The Technium

The Choice of Cities

Thu, 02 Jul 2009 17:22:21 -0800

Cities are technological artifacts, the largest technology we make. Their impact is out of proportion to the number of humans living in them. As the chart above shows, the percentage of humans living in cities averaged about one or two percent for most of recorded history. (The chart's Y axis is a logarithmic scale of percentage.) Yet almost everything that we think of when we say "culture" arose within cities. After all, the terms "city" and "civilization" share the same root. But the massive citification, or urbanization, that characterizes the technium today is a very recent development. Like most other charts depicting the technium, not much happens until the last two centuries. Then populations booms, innovation rockets, information explodes, freedoms increase, and cities rule.

Cities may be engines of innovation, but not everyone thinks they are beautiful, particularly the megalopolises of today, with their sprawling rapacious appetites. They seem like machines eating the wilderness, and many wonder if they are eating us as well. Is the recent large-scale relocation to cities a choice or a necessity? Are people pulled by the lure of opportunities, or are they pushed against their will by desperation? Why would anyone willingly choose to leave the balm of a village and squat in a smelly, leaky hut in a city slum unless they were forced to?

Well, every city begins as a slum. First it's a seasonal camp, with the usual free-wheeling make-shift expediency. Creature comforts are scarce, squalor the norm. Hunters, scouts, traders, pioneers find a good place to stay for the night, or two, and then if their camp is a desirable spot it grows into an untidy village, or uncomfortable fort, or dismal official outpost, with permanent buildings surrounded by temporary huts. If the location of the village favors growth, concentric rings of squatters aggregate around the core until the village swells to a town. When a town prospers it acquires a center — civic or religious — and the edges of the city continue to expand in unplanned, ungovernable messiness. It doesn't matter in what century or in which country, the teaming guts of a city will shock and disturb the established residents. The eternal disdain for newcomers is as old as the first city. Romans complained of the tenements, shacks and huts at the edges of their town that "were putrid, sodden and sagging." Every so often Roman soldiers would raze a settlement of squatters, only to find it rebuilt or moved within weeks.

Babylon, London, and New York all had seamy ghettos of unwanted settlers erecting shoddy shelters with inadequate hygiene and engaging in dodgy dealings. Historian Bronislaw Geremek states that "slums constituted a large part of the urban landscape" of Paris in the Middle Ages. Even by the 1780s, when Paris was at is peak, nearly 20% of its residents did not have a "fixed abode" — that is they lived in shacks. In a familiar complaint about medieval French cities, a gentleman from that time noted: "Several families inhabit one house. A weaver's family may be crowded into a single room, where they huddle around a fireplace." That refrain is repeated throughout history. Manhattan was home to 20,000 squatters in self-made housing. Slab City alone, in Brooklyn (named after the use of planks stolen from lumber mills), contained 10,000 residents in its slum at its peak. In the New York slums "nine out of ten of the shanties have only one room, which does not average over twelve feet square, and this serves all the purposes of the family."

San Francisco was built by squatters. As Rob Neuwirth recounts in his wonderful book Shadow Cities, one survey in 1855 estimated that "95 percent of the property holders in [San Francisco] city would not be able to produce a bona fide legal title to their land." Squatters were everywhere, in the marshes, sand dunes, military bases. One eyewitness said, "Where there was a vacant piece of ground one day, the next saw it covered with half a dozen tents or shanties." Philadelphia was largely settled by what local papers called "squatlers." As late as 1940, one in five citizens in Shanghai was a squatter. Those one million squatters stayed and kept upgrading their slum so that within one generation their shantytown became one of the first 21st century cities.

That's how it works. Over time slums gain permanency. Ad hoc shelters are upgraded, infrastructure extended, and makeshift services become official. What was once the home of poor hustlers becomes, over the span of generations, the home of rich hustlers. Propagating slums is what cities do, and living in slums is how cities grow. The majority of neighborhoods in almost every modern city are merely successful former slums. The squatter cities of today will become the blue-blood neighborhoods of tomorrow.

Slums of the past and slums today follow the same description. The first impression is and was one of filth and overcrowding. In a ghetto a thousand years ago and in a slum today shelters are haphazard and dilapidated. The smells overwhelming. But there is vibrant economic activity. Every slum boasts eateries, and bars. And most have rooming houses, or places you can rent a bed. They have animals, fresh milk, grocery stores, barber shops, healers, herb stores, repair stands, and strong armed men offering "protection." A squatter city is, and has always been, a shadow city, a parallel world without official permission, but a city nonetheless.

