties.
Associatively integrated robots |
Good ideas are successful because they build upon prior
developments that have been successfully implemented.
Johnson demonstrates that they are phenotypic expressions of
memetic plans subject to the laws of complex adaptive systems (CAS).
Developing ideas |
Strategic innovation |
Roger Cohen's New York Times opinion about the implications of
BREXIT is summarized. His ideas are then framed by complex
adaptive system (CAS) theory and
reviewed.
BREXIT |
Scott Galloway argues that Apple, Amazon, Facebook and Google
are monopolists that
trade workers for technology. Monopolies that he argues
should be broken up to ensure the return of a middle
class.
Following our summary of his arguments, RSS comments on these arguments
assuming they relate to a complex adaptive system (CAS).
While Scott's issue is highly significant his analysis conflicts
with relevant CAS history and theory.
Monopoly job killers |
The IPO of Netscape is
defined as the key emergent event of
the New Economy by Michael Mandel. Following the summary
of Mandel's key points the complex adaptive system (CAS) aspects are highlighted.
New economy |
Ed Conway argues that Bretton Woods produced a unique set of
rules and infrastructure for supporting the global economy. It was
enabled by the experience of Keynes
and White during and after the First World War, their dislike of the Gold Standard,
the necessity of improving
the situation between the wars and the opportunity created
by the catastrophe of the Second
World War.
He describes how it was planned
and developed. How it
emerged from the summit.
And he shows how the opportunity inevitably allowed the US to replace the UK at the center of the global economy.
Like all plans there are
mistakes and Conway takes us through them and how the US recovered the situation as
best it could.
And then Conway describes the period after
Bretton Woods collapsed. He explains what followed
and also compares the relative performance of the various
periods before during and after Bretton Woods.
Following our summary of his arguments RSS comments from the
perspective of Complex Adaptive System (CAS)
theory. Conway's book illustrates the rule making and
infrastructure that together build an evolved amplifier.
He shows the strategies at play of agents that were for and
against the development
and deployment of the system. And The Summit provides a
key piece of the history of our global economic CAS.
Bretton woods |
A key agent in the 1990 - 2008
housing expansion Countrywide is linked into the residential
mortgage value delivery system (VDS)
by Paul Muolo and Mathew Padilla. But they show the VDS
was full of amplifiers and control points. With no one
incented to apply the brakes the bubble grew and burst.
Following the summary of Muolo and Padilla's key points the
complex adaptive system (CAS)
aspects are highlighted.
Housing amplifiers |
Satyajit Das uses an Indonesian company's derivative trades to
introduce us to the workings of the international derivatives
system. Das describes the components of the value delivery
system and the key
transactions. He demonstrates how the system
interacted with emerging economies
expanding them, extracting profits and then moving on as the
induced bubbles burst. Following Das's key points the
complex adaptive system (CAS)
aspects are highlighted.
Derivative systems |
Johnson & Kwak argue that expanding the national debt
provides a hedge against unforeseen future problems, as long as
creditors are willing to continue lending. They illustrate
different approaches to managing the debt within the US over its history and of the
eighteenth century administrations of England and France.
The US embodies two different political and economic systems which
approach the national debt differently:
- Taxes to support a sinking
fund to ensure credit to leverage fiscal power in:
Wars, Pandemics, Trade disputes, Hurricanes, Social
programs; Starting with Hamilton,
Lincoln & Chase,
Wilson, FDR;
- Low taxes, limited infrastructure, with risk assumed by
individuals: Advocated by President's Jefferson & Madison,
Reagan,
George W. Bush (Gingrich);
Johnson & Kwak develop a model of what the US
government does. They argue that the conflicting
sinking fund and low tax approaches leaves the nation 'stuck in
the middle' with a future problem.
And they offer their list of 'first principles' to help
assess the best approach for moving from 2012 into the
future.
They conclude the question is still political. They hope
it can be resolved with an awareness of their detailed
explanations. They ask who is willing to
push all the coming risk onto individuals.
Following our summary of their arguments RSS frames them from the
perspective of complex adaptive system (CAS) theory.
Historically developing within the global cotton value delivery
system, key CAS features are highlighted.
National debt |
Robert Gordon argues that the inventions of the second
industrial revolution were the foundation for
American economic growth. Gordon shows how flows of people
into difficult rural America built a population base
which then took the opportunity to move on to urban settings: Houses, Food in supermarkets,
Clothes in
department stores;
that supported increasing productivity and standard of living.
The deployment of nationwide networks: Rail, Road, Utilities;
terminating in the urban housing and work places allowing the workers to
leverage time saving goods and services, which helped grow
the economy.
Gordon describes the concomitant transformation of:
- Communications
and advertising
- Credit
and finance
- Public
health and the health
care network
- Health insurance
- Education
- Social
and welfare services
Counter intuitively the constraints
introduced before and in the Great Depression and the demands of World War 2
provide the amplifiers that drive the inventions deeply and
fully into every aspect of the economy between 1940 and 1970
creating the exceptional growth and standard of living of post
war America.
Subsequently the
rate of growth was limited until the shift of women
into the workplace and the full networking of
voice and data supported the Internet and World Wide Web
completed the third industrial revolution, but the effects were
muted by the narrow reach of the technologies.
The development of Big Data, Robots,
and Artificial Intelligence may support additional growth,
but Gordon is unconvinced because of the collapse of
the middle class.
Following our summary of Gordon's book RSS frames his arguments from
the perspective of complex adaptive system (CAS) theory.
American growth |
Carl Menger argues that the market induced the emergence of
money based on the attractive features of precious metals.
He compares the potential for government edicts to create money
but sees them as lacking.
Following our summary of his arguments RSS frames his arguments from
the perspective of complex adaptive system (CAS) theory.
With two hundred years of additional knowledge we conclude that
precious metals are not as attractive as Menger asserts.
Government backed promissory notes are analogous to:
- Other evolved CAS forms of ubiquitous high energy
transaction intermediates and
- Schematic strategies that are proving optimal in
supporting survival and replication in the currently
accessible niches.
Emergence of money |
Eric Beinhocker sets out to answer a question Adam Smith
developed in the Wealth of Nations: what is wealth? To do
this he replaces traditional
economic theory, which is based on the assumption that an
economy is a system in
equilibrium, with complexity
economics in which the economy is modeled as a complex
adaptive system (CAS).
He introduces Sugerscape
to illustrate an economic CAS model in action. And then he
explains the major features of a CAS economy: Dynamics,
Agents, Networks, Emergence, and
Evolution.
Building on complexity economics Beinhocker reviews how evolution applies to
the economy to build wealth. He explains how design spaces
map strategies to instances of physical and
social
technologies. And he identifies the interactors and
selection mechanism of economic
evolution.
This allows Beinhocker to develop a new definition
of wealth.
In the rest of the book Beinhocker looks at the consequences of
adopting complexity economics for business and society: Strategy, Organization, Finance,
& Politics
& Policy.
Following our summary of his arguments, RSS explores his conclusions
and aligns Beinhocker's model of CAS with the CAS theory and evidence we
leverage.
Economic complexity |
Sven Beckert describes the historic transformation of the
growing, spinning, weaving, manufacture of cotton goods and
their trade over time. He describes the rise of a first global
commodity, its dependence on increasing: military power, returns for
the control points in the value delivery system(VDS), availability of land
and labor to work it including slaves.
He explains how cotton offered the opportunity for
industrialization further amplifying the productive capacity of
the VDS and the power of the control points. This VDS was quickly
copied. The increased capacity of the industrialized
cotton complex adaptive system (CAS) required more labor to
operate the machines. Beckert describes the innovative introduction of wages
and the ways found to
mobilize industrial labor.
Beckert describes the characteristics of the industrial cotton
CAS which made it flexible enough to become globally interconnected.
Slavery made the production system so cost effective that all
prior structures collapsed as they interconnected. So when
the US civil war
blocked access to the major production nodes in the
American Deep South the CAS began adapting.
Beckert describes the global
reconstruction that occurred and the resulting destruction of the traditional ways
of life in the global countryside. This colonial expansion
further enriched and empowered the 'western' nation
states. Beckert explains how other countries responded
by copying the colonial strategies and creating the
opportunities for future armed conflict among the original
colonialists and the new upstarts.
Completing the adaptive
shifts, Beckert describes the advocates for industrialization in
the colonized global south and how over time they joined
the global cotton CAS disrupting the early western manufacturing
nodes and creating the current global CAS
dominated by merchants like Wal-Mart
pulling goods through a network of clothing manufacturers,
spinning and weaving factories, and growers competing with each
other on cost.
Following our summary of Beckert's book, RSS comments from the
perspective of CAS theory. The transformation of
disconnected peasant farmers,
pastoral warriors and their lands into a supply chain for a
highly profitable industrial CAS required the development over
time: of military force, global transportation and communication
networks, perception and representation control networks, capital stores and flows,
models, rules, standards and markets; along with the support at
key points of: barriers, disruption, and infrastructure and
evolved amplifiers. The emergent
system demonstrates the powerful constraining influence of
extended phenotypic alignment.
Globalization from cotton |
The structure and problems of the US
health care network is described in terms of complex adaptive
system (CAS) theory.
The network:
- Is deeply embedded in the US nation state. It reflects the
conflict between two
opposing visions for the US: high tax with safety net
or low tax without. The emergence
of a parasitic elite supported by tax policy, further
constrains the choices available to improve the efficiency
and effectiveness of the network.
- The US is optimized to sell its citizens dangerous
levels of: salt,
sugar, cigarettes,
guns, light, cell phones, opioids,
costly education, global travel,
antibacterials, formula, foods including
endocrine disrupters;
- Accepting the US controlled global supply chain's
offered goods & services results in: debt, chronic stress,
amplified consumption and toxic excess, leading to obesity, addiction, driving instead of
walking, microbiome
collapse;
- Globalization connects disparate environments in a network. At the edges,
humans are drastically altering the biosphere. That
is reducing the proximate natural environment's
connectedness, and leaving its end-nodes disconnected and
far less diverse. This disconnects predators from
their prey, often resulting in local booms and busts that
transform the local parasite
network and their reservoir and amplifier
hosts. The situation is setup so that man is
introduced to spillover
from the local parasites' hosts. Occasionally, but
increasingly, the spillover results in humanity becoming
broadly infected. The evolved
specialization of the immune system
to the proximate environment during development
becomes undermined as the environment transforms.
- Is incented to focus on localized competition generating
massive & costly duplication of services within
physician based health care operations instead of proven
public health strategies. This process drives
increasing research & treatment complexity and promotes hope
for each new technological breakthrough.
- Is amplified by the legislatively structured separation
and indirection of service development,
provision, reimbursement and payment.
- Is impacted by the different political strategies for
managing the increasing
cost of health care for the demographic bulge of retirees.
- Is presented with acute
and chronic
problems to respond to. As currently setup the network
is tuned to handle acute problems. The interactions
with patients tend to be transactional.
- Includes a legislated health insurance infrastructure
which is:
- Costly and inefficient
- Structured around yearly
contracts which undermine long-term health goals and
strategies.
- Is supported by increasingly regulated HCIT
which offers to improve data sharing and quality but has
entrenched commercial EHR
products deep within the hospital systems.
- Is maintained, and kept in
alignment, by massive network
effects across the:
- Hospital platform
based
sub-networks connecting to
- Physician networks
- Health insurance networks - amplified by ACA
narrow network legislation
- Hospital clinical supply and food
production networks
- Medical school and academic research network and NIH
- Global
transportation network
- Public health networks
- Health care IT supply
network
Health care |
Deaton describes the wellbeing
of people around the world today. He explains the powerful benefit of public
health strategies and the effect of growth in
material wellbeing but also the corrosive effects of
aid.
Following our summary of Deaton's arguments RSS comments from the
perspective of complex adaptive system (CAS)
theory. The situation he describes is complex including
powerful amplifiers, alignment and incentives that overlap
broadly with other RSS summaries of adaptations of: The
biosphere, Politics, Economics,
Philosophy and Health care.
Improving wellbeing |
Donald Barlett and James Steele write about their investigations
of the major problems afflicting US
health care as of 2006.
Problems of US health care |
Glenn Steele & David Feinberg review the development of the
modern Geisinger healthcare business after its near collapse
following the abandoned merger with Penn State AMC. After an overview of the
business, they describe how a calamity
unfolding around them supported building a vision of a
better US health care network. And they explain:
- How they planned
out the transformation,
- Leveraging an effective
governance structure,
- Using a strategy
to gain buy in,
- Enabling
reengineering at the clinician patient
interface.
- Implementing the reengineering for acute, chronic
& hot
spot care; to help the patients and help the
physicians.
- Geisinger's leverage of biologics.
- Reengineering healing with ProvenExperience.
- Where Geisinger is headed next.
Following our summary of their arguments RSS comments on them. We
frame their ideas with complex adaptive system (CAS)
theory.
E2E insured quality care |
Robert Pearl explains the perspectives of a health care leader
and son who know that the current health care network interacts
with human behavior to induce a poorly performing system that
caused his father's death. But he is confident that these
problem perceptions can be changed. Once that occurs he
asserts the network will become more integrated, coordinated,
collaborative, better led, and empathetic to their
patients. The supporting technology infrastructure will be
made highly interoperable. All that will reduce medical
errors and make care more cost effective.
Following our summary of his arguments RSS comments on them. We
frame his ideas with complex adaptive system (CAS) theory
including synergistic examples of these systems in
operation. The health care network is built out of
emergent human agents. All agents must model the signals
they perceive to represent and respond to them. Pinker
explains how this occurs. Sapolsky explains why fear and
hierarchy are so significant. He includes details of Josh
Green's research on morality and death. Charles Ferguson
highlights the pernicious nature of financial incentives.
Bad medical models |
US healthcare is ripe for
disruption. Christensen, Grossman and Hwang argue that
technologies are emerging which will support low cost business
models that will undermine the current network. Applying
complex adaptive system (CAS)
theory to these arguments suggests that the current power hierarchy can effectively resist
these progressive forces.
Disrupting health care |
Atul Gawande writes about the opportunity for a thirty per cent
improvement in quality in medicine by organizing
to deploy as agent based teams using shared schematic
plans and distributed signalling or as he puts it the use of checklists.
With vivid examples from a variety of situations including construction, air crew support and global health care Gawande illustrates
the effects of
complexity and how to organize to cope with it.
Following the short review RSS
additionally relates Gawande's arguments to its models of
complex adaptive systems (CAS) positioning his discussion within
the network of US health care,
contrasting our view of complexity, comparing the forces shaping
his various examples and reviewing facets of complex
failures.
Complexity checklists |
Friedman and Martin leverage the lifelong data collected on
1,528 bright individuals selected by Dr. Lewis Terman
starting in 1921, to understand what aspects of the subjects'
lives significantly affected their longevity. Looking
broadly across each subject's: Personality,
Education, Parental impacts,
Energy
levels, Partnering,
Careers, Religion,
Social networks,
Gender, Impact from war and
trauma; Friedman and Martin are able to develop a set of model pathways,
which each individual could be seen to select and travel
along. Some paths led to the traveler having a long
life. Others were problematic. The models imply that
the US approach to health and
wellness should focus
more on supporting
the development and selection of beneficial pathways.
Following our summary of their arguments RSS comments from the
perspective of CAS theory. The pathways are most
applicable to bright individuals with the resources and support
necessary to make and leverage choices they make. Striving
to enter and follow a beneficial pathway seems sensible but may
be impossible for individuals trapped in a collapsing network,
starved of resources.
Promoting longevity |
Gawande uses his personal experience, analytic skills and lots
of stories of innovators to demonstrate better ways of coping
with aging and death. He introduces the lack of focus on
aging and death in traditional medicine. And goes on to
show how technology has amplified
this stress point. He illustrates the traditional possibility of the
independent self, living fully while aging with the
support of the extended family. Central
planning responded to the technological and societal changes
with poorly designed infrastructure and funding. But
Gawande then contrasts the power of
bottom up innovations created by experts responding to
their own family situations and belief
systems.
Gawande then explores in depth the challenges
that unfold currently as we age and become infirm.
He notes that the world is following the US path. As such it will
have to understand the dilemma of
integrating medical treatment and hospice
strategies. He notes that all parties
involved need courage to cope.
He proposes medicine must aim to assure
well being. At that point all doctors will practice
palliative care.
Complex adaptive system (CAS) models of agency, death,
evolution, cooperation and adaptations
to new technologies are discussed.
Agent death |
Sonia Shah reviews the millennia old (500,000 years) malarial arms race between Humanity, Anopheles
mosquitoes and Plasmodium. 250 - 500 million people are
infected each year with malaria and one million die.
Malaria |
Peter Medawar writes about key historic events in the evolution
of medical science.
Medical science events |
Using John Holland's theory of adaptation in complex
systems Baldwin and Clark propose an evolutionary theory of
design. They show how this can limit the interdependencies
that generate complexity
within systems. They do this through a focus on
modularity.
Modular designed systems |
Lou Gerstner describes the challenges he faced and the
strategies he used to successfully restructure the computer
company IBM.
Compartmented systems |
Grady Booch advocates an object oriented approach to computer
software design.
Object based systems |
Bertrand Meyer develops arguments, principles and strategies for
creating modular software. He concludes that abstract data
types and inheritence make object orientation a superior
methodology for software construction. Complex adaptive
system (CAS) theory suggests agents provide an alternative strategy
to the use of objects.
Software construction |
Tools and the businesses that produce them have evolved
dramatically. W Brian Arthur shows how this occurred.
Tools |
Matt Ridley demonstrates the creative effect of man on the
World. He highlights:
- A list of
preconditions resulting in
- Additional niche
capture & more free time
- Building a network
to interconnect memes processes & tools which
- Enabling inter-generational
transfers
- Innovations
that help reduce environmental stress even as they leverage fossil
fuels
Memetic trading networks |
E O. Wilson argues that campfire gatherings on the savanna supported
the emergence of human creativity. This resulted in man
building cultures and
later exploring them, and their creator, through the humanities. Wilson
identifies the transformative events, but he notes many of these
are presently ignored by the humanities. So he calls for a
change of approach.
He:
- Explores creativity:
how it emerged from the benefits of becoming an omnivore hunter-gatherer,
enabled by language & its catalysis of invention, through stories told in the
evening around the campfire. He notes the power of
fine art, but suggests music provides the most revealing
signature of aesthetic
surprise.
- Looks at the current limitations of the
humanities, as they have suffered through years of neglect.
- Reviews the evolutionary processes of heredity and
culture:
- Ultimate causes viewed
through art, & music
- The bedrock of:
- Ape senses and emotions,
- Creative arts, language, dance, song typically studied
by humanities,
&
- Exponential change in science and
technology.
- How the breakthrough from
our primate past occurred, powered by eating meat,
supporting: a bigger brain, expanded memory &
language.
- Accelerating changes now driven by genetic cultural coevolution.
- The impact on human nature.
- Considers our emotional attachment to the natural world: hunting, gardens; we are
destroying.
- Reviews our love of metaphor, archetypes,
exploration, irony, and
considers the potential for a third enlightenment,
supported by cooperative
action of humanities and science
Following our summary of his arguments RSS frames these from the
perspective of complex adaptive system (CAS) theory:
- The humanities are seen to be a functionalist framework
for representing the cultural CAS while
- Wilson's desire
to integrate the humanities and science gains support from
viewing the endeavor as a network of layered CAS.
Evening campfire rituals |
Brynjolfsson and McAfee explore the effects of Moore's law on the
economy. They argue it has generated exponential
growth. This has been due to innovation.
It has created a huge bounty of
additional wealth.
But the wealth is spread unevenly across
society. They look at the short and long term implications of
the innovation bounty and spread
and the possible future of
technology.
Following our summary of their arguments RSS comments from the
perspective of CAS theory.
