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This web frame explores very
significant example real world complex
adaptive systems (CAS). It explains how the examples
relate to each other, why we all have trouble effectively
comprehending these systems and outlines the items we see as key
to the system and why. By understanding these summaries
you can better frame the interdependencies of important events
such as war in Iraq, new iPhone releases or a cancer diagnosis and see how
they are impacting you.
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 |
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 complexity and problems of the US
Health 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. The emergence
of a parasitic elite further constrains the choices
available to improve the efficiency and effectiveness of the
network.
- 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.
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 |
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 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 |
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 |
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 and Telegraph (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 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 and Telegraph (AT&T) Bell
Laboratory's (Bell Labs) strategies for generating revolutionary
innovation is the economic realization of invention and combinatorial exaptation. 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. 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
competitors as he could. He argued for AT&T to be made
a politically supervised monopoly 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.
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, leading physicist and teacher
and developer of the oil drop experiment, determined the fundamental charge of an electron. The 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 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 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.
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 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.
to enable the system to cope. Kelly and the other
scientists added theory to Edison'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 aims to develop plans and strategies which ensure effective coordination to improve the common good of the in-group. John Adair developed a 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 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 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 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. 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 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 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 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 time to directly pursue all his interests. So
he encouraged others to investigate them. He was
interested in genetics and encouraged Shannon 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 wondered if TV, radio,
telephones and telegraphs 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 worked on Information Theory writing a paper A
Mathematical Theory Of Communication. It included:
- General rules and unifying ideas -
- Information can be treated like a physical quantity,
like mass or energy.
- All communication systems are architecturally the
same.
- Information can be represented via its ability to
resolve uncertainty on receipt. In a redundant
scheme receipt of initial string will indicate what will
follow.
- Binary representation allows for a medium independent
coding of the information.
- 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 and
Barney Oliver developed a digital representation of a phone call
using Pulse Code Modulation. It was used during the war to
support telephone 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
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 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 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 monopoly. 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.
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 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 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. 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 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 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) and 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, 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, 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 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. 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 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 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 and
telegraph (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. Over the years this had resulted in:
- 1913 AT&T agreed to stop buying local phone companies
and allow others access to i's long-distance network.
- 1956 consent decree allowed AT&T to continue its
regulated monopoly on phone service but forced the company
out of the computer business and improved external access to
AT&T's patents.
- The late 1960s with service problems undercutting
AT&T's public image,
- Federal communications commission (FCC is the Federal Communications Commission established in 1934.
) allowed independent
manufacturers to connect their equipment to the Bell
Network.
- FCC
lawyers agreed with Microwave Communications Inc. (MCI)
that its long distance network would add value being much
cheaper than AT&T's offering. AT&T argued
it was providing end-to-end service which allowed Lab's
scientists and engineers to innovate broadly. But
the FCC mandated MCI access in 1971.
- 1974 the Department of Justice (DOJ) consequently filed a
sweeping antitrust suit alleging an unlawful conspiracy to
monopolize communications services. The DOJ - U.S. Department of Justice.
requested the courts
break off:
- Western Electric from AT&T as well as
- The local phone companies.
Bill Baker accepted the government's view that telephone
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 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. of its network
and innovation is the economic realization of invention and combinatorial exaptation. 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. 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 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 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. 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. Samuel
modeling is described as an approach.
model of innovation is the economic realization of invention and combinatorial exaptation. 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 is positioned relative to the natural
sciences. It catalogs the laws and strategies which
underpin the operation of systems that are based on the
interaction of emergent agents.
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. 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 aims to develop plans and strategies which ensure effective coordination to improve the common good of the in-group. John Adair developed a 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 the 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. 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 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 golden age This page discusses the mechanisms and effects of emergence
underpinning any complex adaptive system (CAS). 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 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, oil distribution
companies, and financial trusts. The telephone 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 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.
superorganism 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.
of new technologies. Key aspects include:
- Monopoly rents:
- Constraining competitive threats. While Gertner
does not review the mechanism it is significant since it
reinforced the long term nature of Bell Labs goals.
The progressive era administrations and laws supported
monopolies by controlling the pricing of products based on
the fixed costs of the companies. But only while the
monopolist was not shown to be impacting the public or its
shareholders. Monopolists expanded their fixed cost
base inducing entry
barriers for competitors attempting to enter
sustainable niches. Forty year replacement rates for
network equipment allowed these assets to count as part of
the cost base. Gertner highlights how this affected
Bell Labs encouraging long term creative actions
including:
- Protecting AT&T's strategies from 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.
- 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's work required computing
technologies. So Bell Labs used their innovation is the economic realization of invention and combinatorial exaptation. 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). 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 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). 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.
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. Samuel
modeling is described as an approach.
Models: As Baker
believed, scientists being This page discusses the mechanisms and effects of emergence
underpinning any complex adaptive system (CAS). Key research is
reviewed.
emergent
This page introduces the complex adaptive system (CAS) theory
frame. The theory is positioned relative to the natural
sciences. It catalogs the laws and strategies which
underpin the operation of systems that are based on the
interaction of emergent agents.
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 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.
Superorganism 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 is positioned relative to the natural
sciences. It catalogs the laws and strategies which
underpin the operation of systems that are based on the
interaction of emergent agents.
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 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 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 aims to develop plans and strategies which ensure effective coordination to improve the common good of the in-group. John Adair developed a 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). 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.
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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