The improvisation and creative energies unleashed by a squatter city are so attractive that we build them just for the pleasure of their raucousness. Take Burning Man, the arts festival arising every year in the Nevada desert. It is a bona fide squatter city built and run semi-legally by its inhabitants. It is, in essence, a slum with porta potties. It draws 40,000 residents who bang together huts, shanties, tents, and make-shift shelters, and then, like any other slum, trade, barter, and share their few skills and belongings. The owner-built architecture of Burning Man is thrilling, and the gift economy bracing. Because this futuristic slum is so dense and temporary, it has one of the highest concentrations of creativity I've seen anywhere.
Like any city, a slum is highly efficient. Maybe even more than the official sections because nothing goes to waste. The rag pickers and resellers and scavengers all live in the slums and scour the rest of the city for scraps to assemble into shelter, and to feed their economy. Slums are the skin of the city, its permeable edge that can balloon as it grows. The city as a whole is a wonderful technological invention which concentrates the flow of energy and minds into computer chip-like density. In a relatively small footprint, a city not only provides living quarters and occupations in a minimum of space, but a city also generates a maximum of ideas and inventions.

The squatter city at Black Rock, Nevada

As Stewart Brand notes in the City Planet chapter of his upcoming book Whole Earth Discipline, "Cities are wealth creators; they have always been." He quotes urban theorist Richard Florida who claims that 40 of the largest megacities in the world, home to 18% of the world's population, "produce two-thirds of global economic output and nearly 9 in 10 new patented innovations." A Canadian demographer figured that "80 to 90 percent of GNP growth occurs in cities." The raggedy new part of each city, its squats and encampments, often house the most productive citizens. As Mike Davis points out in Planet of Slums, "The traditional stereotype of the Indian pavement-dweller is a destitute peasant, newly arrived from the countryside, who survives by parasitic begging, but as research in Mumbai has revealed, almost all (97 percent) have at least one breadwinner, and 70 percent have been in the city at least six years…" Slum dwellers are often busy with low paying service jobs in nearby high rent districts; they have money but live in a squatter city because it's close to their work. Because they are industrious, they progress fast. One UN report found that households in the older slums of Bangkok have on average 1.6 televisions, 1.5 cell phones, a refrigerator; two-thirds have a washing machine and CD player, and half have a fixed line phone, video player and a motor scooter. In the favelas of Rio, the first generation of squatters had a literacy rate of only 5%, but their kids were 97% literate.

There is a price to pay for that growth. As vibrant and dynamic as cities are, their edges can be unpleasant. To enter a slum you need to walk down shit lane. There is human excrement rotting on the sidewalk, urine flowing in the gutter and garbage piled up in heaps. I've done it many times in the sprawling shantytowns of the developing world and it is no fun — especially for the residents. To compensate for this outer contamination and ugliness, the insides of squatter housing is often surprisingly soothing. Recycled material covers the walls, color abounds, knick-knacks accumulate to create a comfy zone. Sure, one room will house far more people than seems possible, but for many, a slum dwelling offers more comfort than a village hut. While the pirated electricity may be unreliable, at least there is electricity. The single water spigot may have a long line, but it might be closer than the well at home. Medicines are expensive, but available. And there are schools with teachers that show up.

It is not utopia. When it rains, slums turn to mud cities. The ceaseless call for bribes for everything is dispiriting. And there is the embarrassment that squatters feel about the obvious low-status of their homes. As Suketa Mehta, author of Maximum City (about Mumbai, and quoted by Brand) says, "Why would anyone leave a brick house in the village with its two mango trees and its view of small hills in the East to come here?" Then he answers: "So that someday the eldest son can buy two rooms in Mira Road, at the northern edges of the city. And the younger one can move beyond that, to New Jersey. Discomfort is an investment…"