Brilliant technologies |
Salman Khan argues that the evolved global education system is
inefficient and organized around constraining and corralling
students into accepting dubious ratings that lead to mundane
roles. He highlights a radical and already proven
alternative which offers effective self-paced deep learning
processes supported by technology and freed up attention of
teams of teachers. Building on his personal experience of
helping overcome the unjustified failing grade of a relative,
Khan:
- Iteratively learns how to teach: Starting with Nadia, Leveraging
short videos focused on content,
Converging on mastery,
With the help of
neuroscience, and filling
in dependent gaps; resulting in a different approach
to the mainstream method.
- Assesses the broken US education system: Set in its ways, Designed for the 1800s,
Inducing holes that
are hidden by tests, Tests
which ignore creativity.
The resulting teaching process is so inefficient it needs to
be supplemented with homework.
Instead teachers were encouraging their pupils to use his tools at home so
they could mentor them while they attended school, an
inversion that significantly improves the economics.
- Enters the real world: Builds a scalable service,
Working with a
real classroom, Trying stealth
learning, At Khan Academy full time, In the curriculum at
Los Altos, Supporting life-long
learning.
- Develops The One World Schoolhouse: Back to the future with
a one
room school, a robust
teaching team, and creativity enabled;
so with some catalysis
even the poorest can
become educated and earn credentials
for current jobs.
- Wishes he could also correct: Summer holidays, Transcript based
assessments, College
education;
- Concludes it is now possible to provide the infrastructure
for creativity to
emerge and to support risk taking.
Following our summary of his arguments RSS frames them from the
perspective of complex adaptive system (CAS) theory. Disruption is a powerful force for
change but if its force is used to support the current teachers
to adopt new processes can it overcome the extended phenotypic alignment and evolutionary amplifiers sustaining the
current educational network?
Education versus guilds |
Amy Chua and Jed Rubenfeld's New York Times opinion based on The
Triple Package is summarized. Their ideas are then framed
by CAS theory and reviewed.
What drives success |
Peter Turchin describes how major pre-industrial empires
developed due to effects of geographic boundaries constraining
the empires and their neighbors' interactions. Turchin
shows how the asymmetries of breeding rates and resource growth
rates results in dynamic cycles within cycles. After the
summary of Turchin's book complex adaptive system (CAS) theory
is used to augment Turchins findings.
Warrior groups |
Through the operation of three different food chains Michael
Pollan explores their relative merits. The application of
complex adaptive system (CAS)
theory highlights the value of evolutionary
testing of the food chain.
Natural systems |
E. O. Wilson & Bert Holldobler illustrate how bundled cooperative strategies can
take hold. Various social insects have developed
strategies which have allowed them to capture the most valuable
available niches. Like humans they invest in
specialization and cooperate to subdue larger, well equipped
competitors.
Insect superorganisms |
Computational
theory of the mind and evolutionary
psychology provide Steven Pinker with a framework on which
to develop his psychological arguments about the mind and its
relationship to the brain. Humans captured a cognitive niche by
natural selection 'building out'
specialized aspects of their bodies and brains resulting in a system of mental organs
we call the mind.
He garnishes and defends the framework with findings from
psychology regarding: The visual
system - an example of natural
selections solutions to the sensory challenges
of inverse
modeling of our
environment; Intensions - where
he highlights the challenges of hunter-gatherers -
making sense of the objects
they perceive and predicting what they imply and natural
selections powerful solutions; Emotions - which Pinker argues are
essential to human prioritizing and decision making; Relationships - natural selection's
strategies for coping with the most dangerous competitors, other
people. He helps us understand marriage, friendships and war.
These conclusions allow him to understand the development and
maintenance of higher callings: Art, Music, Literature, Humor,
Religion, & Philosophy; and develop a position on the meaning of life.
Complex adaptive system (CAS) modeling allows RSS to frame Pinker's arguments
within humanity's current situation, induced by powerful evolved
amplifiers: Globalization,
Cliodynamics, The green revolution
and resource
bottlenecks; melding his powerful predictions of the
drivers of human behavior with system wide constraints.
The implications are discussed.
Computationally adapted mind |
The stages of development of the human female, including how her brain changes and the
impacts of this on her 'reality' across a full life span:
conception, infantile
puberty, girlhood,
juvenile pause, adolescence, dating years, motherhood, post-menopause; are
described. Brizendine notes the significant difference in
how emotions are processed
by women compared to men.
Complex adaptive system (CAS) theory associates the stages with
the evolutionary under-pinning, psychological implications and
behavioral CAS.
Evolved female brain |
The complexity of behavior is explored through Sapolsky
developing scenarios of our best and worst behaviors across time
spans, and scientific subjects including: anthropology,
psychology, neuroscience, sociology. The rich network of adaptive flows he
outlines provides insights and highlight challenges for
scientific research on behavior.
Complex adaptive system (CAS) theory builds on Sapolsky's
details highlighting the strategies that evolution has captured
to successfully enter niches we now occupy.
CAS behavior |
Carlo Rovelli resolves the paradox of time.
Rovelli initially explains that low level physics does not
include time:
- A present that is common throughout the universe does not exist
- Events are only partially ordered. The present is
localized
- The difference between past and future is not foundational.
It occurs because of state that through our blurring appears
particular to us
- Time passes at different speeds dependent on where we are and how fast we travel
- Time's rhythms are due to
the gravitational field
- Our quantized physics shows neither
space nor time, just processes transforming physical
variables.
- Fundamentally there is no time. The basic equations
evolve together with events, not things
Then he
explains how in a physical world without time its perception can
emerge:
- Our familiar time emerges
- Our interaction with the world is partial, blurred,
quantum indeterminate
- The ignorance determines the existence of thermal time
and entropy that quantifies our uncertainty
- Directionality of time is real
but perspectival. The entropy of the world in
relation to us increases with our thermal time. The
growth of entropy distinguishes past from future: resulting in
traces and memories
- Each human is a
unified being because: we reflect the world, we
formed an image of a unified entity by
interacting with our kind, and because of the perspective
of memory
- The variable time: is one
of the variables of the gravitational field.
With our scale we don't
register quantum fluctuations, making space-time
appear determined. At our speed we don't perceive
differences in time of different clocks, so we experience
a single time: universal, uniform, ordered; which is
helpful to our decisions
Emergence of time |
Consciousness has confounded philosophers and scientists for
centuries. Now it is finally being characterized
scientifically. That required a transformation of
approach.
Realizing that consciousness was ill-defined neuroscientist
Stanislas Dehaene and others characterized and focused on conscious access.
In the book he outlines the limitations of previous
psychological dogma. Instead his use of subjective
assessments opened the
window to contrast totally unconscious
brain activity with those
including consciousness.
He describes the research methods. He explains the
contribution of new sensors and probes that allowed the
psychological findings to be correlated, and causally related to
specific neural activity.
He describes the theory of the brain he uses, the 'global neuronal
workspace' to position all the experimental details into a
whole.
He reviews how both theory and practice support diagnosis and
treatment of real world mental illnesses.
The implications of Dehaene's findings for subsequent
consciousness research are outlined.
Complex adaptive system (CAS) models of the brain's development and
operation introduce constraints which are discussed.
Conscious access |
Reading and writing present a conundrum. The reader's
brain contains neural networks tuned to reading. With
imaging a written word can be followed as it progresses from the
retina through a functional chain that asks: Are these letters?
What do they look like? Are they a word? What does it sound
like? How is it pronounced? What does it mean? Dehaene
explains the importance of
education in tuning the brain's networks for reading as
well as good strategies for teaching reading and countering dyslexia. But
he notes the reading
networks developed far too recently to have directly evolved.
And Dehaene asks why humans are unique in developing
reading and culture.
He explains the cultural
engineering that shaped writing to human vision and the exaptations and neuronal structures that
enable and constrain reading and culture.
Dehaene's arguments show how cellular, whole animal and cultural
complex adaptive system (CAS) are
related. We review his explanations in CAS terms and use
his insights to link cultural CAS that emerged based on reading
and writing with other levels of CAS from which they emerge.
Evolved reading |
Read Montague explores how brains make decisions. In
particular he explains how:
- Evolution can create indirect abstract models, such as the dopamine system, that
allow
- Life changing real-time
decisions to be made, and how
- Schematic structures provide
encodings of computable control
structures which operate through and on incomputable,
schematically encoded, physically active structures and
operationally associated production
functions.
Receptor indirection |
Daniel Goleman and Richard Davidson describe a scientific
investigation of meditation's
impact on the brain. They introduce
the book by describing their experiences with meditation,
science and the research establishment, their friendship, how
meditation is now used in two distinct ways: deep - leading to altered
traits & wide - that can reach the multitudes; which
the book reviews as it critiques the claims and research used to
back them up.
Goleman and Davidson describe meeting as Harvard psychology
graduate students, interested in consciousness, and how minds
work. They rebel against the behavioral orthodoxy, visit Asia and discover the Eastern
tradition of exploring and altering the mind.
Goleman had travelled to Sri Lanka to understand an Asian model
of the mind, which he presented to the undergraduates at
Harvard. Goleman and Davidson developed it into a shared vision of
consciousness. It took over twenty years for
scientific theory and experimental data to catch up and align
with this model. Much of the prior
experimental data had to be abandoned.
They introduce meditation's
impact on the amygdala
responding to pain and stress.
They look at the changes in:
- Stress
- Compassion
- Attention
- Self-awareness; and the
potential for use of mediation
in psychiatry.
And they warn of the occurrence of dark
nights.
They detail how scientists were able to study the brains of Tibetan meditation masters,
starting with Mingyur Rinpoche,
and detect meditation altering
traits.
Finally they discuss the potential
benefits of meditation and strategies to distribute it
broadly to a busy America.
Meditating neurons |
Tara Brach was worried from
a young age that there was something terribly wrong with
her: she like many others felt unworthy. She responded
by developing Radical
Acceptance. Brach then explains the steps in
applying it: pause,
greet what happens next with unconditional
friendliness; allowing us to:
- Initially attend to the sensations
of our body,
- Accept the
wanting self and discover its source of boundless
love.
- Welcome
fear with a widening
attention, accept the pain of death and become
free.
- Use adversity as a gateway to limitless compassion for ourselves
and others.
- Focus on
our basic goodness to counter Western culture turning anger, at being betrayed,
towards ourselves. Extend observing this goodness in
everyone. This enables the use of loving-kindness.
- Leverage
friendships to understand more about our shared nature
and strengthen Radical Acceptance.
- Realize our Buddha nature.
Complex adaptive system (CAS) theory describes the emergence of
the dualistic self and the tree of life linked by the genetic
code and machinery. It provides an analog of the Buddhist
presence.
Compassionate CAS |
The influence of childhood on behavior is significant.
Enneagrams define personality
types: Reformer, Helper, Achiever,
Individualist, Investigator, Loyalist, Enthusiast,
Challenger and Peacemaker; based on the impact of
childhood driven wounds.
The Enneagram becomes
a tool to enable interested people to transform from the
emotionally wounded base, hidden within
the armor of the type, to the liberated underlying essence.
Childhood leaves each of us with some environmentally specific Basic Fear. In response each
of us adopts an induced Basic Desire
of the type. But as we develop the inner observer, it will
support presence and
undermine the identification
that supports the armor of the type.
The Enneagram reveals three sets of relations about our type
armor:
- Triadic self
revealing: Instinctive,
feeling, thinking; childhood needs
that became significant wounds
- Social style
groupings: Assertive, compliant, withdrawn; strategies for
managing inner conflict
- Coping styles: Positive outlook, competency, reactive; strategies for
defending childhood wounds
Riso and Hudson augment the Enneagram with instinctual
distortions reflected in the interests of the variants.
The Enneagram also offers tools for understanding a person's level of development:
unhealthy, average, healthy,
liberation; including their
current center of gravity,
steriotypical social role,
wake-up call, leaden rule, red
flag, and direction
of integration and disintegration.
Complex adaptive system (CAS) theory associates the models
presented by the Enneagram with evolved behaviors and structures
in the mind: feelings, emotions, social behaviors, ideas; driven
by genetic and cultural evolution and the constraints of family
and social life. Emergent evolved amplifers can be
constrained by Riso and Hudson's awareness strategies.
Enneagram strategies |
Antonio Damasio argues
that ancient
& fundamental homeostatic processes,
built into
behaviors and updated by evolution
have resulted in the emergence
of nervous systems and feelings. These
feelings, representing the state of the viscera, and represented with general
systems supporting enteric
operation, are later ubiquitously
integrated into the 'images'
built by the minds of higher animals
including humans.
Damasio highlights the separate
development of the body frame in the building of
minds.
Damasio explains that this integration of feelings by minds
supports the development of subjectivity and consciousness. His chain of
emergence suggests the 'order of things.' He stresses the
end-to-end
integration of the organism which undermines dualism. And he reviews Chalmers
hard problem of consciousness.
Damasio reviews the emergence of cultures
and sees feelings, integrated with reason, as the judges of the
cultural creative process, linking culture to
homeostasis. He sees cultures as supporting the
development of tools
to improve our lives. But the results of the
creative process have added
stresses to our lives.
Following our summary of his arguments RSS frames his arguments from
the perspective of complex adaptive system (CAS) theory.
Each of the [super]organisms
discussed is a CAS reflecting the theory of such systems:
- Damasio's proposals about homeostasis routed signalling, aligns
well with CAS theory.
- Damasio's ideas on cultural stresses are elaborated by CAS
examples.
Emergence of feelings |
Robert Coram highlights the noble life of John Boyd. John
spent a lot of time alone
during his childhood.
He: excelled at swimming and was a lifeguard, enlisted in the
Army Air Corp while at school which rejected him for pilot
training, was part of the Japan occupation force where he swam;
so the US paid for him to attend University
of Iowa, where he: joined the Air Force Officers' training
corps, was accepted to be an Air Force pilot, and got engaged to
Mary Bruce.
Boyd trained at Nellis AFB to become a
combat ready pilot in
the Korean War.
While the US Air Force focused on
Strategic bombing, Boyd loved
dogfights. His exceptional tactical ability was
rewarded with becoming an instructor. Boyd created new
ways to think about dogfighting and beat all-comers
by using them in the F-100.
He was noticed and enabled by Spradling. As he trained, and defeated the top
pilots from around the US and allied base network, his
reputation spread. But he needed to get
nearer to the hot spring in Georgia, and when his move to
Tyndall AFB was blocked he used the AFIT to train in engineering at
Georgia tech. While preparing to move he documented his FWS training
and mentored Ronald Catton.
While there he first realized the
link between energy
and maneuverability.
At Eglin, in partnership with Tom Christie,
he developed tools to model the link. They developed
comparisons of US and Soviet aircraft which showed the US
aircraft performing poorly. Eventually General Sweeney
was briefed on
the theory and issues with the F-105, F-4, and F-111.
Sent to the Pentagon
to help save the F-X budget, Boyd joined forces with Pierre Sprey to
pressure procurement into designing and
building tactically exceptional aircraft: a CAS tank killer and a
lightweight maneuverable
fighter. The navy aligned with
Senators of states with navy bases, prepared to sink the
F-X and force the F-14 on
the Air Force. Boyd saved
the plane from the Navy and the budget from Congress, ensuring
the Air Force executive and its career focused hierarchy had the
freedom to compromise
on a budget expanding over-stuffed F-X (F-15). Boyd requested to
retire, in disgust.
Amid mounting hostility from the organizational hierarchy Boyd
and Sprey secretly
developed specifications for building prototype lightweight
fighters with General Dynamics: YF-16;
and Northrop: YF-17; and enabled by Everest Riccioni.
David Packard
announced a budget of $200 million for the services to spend on
prototypes. Pierre Sprey's friend Lyle Cameron picked a
short takeoff and landing transport aircraft and Boyd's lightweight fighter to
prototype.
Boyd was transferred to Thailand
as Vice Commander of Task
Force Alpha, inspector general and equal opportunity
training officer; roles in which he excelled. And he
started working on his analysis of creativity: Destruction
and Creation. But on completion of the tour Boyd was
apparently abandoned and sent to run
a dead end office at the Pentagon.
The power hierarchy moved to protect the F-15, but: Boyd,
Christie, Schlesinger,
and the Air Force chief of staff; kept the
lightweight fighter budgeted and aligned with Boyd's
requirements in a covert campaign. The Air Force
threw a phalanx of developers at the F-16, distorting Boyd's
concept. He accepted he had lost the fight and retired
from the Air Force.
Shifting to scholarship Boyd reflects on how rigidity must be destroyed to enable
creative new assemblies. He uses the idea to explain
the operational success of the YF16 and F-86 fighters, and then
highlights how the pilot can take advantage of their
infrastructure advantage with rapid decision making he
explains with the O-O-D-A Loop.
Boyd encouraged Chuck Spinney
to expose the systemic cost overruns
of the military procurement process. The military
hierarchy moved to undermine the
Spinney Report and understand the
nature of the reformers. Boyd acted as a progressive
mentor to Michael
Wyly, who taught the
Marine Corps about maneuver
warfare, and Jim Burton.
Finally, after the military hierarchy appears to have
beaten him, Boyd's ideas are tested during
the First Gulf War.
Following our summary of his main points, RSS frames the details from the
perspective of complex adaptive system (CAS) theory. Boyd was Darwinesque, placing the art of
air-to-air combat within a CAS framework.
Air warrior |
Alfred Nemeczek reveals the chaotic, stressful life of Vincent
van Gogh in Arles.
Nemeczek shows that Vincent was driven
to create, and successfully
invented new methods of representing feeling in paintings, and
especially portraits. Vincent
worked hard to allow artists like him-self
to innovate. But
Vincent failed in this goal, collapsing into psychosis.
Nemeczek also provides a brief history of
Vincent's life.
Following our summary of his main points, RSS frames the details from the
perspective of complex adaptive system (CAS) theory.
Vincent creates |
Reginald Dwight, better known as Elton John, writes a hilarious
memoir, full of anecdotal and sometimes morbid humor and gossip, which describes his
immediate family, upbringing, development as a singer
songwriter, stardom and its support for his problems, collapse
and eventual recovery.
Elton stresses the serendipitous nature
of his emergence as a musician. He describes
the contributions of his parents, Stanley & Sheila, mother's
sister, and her mother Ivy;
who formed his early
childhood proximate environment which prepared
him for a job in entertainment: he
developed his performance in the club circuits, setup a
commercial partnership with Bernie Taupin to write songs;
entering a network based around Dick James Music.
And he almost got married.
DJM focused Elton and Bernie's initial song writing
while they studied the songs they admired and Elton did session
work, tightening his performance skills and paying for the
food. A first album supported touring and the formation of
a band. A second one sent them to the US where Elton became an
overnight sensation. And during this period of time
Elton's testosterone
level ramped. Life changed
dramatically.
Stardom provided many rewards but there
were still life's problems to deal with. Elton was
befriended by his idol, John Lennon; he achieved new heights of
success but, sensitive to any hint of failure and fraud, suicidally disassociated.
His career crested, he struggled with loneliness and drugs, and
foresaw a fearful vision of his future, as fame caged him idly
in hotels between concerts. His hair abandoned him.
But he was saved by the challenge of
transforming the collapsed Watford football club. He
retired from touring which allowed him the time to reconstruct his life.
Empowered by success, supported by the removal of constraints,
Elton dominates - limiting feedback, doing whatever he
hopes will bring him happiness:
trying new options, expanding the range and increasing the
quantity of mind altering substances; eventually hitting John Reid and marrying
Renata.
He allows his drug use to enter the recording studio. Problems stress him. He is
frightened by a cancer
scare, AIDS, inspired by
Ryan White, angered by the
Sun, and saddened at
breaking Renata's heart. But he was there for Ryan White's
final days. And his lover Hugh Williams confronted Elton
about his string of addictions.
Elton finally agreed he had a problem.
He went to rehab, stopped hating himself,
gave up his current addictions, accepted the influence of a
higher force, and began admiring the everyday world and other
people.
It seemed the higher force was
supporting Elton's progress: he wrote the music for the
Lion King, met David Furnish who accepted Elton warts and all;
they both enjoyed a friendship with Gianni Versace; until Gianni
was murdered. Princess Diana
died soon after, and Elton performed at the funeral.
He toured with Billy Joel and aimed to do the same with Tina
Turner. While his new records sold well he found
himself in debt and terminated the management relationship
with John Reid
Enterprises.
Elton and Bernie improved their
situations: Elton started writing film scores, he helped
turn the film Billy Elliot into a musical, Bernie lobbied Elton
to improve the way they were making records, Elton and David
entered into a civil partnership, and Elton made a record with
his seminal influence: Leon
Russell.
Elton and David became parents of
two boys: Zachary and Elijah; using their sperm a surrogate
mother and network in California. They quietly get married
when the UK allows.
Elton's mum remains
difficult and cruel to him, but he is sad when she dies, and many
at the funeral recall her fun side with him. Being parents
increases the long-term
stresses on their lives, forcing them to adjust, so they can be there for their boys.
But Elton needs to go out with a bang!
And everyone helps.
Following our summary of his main points, RSS frames the details
of the creative process from the perspective of complex
adaptive system (CAS) theory.
My song |
Richard Feynman
outlines a series of amusing vignettes, as he reviews his life story.
Richard's personality
encouraged him to patiently
seek out fun: performing Shewhart cycles
with electricity, in his childhood laboratory, and aligning theory, and
practice through building and fixing radios.
Leonardo's life inspired him to try
innovation, which he
concluded was hard. He played
with the emotion
in communications, a skill
which he used later at
Caltech. And he made a game of avoiding following
orders at MIT. Working during
the holidays revealed the benefit of joining theory and
practice.
Feynman enrolled as a graduate
student at Princeton, where the successful
approach to science was just like his.
His approach was based on
patience and fun: he used his home lab and other tools for
qualitative exploration. Overtime he added experimental
techniques. He would test
the assertions in articles with amusing investigations;
with his mind aligned by
feelings of joy. Everyone at Princeton heard he would want to be hypnotized.
He was driven to compare the challenges of complex subjects being
taught at Princeton to his current pick. In his summer
recess he explored biology.
Gathering problems in challenging areas of science, and then picking one to solve, supported his
creativity. And his practical
orientation and situation when growing up in Far Rockaway,
supported his desire for choices
and adolescent dislike for purely intellectual and cultural
pursuits. Being mostly self-taught, he
developed different approaches to problems than the
standard strategies provided by mass education.
Richard saw his skill set as very different to that exhibited by his father. But are they very
different?
While Richard was at Princeton, America became concerned about
the implications of the European war. After a friend
enlisted he decided to dedicate his
summer holiday to helping the war effort. Feynman got involved in the
Manhattan Project, and went to Los Alamos where he
experienced constraints, applied by: the military, the
physics of the project, him on Niels
Bohr; but was
freed from them by Von
Neumann. The records & reports of the project
were kept in filing cabinets. Richard explored the weaknesses of
the locks and safes deployed to secure these
secrets. Just after the war he was called up by the draft
board for a medical but was rejected for being mentally
unfit.
After the war, Richard was asked to become a professor at Cornell.
He initially struggled in this role: Too young to match
expectations, stressed by the demands of his new job and his
recent experiences; until he adopted an approach that focused on
fun. He enjoyed knowing
about numbers: using, learning about them and the tools to
use them, and competing with others; to calculate, interpolate
and approximate a value the fastest.
Traveling to Buffalo in a light plane once a week to give a
physics lecture before flying back the next morning wasn't much
fun for Richard. So he used
the stipend to visit a bar after each lecture to meet
beautiful women. Richard liked bars and nightclubs, spending a summer in Albuquerque
frequenting one, and later
ones in Las Vegas, as he explored how to get the girls he
drank with to sleep with him.
Richard reflects on various times when he made government
officials obey their parts of contracts: patent fees, limits on red tape;
Richard became frustrated with his life at Cornell, seeing more
things that interested him on the sunny west coast at Caltech. Both
institutions, and Chicago, offered him incentives to help his decision making,
but Richard began to find reevaluating the alternatives a waste
of time and he saw risks in
a really high salary, deciding he would move to Caltech
and stay there.
Richard is invited to attend a scientific symposium in
Japan. Each of the US attendees is asked to learn a little
Japanese. Richard takes lessons, persists, can converse
effectively, but stops when he
finds the cultural parts of the language conflict with his
individualism.
Richard was unhappy with his achievements in physics. He
felt: slower than his peers, not keeping up or understanding the
latest details, fearful that
he could not cope; as the community
worked to understand the laws of beta decay. But
Martin Block pushed him to question the troubling parity
premise. Encouraged by Oppenheimer the community focused
on parity and failures were discovered in a cascade of
reports. Richard attended a meeting where Lee & Yang
discussed a failure and a theory to explain it. Richard
felt terrified and could not understand what they said.
His sister pushed him to change his attitude: act like a student
having fun, read every
line and equation of their paper; he would understand it.
And he did, as well as developing additional insights about what
was happening and what still seemed conflicted. He
reported his ideas back to the community. After Richard
returned from Brazil he reviewed the confusion of facts with
Caltech's experimental physicists who made him aware of
Gell-mann abandoning another former premise of Beta decay.
Feynman realized his ideas were consistent: fully and simply
describing the details of beta decay. He had identified
the workings of a fundamental law. Years later he was awarded the Nobel
prize for physics. He was conflicted about the prize
and attending the ceremony, but eventually enjoyed the trip,
where he discussed cultural achievement with the Japanese
ambassador.
Richard was interested in the operation of the brain, modeling
it on a digital computer. He explored hallucinations and the reality of
experiences.
Richard lobbies for integrity
in science.
In aspects of his life that weren't focused directly on science,
Richard was quirky. He would tease those who asked for his
help: pushing bargains to their logical conclusion; insisting on everyone keeping to
their part of the agreement. And he paid no attention to the
logistical details of planning. He loved percussion,
playing: drums, bongos, baskets, tables, Frigideira; and became quite a success. He
eventually discovered art could be
fun, and tried to express his joy at the underlying
mathematical beauty of the physical world. He had a great
art teacher. But he discovered although he could
eventually draw well he did not understand art.
Many of the artists he met were fakers, and even the powerful,
who were interested in integrating art and science, did not
understand either subject. He found the situation was
similar in other complex adaptive systems: philosophy, religion and
economics; which he dabbled in for a while but found the
strategies of other people practicing the study of such subjects
made him angry and
disturbed, so he avoided participating in them. It seemed
ironic that he was eventually asked to help in bringing
culture to the physicists!
He discusses issues in teaching creative physics in Brazil. He gets
involved in the California public school text
book selection process which he concluded was totally
broken, but also reveals how his father
provided him with a vision of how our world works,
inspiring his interest in experimentation and physical
theory.
Following our summary of his main points, RSS reviews how his personality, family and cultural history supported
his creative development from the perspective of complex
adaptive system (CAS) theory.
Richard draws |
Desmond & Moore paint a picture of Charles Darwin's life,
expanded from his own highlights:
- His naughty
childhood,
- Wasted
schooldays,
- Apprenticeship with Grant,
- His extramural
activities at Cambridge, walks with Henslow,
life with FitzRoy on the
Beagle,
- His growing
love for science,
- London: geology, journal and Lyell.
- Moving from
Gower Street to Down and writing Origin and other
books.
- He reviewed his position on
religion: the long
dispute with Emma, his
slow collapse of belief
- damnation for unbelievers like his father and brother, inward conviction
being evolved and unreliable, regretting he had ignored his father's
advice; while describing Emma's side of the
argument. He felt happy with his decision to dedicate
his life to science. He closed by asserting after Self &
Cross-fertilization his strength will be
exhausted.
Following our summary of their main points, RSS frames the details from the
perspective of complex adaptive system (CAS) theory. Darwin placed
evolution within a CAS framework, and built a network of supporters whose
complementary skills helped drive the innovation.
Darwin emerges |
Richard Dawkin's explores how nature has created implementations
of designs, without any need for planning or design, through the
accumulation of small advantageous changes.
Accumulating small changes |
Russ Abbott explores the impact on science of epiphenomena and
the emergence of agents.
Autonomous emergence |
Terrence Deacon explores how constraints on dynamic flows can
induce emergent phenomena
which can do real work. He shows how these phenomena are
sustained. The mechanism enables
the development of Darwinian competition.
Constraint based phenomena |
|
|
Strategic innovations
Summary
A government sanctioned monopoly
supported the construction of a superorganism
American Telephone is a device for capture of spoken voice signals, for their encoding and transmission over a signalling medium, initially the telegraph, but subsequently: microwave, optical links and networks and wireless networks; and the receipt and playing of the signals in the receiver. A variety of inventors saw the opportunity to add voice communications to the telegraph including: Alexander Graham Bell, Elisha Gray, Antonio Meucci; inducing significant litigation regarding the patent rights. and
Telegraph is a point to point signalling system. Electric versions were developed and deployed around 1840s. They were helpful supporting infrastructure for railway networks, banking and rapid news relaying. Each transmitted letter was encoded in the transmissions. Two main types were deployed: - Needle telegraphs which moved a needle to represent the signal. Often multiple needles were used in the encoding requiring multiple wires to be strung between the stations. Cooke and Wheatstone's telegraph was of this type and was widely deployed within the British Empire.
- Armature telegraphs where a pulse generates a click at the receiver station. Samuel Morse developed a single wire (low cost) system of this type along with the Morse Code. German railways standardized on the Morse telegraph and it was deployed in the US supporting railway operation.
(AT&T). Within this Bell Labs was at the center of
three networks:
- The evolving global scientific
network.
- The Bell telephone network. And
- The military
industrial network deploying 'fire and missile
control' systems.
Bell Labs strategically leveraged each network to create an innovation
engine.
They monitored the opportunities to leverage the developing
ideas, reorganizing to replace incumbent
opposition and enable the creation and growth of new
ideas.
Once the monopoly is a power relation within: - A state in which a group has enough power to enforce its will on other citizens. If this is a central authority with a cohesive military, it can overpower other warlords and stabilize the society.
- An economy in which one business has enough share in a market segment to control margins to its advantage. An economic monopoly can be broadly beneficial: AT&T monopoly, US patent monopoly rights;
was
dismantled, AT&T disrupted.
Complex adaptive system (CAS) models of the innovation mechanisms are
discussed.
The Idea Factory
In Jon Gertner's book
'The Idea Factory' he uses the work of six exemplars to
illustrate American Telephone is a device for capture of spoken voice signals, for their encoding and transmission over a signalling medium, initially the telegraph, but subsequently: microwave, optical links and networks and wireless networks; and the receipt and playing of the signals in the receiver. A variety of inventors saw the opportunity to add voice communications to the telegraph including: Alexander Graham Bell, Elisha Gray, Antonio Meucci; inducing significant litigation regarding the patent rights.
and Telegraph is a point to point signalling system. Electric versions were developed and deployed around 1840s. They were helpful supporting infrastructure for railway networks, banking and rapid news relaying. Each transmitted letter was encoded in the transmissions. Two main types were deployed: - Needle telegraphs which moved a needle to represent the signal. Often multiple needles were used in the encoding requiring multiple wires to be strung between the stations. Cooke and Wheatstone's telegraph was of this type and was widely deployed within the British Empire.
- Armature telegraphs where a pulse generates a click at the receiver station. Samuel Morse developed a single wire (low cost) system of this type along with the Morse Code. German railways standardized on the Morse telegraph and it was deployed in the US supporting railway operation.
(AT&T) Bell Laboratory's (Bell Labs) strategies for
generating revolutionary innovation is the economic realization of invention and combinatorial exaptation. Keynes noted it provided the unquantifiable beneficial possibility that limits fear of uncertainty. Innovation operates across all CAS, being supported by genetic and cultural means. Creativity provides the mutation and recombination genetic operators for the cultural process. While highly innovative, monopolies: AT&T, IBM; usually have limited economic reach, constraining productivity. This explains the use of regulation, or even its threat, that can check their power and drive the creations across the economy. s
during the period between 1930 and 1970. His goal is to
explore how innovation happens. Six men: Mervin Kelly (2,), Jim
Fisk, William Shockley (2,), Claude Shannon, John Pierce and William Baker; were
research scientists, and technical managers who catalyzed the development is a phase during the operation of a CAS agent. It allows for schematic strategies to be iteratively blended with environmental signals to solve the logistical issues of migrating newly built and transformed sub-agents. That is needed to achieve the adult configuration of the agent and optimize it for the proximate environment. Smiley includes examples of the developmental phase agents required in an emergent CAS. In situations where parents invest in the growth and memetic learning of their offspring the schematic grab bag can support optimizations to develop models, structures and actions to construct an adept adult. In humans, adolescence leverages neural plasticity, elder sibling advice and adult coaching to help prepare the deploying neuronal network and body to successfully compete. and
deployment of vacuum
tube based amplifiers, transcontinental telephone networks,
statistical
quality control and the Walter Shewhart's iterative development process is found in many
complex adaptive systems (CAS).
The mechanism is reviewed and its value in coping with random
events is explained.
Shewhart
cycle, germanium and silicon
transistors, solar cells,
information
theory, pulse-code
modulation, LASERs,
microwave networks,
fiber optic
communication networks and cellular
networks.
Bell Labs provided the research and development capabilities to
AT&T's long distance and local phone operations and its
equipment company Western Electric, so as to fulfil AT&T's
universal connectivity vision. From early in
its existence, Gertner explains, AT&T contained a multitude
of other large companies: local phone companies, long-lines, and
Western Electric.
AT&T early evolution
AT&T in 1910 was an aggressive, unscrupulous competitor
intent on developing a monopoly is a power relation within: - A state in which a group has enough power to enforce its will on other citizens. If this is a central authority with a cohesive military, it can overpower other warlords and stabilize the society.
- An economy in which one business has enough share in a market segment to control margins to its advantage. An economic monopoly can be broadly beneficial: AT&T monopoly, US patent monopoly rights;
.
They resisted competitors connecting to their network. But
under the chairmanship of Ted Vale AT&T's strategic approach
changed.
Ted Vale's monopoly
Vale realized that AT&T would benefit from competitor's
using their network and building This page discusses the effect of the network on the agents participating in a complex
adaptive system (CAS). Small
world and scale free networks are considered.
network
effects. He purchased as many local telephone is a device for capture of spoken voice signals, for their encoding and transmission over a signalling medium, initially the telegraph, but subsequently: microwave, optical links and networks and wireless networks; and the receipt and playing of the signals in the receiver. A variety of inventors saw the opportunity to add voice communications to the telegraph including: Alexander Graham Bell, Elisha Gray, Antonio Meucci; inducing significant litigation regarding the patent rights. competitors as
he could. He argued for AT&T to be made a politically
supervised monopoly is a power relation within: - A state in which a group has enough power to enforce its will on other citizens. If this is a central authority with a cohesive military, it can overpower other warlords and stabilize the society.
- An economy in which one business has enough share in a market segment to control margins to its advantage. An economic monopoly can be broadly beneficial: AT&T monopoly, US patent monopoly rights;
highlighting the benefits of 'one policy, one system, universal
service'.
The monopoly strategy led Vale to encourage AT&T to focus on
being a technology leader over decades. Frank Jewett and
Harold Arnold set about creating a laboratory at Western
Electric built upon the notion that by encouraging their staff
to understand a technology, they could create advances that were
not only useful but revolutionary. An industrial lab,
Jewett explained, was a group of intelligent men "specially
trained in knowledge of the things and methods of
science." A properly staffed and organized lab could avoid
the mistakes of cut-and-try experimentation and in turn "bring
to bear an aggregate of creative force on any particular problem
which is infinitely greater than the force which can be
conceived of as residing in the intellectual capacity of an
individual."
Gertner suggests the activities of Bell Labs staff illustrates
principles of innovation is the economic realization of invention and combinatorial exaptation. Keynes noted it provided the unquantifiable beneficial possibility that limits fear of uncertainty. Innovation operates across all CAS, being supported by genetic and cultural means. Creativity provides the mutation and recombination genetic operators for the cultural process. While highly innovative, monopolies: AT&T, IBM; usually have limited economic reach, constraining productivity. This explains the use of regulation, or even its threat, that can check their power and drive the creations across the economy.
as they tried to solve problems identified in the telephone
network by collecting ideas about the situation and developing
products to be deployed into the network so as to solve the
problems and operate without failure for forty or more
years. Bell Labs was, he concludes, a factory for
ideas.
Oil Drops
Gertner contrasts Robert
Millikan was an influential physicist, who determined experimentally the charge on the electron. He was influential in the Christian conservative movement, helping Hoover to battle the New Deal. He was president of Caltech. Millikan was a key node in the academic network linking it with AT&T's Bell Laboratories. , leading physicist and teacher and developer of
the oil drop experiment, determined the fundamental charge of an electron. Robert Millikan's method balanced gravitational forces on droplets of oil and electric forces on charged particles in the oil drops pushed upwards by electrodes. The charges of the droplets were all calculated to be multiples of the value -1.5924 * 10**-19 Coulombs.
experiment with Thomas
Edison was a prolific inventor contributing to the emergence of electric power generation, mass communications, sound recording and movies. He invented the electric light bulb, phonograph, and motion picture camera. Born in Milan, Ohio, in 1847, Thomas was the seventh child of Samuel Edison and Nancy Elliot. He contracted scarlet fever as a child which is attributed with causing his deafness from the age of 12. His mother was a school teacher who taught Thomas to read, write and do arithmetic. He had almost no formal education, until he was 28, but taught himself by reading about anything that made him curious. He was interested in technology and did experiments at home. At 28, Thomas enrolled in a four year chemistry course at The Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art. Edison was entrepreurial from age 13 when he sold candy, newspapers and vegetables on the trains flowing from Port Huron to Detroit, to finance his electricity and chemistry experiments. After saving a three year old boy from being hit by a train he was rewarded by the boy's father with training as a telegraph operator. By working night shifts he used this time to read and experiment, which got him fired. He teamed up with Franklin Pope another inventor and telegrapher and developed a multiplex telegraphic system, which he sold financing his further business ventures. He used the funds to setup the first industrial research lab at Menlo Park, New Jersey. This allowed Edison to gather together materials and leverage other employees: mathematicians, engineers; to work together on analysis, inventions and technological innovations: telephone, phonograph, electric railway, iron ore separator, electric lighting; which Edison patented. He founded a large number of companies including: G.E.; enabling innovation. demonstrating the shift in approach from practical
tinkering to leveraging scientifically validated theories to
support improved practices.
- Edison the great inventor of the prior generation to
Millikan had limited interest or respect for theory but
gathered huge varieties of materials and tested them in
support of improving his many product prototypes. It
was for him a highly successful method. Edison was
totally focused on his work. He did not even allocate
time to bath or sleep regularly.
- Millikan was highly networked to the leading scientists
in Europe and America (Cornell, Johns
Hopkins and University
of Chicago). He introduced his students to
European discoveries such as radiation, X-rays, and
quanta. He integrated theory and practice in his
experiments. He was a hard working experimentalist who
looked for weak points that could subsequently be improved
upon.
Transcontinental
phone calls
Millikan was an influential physicist, who determined experimentally the charge on the electron. He was influential in the Christian conservative movement, helping Hoover to battle the New Deal. He was president of Caltech. Millikan was a key node in the academic network linking it with AT&T's Bell Laboratories. had a
close relationship with AT&T. He had been asked, by a
friend at AT&T Frank Jewett, to help identify ways to
implement a transcontinental phone call. AT&T's system
failed as the distance of a call increased. With
Millikan's help they concluded repeaters (amplifiers) placed in
series in the call path would be a good approach. But only
if de Forest was an American inventor. Lee de Forest invented the Audion three-electrode vacuum-tube and Phonofilm sound-on-film recording. The Audion was the foundation for circuit amplifiers. 's original
idea could be understood and radically improved. Millikan
identified three of his best PhD scientists in the area of
electrons that could help. One went to AT&T helping in
the improvement of the vacuum tube allowing support of a
transcontinental call by 1915.