Then Mehta continues: "For the young person in an Indian village, the call of Mumbai isn't just about money. It's also about freedom." Stewart Brand recounts this summation of the magnetic pull of cities by activist Kavita Ramdas: "In the village, all there is for a woman is to obey her husband and relatives, pound millet, and sing. If she moves to town, she can get a job, start a business, and get education for her children." The Bedouin of Arabia were once seemingly the freest people on earth, roaming the Great Empty Quarter at will, under a tent of stars and no one's boss. But they are rapidly quitting their nomadic life and hustling into drab concrete block apartments in exploding Gulf-state ghettos. As reported by Donovan Webster for National Geographic, they stable their camels and goats in their ancestral village, since the bounty and attraction of the herder's life still remain for them. The Bedouin are lured, not pushed, to the city because, in their own words: "We can always go into the desert to taste the old life. But this [new] life is better than the old way. Before there was no medical care, no schools for our children." An 80-year old Bedouin chief sums it up better than I could: "The children will have more options for their future."

The migrants don't have to come. Yet, they come by the millions from the villages, or the deserts and scrublands. If you ask them why they come, it's almost always the same answer, the same answer given by the Bedouin and slum dwellers of Mumbai. They come for opportunities. They could stay where they are. The seasonal droughts and floods are eternal. The hardship in planting and harvesting in the hills are ancient. And so is the incredible beauty of the land and the intensity of family and community support. If everything were equal who would want to leave a Greek island, or a Himalayan village, or the lush gardens of southern China? The young men and women could stay in the villages and adopt the satisfying rhythms of agriculture and small town craft that their parents followed. The same tools work. The same traditions would deliver the same good things. Very little in the country side has changed. It is all as it has always been — except the outside around it is new. Now the young have TV and radio and trips into town to see movies and they know what is possible. They could stay. But while their options in the village have not decreased, the options outside the village in the city have enlarged to such a degree that it makes the village seem a prison. They could stay, like the Amish choose to do. Or Wendell Berry. They could keep the minimalist ways going as their ancestors have for millennia. They could stay and not increase their technology. But they choose — very willingly, very eagerly — to run to the city.

Some argue that they had no choice. That those who arrive in the slums are forced against their desires to migrate to the city because their villages lacked the options of education, jobs and opportunity. It is true there's an imbalance of options — that's the point. But there is work in the villages; it is just that this work does not pay cash (by which to buy cell phones and movie tickets), and it is boring for many, although it can be very satisfying if one is patient. That livelihood of seasonal toil, abundant leisure, strong family ties, strong conformity, rewarding physical labor — all this treasure is unquestionably available to them. They could stay. But they do not choose it. They choose possibilities and opportunities.

They stream into the open-ended city aware of what they left behind. I once spotted the classic Manhattan subway map on the mud walls of a Sherpa hut in the Himalaya. It was some trekker's small joke, a nod to technological incongruity. But in many parts of Africa and Asia it is not incongruous to hear country-western music wailing from a radio in a quiet alley. Country music has an unexpected international appeal. Country star Kenny Rogers is the number one musician in Kenya, where there are more than one all-country-music radio stations. Dolly Parton sells out in South Africa. Modified versions of Johnny Cash cover songs can he heard in Afghanistan. Country music has fans wherever people are departing rural areas. In other words, worldwide. Turns out that the weeping tunes about better days can be understood even without understanding the lyrics. That crying slide guitar is the perfect accompaniment for the universal nostalgia that millions of migrants experience in their new urban homes. They miss the countryside they recently left, and they can hear their own yearning for it in Kenny Rogers's deep longing. Country music began in America during the very period when vigorous farm towns dissolved into suburbia. It is played along highways, among factory workers, and in the low-rent fringes of urbanity as a comforting reminder of what has been lost. Perhaps the songs serve as a charm to ward off further demise. The benefits of the city and technology are not free; they are paid with a sigh.

There are times and places when that pull of options is replaced by a involuntary push. I think there is nothing as disturbing as the sight of indigenous tribesmen, say in the Amazon basin or in the jungles of Borneo or Papua New Guinea, wielding chain saws felling their own forests. When your forest home is toppled, you are pushed into camps, then towns, and then to cities. That migration is not voluntary. Once in a camp, cut off from your hunter-gatherer skills, it makes a weird sense to take the only paid job around, which is cutting down your neighbors forest. Even though this job is a choice of sorts, the narrow options that constrain it are very clear. The despicable treatment of indigenous tribes by American white settlers really did force them into settlements and the adoption of new technologies they were in no hurry to use. But since not every colonial nation forced their indigenous subjects into urbanity, this forced migration is not inherent in urbanity. It is a policy that is freely chosen by a people, and not mandated by technology itself. Gratefully, forced migration happens less and less. Habitat for aboriginal tribes, however, is still being cut down, putting intense pressure on them to abandon their ancient lifestyles. A certain small percentage of the river of people streaming into the cities today are being pushed by the expansion of the technium. It is a horribly stupid policy to destroy natural habitat this way, and a horribly stupid policy to displace tribes. It does not have to be that way. Wiser people would not allow it.