Millikan sent various bright students to AT&T. One of
these was Mervin Kelly.
Mervin Kelly's
background
Mervin Kelly was first in his class at school in Gallatin
Missouri. He moved and talked unusually fast and was
remarkably energetic: Working on his father's farm emerged several times and various places, probably first around 11,000 years ago. It depends on and supports evolved amplifiers which introduce instability and problems with sustainability of the populations that depended on it, unlike the earlier hunting and gathering. Today the uncertainty can be hedged, although third world farmers' businesses are undermined by first world agricultural policy. J.R. McNeill explains the sustainability issue: "all farming is a struggle against the depletion of soil nutrients. Crops absorb nutrients; these are eaten by people or animals; then they spend shorter or longer periods of time in human or animal bodies, before returning to the soil. If these nutrients, in one manner or another, return to farmers' fields, then a nutrient cycle can last indefinitely. If they do not, then those fields gradually lose nutrient and over time produce less and less food - unless some intervention such as fertilizer counteracts the nutrient loss." However, McNeill notes three notable exceptions: Egypt until the Aswan High Dam, Southern China, Medieval Europe; "each ecologically successful over long periods of time." Their success resulted from trial and error and favorable circumstances. . Helping with
the book keeping at his father's shop; and he was gifted at
leverage - organizing other boys to deliver newspapers at a
handy profit.
Gallatin intersected rural America and industrialization with a
railway uses low friction tracks to support an engine and cars which can carry people and goods. Modern railroads began with the Stockton to Darlington railway built by George Stephenson with a steam powered engine Locomotion No. 1 in 1825. Electric power, and telegraph network were later leveraged. Railroads contributed to the colonization of the world, the shift to regimentation with standardized time, maintained the efficiency of the cotton plantation trading network, supported the urbanization of the US, enabled the distribution of Californian lettuce and Midwestern beef with the refrigerated rail car, until government policy drove a shift to road networks, but were dangerous to walk on and supported the distribution of cholera to the US. The monopsonistic network effects were leveraged by John D. Rockefeller, in building his Standard Oil trust. passing through
it. Kelly got rapid access to new technology including
radios. Gallatin had cars and diesel generators.
Kelly followed other scientists from the University
of Chicago to AT&T. Vale's 'Universal Service'
vision demanded innovation is the economic realization of invention and combinatorial exaptation. Keynes noted it provided the unquantifiable beneficial possibility that limits fear of uncertainty. Innovation operates across all CAS, being supported by genetic and cultural means. Creativity provides the mutation and recombination genetic operators for the cultural process. While highly innovative, monopolies: AT&T, IBM; usually have limited economic reach, constraining productivity. This explains the use of regulation, or even its threat, that can check their power and drive the creations across the economy.
to enable the system to cope. Kelly and the other
scientists added theory to Edison was a prolific inventor contributing to the emergence of electric power generation, mass communications, sound recording and movies. He invented the electric light bulb, phonograph, and motion picture camera. Born in Milan, Ohio, in 1847, Thomas was the seventh child of Samuel Edison and Nancy Elliot. He contracted scarlet fever as a child which is attributed with causing his deafness from the age of 12. His mother was a school teacher who taught Thomas to read, write and do arithmetic. He had almost no formal education, until he was 28, but taught himself by reading about anything that made him curious. He was interested in technology and did experiments at home. At 28, Thomas enrolled in a four year chemistry course at The Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art. Edison was entrepreurial from age 13 when he sold candy, newspapers and vegetables on the trains flowing from Port Huron to Detroit, to finance his electricity and chemistry experiments. After saving a three year old boy from being hit by a train he was rewarded by the boy's father with training as a telegraph operator. By working night shifts he used this time to read and experiment, which got him fired. He teamed up with Franklin Pope another inventor and telegrapher and developed a multiplex telegraphic system, which he sold financing his further business ventures. He used the funds to setup the first industrial research lab at Menlo Park, New Jersey. This allowed Edison to gather together materials and leverage other employees: mathematicians, engineers; to work together on analysis, inventions and technological innovations: telephone, phonograph, electric railway, iron ore separator, electric lighting; which Edison patented. He founded a large number of companies including: G.E.; enabling innovation. 's practice,
developing a radically new approach to product innovation.
Kelly joined Jewett's Western Electric - the equipment
manufacturing arm of AT&T which included research,
development, test and manufacture. He reported into
Arnold's research department where he focused on
repeaters. The research department was seen as essential
to AT&T's business strategy, by providing a 5
to 10 year out view of the potential fundamental contributions
of physics and chemistry to communications. The leaders now aims to develop plans and strategies which ensure effective coordination to improve the common good of the in-group. Pinker notes the evolved pressure of social rivalry associating power with leadership. Saposky observes the disconnect between power hierarchies and wisdom in apes. John Adair developed a modern leadership methodology based on the three-circles model. wanted the
department to provide a freeing environment for genius to assert
itself.
Gertner notes that Kelly wrote a detailed report on the tube
shop processes illustrating the complicated manual work required
to create the intricate vacuum tubes used as repeaters in
AT&T's network. Kelly was fully aware of the
difficulties of scaling up and improving the robustness of such
operations. But during his management of the tube shop he
drove a 80 fold improvement in the life of the repeaters.
With Millikan's support Clinton (Davy)
Davisson, a gifted experimentalist in the research department
who shared an office with Kelly, was doing basic research to
obtain insights into the nature of things. And in 1914
with war in Europe Davisson's ideas were applied to making
vacuum tubes effective in war use. This provided positive
feedback through the war department and military on the value of
AT&T to the politicians in Washington DC. By 1937
Davisson had won a Nobel Prize for the labs for his work on
X-ray diffraction based on Schrodinger's theoretical wave
equations for electrons. This and the relatively high depression era
salaries pulled a lot of young scientists into Bell Labs
which was by then lead by President Frank Jewett, Research head
Oliver Buckley and director of research Kelly.
Gertner
explains that in Kelly's lab the researchers were encouraged to:
- Explore what interested them.
- Let
experimentalists and theoreticians work together.
- Include physicists, chemists and metallurgists in
discussions.
- Formally
record all ideas and future plans and experimental detail
and results in a registered, numbered, managerially and
legally tracked lab notebook with dates and witnesses.
The policy was no erasures. Just initialed lines
through mistakes.
- Stay isolated from day-to-day politics of the
business. Researchers didn't have to raise
funds. Research on a topic or system could be and was
supported for years. Research could be terminated
without damning the researcher. Only Managers to keep
track of how the technology and politics and finances meshed
together. Managers must aim to provide AT&T with
the best and most complete telephone is a device for capture of spoken voice signals, for their encoding and transmission over a signalling medium, initially the telegraph, but subsequently: microwave, optical links and networks and wireless networks; and the receipt and playing of the signals in the receiver. A variety of inventors saw the opportunity to add voice communications to the telegraph including: Alexander Graham Bell, Elisha Gray, Antonio Meucci; inducing significant litigation regarding the patent rights.
service at
the lowest possible cost.
- Produce a journal, Bell
System Technical Journal, staffed by a researcher who
summarized important discoveries and theories from
universities around the world and inside Bell labs.
This stimulated the Bell researchers, and visiting academics
to meet, review and debate the new ideas.
- Form into study groups to share understanding and build
competence in leading edge ideas.
Bell Lab's sense of mission--to plan the future of
communications--was broad and directed allowing the researchers
a circumscribed freedom that was liberating and practical at the
same time.
The depression at
AT&T
The US is the United States of America. 1929 - 40 depression
was threatening to AT&T. Between 1930 and 1933 2.5
million households disconnected from the phone network.
Western electric laid-off 80 percent of its workforce.
Bell labs stopped hiring and instituted pay cuts and a four-day
workweek. But by 1935 phone subscriptions and revenue for
AT&T were rising and Kelly was able to push to hire
scientists for the research department.
Kelly personally hired Bill
Shockley and Jim Fisk from MIT is Massachusetts Institute of Technology. .
Bill Shockley's
background
Bill Shockley grew up in Palo Alto and was educated by a
Stanford professor, Pearley Ross in physics fundamentals based
on his friendship with Ross's daughters. This led to his
attending Caltech
and then a PhD at MIT is Massachusetts Institute of Technology. which
gave him a strong background in quantum mechanics extends mechanics to atomic and subatomic scales. Energy, momentum, angular momentum are all restricted to quantized values and all objects have particle and wave properties. There are various ways to understand quantum mechanics including the cascade of ideas initiated by Hugh Everett.
and connected him with classmate Jim Fisk.
He was genial, loved practical jokes. He had an infectious
energy and a boundless enthusiasm for physics and enjoyed
educating others in it.
Shockley was viewed as having the quickest mind at Bell
labs. He shared an office with Clinton Davisson.
The phone network was a problem rich environment. Bell
labs responded as the start of a supply chain to capture key
high quality materials. Specialists studied the phone
network to understand the problems and develop plans and
activities to deliver solutions. Designs, with 40 year
robustness, were developed that Western Electric then
manufactured. Statistician
Walter Shewhart supported development of quality control
procedures including the Walter Shewhart's iterative development process is found in many
complex adaptive systems (CAS).
The mechanism is reviewed and its value in coping with random
events is explained.
PDCA cycle
that helped the supply chain achieve these high robustness
requirements.
Shockley recalled Kelly
visiting the office. "I was given a lecture by
then-research director Dr. Kelly, saying that he looked forward
to the time when we would get all of the relays that make
contacts in the telephone is a device for capture of spoken voice signals, for their encoding and transmission over a signalling medium, initially the telegraph, but subsequently: microwave, optical links and networks and wireless networks; and the receipt and playing of the signals in the receiver. A variety of inventors saw the opportunity to add voice communications to the telegraph including: Alexander Graham Bell, Elisha Gray, Antonio Meucci; inducing significant litigation regarding the patent rights.
exchange out of the telephone exchange and replace them with
something electronic so they'd have less trouble." Gertner
notes that for the rest of his life Shockley considered Kelly's
lecture as the moment when a particular idea freed his ambition
from its moorings.
By 1939 Shockley had concluded that semiconductors might be a
replacement for vacuum tubes. He felt there were
conditions when they could be good rectifiers and current
amplifiers.
Shockley--theoretician
and the experimentalist--Walter Brattain explored the
fundamentals of semiconductors. But their work was
interrupted by the outbreak of war.
War
Kelly ordered Bell labs
to switch its focus to supporting the war effort by making all
communications based munitions much faster.
Shockley and Fisk
worked on anti-submarine detection and RADAR is radio detection and ranging. It is a method of finding the position and velocity of a target by sending out a pulse of radio frequency electromagnetic waves and analyzing the reflections returned from the target. . Fisk was Kelly's
protege eventually becoming president of Bell Labs. Like
Kelly he had an agile mind and a talent for decision making integrates situational context, state and signals to prioritize among strategies and respond in a timely manner. It occurs in all animals, including us and our organizations: - Individual human decision making includes conscious and unconscious aspects. Situational context is highly influential: supplying meaning to our general mechanisms, & for robots too. Emotions are important in providing a balanced judgement. The adaptive unconscious interprets percepts quickly supporting 'fast' decision making. Conscious decision making, supported by the: DLPFC, vmPFC and limbic system; can use slower autonomy. The amygdala, during unsettling or uncertain social situations, signals the decision making regions of the frontal lobe, including the orbitofrontal cortex. The BLA supports rejecting unacceptable offers. Moral decisions are influenced by a moral decision switch. Sleeping before making an important decision is useful in obtaining the support of the unconscious in developing a preference. Word framing demonstrates the limitations of our fast intuitive decision making processes. And prior positive associations detected by the hippocampus, can be reactivated with the support of the striatum linking it to the memory of a reward, inducing a bias into our choices. Prior to the development of the PFC, the ventral striatum supports adolescent decision making. Neurons involved in decision making in the association areas of the cortex are active for much longer than neurons participating in the sensory areas of the cortex. This allows them to link perceptions with a provisional action plan. Association neurons can track probabilities connected to a choice. As evidence is accumulated and a threshold is reached a choice is made, making fast thinking highly adaptive. Diseases including: schizophrenia and anorexia; highlight aspects of human decision making.
- Organisations often struggle to balance top down and distributed decision making: parliamentry government must use a process, health care is attempting to improve the process: checklists, end-to-end care; and include more participants, but has systemic issues, business leaders struggle with strategy.
.
But he was a more polished version of his mentor.
Shockley improved the methods used to target submarines.
He calculated that bombs were set to detonate too late for the
blast to impact the submarines. By detonating the bombs
earlier in the glide path the navy improved the kill rate
significantly.
RADAR location was linked to anti-aircraft gun
controllers. But the signal returning from the plane was
extremely weak and needed amplification. AT&T
leveraged Birmingham UK is the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland.
research on magnetrons. By designing and building 15
different magnetrons specifically tailored for each situation
Fisk, Davisson and others enabled Western Electric to produce
more than 50 percent of effective wartime RADARs.
During the war Kelly developed a post war plan for Bell labs
including a vision of its place in an exponentially growing
electronics industry. RADAR opened new opportunities for
radio waves and microwave devices. Similarly he argued
telecommunications would start to resemble industries like radio
and television with high volume, annual models and a highly
competitive set of young businesses. He suggested Bell
labs must change to lead this shift. Kelly rehired his old
research team including Shockley.
Solid State
Kelly organized the
design and building of the Murray Hill research labs.
Moving from New York City would: Reduce interference and
noise. Relieve Labs congestion problems.
The design was novel:
- Reflecting a university setting rather than a
factory. And all aspects were connected so as to
inhibit departments becoming silos. Kelly aimed for a
structure that would
E O. Wilson argues that campfire gatherings on the savanna supported
the emergence of human creativity. This resulted in man
building cultures and
later exploring them, and their creator, through the humanities. Wilson
identifies the transformative events, but he notes many of these
are presently ignored by the humanities. So he calls for a
change of approach.
He:
- Explores creativity:
how it emerged from the benefits of becoming an omnivore hunter-gatherer,
enabled by language & its catalysis of invention, through stories told in the
evening around the campfire. He notes the power of
fine art, but suggests music provides the most revealing
signature of aesthetic
surprise.
- Looks at the current limitations of the
humanities, as they have suffered through years of neglect.
- Reviews the evolutionary processes of heredity and
culture:
- Ultimate causes viewed
through art, & music
- The bedrock of:
- Ape senses and emotions,
- Creative arts, language, dance, song typically studied
by humanities,
&
- Exponential change in science and
technology.
- How the breakthrough from
our primate past occurred, powered by eating meat,
supporting: a bigger brain, expanded memory &
language.
- Accelerating changes now driven by genetic cultural coevolution.
- The impact on human nature.
- Considers our emotional attachment to the natural world: hunting, gardens; we are
destroying.
- Reviews our love of metaphor, archetypes,
exploration, irony, and
considers the potential for a third enlightenment,
supported by cooperative
action of humanities and science
Following our summary of his arguments RSS frames these from the
perspective of complex adaptive system (CAS) theory:
- The humanities are seen to be a functionalist framework
for representing the cultural CAS while
- Wilson's desire
to integrate the humanities and science gains support from
viewing the endeavor as a network of layered CAS.
encourage free
interchange of ideas. So he put the scientists'
labs and offices on different floors. There were 700
foot long corridors. Offices had modular
reconfigurable walls.
Kelly also reorganized the labs in 1945. He promoted
experts in solid state physics including Shockley and
Brattain. He included detailed changes to promote
interdisciplinary groups, mixing together: Physicists and
chemists, Metallurgist and engineers, Theoreticians and
experimentalists. He refocused Bell labs towards a unified
approach to solid state physics problems. Any advance
depended on advances in chemistry to understand and develop new
materials, and metallurgy.
Semiconductors proved significant in a variety of ways:
- Photo-electric effect (converting light into a current
driving voltage) was observed in certain crystals. As
these were analyzed and modelled it was realized that
impurities were creating positive and negative areas in the
crystal.
- Brattain investigated the surface properties, while
Pearson looked at the bulk properties. Shockley developed
theoretical models to represent the observations and to make
predictions. Shockley argued they needed more
theoretical expertise. Bell labs hired John Bardeen
who was known to Jim Fisk and Shockley
from Harvard.
Bardeen's approach was to try every angle and doggedly
persisting. He was paired with Brattain the
experimentalist allowing them to iterate round a
Walter Shewhart's iterative development process is found in many
complex adaptive systems (CAS).
The mechanism is reviewed and its value in coping with random
events is explained.
Shewhart cycle of theory,
experiment, analysis and correction. They investigated
rectifiers turning high frequency AC into DC current.
These were developed with potential leverage in power
supplies, and as signal rectifiers and amplifiers in
radios. Shockley postulated the presence of a field
effect. It was not found experimentally for a
year. Then Bardeen looking at a surface effect
postulated it was acting as a barrier to the internal field
effect linking to the outside. So the electro chemist
Gibney applied an electrolyte. It cut through the
surface barriers producing a field effect in Shockley's
magic month. Bardeen proposed a particular geometry to
obtain a solid state amplifier. Brattain was asked to
create a gap in two good points stuck into a germanium
chip. On Dec 16th 1947 they observed amplification
along with a very significant power gain.
- A demonstration of speech amplified 18 fold without a
significant drop in quality was witnessed in Brattain's lab
book 24th Dec 1947. Once a feedback oscillator was
also demonstrated labs management agreed a new thing had
been created by Bardeen and Brattain. The device was
named the transistor and patented by June 1948.
As was normal at Bell Labs Kelly and other senior managers
were not invited to the demonstration to protect the nascent
creative
process.
- Kelly traded access to the technology and patents for
maintenance of AT&T's monopoly is a power relation within:
- A state in which a group has enough power to enforce its will on other citizens. If this is a central authority with a cohesive military, it can overpower other warlords and stabilize the society.
- An economy in which one business has enough share in a market segment to control margins to its advantage. An economic monopoly can be broadly beneficial: AT&T monopoly, US patent monopoly rights;
and licensing
fees of $25K. While popular newspapers missed the
importance of the transistor the electronics industry did
not: RCA, Motorola, Westinghouse, radio and TV manufacturers
asked for information and samples. Academics at Harvard,
Purdue, Stanford and Cornell requested devices. MIT is Massachusetts Institute of Technology. 's Forrester highlighted
the potential in computers.
- Shockley was
disappointed not to be named a co-inventor of the transistor.
AT&T policy discouraged management from competing with
the researchers and engineers. Over Christmas Shockley
invented the junction transistor - an NPN sandwich.
This breaking of policy was never forgiven. It was a
key aspect of the destruction of the Bell Labs transistor
team. Bardeen left for Illinois. Brattain
stopped reporting to Shockley.
- Kelly moved the transistor
activity from research to the main development department
reporting to Jack Morton. Morton saw innovation as an
integrated process with a common industrial goal that
included:
- Science based discovery,
- Leveraged engineering based invention,
- Creation of new markets,
- Development, manufacture and deployment of substantial
quantities through a value delivery system are all needed
to generate an innovation - a product with widespread
practical use.
- To be useful to AT&T the transistor had to displace
the deployed vacuum tubes. It had to be as robust or
better. Morton encouraged Gordon Teal, a metallurgist
to develop a process for pulling perfect crystals of
germanium enabling the creation of robust junction
transistors.
- Bill Pfann a metallurgist developed a 'zone refining'
process for strafing the impurities out of the rods of
Germanium. The solution had revealed itself to Pfann
while he took his after lunch nap. Kelly considered
zone refining one of the most important inventions of the
preceding 25 years.
The Informationist
Gertner introduces Claude
Shannon, Claude Shannon was a key figure in information theory and computation. He developed an electronic circuit using Boolean algebra which simplified the design and operation of a digital computer system enabling architectures such as Von Neumann's to become practical. He also developed the mathematical models of information transfer which support information entropy. as quiet, courteous and 'special.' During a
fellowship at the institute of advanced study at Princeton
Einstein commented that Shannon was
a brilliant, brilliant man.
To acquaintances he was judged amiable, friendly and super
smart. But his first wife found he was sometimes cold,
sulky and depressed. He enjoyed playing both the clarinet,
and chess to a high standard.
Since his childhood Shannon had been puzzling over
communications and tinkering with machines. He responded
to a request for operators for Vannevar Bush was a professor of engineering -- dean of the MIT School of Engineering, a founder while a student of Raytheon and the top science administrator to President F.D. Roosevelt. He developed the Differential Analyzer, encouraged Claude Shannon to study genetics, promoted the education-industrial-military complex arguing university and industrial labs should be contracted to develop government research and set the vision of the World Wide Web with his Atlantic article 'As We May Think' outlining the memex. 's
differential analyzer. He became intrigued with the relays
in its control circuits. Shannon perceived a new way to
think about the design and function of logic. He explained
how Boolean algebra could support the control logic design
process.
In 1937 he spent Carlo Rovelli resolves the paradox of time.
Rovelli initially explains that low level physics does not
include time:
- A present that is common throughout the universe does not exist
- Events are only partially ordered. The present is
localized
- The difference between past and future is not foundational.
It occurs because of state that through our blurring appears
particular to us
- Time passes at different speeds dependent on where we are and how fast we travel
- Time's rhythms are due to
the gravitational field
- Our quantized physics shows neither
space nor time, just processes transforming physical
variables.
- Fundamentally there is no time. The basic equations
evolve together with events, not things
Then he
explains how in a physical world without time its perception can
emerge:
- Our familiar time emerges
- Our interaction with the world is partial, blurred,
quantum indeterminate
- The ignorance determines the existence of thermal time
and entropy that quantifies our uncertainty
- Directionality of time is real
but perspectival. The entropy of the world in
relation to us increases with our thermal time. The
growth of entropy distinguishes past from future: resulting in
traces and memories
- Each human is a
unified being because: we reflect the world, we
formed an image of a unified entity by
interacting with our kind, and because of the perspective
of memory
- The variable time: is one
of the variables of the gravitational field.
With our scale we don't
register quantum fluctuations, making space-time
appear determined. At our speed we don't perceive
differences in time of different clocks, so we experience
a single time: universal, uniform, ordered; which is
helpful to our decisions
time at Bell labs
thinking about relays, switching, circuits and Boolean
logic. Writing this up as a thesis Bush assessed it a
'classic' and he commented on Shannon 'he is shy, personally likeable is an emotion which initiates and maintains an altruistic partnership. It is a willingness to offer someone a favor. It is directed to those who appear likely to return the favor. and a man who
should be handled with great care.' Shannon was judged
exceptionally special. He was to be protected and
nurtured.
Bush was a professor of engineering -- dean of the MIT School of Engineering, a founder while a student of Raytheon and the top science administrator to President F.D. Roosevelt. He developed the Differential Analyzer, encouraged Claude Shannon to study genetics, promoted the education-industrial-military complex arguing university and industrial labs should be contracted to develop government research and set the vision of the World Wide Web with his Atlantic article 'As We May Think' outlining the memex. did not have
sufficient Carlo Rovelli resolves the paradox of time.
Rovelli initially explains that low level physics does not
include time:
- A present that is common throughout the universe does not exist
- Events are only partially ordered. The present is
localized
- The difference between past and future is not foundational.
It occurs because of state that through our blurring appears
particular to us
- Time passes at different speeds dependent on where we are and how fast we travel
- Time's rhythms are due to
the gravitational field
- Our quantized physics shows neither
space nor time, just processes transforming physical
variables.
- Fundamentally there is no time. The basic equations
evolve together with events, not things
Then he
explains how in a physical world without time its perception can
emerge:
- Our familiar time emerges
- Our interaction with the world is partial, blurred,
quantum indeterminate
- The ignorance determines the existence of thermal time
and entropy that quantifies our uncertainty
- Directionality of time is real
but perspectival. The entropy of the world in
relation to us increases with our thermal time. The
growth of entropy distinguishes past from future: resulting in
traces and memories
- Each human is a
unified being because: we reflect the world, we
formed an image of a unified entity by
interacting with our kind, and because of the perspective
of memory
- The variable time: is one
of the variables of the gravitational field.
With our scale we don't
register quantum fluctuations, making space-time
appear determined. At our speed we don't perceive
differences in time of different clocks, so we experience
a single time: universal, uniform, ordered; which is
helpful to our decisions
time to directly pursue
all his interests. So he encouraged others to investigate
them. He was interested in genetics and encouraged Shannon, Claude Shannon was a key figure in information theory and computation. He developed an electronic circuit using Boolean algebra which simplified the design and operation of a digital computer system enabling architectures such as Von Neumann's to become practical. He also developed the mathematical models of information transfer which support information entropy. to work on genetic
algebra at Cold Spring Harbor.
In 1940 Shannon took a temporary job at Bell Labs mathematical
research department. His topic of interest was
unconstrained. He typically asked were there deep
fundamental properties common to all aspects of a system.
He was
initially intrigued by a Bell Lab's proposal by Ralph Hartley on
ways to measure and think about the rate and flow of information
from sender to receiver. Shannon, Claude Shannon was a key figure in information theory and computation. He developed an electronic circuit using Boolean algebra which simplified the design and operation of a digital computer system enabling architectures such as Von Neumann's to become practical. He also developed the mathematical models of information transfer which support information entropy. wondered if TV,
radio, telephones is a device for capture of spoken voice signals, for their encoding and transmission over a signalling medium, initially the telegraph, but subsequently: microwave, optical links and networks and wireless networks; and the receipt and playing of the signals in the receiver. A variety of inventors saw the opportunity to add voice communications to the telegraph including: Alexander Graham Bell, Elisha Gray, Antonio Meucci; inducing significant litigation regarding the patent rights. and
telegraphs is a point to point signalling system. Electric versions were developed and deployed around 1840s. They were helpful supporting infrastructure for railway networks, banking and rapid news relaying. Each transmitted letter was encoded in the transmissions. Two main types were deployed: - Needle telegraphs which moved a needle to represent the signal. Often multiple needles were used in the encoding requiring multiple wires to be strung between the stations. Cooke and Wheatstone's telegraph was of this type and was widely deployed within the British Empire.
- Armature telegraphs where a pulse generates a click at the receiver station. Samuel Morse developed a single wire (low cost) system of this type along with the Morse Code. German railways standardized on the Morse telegraph and it was deployed in the US supporting railway operation.
were related
by common fundamental properties.
He typically did not discuss what he was working on. He
only hinted to Vannevar
Bush was a professor of engineering -- dean of the MIT School of Engineering, a founder while a student of Raytheon and the top science administrator to President F.D. Roosevelt. He developed the Differential Analyzer, encouraged Claude Shannon to study genetics, promoted the education-industrial-military complex arguing university and industrial labs should be contracted to develop government research and set the vision of the World Wide Web with his Atlantic article 'As We May Think' outlining the memex. that he was thinking about communications and the
methods by which intelligence enables the achievement of goals in the face of obstacles. The goals are sub-goals of genes' survival and reproduction and include: - Obtaining and eating food
- Sex
- Finding and maintaining shelter
- Fighting for resources - in the preferred hunter-gatherer environment loss of resources was critical while possession was often transient.
- Understanding the proximate environment
- Securing the cooperation of others
moves from place to place.
The mathematical research department was initially setup under
Thornton Fry to support the engineers in their work. By
encouraging mathematicians to look into any interesting new
problem that Bell Labs identified it grew to include:
- Statistical quality control,
- Conceptualizing circuits,
- Development of digital computer based on telephone relays
using Shannon's ideas about Boolean algebra.
During the Second World War the department focused on 'fire
control' of anti-aircraft guns via RADAR is radio detection and ranging. It is a method of finding the position and velocity of a target by sending out a pulse of radio frequency electromagnetic waves and analyzing the reflections returned from the target. sensing. This
activity was highly successful with AT&T's systems
intercepting 90% of the V1 flying bombs over London.
Shannon initially worked on fire control but then became
interested in secret methods of communication. To Shannon
this was like a game. He wrote A Mathematical Theory of
Cryptography in 1945. It covered histories and
methodologies of various secrecy systems. He catalogued
the types including:
- Ideal systems which were unbreakable.
- Practical systems which were still viable if the ideal
systems proved too cumbersome.
He also included a mathematical proof demonstrating that
languages like English are filled with redundancy and
predictability and discussed the implications for
cryptography.
At night Shannon, Claude Shannon was a key figure in information theory and computation. He developed an electronic circuit using Boolean algebra which simplified the design and operation of a digital computer system enabling architectures such as Von Neumann's to become practical. He also developed the mathematical models of information transfer which support information entropy. worked on
Information Theory writing a paper A Mathematical Theory Of
Communication. It included:
- General rules and unifying ideas -
- Measures.
- Each channel has a maximum capacity.
- A particular message will have a certain flow rate in a
specific channel.
- Robustness - showing how added error correction codes
allow for recovery of a damaged message. This was a
key new idea being counter intuitive.
Based on Information Theory Shannon, Claude Shannon was a key figure in information theory and computation. He developed an electronic circuit using Boolean algebra which simplified the design and operation of a digital computer system enabling architectures such as Von Neumann's to become practical. He also developed the mathematical models of information transfer which support information entropy. and Barney Oliver
developed a digital representation of a phone call using Pulse
Code Modulation. It was used during the war to support telephone is a device for capture of spoken voice signals, for their encoding and transmission over a signalling medium, initially the telegraph, but subsequently: microwave, optical links and networks and wireless networks; and the receipt and playing of the signals in the receiver. A variety of inventors saw the opportunity to add voice communications to the telegraph including: Alexander Graham Bell, Elisha Gray, Antonio Meucci; inducing significant litigation regarding the patent rights. communication
between the UK is the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland. and US is the United States of America. . It proved to be far
more robust than the analog encoded circuits. But Shannon
was not interested in the details of the implementation.
He was excited by the elegance and interest of the
problem.
By 1949 Shannon, Claude Shannon was a key figure in information theory and computation. He developed an electronic circuit using Boolean algebra which simplified the design and operation of a digital computer system enabling architectures such as Von Neumann's to become practical. He also developed the mathematical models of information transfer which support information entropy. had switched his
attention to Automata. But he became increasingly
reluctant to explain his activities. And he procrastinated
and ignored what bored him. He worked alone and ignored
people who didn't believe his ideas. Shannon viewed the
Bell Telephone is a device for capture of spoken voice signals, for their encoding and transmission over a signalling medium, initially the telegraph, but subsequently: microwave, optical links and networks and wireless networks; and the receipt and playing of the signals in the receiver. A variety of inventors saw the opportunity to add voice communications to the telegraph including: Alexander Graham Bell, Elisha Gray, Antonio Meucci; inducing significant litigation regarding the patent rights. System
as a highly complex machine, an immense computer that was
transforming and organizing society. It was an analog for
automata:
- Highly reliable,
- Broad but using simple tasks over and over again. He
thought about how to build a simple machine that was able to
do deep computations fast.
- He used chess as a simple model. He looked at:
- Its purpose,
- The logical theory behind its mechanisms.
- Explanations of why the program could be useful
concluding that it could replace humans in automated
tasks.
- He developed a maze and mouse called 'Theseus' at
home. The mechanism learned as the mouse moved around
the maze. When he took it into Bell Labs it was a
surprise. It became popularly famous making Shannon a
minor celebrity. Fortune magazine profiled Shannon's
Information Theory and Norbert Wiener's Cybernetics
popularizing these ideas.
- He began exploring his ideas on the potential mechanisms
of the human brain having his ideas built as simple machines
by David Hagelbarger.
By 1955 Shannon was finding Bell Labs lack of structure
problematic. He focused much of his Carlo Rovelli resolves the paradox of time.
Rovelli initially explains that low level physics does not
include time:
- A present that is common throughout the universe does not exist
- Events are only partially ordered. The present is
localized
- The difference between past and future is not foundational.
It occurs because of state that through our blurring appears
particular to us
- Time passes at different speeds dependent on where we are and how fast we travel
- Time's rhythms are due to
the gravitational field
- Our quantized physics shows neither
space nor time, just processes transforming physical
variables.
- Fundamentally there is no time. The basic equations
evolve together with events, not things
Then he
explains how in a physical world without time its perception can
emerge:
- Our familiar time emerges
- Our interaction with the world is partial, blurred,
quantum indeterminate
- The ignorance determines the existence of thermal time
and entropy that quantifies our uncertainty
- Directionality of time is real
but perspectival. The entropy of the world in
relation to us increases with our thermal time. The
growth of entropy distinguishes past from future: resulting in
traces and memories
- Each human is a
unified being because: we reflect the world, we
formed an image of a unified entity by
interacting with our kind, and because of the perspective
of memory
- The variable time: is one
of the variables of the gravitational field.
With our scale we don't
register quantum fluctuations, making space-time
appear determined. At our speed we don't perceive
differences in time of different clocks, so we experience
a single time: universal, uniform, ordered; which is
helpful to our decisions
time juggling and riding a
unicycle. When MIT is Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
invited him to work for them he concluded that the scholarly
environment would help and so he left AT&T.
Overall Gertner concludes Shannon was unique in being able to
anticipate a different era twenty to fifty years ahead.
Repeatedly Shannon founded a field, stated all the major results
and proved most of them. But he was also an exemplar of Mervin Kelly's 'guys who
wrote the book'.
Kelly had discussed Bell
Lab's model for 'inventing ways to invent things for the future'
with the Royal Society. He argued that AT&T had a
manageable repeatable process, enabled by a steady stream of
funding based on the telephone is a device for capture of spoken voice signals, for their encoding and transmission over a signalling medium, initially the telegraph, but subsequently: microwave, optical links and networks and wireless networks; and the receipt and playing of the signals in the receiver. A variety of inventors saw the opportunity to add voice communications to the telegraph including: Alexander Graham Bell, Elisha Gray, Antonio Meucci; inducing significant litigation regarding the patent rights.
monopoly is a power relation within: - A state in which a group has enough power to enforce its will on other citizens. If this is a central authority with a cohesive military, it can overpower other warlords and stabilize the society.
- An economy in which one business has enough share in a market segment to control margins to its advantage. An economic monopoly can be broadly beneficial: AT&T monopoly, US patent monopoly rights;
. Kelly
also stressed the leverage of really smart people:
- Researchers providing a reservoir of new knowledge,
principles, materials, methods and art through
discovery. Anyone with a problem was encouraged by
policy to go to the guy who wrote the book such as Shockley, Tukey or Shannon.
- Technical assistants sustaining the reservoir of practical
innovation is the economic realization of invention and combinatorial exaptation. Keynes noted it provided the unquantifiable beneficial possibility that limits fear of uncertainty. Innovation operates across all CAS, being supported by genetic and cultural means. Creativity provides the mutation and recombination genetic operators for the cultural process. While highly innovative, monopolies: AT&T, IBM; usually have limited economic reach, constraining productivity. This explains the use of regulation, or even its threat, that can check their power and drive the creations across the economy.
s.
- Systems engineers developing ways to enhance the phone
system from these reservoirs while coping with the very high
odds of failure. Kelly stressed the driving force of
the needs and problems generated by the Bell System and its
users. Problems included:
- Military necessity,
- Need to make components cheaper,
- Need to make things faster,
- Evolving with societies changing needs,
- Finding markets for the products,
- Coping with the cascading impacts of new technology
deployment.
- Focused on the problems of manufacturing of devices,
switches and transmissions aligned to the delivery
system.
- Educating all the others so as to obtain a higher level of
awareness than a standard
Salman Khan argues that the evolved global education system is
inefficient and organized around constraining and corralling
students into accepting dubious ratings that lead to mundane
roles. He highlights a radical and already proven
alternative which offers effective self-paced deep learning
processes supported by technology and freed up attention of
teams of teachers. Building on his personal experience of
helping overcome the unjustified failing grade of a relative,
Khan:
- Iteratively learns how to teach: Starting with Nadia, Leveraging
short videos focused on content,
Converging on mastery,
With the help of
neuroscience, and filling
in dependent gaps; resulting in a different approach
to the mainstream method.
- Assesses the broken US education system: Set in its ways, Designed for the 1800s,
Inducing holes that
are hidden by tests, Tests
which ignore creativity.
The resulting teaching process is so inefficient it needs to
be supplemented with homework.
Instead teachers were encouraging their pupils to use his tools at home so
they could mentor them while they attended school, an
inversion that significantly improves the economics.
- Enters the real world: Builds a scalable service,
Working with a
real classroom, Trying stealth
learning, At Khan Academy full time, In the curriculum at
Los Altos, Supporting life-long
learning.
- Develops The One World Schoolhouse: Back to the future with
a one
room school, a robust
teaching team, and creativity enabled;
so with some catalysis
even the poorest can
become educated and earn credentials
for current jobs.
- Wishes he could also correct: Summer holidays, Transcript based
assessments, College
education;
- Concludes it is now possible to provide the infrastructure
for creativity to
emerge and to support risk taking.
Following our summary of his arguments RSS frames them from the
perspective of complex adaptive system (CAS) theory. Disruption is a powerful force for
change but if its force is used to support the current teachers
to adopt new processes can it overcome the extended phenotypic alignment and evolutionary amplifiers sustaining the
current educational network?
education
achieved.
The monopoly is a power relation within: - A state in which a group has enough power to enforce its will on other citizens. If this is a central authority with a cohesive military, it can overpower other warlords and stabilize the society.
- An economy in which one business has enough share in a market segment to control margins to its advantage. An economic monopoly can be broadly beneficial: AT&T monopoly, US patent monopoly rights;
revenue was also
necessary to support the military and government contributions
of AT&T. Kelly spent half his time on military and
government business, sustaining the view of the beneficial
monopoly. He argued that to keep the country strong it
must have a strong military and a strong economy is a human SuperOrganism complex adaptive system (CAS) which operates and controls trade flows within a rich niche. Economics models economies. Robert Gordon has described the evolution of the American economy. Like other CAS, economic flows are maintained far from equilibrium by: demand, financial flows and constraints, supply infrastructure constraints, political and military constraints; ensuring wealth, legislative control, legal contracts and power have significant leverage through evolved amplifiers. and AT&T should
support both. He had the same security clearance as the
CIA chief. He was one of the President's wise men
consulted along with Vannevar
Bush was a professor of engineering -- dean of the MIT School of Engineering, a founder while a student of Raytheon and the top science administrator to President F.D. Roosevelt. He developed the Differential Analyzer, encouraged Claude Shannon to study genetics, promoted the education-industrial-military complex arguing university and industrial labs should be contracted to develop government research and set the vision of the World Wide Web with his Atlantic article 'As We May Think' outlining the memex. . He was asked to become the President's science
advisor but instead suggested Princeton's
Robert Oppenheimer, or the presidents of Harvard,
MIT is Massachusetts Institute of Technology. or Cal Tech. Still
having AT&T as part of the growing military-industrial
complex was valuable.
Gertner notes that Kelly was asked to recommend ways to replace
the University of California in managing Sandia labs. He
proposed placing Sandia under an experienced industrial
contractor. His recommendations were accepted by the
Atomic Energy Commission and the Government asked AT&T to
implement the recommendations, as long as AT&T did not
profit from the arrangement.
As Sandia's contractor AT&T became involved in
guided-missile strategy. Bell lab's expertise in RADAR is radio detection and ranging. It is a method of finding the position and velocity of a target by sending out a pulse of radio frequency electromagnetic waves and analyzing the reflections returned from the target. and communications was
leveraged into success in this program. Nuclear arms and
telecommunications were becoming increasingly integrated.
AT&T became contributors to distant early warning (DEW)
remote RADAR installations which were made possible by Bell Labs
microwave communications expertise.
AT&T licensed transistors to: RCA, GE,
Raytheon and targeted for volume production in 1953 with the
intent of starting to replace vacuum tubes and electromechanical
switches. Transistors were still expensive but were
already useful to the military. It was clear that
transistor switches would be orders of magnitude faster.