But today, as in the past, most of the mass movement toward cities — the hundreds of millions per decade — is led by settled people willing to pay the price of inconvenience and grime, living in a slum in order to gain opportunities and freedom. The poor move into the city for the same reason the rich move into the technological future — to head towards possibilities and increased freedoms.

Why Technology Can't Fulfill

Fri, 26 Jun 2009 14:22:43 -0800

At the beginning of this summer an Amish guy I met online rode his bicycle out to our home along the foggy Pacifica coast. Online, is of course, the last place you'd ever expect to meet an Amishman. But he contacted me via my blog, and then a few months later he appeared at our door hot, sweaty and out of breath from the long uphill climb to our house under the redwoods. Parked a few feet away was his ingenious Dohan foldup bike, which he rode from the train station. Like most Amish he did not fly, so he had stored his bike on the 3-day cross-country train ride from Pennsylvania. This was not his first trip to this neck of the woods. He had previously ridden his bike along the entire coast of California, and had in fact seen a lot of the world on train and boats.

For the next week, our Amish visitor couch-surfed in our spare bedroom, and at dinner he regaled us with tales of his life growing up in an horse-and-buggy Old Order Plain Folk community. I'll call our friend Leon Hoffman, although that is not his real name, because the Amish are averse to bringing attention to themselves (thus their reluctance to being photographed). But Leon is an unusual Amish. While he never went to high school (Amish formal education ceases after 8th grade) he is among the few Plain Folk to go to college, where he is currently an older student in his 30s. He hopes to study medicine, and perhaps become the first Amish doctor. Many former Amish have gone to college, or become doctors, but none that remain in the Old Order church. Leon is unusual in that he has remained in the church, yet relishes his ability to live in the "outside" world as well.

The Amish practice a remarkable tradition called "rumspringer" wherein their teenagers are allowed to ditch their home-made uniforms -- suspenders and hats for boys, long dresses and bonnets for girls -- and don baggy pants and short skits to buy a car, listen to music, and party for a few years before they decide to forever give up these modern amenities and join the Old Order church. This intimate, real exposure to the technological universe means that they are fully cognizant of what that world has to offer, and what exactly they are denying themselves. Leon is on a sort of permanent "rumspringer" although he doesn't party, but works very hard. His father runs a machine shop (a common Amish occupation; not all are farmers), and so Leon is genius with tools. I was in the middle of a bathroom plumbing job on the afternoon when Leon first showed up and he quickly took over the job. I was impressed by his complete mastery of hardware store parts. I've heard of Amish auto mechanics who don't drive cars but can fix any model you give them.

As Leon spoke of what his boyhood was like with only a horse and buggy for transportation, and what he learned in his multi-grade, one room school house, a fervent wistfulness played over his face. He missed the comfort of Old Order life now that he was away from it. We outsiders think of life without electricity, central heat, or cars as hard punishment. But curiously Amish life offers more leisure than contemporary urbanity does. In Leon's account, they always had time for a game of baseball, reading, visiting neighbors and hobbies. This was a complete surprise to Eric Brende, an MIT student who gave up an engineering degree and instead dropped out to live alongside an Old Order Amish/Mennonite community. Brende, who is not Amish, eliminated as much gear as he could from his home with his wife and tried to live as Plain as possible, a tale he recounts in his book, Better Off. For over two years Brende gradually adopted what he calls a minimite lifestyle. A minimite uses "the least amount of technology needed to accomplish something." Like his Old Order Amish/Mennonite neighbors, he employed a minimum of technology: no power tools, or electric appliances. Brende found that the absence of electronic entertainment, the absence of long auto commutes or frequent shopping trips, and the absence of chores simply maintaining existing complex technology, was replaced by more real leisure time. In fact the constraints of cutting wood by hand, hauling manure with horses, doing dishes by lamp light liberated the first genuine leisure time he had ever had.