But deployment into the phone network required that the
replacement components be better, cheaper and able to operate
for 30 to 40 years. This presented AT&T with a
dilemma. It took twenty years to fully develop a new cost
effective robust electronic switching system.
Changing from expensive germanium to ubiquitous cheap silicon
should significantly reduce the cost of the transistors.
And germanium was not proving to be robust enough -- failing at
high temperatures. Shockley advocated for
replacement with silicon. Shockley teamed with a chemist
Morris Tanenbaum. Since he wasn't a physicist Shockley did
not feel challenged by Tanenbaum so they got on well and made
progress. But silicon was problematic. It required
extreme temperatures and purity that drove the raw material
price back up. And at high temperatures the crucibles
released impurities. Tanenbaum and his lab technician
Buehler developed a process for pulling silicon at a varying
rate to control the types of impurities. They produced
long crystals with dozens of n-p-n sandwiches. Slicing one
from the stack they made the world's first working silicon
transistor in January 1954. But the complex fabrication
process limited the practical uses of this device.
Cal Fuller had been experimenting with impurities in germanium
and silicon. He developed a diffusion process where a long
silicon crystal is cut into thin round slices which are heated
in a furnace in a gas containing an impurity such as
aluminum. The impurity bombarded the surface of the
silicon slowly forcing their way to the interior. By
varying the diffusing impurity a series of thin coats of p- and
n- type materials was built up. On March 17th 1955
Tanenbaum melted an aluminum wire through the thin top layer
making a good contact. The resulting silicon transistor
performed better than any germanium transistor in
existence. This transistor would be easy to
manufacture. Morton and thus Kelly backed switching
manufacture over to diffused silicon transistors.
Diffused
silicon was also used to create a solar energy converter.
Cal Fuller and G. I. Pearson were attempting to develop a
silicon power rectifier. But Pearson observed that the
material was highly sensitive to light. He shared the
details with Daryl Chapin who was attempting to build power
sources for remote telephone is a device for capture of spoken voice signals, for their encoding and transmission over a signalling medium, initially the telegraph, but subsequently: microwave, optical links and networks and wireless networks; and the receipt and playing of the signals in the receiver. A variety of inventors saw the opportunity to add voice communications to the telegraph including: Alexander Graham Bell, Elisha Gray, Antonio Meucci; inducing significant litigation regarding the patent rights.
installations. Working remotely the three perfected a
silicon solar battery fifteen times more efficient than previous
cells. But the cell was a financial failure costing too
much to provide the needed power.
Around the same time
systems engineers at AT&T were interested in removing the
congestion on the long-distance phone network. This was
currently supported by underground coax cables. The new
plan would replace the backbone with far less expensive line of
sight microwave towers. Microwave towers would shape the
future of telecommunications. Gertner noted it would also
seal the fate of Bell Labs -- providing an entry point for MCI
into the Bell system.
In 1953 Bell Labs struggled to deploy network bandwidth across
the Atlantic. Cables were difficult to lay and maintain
and very costly. Radio waves were effected by
unpredictable interference. They succeeded in
developing a cable and ship based deployment, recovery and
repair system which operated without failure for twenty-two
years after it was activated.
Shockley had by now left Bell Labs to setup his own company with
the support of Fred Terman was a Stanford University engineering dean, and later provost of the university. He encouraged the development of a cluster of engineering companies based around the university including Hewlett-Packard. He encouraged William Shockley to setup a startup in Palo Alto catalyzing a further cluster of semiconductor companies. who was by
then Stanford University's provost. He was not able to
attract many AT&T scientists so he hired young solid state
physicists Gordon Moore, Robert Noyce, Jean Hoerni and Eugene
Kleiner. Kelly helped Shockley with this transition and he
also lobbied the Nobel committee to award the physics prize for
the transistor. On November 2 1956 Brattain, Bardeen and
Shockley heard they were sharing the prize.
The
government was looking to close down a 1949 Justice Department
lawsuit to break Western Electric from AT&T. It asked
AT&T for concessions to allow it to continue its network monopoly is a power relation within: - A state in which a group has enough power to enforce its will on other citizens. If this is a central authority with a cohesive military, it can overpower other warlords and stabilize the society.
- An economy in which one business has enough share in a market segment to control margins to its advantage. An economic monopoly can be broadly beneficial: AT&T monopoly, US patent monopoly rights;
intact.
AT&T proposed:
- To allow almost free access to its patents.
- It would stay out of the consumer electronics and computer
markets.
The government accepted AT&T's proposal.
Digital
information - a strength and a weakness for AT&T
Bell labs had developed an almost mythical status is a publically accepted, signal that one possesses assets: wealth, beauty, talent, expertise, access & trust of powerful people; to be able to help others. . William
Whyte's The Organizational Man argued that Bell Labs
(thinkers like Shannon, Claude Shannon was a key figure in information theory and computation. He developed an electronic circuit using Boolean algebra which simplified the design and operation of a digital computer system enabling architectures such as Von Neumann's to become practical. He also developed the mathematical models of information transfer which support information entropy. )
and Edison was a prolific inventor contributing to the emergence of electric power generation, mass communications, sound recording and movies. He invented the electric light bulb, phonograph, and motion picture camera. Born in Milan, Ohio, in 1847, Thomas was the seventh child of Samuel Edison and Nancy Elliot. He contracted scarlet fever as a child which is attributed with causing his deafness from the age of 12. His mother was a school teacher who taught Thomas to read, write and do arithmetic. He had almost no formal education, until he was 28, but taught himself by reading about anything that made him curious. He was interested in technology and did experiments at home. At 28, Thomas enrolled in a four year chemistry course at The Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art. Edison was entrepreurial from age 13 when he sold candy, newspapers and vegetables on the trains flowing from Port Huron to Detroit, to finance his electricity and chemistry experiments. After saving a three year old boy from being hit by a train he was rewarded by the boy's father with training as a telegraph operator. By working night shifts he used this time to read and experiment, which got him fired. He teamed up with Franklin Pope another inventor and telegrapher and developed a multiplex telegraphic system, which he sold financing his further business ventures. He used the funds to setup the first industrial research lab at Menlo Park, New Jersey. This allowed Edison to gather together materials and leverage other employees: mathematicians, engineers; to work together on analysis, inventions and technological innovations: telephone, phonograph, electric railway, iron ore separator, electric lighting; which Edison patented. He founded a large number of companies including: G.E.; enabling innovation. 's General
Electric were proof of the virtues of free research.
They attracted brilliant men and were outstandingly profitable
because they believed in 'idle curiosity'. Fortune's
Francis Bello extolled Bell Labs power of organized industrial
research and noted the combined power of the transistor and
information theory to influence the future. But inside
Labs some scientists pointed out that such digital networks did
not benefit from being designed and run by one operator.
An Instigator
John Robinson Pierce, Gertner argues was Bell Labs great
instigator. Typically he dropped ideas on people. He
approved quickly and then moved on. He had lots of nervous
energy.
He grew up in Iowa and Minnesota. He had always been
interested in new technology: Electric motors, steam engines uses heat to generate steam to do mechanical work. They have an external combustion source that burns wood or coal. Early instances include Newcomen's stationary beam atmospheric engine, and Boulton and Watt's more efficient beam engine. The steam engine was later used in railroads. , EMF means electric and magnetic fields. , radios. He found
algebra, geometry, chemistry easy. He built and wrote
about building a glider. He viewed it as 'something
complicated that really worked, that was a practical realization
of purpose rather than mere tinkering.'
He went to Caltech,
by that time run by Millikan, where he
concluded he was too clumsy to be a good chemist and that
aeronautical engineering was boring. But he enjoyed
electrical engineering and was viewed as exceptional and
quick. He was also seen as eccentric. He was picked
up by Bell Labs to work on vacuum tubes. But he was given
total freedom to explore. He felt a little freedom was
helpful but too much was horrible.
Shockley explained
vacuum tube physics to Pierce and the two became friends.
Pierce always gravitated to the smartest people and they liked is an emotion which initiates and maintains an altruistic partnership. It is a willingness to offer someone a favor. It is directed to those who appear likely to return the favor. him. He viewed Shannon and Kelly as heroes.
And like Kelly, Pierce tore ideas apart looking for the good
ones. So, many people at Bell Labs feared him.
Actually he was just pragmatic and focused on actions.
Gertner argues an instigator is a rare person who seeks to get
others to do things. Pierce said it was because he was
lazy! More likely he had so many interests he could not do
them all himself, like Bush.
He was able to get most others interested in something that
hadn't occurred to them before. Shannon was the exception who
ignored everyone else's ideas. Also, once Pierce had
identified a good idea he championed it and publicized it.
He became aware of Kompfner's travelling wave tube and promoted
it inside Bell Labs. He wrote about communicating by
bouncing waves off the moon. This was the catalysis for
the development of satellite communication.
Trans-Atlantic
calls provided an obvious application of such satellites but the
technologies arrived slowly and piecemeal:
- Horn antenna
- Silicon
solar battery - which finally found a problem that it
matched.
- Low power amplification required the transistor.
- Travelling wave tube
- Maser developed by Pierces former colleague Charles Townes
- Rocket launchers driven by the Sputnik launch
competition.
Pierce also had to wait for Mervin Kelly to retire since he was
against investing in satellites. Finally with all the
enablers present Pierce pushed for:
- A passive 'Echo' reflective balloon satellite allowing
validation of all the ground systems including computers to
track the satellite, transmitters and receivers.
Pierce felt it had proceeded smoothly because few people
perceived its practical importance. and later
- An active Telstar satellite. This became a sensation
allowing Congress and the Kennedy administration to push all
private companies out of the international satellite
business.
Futures: Real and
Imagined
At the New York world fair AT&T had an opportunity to
demonstrate the complexity of the phone system and their vision
to the general public. But while Pierce suggested: Personal
hand-carried telephones is a device for capture of spoken voice signals, for their encoding and transmission over a signalling medium, initially the telegraph, but subsequently: microwave, optical links and networks and wireless networks; and the receipt and playing of the signals in the receiver. A variety of inventors saw the opportunity to add voice communications to the telegraph including: Alexander Graham Bell, Elisha Gray, Antonio Meucci; inducing significant litigation regarding the patent rights. ,
FAX, and computer information retrieval; the exhibit eventually
included just: push-button dialing, Telstar function and the
video phone. AT&T executives used the fair to perform
a market assessment of the video phone. The results were
badly misinterpreted. The product while fascinating, was
in reality costly, its value was unproven and it would struggle
to get network effects. It was a flop.
By 1964
Bell Labs had spent $100 million developing ESS no 1, its
electronic switching station. It was a computerized switch
intended to cope with the increasing complexity of setting up,
routing and re-routing telephone is a device for capture of spoken voice signals, for their encoding and transmission over a signalling medium, initially the telegraph, but subsequently: microwave, optical links and networks and wireless networks; and the receipt and playing of the signals in the receiver. A variety of inventors saw the opportunity to add voice communications to the telegraph including: Alexander Graham Bell, Elisha Gray, Antonio Meucci; inducing significant litigation regarding the patent rights.
system circuits. It would replace cross bar switching
infrastructure and be better and cheaper. But to the
telephone systems users ESS was initially an incremental
improvement. Eventually its call routing and
forwarding would enable true mobility.
Jim Fisk by then president of Bell Labs felt
that in the future the Bell system would:
- Need to be faster. It was felt ESS and touch tone
dialing would help with this.
- Need to send more information digitally. Deployment
of T-1 lines using PCM
would help here.
- Become more congested. Fisk proposed to cope with
this by increasing the transmission frequency.
Circular waveguides supported use of high frequency radio
waves to carry circuits.
Fisk did not get involved in the detail of Bell Labs. For
this he depended on his deputy Julius Molnar. His other
deputy Bill Baker was head of Bell Labs' research
division. Mervin
Kelly hired both Fisk and Baker.
Baker was a chemist, graduating with a PhD from Princeton
in 1939. He tuned his technical appreciation of chemistry
methods while identifying a perfect turkey food for his mother's
business. He was highly intelligent. He was highly
secretive. Baker
considered science rests on a foundation of inquiry rather than
certainty. He perceived that progress was really the
struggle to understand the composition of materials and to
fashion new and better ones where possible. He felt
Shockley and Peirce had a new approach to science bridging the
gap between the best science of the academy and the important
applications that a modern society needed. They attacked
the fundamental hard problems that until then were left to the
great universities.
Baker and Fisk were accomplished
administrators. Baker was very close with his deputy John Pierce. He leveraged
Pierce's valuation of new ideas and he supported Pierce-driven
efforts.
He was appreciated by the government who used him to manage the
development of communications analysis to support the NSA.
Baker leveraged Pierce, Luis Alvarez and John Tukey to search
for new concepts of inter-conversion of information and intelligence enables the achievement of goals in the face of obstacles. The goals are sub-goals of genes' survival and reproduction and include: - Obtaining and eating food
- Sex
- Finding and maintaining shelter
- Fighting for resources - in the preferred hunter-gatherer environment loss of resources was critical while possession was often transient.
- Understanding the proximate environment
- Securing the cooperation of others
. He
understood how information works and how it flows. He
eventually consulted to President Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson,
Nixon, Ford and Reagan.
Gertner noted
that Baker understood transistors enabled digital
technology. So he saw a grand future for AT&T.
During the 1950s and 1960s a stream of semiconductor innovation is the economic realization of invention and combinatorial exaptation. Keynes noted it provided the unquantifiable beneficial possibility that limits fear of uncertainty. Innovation operates across all CAS, being supported by genetic and cultural means. Creativity provides the mutation and recombination genetic operators for the cultural process. While highly innovative, monopolies: AT&T, IBM; usually have limited economic reach, constraining productivity. This explains the use of regulation, or even its threat, that can check their power and drive the creations across the economy. s emerged from
Bell Labs. They were licensed to GE,
RCA, TI and Fairchild where Noyce and Moore had moved after
working for Shockley. Jack Kilby visited Bell Labs in 1952
for a seminar in how transistors work. As transistor
devices grew in scope the connections became a significant issue
-- called the Tyranny of numbers. Alternative strategies
for solving this issue were identified by Bell Labs (Functional
devices) and other companies. Kilby and Noyce both
identified integrated circuits (IC) as the strategy. Bell
Lab's Morton argued that ICs could never be reliable.
Kilby and Noyce assumed the manufacturing challenges could be
worked out over Carlo Rovelli resolves the paradox of time.
Rovelli initially explains that low level physics does not
include time:
- A present that is common throughout the universe does not exist
- Events are only partially ordered. The present is
localized
- The difference between past and future is not foundational.
It occurs because of state that through our blurring appears
particular to us
- Time passes at different speeds dependent on where we are and how fast we travel
- Time's rhythms are due to
the gravitational field
- Our quantized physics shows neither
space nor time, just processes transforming physical
variables.
- Fundamentally there is no time. The basic equations
evolve together with events, not things
Then he
explains how in a physical world without time its perception can
emerge:
- Our familiar time emerges
- Our interaction with the world is partial, blurred,
quantum indeterminate
- The ignorance determines the existence of thermal time
and entropy that quantifies our uncertainty
- Directionality of time is real
but perspectival. The entropy of the world in
relation to us increases with our thermal time. The
growth of entropy distinguishes past from future: resulting in
traces and memories
- Each human is a
unified being because: we reflect the world, we
formed an image of a unified entity by
interacting with our kind, and because of the perspective
of memory
- The variable time: is one
of the variables of the gravitational field.
With our scale we don't
register quantum fluctuations, making space-time
appear determined. At our speed we don't perceive
differences in time of different clocks, so we experience
a single time: universal, uniform, ordered; which is
helpful to our decisions
time. For Bell
Labs the significance was that an important advance in
solid-state engineering, though built upon Labs discoveries,
occurred outside. Bell Labs had developed all the
technologies and processes but no one had the foresight except
Noyce and Kilby.
Similarly while
Charles Townes had invented the maser, and worked at Bell Labs
in the late 50s on lasers the first working examples were built
at Hughes aircraft. Still Bell Labs did develop a
continuous ruby laser which would be important in using high
frequency light to carry telephone is a device for capture of spoken voice signals, for their encoding and transmission over a signalling medium, initially the telegraph, but subsequently: microwave, optical links and networks and wireless networks; and the receipt and playing of the signals in the receiver. A variety of inventors saw the opportunity to add voice communications to the telegraph including: Alexander Graham Bell, Elisha Gray, Antonio Meucci; inducing significant litigation regarding the patent rights.
calls. Pierce had
understood the potential of a laser for increasing communication
bandwidth and so Labs had suggested to academics that they
refocus their research towards laser development. Bell
labs engineers worked on technology to modulate voice and data
signals and impress them on a laser beam.
Bell Lab's
engineers were also puzzling over what medium the light should
be transmitted through? International telephone is a device for capture of spoken voice signals, for their encoding and transmission over a signalling medium, initially the telegraph, but subsequently: microwave, optical links and networks and wireless networks; and the receipt and playing of the signals in the receiver. A variety of inventors saw the opportunity to add voice communications to the telegraph including: Alexander Graham Bell, Elisha Gray, Antonio Meucci; inducing significant litigation regarding the patent rights. and telegraph is a point to point signalling system. Electric versions were developed and deployed around 1840s. They were helpful supporting infrastructure for railway networks, banking and rapid news relaying. Each transmitted letter was encoded in the transmissions. Two main types were deployed: - Needle telegraphs which moved a needle to represent the signal. Often multiple needles were used in the encoding requiring multiple wires to be strung between the stations. Cooke and Wheatstone's telegraph was of this type and was widely deployed within the British Empire.
- Armature telegraphs where a pulse generates a click at the receiver station. Samuel Morse developed a single wire (low cost) system of this type along with the Morse Code. German railways standardized on the Morse telegraph and it was deployed in the US supporting railway operation.
(ITT)'s Charles
Kao was researching glass fiber as a medium. Baker and Fisk bet on wave guides as more
feasible. In 1970 Corning announced the creation of pure
glass fibers which essentially killed wave guides.
Bell Lab's was still innovating developing charge coupled
devices (CCD) now used in digital photography and computer
technologies including UNIX is a computer operating system. It is a registered trademark of AT&T.
and 'c is a small portable computer programming language developed by Dennis Ritchie of AT&T Bell Labs to support implementaton of a portable UNIX operating system. '.
Every twenty years the US is the United States of America. Government reassessed if it
should continue the AT&T monopoly is a power relation within: - A state in which a group has enough power to enforce its will on other citizens. If this is a central authority with a cohesive military, it can overpower other warlords and stabilize the society.
- An economy in which one business has enough share in a market segment to control margins to its advantage. An economic monopoly can be broadly beneficial: AT&T monopoly, US patent monopoly rights;
.
Over the years this had resulted in:
Bill Baker accepted the government's view that telephone is a device for capture of spoken voice signals, for their encoding and transmission over a signalling medium, initially the telegraph, but subsequently: microwave, optical links and networks and wireless networks; and the receipt and playing of the signals in the receiver. A variety of inventors saw the opportunity to add voice communications to the telegraph including: Alexander Graham Bell, Elisha Gray, Antonio Meucci; inducing significant litigation regarding the patent rights. networking was
a mature industry and that AT&T no longer expected to have
to demonstrate new technical communications functions. He
concluded Bell Labs should concentrate on maximizing the
efficiency, performance and economy is a human SuperOrganism complex adaptive system (CAS) which operates and controls trade flows within a rich niche. Economics models economies. Robert Gordon has described the evolution of the American economy. Like other CAS, economic flows are maintained far from equilibrium by: demand, financial flows and constraints, supply infrastructure constraints, political and military constraints; ensuring wealth, legislative control, legal contracts and power have significant leverage through evolved amplifiers.
of its network and innovation is the economic realization of invention and combinatorial exaptation. Keynes noted it provided the unquantifiable beneficial possibility that limits fear of uncertainty. Innovation operates across all CAS, being supported by genetic and cultural means. Creativity provides the mutation and recombination genetic operators for the cultural process. While highly innovative, monopolies: AT&T, IBM; usually have limited economic reach, constraining productivity. This explains the use of regulation, or even its threat, that can check their power and drive the creations across the economy. s.