Who is not seduced by the allure of this lifestyle?

At the same time, the hard, strenuous manual work was satisfying and rewarding. He not only found more leisure but more fulfillment as well. Wendell Berry is a thinker and farmer who works his farm in an old fashioned way using horses instead of tractors, very similar to the Amish. Like Brende, Berry finds tremendous satisfaction in the visible arrangement of bodily labor and agricultural results. Berry is a master wordsmith as well, and no one has been able to convey the "gift" which minimalism can deliver as well as he. One particular story from his collection The Gift of Good Land captures the almost ecstatic sense of fulfillment won with minimal technology.

Last summer we put up our second cutting of alfalfa on an extremely hot, humid afternoon. Our neighbors came in to help, and together we settled into what could pretty fairly be described as suffering. The hayfield lies in a narrow river bottom, a hill on one side and tall trees along the river on the other. There was no breeze at all. The hot, bright, moist air seemed to wrap around us and stick to us while we loaded the wagons.

It was worse in the barn, where the tin roof raised the temperature and held the air even closer and stiller. We worked more quietly than we usually do, not having breath for talk. It was miserable, no doubt about it. And there was not a push button anywhere in reach.

But we stayed there and did the work, were even glad to do it, and experienced no futurological fits. When we were done we told stories and laughed and talked a long time, sitting on a post pile in the shade of a big elm. It was a pleasing day.

Why was it pleasing? Nobody will ever figure that out by a "logical projection." The matter is too complex and too profound for logic. It was pleasing, for one thing, because we got done. That does not make logic, but it makes sense. For another thing, it was good hay, and we got it up in good shape. For another, we like each other and we work together because we want to.

And so, six months after we shed all that sweat, there comes a bitter cold January evening when I go up to the horse barn to feed. It is nearly nightfall, and snowing hard. The north wind is driving the snow through the cracks in the barn wall. I bed the stalls, put corn in the troughs, climb into the loft and drop the rations of fragrant hay into the mangers. I go to the back door and open it; the horses come in and file along the driveway to their stalls, the snow piled white on their backs. The barn fills with the sounds of their eating. It is time to go home. I have my comfort ahead of me: talk, supper, fire in the stove, something to read. But I know too that all my animals are well fed and comfortable, and my comfort is enlarged in theirs. On such a night you do not feed out of necessity or duty. You never think of the money value of the animals. You feed and care for them out of fellow feeling, because you want to. And when I go out and shut the door, I am satisfied.

Leon spoke of the same equation: fewer distractions, more satisfaction. The ever-ready embrace of his community was palpable. Imagine it: neighbors would pay your medical bill if needed, or build your house in a few weeks without pay, and more importantly allow you to do the same for them. Minimal technology, unburdened by the cultural innovations such as insurance or credit cards, forces a daily reliance on neighbors and friends. Hospital stays are paid by church members, who also visit the sick regularly. Barns destroyed by fire or storm are rebuilt in a barn-raising. Financial, marital, behavioral counseling are done by peers. The community is as self-reliant as it can make itself, and only as self-reliant as it is because it is a community. I began to understand the strong attraction the Amish exerts on its young adults and why, even today, only a very few leave after their rumspringer. Leon observed that of the 300 or so friends his age in his church, only 2 or 3 have abandoned this very technologically constrained life, and the ones who did, joined a lifestyle that is still constrained compared to the average American.

But the cost for this closeness and dependency is limited choice. No education beyond 8th grade. Few career options for guys, none besides homemakers for girls. I asked Leon whether he could imagine all the goodness of the Amish life -- all that comforting mutual aid, satisfying hands-on work, reliable community infrastructure --whether it could still issue forth if, say, all kids attended school up to 10th grade? Just for starters. Well, you know, he said, "hormones kick in around the 9th grade and boys, and even some girls, just don't want to sit at desks and do paperwork. They need to use their hands as well as their heads and they ache to be useful. Kids learn more doing real things at that age."

Fair enough. I can really identify with that, since I wish I had been "doing real stuff" instead of being holed up in a stuffy high school classroom. On the other hand, reading books in high school opened up my mind to possibilities I had never imagined in grade school, and my world began expanding in those years and has never stopped. The technium amplifies possibilities, and a technological oriented education (which is what contemporary education is) optimizes choices. Amish minimalism, on the other hand, is deliberately aimed to optimize satisfaction, fulfillment and the comforting bonds of family and community. It does that well.

In the late 1960s some million self-described hippies stampeded to small farms and make-shift communes to live simply, not too different from the Amish. I was part of that movement. Wendell Berry was one of the clear-thinking gurus we listened to. In tens of thousands of experiments in rural America, we jettisoned the technology of the modern world (because it seemed to crush individualism) and tried to rebuild a new world while digging wells by hand, grinding our own flour, keeping bees, erecting homes from sun-dried clay, and even getting windmills and water generators to occasionally work. Some found religion, too. Our discoveries paralleled what the Amish knew -- that this simplicity worked best in community, that the solution wasn't no-technology but some technology, and what we then called appropriate technology. This day-glo, deliberate, conscious engagement with appropriate technology was deeply satisfying for a while.

But only for a while. The Whole Earth Catalog, which I edited at one point, published the field manual for those millions of simple technology experiments. We ran pages and pages of how to build chicken coops, grow your own veggies, curdle your own cheese, school your children and start a home business in house made from bales of straw. I got to witness close up how the early enthusiasm for restricted technology would inevitably give way to unease and restlessness. Slowly those millions of hippies drifted away from their deliberate low tech world. One-by-one they left their domes for suburban garages and lofts, and much to our collective astonishment, transformed their small-is-beautiful skills into small-is-startup entrepreneurs. The origins of the Wired generation and the laid-back, long-hair computer culture (think open source) lay in the hippies of the 70s. As Stewart Brand, hippy founder of the Whole Earth Catalog remembers, " 'Do your own thing' easily translated into 'Start your own business'." I've lost count of the hundreds of individuals I personally know who left communes to eventually start hi-tech companies in Silicon Valley. It's almost a cliche by now -- barefoot to billionaire, a la Steve Jobs.

The hippies of the previous generation did not remain in their Amish-like mode because as satisfying and attractive as the work in those communities were, the siren of choices was more attractive. The hippies left the farm for the same reason the young have always left: the possibilities leveraged by technology beckon all night and day. In retrospect we might say the hippies left for the same reason Thoreau left his Walden; they came and then left to experience life to its fullest. Volunteer simplicity is a possibility, an option, a choice that one should experience for a least part of one's life, not the least to help you sort out your technology priorities. But in my observation simplicity's fullest potential requires that one consider it one phase of many (even if a recurring phase as is meditation or the Sabbath). In the past decade a new generation of minimites has arisen, and they are now urban homesteading -- living lightly in cities, supported by adhoc communities of like-minded homesteaders. They are trying to have both, the Amish satisfaction of intense mutual aid and hand labor, and the ever cascading choices of a city.

It is a fine experiment. I too left a place where I built a house from scratch, and kept bees, and lived on a commune, and I left because choices were limited. Instead I came to a place where opportunities increased every day: a megalopolis sprawl. Yet I carry an old habit of minimites: I am constantly seeking the least amount of technology needed to do the most good. I have hope that some version of minimitism is possible in urbanity.

Because of my own personal journey from low-tech to high choice, I remain fascinated and deeply impressed by Leon and Berry, and Brende and the Old Order Plain Folk communities. I am impressed that their tightly bound mutual support can reliably resist the perennial lure of modernity. That's an amazing testimony because so few other cultures can boast that.

But there is one aspect of the Amish, and the minimites, and the small-is-beautiful hippies at their heyday, that is selfish. The "good" they wish their minimal technology to achieve is primarily the fulfillment of a fixed nature. The human that is satisfied by this agricultural goodness is an unchanging human. For the Amish, one's fulfillment must swell inside the traditional confine of a farmer, tradesman, or housewife. For minimites and hippies, fulfillment must rise within the confine of the natural unhampered by artificial aids. For example, Wendell Berry will agree that a solid cast iron hand pump is much superior to hauling water in buckets on a yoke. And that domesticated horses (an invention equal to iron) are vastly better than pulling a plow yourself, as many an ancient farmer has done. But for Berry, who uses horses to drive his farm gear, anything beyond the innovation of horse power works against the satisfaction of human nature and natural systems. When tractors were introduced in the 1940s, "the speed of work could be increased, but not the quality." He writes: "Consider, for example, the International High Gear No. 9 mowing machine. This is a horse-drawn mower that certainly improved on everything that came before it, from the scythe to previous machines in the International line... I own one of these mowers. I have used it in my hayfield at the same time that a neighbor mowed there with a tractor mower; I have gone from my own freshly cut hayfield into others just mowed by tractors; and I can say unhesitatingly that, though the tractors do faster work, they do not do it better. The same is substantially true, I think, of other tools: plows, cultivators, harrows, grain drills, seeders, spreaders, etc... The coming of the tractor made it possible for a farmer to do more work, but not better."