He was assuming this focus would provide AT&T an advantage
in a competitive environment. With hindsight Gertner notes
this was a mistake. The network still offered lots of new
niche opportunities. Manufacture and deployment of fiber
optic networks and mobile telephones totally transformed the
nature of the network.
From the 1960s
Bell Lab's scientists viewed optical networking as important to
improve capacity. But they concluded a number of innovation is the economic realization of invention and combinatorial exaptation. Keynes noted it provided the unquantifiable beneficial possibility that limits fear of uncertainty. Innovation operates across all CAS, being supported by genetic and cultural means. Creativity provides the mutation and recombination genetic operators for the cultural process. While highly innovative, monopolies: AT&T, IBM; usually have limited economic reach, constraining productivity. This explains the use of regulation, or even its threat, that can check their power and drive the creations across the economy. s were needed:
- Room temperature laser,
- Fiber optics. Having accepted fiber optics would be
a key technology AT&T had to match Corning with low
scattering and absorption. In the early 1970s Corning
and Bell Labs agreed to share their patents on fiber
production. Both companies identified ways to reduce
absorption and scattering. And the fibers became more
flexible.
- Splicing of fibers.
- Adding amplifiers to sustain the signal as it
attenuated.
By 1975, just fifteen years later, fiber optic networks were
available for test deployment in AT&T's network.
Mobile
phones were also ready to field test by 1975 but they had taken
many years, of stop-and-start evolution to develop and
manufacture. Ship-to-shore radio telephony is a device for capture of spoken voice signals, for their encoding and transmission over a signalling medium, initially the telegraph, but subsequently: microwave, optical links and networks and wireless networks; and the receipt and playing of the signals in the receiver. A variety of inventors saw the opportunity to add voice communications to the telegraph including: Alexander Graham Bell, Elisha Gray, Antonio Meucci; inducing significant litigation regarding the patent rights. for affluent
passengers and police mobile radio communications were supported
in 1920s. The demands of the military during the Second
World War focused Bell Labs and Motorola on compact mobile
communications for tanks and planes. In the wake of the
war AT&T supported the development of a business selling
mobile telephone service to car owners.
But the systems lacked suitable radio spectrum, which the FCC is the Federal Communications Commission established in 1934. was allocating to other
industries. In 1947 AT&T petitioned the FCC for more
ultra-high-frequency (UHF) spectrum. The petition included
Doug Ring and Rae Young's proposal to operate cells of coverage.
In 1952 the FCC allocated the spectrum to mass
communication. John Pierce
and AT&T executives continued to lobby for mobile telephony
spectrum. When by 1967 the FCC became disappointed with
the low quality and take-up of UHF television they asked
AT&T for more proposals.
Already in 1966 Dick Frankel, Phil Porter and Joel Engel had
started informally to investigate Ring and Young's proposal to
support car phones. They concluded all the technology
enablers were present: computer enabled signal strength sensing,
location, handoff and routing and capacity planning based on ICs and the ESS.
The FCC decision to consider proposals was the catalyst.
And without the experience to contemplate failure the three got
AT&T, via Bill Jakes and Gerry DiPiazza to invest $100
million over three years to deploy cellular wireless.
To handle Motorola and government monopoly is a power relation within: - A state in which a group has enough power to enforce its will on other citizens. If this is a central authority with a cohesive military, it can overpower other warlords and stabilize the society.
- An economy in which one business has enough share in a market segment to control margins to its advantage. An economic monopoly can be broadly beneficial: AT&T monopoly, US patent monopoly rights;
concerns AT&T
announced they would only build and operate cellular networks,
not the handsets.
By 1980 the success of both optical and cellular network
technologies seemed assured. But AT&T
appeared headed for breakup. Judge Harold Greene and the DOJ - U.S. Department of Justice. 's William Baxter took on
the new chairman of AT&T Charles Brown. Baxter viewed
AT&T as both vertically and horizontally integrated.
Given Judge Green's apparent hostility Brown decided to
settle. On Jan 8 1982 AT&T agreed to divest its local
phone companies and it would be allowed to enter other
industries such as computers. Bill Baker viewed it as
announcing the death of the 'idea factory' and Peter Drucker
agreed.
Gertner assesses the appropriateness of applying the Bell Labs innovation is the economic realization of invention and combinatorial exaptation. Keynes noted it provided the unquantifiable beneficial possibility that limits fear of uncertainty. Innovation operates across all CAS, being supported by genetic and cultural means. Creativity provides the mutation and recombination genetic operators for the cultural process. While highly innovative, monopolies: AT&T, IBM; usually have limited economic reach, constraining productivity. This explains the use of regulation, or even its threat, that can check their power and drive the creations across the economy. model
today. Gertner reiterates John Pierce's comment to a U.S.
Senate subcommittee "The only really important thing about
communications is how well it serves man," he said. "New
gadgets or new technologies are important only when they really
make good new things possible or good old things cheaper or
better." He recalls Mervin Kelly's larger view of
innovation was that a great institution with the capacity for
both research and development--a place where a "critical mass"
of scientists could exchange all kinds of information and
consult with one another for explanations--was the most fruitful
way to organize a "creative technology."
Gertner
argues that Kelly's conception was matched to its
situation. As industrial science evolved a different The agents in complex adaptive
systems (CAS) must model their
environment to respond effectively to it. Evolution's
schematic operators and Samuel
modeling together support the indirect recording of past
successes and their strategic use by the current agent to learn
how to succeed in the proximate environment.
model of innovation is the economic realization of invention and combinatorial exaptation. Keynes noted it provided the unquantifiable beneficial possibility that limits fear of uncertainty. Innovation operates across all CAS, being supported by genetic and cultural means. Creativity provides the mutation and recombination genetic operators for the cultural process. While highly innovative, monopolies: AT&T, IBM; usually have limited economic reach, constraining productivity. This explains the use of regulation, or even its threat, that can check their power and drive the creations across the economy. arose.
Silicon Valley entrepreneurs proved that new ideas didn't need
to be attached to a large corporation. He says instead of
a factory of ideas it is a geography of ideas--an innovation
hub. Bill Baker
aimed to respond to the Silicon Valley innovation hub, hiring Fred Terman
to map out an innovation hub for New Jersey. Terman's
response proved too costly for the New Jersey companies to
fund.
Gertner
identifies the Bell Lab's innovation
factory as the architecture being applied to biomedical
problems at Janelia
Farm, a research center of the Howard Hughes Medical
Institute. Janelia is supported by a multibillion-dollar
endowment. Gertner notes that early results suggest
Janelia is out innovating academics working in the traditional
federally financed medical research network. Gertner also
identifies U.S. secretary of energy Steven Chu's innovation hubs
as using Bell Lab's architectures. These hubs aim to
innovate in clean energy.
Gertner notes that the This page reviews Christensen's disruption
of a complex adaptive system (CAS).
The mechanism is discussed with examples from biology and
business.
innovator's
dilemma did not seem to undermine Mervin Kelly's business
models. He suggests that it is the monopoly
that protected Kelly from its force.
Complex adaptive system This page introduces the complex adaptive system (CAS) theory
frame. The theory provides an organizing framework that is
used by 'life.' It can be used to evaluate and rank models
that claim to describe our perceived reality. It catalogs
the laws and strategies which underpin the operation of systems
that are based on the interaction of emergent
agents. It highlights the
constraints that shape CAS and so predicts their form. A
proposal that does not conform is wrong.
John Holland's framework for representing complexity is
outlined. Links to other key aspects of CAS theory
discussed at the site are presented.
(CAS) theory applies directly to the
This page discusses the effect of the network on the agents participating in a complex
adaptive system (CAS). Small
world and scale free networks are considered.
network of Plans are interpreted and implemented by agents. This page
discusses the properties of agents in a complex adaptive system
(CAS).
It then presents examples of agents in different CAS. The
examples include a computer program where modeling and actions
are performed by software agents. These software agents
are aggregates.
The participation of agents in flows is introduced and some
implications of this are outlined.
agents which
Gertner details in exploration of Bell Labs.
Gertner illustrates the existence of a controlled and catalyzed
flow of dynamic, smart, young men into an innovation is the economic realization of invention and combinatorial exaptation. Keynes noted it provided the unquantifiable beneficial possibility that limits fear of uncertainty. Innovation operates across all CAS, being supported by genetic and cultural means. Creativity provides the mutation and recombination genetic operators for the cultural process. While highly innovative, monopolies: AT&T, IBM; usually have limited economic reach, constraining productivity. This explains the use of regulation, or even its threat, that can check their power and drive the creations across the economy. network
within AT&T. He suggests that Robert
Millikan acted as: an academic network hub, as a Agents use sensors to detect events in their environment.
This page reviews how these events become signals associated
with beneficial responses in a complex adaptive system (CAS). CAS signals emerge from
the Darwinian information
model. Signals can indicate decision
summaries and level of uncertainty.
sensor for AT&T, and a role model
providing a viable Plans emerge in complex adaptive
systems (CAS) to provide the
instructions that agents use to
perform actions. The component architecture and structure
of the plans is reviewed.
memetic toolkit
to transform the fledgling scientists into creative agents within Bell
Labs. Network hubs enable efficient association with other
equivalents including Vannevar
Bush was a professor of engineering -- dean of the MIT School of Engineering, a founder while a student of Raytheon and the top science administrator to President F.D. Roosevelt. He developed the Differential Analyzer, encouraged Claude Shannon to study genetics, promoted the education-industrial-military complex arguing university and industrial labs should be contracted to develop government research and set the vision of the World Wide Web with his Atlantic article 'As We May Think' outlining the memex. . It appears key that:
- As college hires these future leaders now aims to develop plans and strategies which ensure effective coordination to improve the common good of the in-group. Pinker notes the evolved pressure of social rivalry associating power with leadership. Saposky observes the disconnect between power hierarchies and wisdom in apes. John Adair developed a modern leadership methodology based on the three-circles model.
were young
enough to still
be working through their cognitive apprentiship and open to seed ideas in humans supports the transition from a juvenile configuration, dependent on parents and structured to learn & logistically transform, to adult optimized to the proximate environment. And it is staged, encouraging male adolescents to escape the hierarchy they grew up in and enter other groups where they may bring in: fresh ideas, risk taking; and alter the existing hierarchy: Steve Jobs & Steve Wozniak, Bill Gates & Paul Allen; while females become highly focused on friendships and communications. It marks the beginning of Piaget's formal operational stage of cognitive development. The limbic, autonomic and hormone networks are already deployed and functioning effectively. The frontal cortex has to be pruned: winning neurons move to their final highly connected positions, and are myelinated over time. The rest dissolve. So the frontal lobe does not obtain its adult configuration and networked integration until the mid-twenties when prefrontal cortex control becomes optimal. The evolutionarily oldest areas of the frontal cortex mature first. The PFC must be iteratively customized by experience to do the right thing as an adult. Adolescents: - Don't detect irony effectively. They depend on the DMPFC to do this, unlike adults who leverage the fusiform face area.
- Regulate emotions with the ventral striatum while the prefrontal cortex is still being setup. Dopamine projection density and signalling increase from the ventral tegmentum catalyzing increased interest in dopamine based rewards. Novelty seeking allows for creative exploration which was necessary to move beyond the familial pack. Criticisms do not get incorporated into learning models by adolescents leaving their risk assessments very poor. The target of the dopamine networks, the adolescent accumbens, responds to rewards like a gyrating top - hugely to large rewards, and negatively to small rewards. Eventually as the frontal regions increase in contribution there are steady improvements in: working memory, flexible rule use, executive organization and task shifting. And adolescents start to see other people's perspective.
- Drive the cellular transformations with post-pubescent high levels of testosterone in males, and high but fluctuating estrogen & progesterone levels in females. Blood flow to the frontal cortex is also diverted on occasion to the groin.
- Peer pressure is exceptionally influential in adolescents. Admired peer comments reduce vmPFC activity and enhance ventral striatal activity. Adults modulate the mental impact of socially mean treatment: the initial activation of the PAG, anterior cingulate, amygdala, insula cortex; which generate feelings of pain, anger, and disgust, with the VLPFC but that does not occur in adolescents.
- Feel empathy intensely, supported by their rampant emotions, interest in novelty, ego. But feeling the pain of others can induce self-oriented avoidance of the situations.
which they could subsequently develop, fight
for and leverage.
- The environment at Bell labs focused these developing
leaders' attention on the problems of
Robert Gordon argues that the inventions of the second
industrial revolution were the foundation for
American economic growth. Gordon shows how flows of people
into difficult rural America built a population base
which then took the opportunity to move on to urban settings: Houses, Food in supermarkets,
Clothes in
department stores;
that supported increasing productivity and standard of living.
The deployment of nationwide networks: Rail, Road, Utilities;
terminating in the urban housing and work places allowing the workers to
leverage time saving goods and services, which helped grow
the economy.
Gordon describes the concomitant transformation of:
- Communications
and advertising
- Credit
and finance
- Public
health and the health
care network
- Health insurance
- Education
- Social
and welfare services
Counter intuitively the constraints
introduced before and in the Great Depression and the demands of World War 2
provide the amplifiers that drive the inventions deeply and
fully into every aspect of the economy between 1940 and 1970
creating the exceptional growth and standard of living of post
war America.
Subsequently the
rate of growth was limited until the shift of women
into the workplace and the full networking of
voice and data supported the Internet and World Wide Web
completed the third industrial revolution, but the effects were
muted by the narrow reach of the technologies.
The development of Big Data, Robots,
and Artificial Intelligence may support additional growth,
but Gordon is unconvinced because of the collapse of
the middle class.
Following our summary of Gordon's book RSS frames his arguments from
the perspective of complex adaptive system (CAS) theory.
one of the transformative innovations
of the twentieth century, the telephone is a device for capture of spoken voice signals, for their encoding and transmission over a signalling medium, initially the telegraph, but subsequently: microwave, optical links and networks and wireless networks; and the receipt and playing of the signals in the receiver. A variety of inventors saw the opportunity to add voice communications to the telegraph including: Alexander Graham Bell, Elisha Gray, Antonio Meucci; inducing significant litigation regarding the patent rights. network,
allowing the Baldwin
effect suggests learning can guide evolution. While some aspects of the organism are setup directly by genes others are left to be set through learning. Trial and error is used to tune the learned settings. Learning can allow a configuration that natural selection is highly unlikely to generate and that is tuned to the proximate environment, to be found by iterative testing. Natural selection can retain the schematic structures that specify the learning infrastructure and the most successful aspects set directly evolving towards a desired outcome. The result looks Lamarckian. to enhance
their cognitive strategies.
The strategy of AT&T supporting the government in times of
war helped make its research scientists aware of additional Agents use sensors to detect events in their environment.
This page reviews how these events become signals associated
with beneficial responses in a complex adaptive system (CAS). CAS signals emerge from
the Darwinian information
model. Signals can indicate decision
summaries and level of uncertainty.
signal, sensor and action problems
including cryptography, mobile communications, RADAR is radio detection and ranging. It is a method of finding the position and velocity of a target by sending out a pulse of radio frequency electromagnetic waves and analyzing the reflections returned from the target. and fire control.
AT&T was part
of the Robert Gordon argues that the inventions of the second
industrial revolution were the foundation for
American economic growth. Gordon shows how flows of people
into difficult rural America built a population base
which then took the opportunity to move on to urban settings: Houses, Food in supermarkets,
Clothes in
department stores;
that supported increasing productivity and standard of living.
The deployment of nationwide networks: Rail, Road, Utilities;
terminating in the urban housing and work places allowing the workers to
leverage time saving goods and services, which helped grow
the economy.
Gordon describes the concomitant transformation of:
- Communications
and advertising
- Credit
and finance
- Public
health and the health
care network
- Health insurance
- Education
- Social
and welfare services
Counter intuitively the constraints
introduced before and in the Great Depression and the demands of World War 2
provide the amplifiers that drive the inventions deeply and
fully into every aspect of the economy between 1940 and 1970
creating the exceptional growth and standard of living of post
war America.
Subsequently the
rate of growth was limited until the shift of women
into the workplace and the full networking of
voice and data supported the Internet and World Wide Web
completed the third industrial revolution, but the effects were
muted by the narrow reach of the technologies.
The development of Big Data, Robots,
and Artificial Intelligence may support additional growth,
but Gordon is unconvinced because of the collapse of
the middle class.
Following our summary of Gordon's book RSS frames his arguments from
the perspective of complex adaptive system (CAS) theory.
golden age This page discusses the mechanisms and effects of emergence
underpinning any complex adaptive system (CAS). Physical forces and
constraints follow the rules of complexity. They generate
phenomena and support the indirect emergence of epiphenomena.
Flows of epiphenomena interact in events which support the
emergence of equilibrium and autonomous
entities. Autonomous entities enable evolution
to operate broadening the adjacent possible.
Key research is reviewed.
emergent set of businesses with positive return, W. Brian Arthur's conception of how high tech products have positive economic feedback as they deploy. Classical products such as foods have negative returns to scale since they take increasing amounts of land, and distribution infrastructure to support getting them to market. High tech products typically become easier to produce or gain from platform and network effects of being connected together overcoming the negative effects of scale. economics is the study of trade between humans. Traditional Economics is based on an equilibrium model of the economic system. Traditional Economics includes: microeconomics, and macroeconomics. Marx developed an alternative static approach. Limitations of the equilibrium model have resulted in the development of: Keynes's dynamic General Theory of Employment Interest & Money, and Complexity Economics. Since trading depends on human behavior, economics has developed behavioral models including: behavioral economics. from network
effects, including railways uses low friction tracks to support an engine and cars which can carry people and goods. Modern railroads began with the Stockton to Darlington railway built by George Stephenson with a steam powered engine Locomotion No. 1 in 1825. Electric power, and telegraph network were later leveraged. Railroads contributed to the colonization of the world, the shift to regimentation with standardized time, maintained the efficiency of the cotton plantation trading network, supported the urbanization of the US, enabled the distribution of Californian lettuce and Midwestern beef with the refrigerated rail car, until government policy drove a shift to road networks, but were dangerous to walk on and supported the distribution of cholera to the US. The monopsonistic network effects were leveraged by John D. Rockefeller, in building his Standard Oil trust. ,
oil distribution companies, and financial trusts. The telephone is a device for capture of spoken voice signals, for their encoding and transmission over a signalling medium, initially the telegraph, but subsequently: microwave, optical links and networks and wireless networks; and the receipt and playing of the signals in the receiver. A variety of inventors saw the opportunity to add voice communications to the telegraph including: Alexander Graham Bell, Elisha Gray, Antonio Meucci; inducing significant litigation regarding the patent rights. network acted
as an This page reviews the catalytic
impact of infrastructure on the expression of phenotypic effects by an
agent. The infrastructure
reduces the cost the agent must pay to perform the selected
action. The catalysis is enhanced by positive returns.
infrastructure amplifier.