For Berry technology peaked in 1940, about the moment when all these farm implements were as good as they got. In his eyes, and the Amish too, the elaborate circular solution of a small mixed family farm, where the farmer produces plant feed for the animals who produced manure, power and food to grow more plants, is the perfect pattern for the health and satisfaction of a human being, human society and environment. Yet, it is pure foolishness, if not the height of conceit and hubris, to believe that in the long course of human history, and by that I mean the next ten thousand years in addition to the past ten thousand years, the peak of human invention and satisfaction should be 1940. It is no coincidence that this date also happens to be the time when Wendell Berry was a young boy growing up on a farm with horses. 1940 cannot be the end of technological perfection for human fulfillment simply because human nature is not at its end.

We have domesticated our humanity as much as we have domesticated our horses. Our human nature is a malleable crop that we planted 50,000 years ago, and continue to garden even today. The field of our nature has never been static. We know that genetically our bodies are changing faster now than at any time in the past million years. Our minds are being rewired by our culture. With no exaggeration, and no metaphor, we are not the same people who first started to plow 10,000 years ago. The snug interlocking system of horse and buggy, wood fire cooking, compost gardening, and minimal industry may be perfectly fit for a human nature -- of an ancient agrarian epoch. I call this devotion to a traditional being "selfish" because it ignores the way in which our nature -- our wants, desires, fears, primeval instincts, and loftiest aspirations -- are being recast by ourselves, by our inventions, and it excludes the needs of our new natures.

There are many traditionalists who deny this shift, and who hold our nature is unchanging; from the perspective of an individual, or even a generation, it looks that way. But for anyone raised by a modern culture crammed with ubiquitous writing, communication technology, science, pervasive entertainment, travel, surplus food, abundant nutrition, and new possibilities every day, we are different beings than our ancestors. We think different. That should be no surprise because our personas are dictated beyond our genetics. More than our hunter-gatherer ancestors we are shaped by the accumulating wisdom, practices, traditions, and culture of our all those who've lived before us and live with us. At the same time our genes are racing. And we are speeding the acceleration of those genes by several means, from medical interventions to gene therapy, and then racing our culture with computers and wires as well. In fact every trend of the technium -- especially its increasing evolvability -- point to more rapid change of human nature in the future. Curiously many of the same traditionalists who deny we are changing, insist that we had better not.

Not everyone is born to be a farmer. Not every human is ideally matched to the rhythms of horse and corn and seasons, and the eternal close inspection of village conformity. Where in the Amish scheme of things is the support for a mathematical genius, or a native doctor, or a person who might spend all day composing new music? Mr. Berry himself supplements his farming satisfactions with those of essay writing (using paper and pencil). A large technological system of book printing, distribution, desk-bound editors, and bookshop sellers reward his efforts. He would have engaged that part of himself much less if no one outside his family was reading him.

What the Amish can't deliver are possibilities. Technology summons possibilities. The arc of change in the technium moves toward increasing choices, options, and possibilities. Chief among those expanding possibilities are new ways to be human. If we expand our memory with an always-on auxiliary Google-in-a-phone attachment from when we are young, then we have a new organ. But we don't know how to satisfy those new parts of us. The honest truth is that as the technium explodes with new self-made options, we find it harder to find fulfillment. How can we be fulfilled when we don't know what is being filled? And how do we know how large we are -- our innate potential -- until we try to overfill it?