But with federal help AT&T became supported by
congressional This page discusses the physical foundations of complex adaptive
systems (CAS). A small set of
rules is obeyed. New [epi]phenomena then emerge. Examples are
discussed.
rules helping it
become an This page reviews the strategy of setting up an arms race. At its
core this strategy depends on being able to alter, or take
advantage of an alteration in, the genome
or equivalent. The situation is illustrated with examples
from biology, high tech and politics.
evolved amplifier. A
rich protected environment allowed AT&T to follow the superorganism is a wealthy autonomous entity needing and controlling the richest niches in the proximate environment, that emerges from the bundled cooperation of schematically aligned agents. The term is based on the social insect model, used by: ants, termites, and bees; and identified by Holldobler & E.O. Wilson. These genetically identical insect superorganisms cooperatively limit their reproduction to align with the resources available in the niche. Wilson asserts these insects all developed nests to which they returned to raise their offspring, and when the nest sites were of limited capacity some family members responded by focusing on defending the nest and foraging while their mother became an egg laying queen, enabled by "a single genetic change which silenced the brain's program for dispersal and prevents the mother and her offspring from dispersing to create new nests," Wilson explains. He adds climate control of the nest and disease resistance, just like the human immune system, demand individually focused diversity. So the queen's genome consists of low variety alleles for the extended phenotypic 'robot' worker caste agents and their organization - queen and workers competing as one, with other colonies and individual insects - and other parts which are high where the genome includes significant diversity. For humans it is an evolved cultural strategy used when the environment is supportive, but it is dependent on our imperfect cognitive assessment of kinship as well as group selection driven emotions: other-condemning, other-praising, other-suffering and self-conscious; and group oriented pressures to conform and remain: religions. And the adjacent possible must be recreated and modeled culturally through the emergence of processes such as democracy. It depends on inter-agent signalling. In both insects and humans it allows specialization, and encourages operations and flows that are tightly controlled, limiting waste, leveraging parallel activity, supporting coherence. Superorganisms reflect cliodynamic flows. A superorganism has a development and operational phase. As additional agents are coopted into the superorganism they align, participate in supply and demand activities and so contribute to the evolutionary amplification. Damasio notes that prokaryotes, in rich environments, can similarly operate in a symbiotic fashion expressing cultural behaviors. This page reviews the strategy of bundling multiple products
within a single offer in a complex
adaptive system (CAS). The
mechanism is discussed with examples from biology and
business.
bundling strategy. But when the
market share and revenue guarantees were removed AT&T's This page reviews the inhibiting effect of the value delivery system on the
expression of new phenotypic
effects within an agent.
extended phenotypic alignment
constrained its ability to respond to businesses entering its
markets from other niche environments. Gertner illustrates how MCI
This page discusses the strategy of going around the
competitor's flank to reach and assault its rear.
enveloped AT&T's one system
universal service business.
Within AT&T Gertner identifies various facets which
supported the innovation is the economic realization of invention and combinatorial exaptation. Keynes noted it provided the unquantifiable beneficial possibility that limits fear of uncertainty. Innovation operates across all CAS, being supported by genetic and cultural means. Creativity provides the mutation and recombination genetic operators for the cultural process. While highly innovative, monopolies: AT&T, IBM; usually have limited economic reach, constraining productivity. This explains the use of regulation, or even its threat, that can check their power and drive the creations across the economy.
of new technologies. Key aspects include:
- Monopoly rents:
- Government
Flows of different kinds are essential to the operation of
complex adaptive systems (CAS).
Example flows are outlined. Constraints on flows support
the emergence of the systems.
Examples of constraints are discussed.
constraints:
limited AT&T's market reach. Inhibiting
AT&T from competing in computers did not stop Bell
Labs from developing computer technologies. As Gertner
explains they needed computing capabilities to develop the ESS.
And leverage of Shannon, Claude Shannon was a key figure in information theory and computation. He developed an electronic circuit using Boolean algebra which simplified the design and operation of a digital computer system enabling architectures such as Von Neumann's to become practical. He also developed the mathematical models of information transfer which support information entropy. 's
work required computing technologies. So Bell Labs
used their innovation is the economic realization of invention and combinatorial exaptation. Keynes noted it provided the unquantifiable beneficial possibility that limits fear of uncertainty. Innovation operates across all CAS, being supported by genetic and cultural means. Creativity provides the mutation and recombination genetic operators for the cultural process. While highly innovative, monopolies: AT&T, IBM; usually have limited economic reach, constraining productivity. This explains the use of regulation, or even its threat, that can check their power and drive the creations across the economy.
system to develop computing technologies that were useful to
them. And they allowed their contributions including UNIX is a computer operating system. It is a registered trademark of AT&T. and 'c is a small portable computer programming language developed by Dennis Ritchie of AT&T Bell Labs to support implementaton of a portable UNIX operating system. ' to be freely accessible
within the academic community. This flow supported the
This page discusses the mechanisms and effects of emergence
underpinning any complex adaptive system (CAS). Physical forces and
constraints follow the rules of complexity. They generate
phenomena and support the indirect emergence of epiphenomena.
Flows of epiphenomena interact in events which support the
emergence of equilibrium and autonomous
entities. Autonomous entities enable evolution
to operate broadening the adjacent possible.
Key research is reviewed.
emergence of open
computing. As Steven Johnson
notes in Where
Good Ideas Come From this release of ideas is not
typical when commercial platforms is agent generated infrastructure that supports emergence of an entity through: leverage of an abundant energy source, reusable resources; attracting a phenotypically aligned network of agents.
operate unconstrained.
- Telephone network operations: provided a stream of
difficult problems that had to be understood and
overcome. And it demonstrated
how a simple repetitive architecture with
This page discusses the physical foundations of complex adaptive
systems (CAS). A small set of
rules is obeyed. New [epi]phenomena then emerge. Examples are
discussed.
rules and Plans emerge in complex adaptive
systems (CAS) to provide the
instructions that agents use to
perform actions. The component architecture and structure
of the plans is reviewed.
procedures
operated by a set of Plans are interpreted and implemented by agents. This page
discusses the properties of agents in a complex adaptive system
(CAS).
It then presents examples of agents in different CAS. The
examples include a computer program where modeling and actions
are performed by software agents. These software agents
are aggregates.
The participation of agents in flows is introduced and some
implications of this are outlined.
agents
could support This page discusses the mechanisms and effects of emergence
underpinning any complex adaptive system (CAS). Physical forces and
constraints follow the rules of complexity. They generate
phenomena and support the indirect emergence of epiphenomena.
Flows of epiphenomena interact in events which support the
emergence of equilibrium and autonomous
entities. Autonomous entities enable evolution
to operate broadening the adjacent possible.
Key research is reviewed.
emergence of a
powerful networked system. The lack of robustness and
high power consumption of the initial analog approach to
building out the network highlighted the potential for
replacements based on evolved mechanisms and models that
science and mathematics were discovering and
representing. A smart, well-informed cross systems
thinker like Shannon was
able to highlight the anomalies, opportunities and
underlying models that applied across the systems.
- Telephone equipment development and deployment: was
supported by:
- Formal
management and recording of the
Plans emerge in complex adaptive
systems (CAS) to provide the
instructions that agents use to
perform actions. The component architecture and structure
of the plans is reviewed.
memetic plan which ensures that
the long term approach is supported by recorded plans and
ideas. While allowing the priorities and actions
adopted by the agents to reflect the current situation
within an ever shifting environment. The capturing and
highlighting of new models of the world based on scientific
discoveries and new theories supported the Tools and the businesses that produce them have evolved
dramatically. W Brian Arthur shows how this occurred.
revolution of the memetic plan and
technologies inside Bell Labs.
- Labs
Representing state in emergent entities is essential but
difficult. Various structures are used to enhance the rate
and scope of state transitions. Examples are
discussed.
physical and organizational
structure was adjusted to
become a This page discusses the interdependence of perception and
representation in a complex adaptive system (CAS). Hofstadter
and Mitchell's research with Copycat is
reviewed. The bridging of a node from a network of 'well
known' percepts to a new representational instance is discussed
as it occurs in biochemistry, in consciousness and
abstractly.
representation and
perception architecture to support the flow,
understanding and acceptance of ideas and problems from the
telephone and scientific research networks.
- While the Bell System monopoly held, the research managers
were at the center
of both the business and scientific networks enabling them
to
This page discusses the benefits of bringing agents and resources to the
dynamically best connected region of a complex adaptive system (CAS).
centralize the appropriate
agents to support the innovation process.
- Epistasis was supported by insisting all
ideas were maintained in lab notebooks and by keeping
a broad group of experts networked together, allowing ideas
to wait dormant until they could be leveraged through the
value chain into the Bell system. For example:
This page discusses the benefits of proactively strengthening
strong points.
Prophylaxis: The managers in
charge of AT&T's research lab, such as Mervin Kelly,
focused considerable attention on improving the key:
Technologies (vacuum tubes, copper cables, mechanical
exchange) Processes and Ideas; by focusing on strong
points.
Agents can manage uncertainty by limiting
their commitments of resources until the environment contains signals strongly correlated with the
required scenario. This page explains how agents can use Shewhart cycles and SWOT processes to do this.
Commitments match preconditions:
AT&T allowed managers such as Pierce
the time
to wait for all the pre-conditions to become present
enabling the Good ideas are successful because they build upon prior
developments that have been successfully implemented.
Johnson demonstrates that they are phenotypic expressions of
memetic plans subject to the laws of complex adaptive systems (CAS).
slow hunch.
This page reviews the strategy of collective punishment of agents who game agreements in a
complex adaptive system (CAS).
The mechanism and its consequences are discussed.
Guardian morality: AT&T
enforced an agreement between the management and technical
staff ensuring that technical innovations were credited to
the scientists and technologists. Shockley broke
this agreement undermining the basis of trust and distrust are evolved responses to sham emotions. During a friendship where no sham emotions have been detected trust will build up. .
The agents in complex adaptive
systems (CAS) must model their
environment to respond effectively to it. Evolution's
schematic operators and Samuel
modeling together support the indirect recording of past
successes and their strategic use by the current agent to learn
how to succeed in the proximate environment.
Models: As Baker
believed, scientists being This page discusses the mechanisms and effects of emergence
underpinning any complex adaptive system (CAS). Physical forces and
constraints follow the rules of complexity. They generate
phenomena and support the indirect emergence of epiphenomena.
Flows of epiphenomena interact in events which support the
emergence of equilibrium and autonomous
entities. Autonomous entities enable evolution
to operate broadening the adjacent possible.
Key research is reviewed.
emergent
This page introduces the complex adaptive system (CAS) theory
frame. The theory provides an organizing framework that is
used by 'life.' It can be used to evaluate and rank models
that claim to describe our perceived reality. It catalogs
the laws and strategies which underpin the operation of systems
that are based on the interaction of emergent
agents. It highlights the
constraints that shape CAS and so predicts their form. A
proposal that does not conform is wrong.
John Holland's framework for representing complexity is
outlined. Links to other key aspects of CAS theory
discussed at the site are presented.
CAS Plans are interpreted and implemented by agents. This page
discusses the properties of agents in a complex adaptive system
(CAS).
It then presents examples of agents in different CAS. The
examples include a computer program where modeling and actions
are performed by software agents. These software agents
are aggregates.
The participation of agents in flows is introduced and some
implications of this are outlined.
agents
can't know about their environment directly. They can
only use selection ( This page reviews the implications of selection, variation and
heredity in a complex adaptive system (CAS).
The mechanism and its emergence are
discussed.
evolution and
the scientific method) to associate effective models with
particular environmental niches.
Gertner notes the
concern of AT&T scientists about reduced justification
for AT&T's Superorganism is a wealthy autonomous entity needing and controlling the richest niches in the proximate environment, that emerges from the bundled cooperation of schematically aligned agents. The term is based on the social insect model, used by: ants, termites, and bees; and identified by Holldobler & E.O. Wilson. These genetically identical insect superorganisms cooperatively limit their reproduction to align with the resources available in the niche. Wilson asserts these insects all developed nests to which they returned to raise their offspring, and when the nest sites were of limited capacity some family members responded by focusing on defending the nest and foraging while their mother became an egg laying queen, enabled by "a single genetic change which silenced the brain's program for dispersal and prevents the mother and her offspring from dispersing to create new nests," Wilson explains. He adds climate control of the nest and disease resistance, just like the human immune system, demand individually focused diversity. So the queen's genome consists of low variety alleles for the extended phenotypic 'robot' worker caste agents and their organization - queen and workers competing as one, with other colonies and individual insects - and other parts which are high where the genome includes significant diversity. For humans it is an evolved cultural strategy used when the environment is supportive, but it is dependent on our imperfect cognitive assessment of kinship as well as group selection driven emotions: other-condemning, other-praising, other-suffering and self-conscious; and group oriented pressures to conform and remain: religions. And the adjacent possible must be recreated and modeled culturally through the emergence of processes such as democracy. It depends on inter-agent signalling. In both insects and humans it allows specialization, and encourages operations and flows that are tightly controlled, limiting waste, leveraging parallel activity, supporting coherence. Superorganisms reflect cliodynamic flows. A superorganism has a development and operational phase. As additional agents are coopted into the superorganism they align, participate in supply and demand activities and so contribute to the evolutionary amplification. Damasio notes that prokaryotes, in rich environments, can similarly operate in a symbiotic fashion expressing cultural behaviors.
network monopoly and This page reviews the strategy of architecting an end-to-end
solution in a complex adaptive system (CAS).
The mechanism and its costs and benefits are discussed.
end-2-end
architectural approach following the release of Shannon's
Information Theory and AT&T's Transistor patents.
From a This page introduces the complex adaptive system (CAS) theory
frame. The theory provides an organizing framework that is
used by 'life.' It can be used to evaluate and rank models
that claim to describe our perceived reality. It catalogs
the laws and strategies which underpin the operation of systems
that are based on the interaction of emergent
agents. It highlights the
constraints that shape CAS and so predicts their form. A
proposal that does not conform is wrong.
John Holland's framework for representing complexity is
outlined. Links to other key aspects of CAS theory
discussed at the site are presented.
CAS perspective what is
needed is the capability to adapt effectively as the environment
changes. The US is the United States of America. systems
To benefit from shifts in the environment agents must be flexible. Being
sensitive to environmental signals
agents who adjust strategic priorities can constrain their
competitors.
flexibility, prior to the Charles Ferguson argues that the US power structure has become
highly corrupt.
Ferguson identifies key events which contributed to the
transformation:
- Junk bonds,
- Derivative
deregulation,
- CMOs,
ABS and analyst fraud,
- Financial network deregulation,
- Financial network consolidation,
- Short term incentives
Subsequently the George W. Bush administration used the
situation to build
a global bubble, which Wall Street
leveraged. The bursting of the
bubble: managed
by the Bush Administration and Bernanke Federal Reserve;
was advantageous to some.
Ferguson concludes that the restructured and deregulated
financial services industry is damaging to
the American economy. And it is supported by powerful, incentive aligned academics.
He sees the result being a rigged system.
Ferguson offers his proposals
for change and offers hope that a charismatic young FDR will appear.
Following our summary of his arguments, RSS comments on them framed by
complex adaptive system (CAS)
theory. Once the constraints are removed from CAS
amplifiers, it becomes advantageous to leverage the increased flows. And it is often
relatively damaging not to participate. Corruption and parasitism can become
entrenched.
predatory alignment of power and wealth is schematically useful information and its equivalent, schematically useful energy, to paraphrase Beinhocker. It is useful because an agent has schematic strategies that can utilize the information or energy to extend or leverage control of the cognitive niche. , allowed it to
benefit from both the monopoly phase of AT&T and the
subsequent competitive period. While the US proximate
environment is rich enough the flexibility should be maintained
requiring the Plans emerge in complex adaptive
systems (CAS) to provide the
instructions that agents use to
perform actions. The component architecture and structure
of the plans is reviewed.
memetic plan to be
preserved somewhere within the system. The US nation
benefited significantly from AT&T both responding to the
monopoly opportunity and being aware that its preservation
depended on providing enough benefits back to the US.
Over Carlo Rovelli resolves the paradox of time.
Rovelli initially explains that low level physics does not
include time:
- A present that is common throughout the universe does not exist
- Events are only partially ordered. The present is
localized
- The difference between past and future is not foundational.
It occurs because of state that through our blurring appears
particular to us
- Time passes at different speeds dependent on where we are and how fast we travel
- Time's rhythms are due to
the gravitational field
- Our quantized physics shows neither
space nor time, just processes transforming physical
variables.
- Fundamentally there is no time. The basic equations
evolve together with events, not things
Then he
explains how in a physical world without time its perception can
emerge:
- Our familiar time emerges
- Our interaction with the world is partial, blurred,
quantum indeterminate
- The ignorance determines the existence of thermal time
and entropy that quantifies our uncertainty
- Directionality of time is real
but perspectival. The entropy of the world in
relation to us increases with our thermal time. The
growth of entropy distinguishes past from future: resulting in
traces and memories
- Each human is a
unified being because: we reflect the world, we
formed an image of a unified entity by
interacting with our kind, and because of the perspective
of memory
- The variable time: is one
of the variables of the gravitational field.
With our scale we don't
register quantum fluctuations, making space-time
appear determined. At our speed we don't perceive
differences in time of different clocks, so we experience
a single time: universal, uniform, ordered; which is
helpful to our decisions
time Bell Labs failed to value
To benefit from shifts in the environment agents must be flexible. Being
sensitive to environmental signals
agents who adjust strategic priorities can constrain their
competitors.
strategic flexibility, rejecting
strategies that turned out to be ground breaking such as ICs and glass fiber
communications media. The leaders now aims to develop plans and strategies which ensure effective coordination to improve the common good of the in-group. Pinker notes the evolved pressure of social rivalry associating power with leadership. Saposky observes the disconnect between power hierarchies and wisdom in apes. John Adair developed a modern leadership methodology based on the three-circles model. had matured and
were cognitively
inclined to use and defend strategies they had learned
during development is a phase during the operation of a CAS agent. It allows for schematic strategies to be iteratively blended with environmental signals to solve the logistical issues of migrating newly built and transformed sub-agents. That is needed to achieve the adult configuration of the agent and optimize it for the proximate environment. Smiley includes examples of the developmental phase agents required in an emergent CAS. In situations where parents invest in the growth and memetic learning of their offspring the schematic grab bag can support optimizations to develop models, structures and actions to construct an adept adult. In humans, adolescence leverages neural plasticity, elder sibling advice and adult coaching to help prepare the deploying neuronal network and body to successfully compete.
and that had served them well.
Gertner compares and contrasts Bell Labs
innovation process with Silicon Valley's leverage of This page discusses the benefits of geographic clusters of agents and resources at the center of a complex adaptive
system (CAS).
geographic clusters. He notes
that it now seems more appropriate to apply the innovation
factory in neuroscience and clean energy. But This page discusses the mechanisms and effects of emergence
underpinning any complex adaptive system (CAS). Physical forces and
constraints follow the rules of complexity. They generate
phenomena and support the indirect emergence of epiphenomena.
Flows of epiphenomena interact in events which support the
emergence of equilibrium and autonomous
entities. Autonomous entities enable evolution
to operate broadening the adjacent possible.
Key research is reviewed.
emergence at the adjacent possible
is best supported by maintaining the schematic structures to
support a rich toolbox. Mead
and Conway's standardization of VLSI is very large scale integration of silicon on a single chip. Robert Noyce and Jack Kilby realized that all components of a circuit could be fashioned on one chip of semiconductor material removing the interconnection wiring constraint. and the IETF
process support Silicon Valley's clusters analogously to
Bell Lab's supporting of ideas by formal processes
for managing lab notebooks, and networking.
Joel
Birnbaum, former head of Hewlett Packard Laboratories and a
director at IBM's
T.J. Watson Labs, asserted at a HiveMumble that, applied
research labs within SuperOrganisms provide three facilities:
- They support documented
failure,
which should reduce the occurrence of the far more expensive
investment by a product division in the failing
venture.
- They easily integrate
diverse viewpoints, skills and disciplines, parts of the
company, and long-term ideas, when product divisions
must be focused and limited in their mission's scope.
- Solutions from one field can be applied to another; with
Brynjolfsson and McAfee explore the effects of Moore's law on the
economy. They argue it has generated exponential
growth. This has been due to innovation.
It has created a huge bounty of
additional wealth.
But the wealth is spread unevenly across
society. They look at the short and long term implications of
the innovation bounty and spread
and the possible future of
technology.
Following our summary of their arguments RSS comments from the
perspective of CAS theory.
vast numbers of new technologies,
valuable new combinations can be enabled at a research
lab.
The Idea Factory is an insightful book highlighting key aspects
of the Good ideas are successful because they build upon prior
developments that have been successfully implemented.
Johnson demonstrates that they are phenotypic expressions of
memetic plans subject to the laws of complex adaptive systems (CAS).
innovation process via
powerful examples from Bell Lab's greatest years.
.
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