We expand technology to find out who we are. The Amish find incredible contentment in their enactment of a fixed human nature. This deep human contentment is real, visceral, renewable, and so attractive that Amish numbers are doubling every generation. But I believe the Amish and minimites have not, and can not, really discover who they are. They trade discovery for contentment. In their deliberate constraint of technology they optimize an alluring combination of leisure, comfort, and certainty over the optimization of uncertain possibilities - which is what the technium optimizes.

The narrow minimite definition of humanity and the occupations one can attain, not only constrain themselves, but others. If you are a web designer today, it is only because many tens of thousands of other people have been expanding the realm of possibilities. They have gone beyond farms and home shops to invent a complex ecology of electronic devices that require new expertise and new ways of thinking. If you are an accountant, untold numbers of creative people in the past devised the logic and tools of accounting for you. If you do science, your instruments and field of study have been created by others. If you are a photographer, or an extreme sports athlete, or a baker, or an auto mechanic, or a nurse -- then your potential has been given an opportunity by the work of others. You are being expanded as others expand themselves.

I know the Amish, and Wendell Berry and Eric Brende, and the minimites well enough to know that they believe we don't need exploding technology to expand ourselves, at least in the proper directions. They are, after all, minimalists. They see most of the promises of freedoms from increased technology as illusionary. In their eyes, technology generates fake choices, meaningless options, or real choices that are really entrapments. This is an argument worth exploring because there is some truth in it. The technium is an autonomous system that tends to favor choices by humans that expand its own reach, which can feel like a type of entrapment. And many choices we make don't matter.

But the evidence that the technium expands real choices is voluminous. Throughout history there is a one-way march from the farm to the bustling choices of the city. That steady migration is going on today at a shocking rate; More than two million people per day decide they prefer the options that modern technology life offers, so they flee the constrained choices in a picturesque and comforting village somewhere. They can't all be bewitched. It would be a powerful spell to fool 50% of the people living on this planet.

Those million urban migrants per day have enrolled into the technium for the same reason you have (and you have if you are reading this): to increase your choices. To increase your chances of unleashing your full potential. Perhaps someday someone will invent a tool that is made just for your special combination of hidden talents. Or perhaps you will make your own tool. Most importantly, and unlike the Amish and minimites, you may invent a tool which will help unleash the fullest of someone else. Our call is not only to discover our fullest selves in the technium, but to expand the possibilities for others. We have a moral obligation to increase the amount of technology in the world in order to increase the number of possibilities for the most people. Greater technology will selfishly unleash us, but it will also unselfishly unleash others, our children and all to come.

The Amish are a little sensitive about this, but their self reliant lifestyle as it is currently practiced is heavily dependent on the greater technium that surrounds their enclaves. They do not mine the metal they build their mowers from. They do not drill or process the kerosene they use. They don't manufacture the solar panels on their roofs. They don't grow or weave the cotton in their clothes. They don't educate or train their own doctors. They also famously do not enroll in armed forces of any kind (but in compensation of that, they are world-class volunteers in the outside world. Few people volunteer more often, or with more expertise and passion than the Amish/Mennonites.) In short they depend up the outside world for they way they currently live. The increasing numbers of minimite urban homesteads are likewise indebted to the ongoing technium. If the Amish had to generate their all their own energy, grow all their clothing fibers, mine all metal, harvest and mill all lumber, it would not be Amish at all. Their communities would hardly be civilized.

Their choice of minimal technology adoption is a choice -- but a choice enabled by the technium. Their lifestyle is within the technium, not outside it.

As I encourage new technologies I am working for the Amish, and Leon, and the minimite homesteaders. So is anyone who is inventing, discovering, and expanding possibilities. In our ceaseless collective generation of new technologies, we technology boosters can invent more appropriate tools for minimalism, even though they are not doing that for us. Nonetheless, the Amish and minimites have something important to teach us about selecting what we embrace. I don't want a lot of devices that add maintenance chores to my life without adding real benefits. I do want to be slow to embrace technology that I can back out of. I don't want stuff that closes off options to others (like weapons). And I do want the minimum because I've learned that I have limited time or attention.

I think I can put it this way: What we are seeking is the minimum amount of technology that will generate the maximum number of options for all.

Triumph of the Default

Mon, 22 Jun 2009 23:47:24 -0800

One of the greatest unappreciated inventions of modern life is the default. "Default" is a technical concept first used in computer science in the 1960s to indicate a preset standard. Default, for instance, as in: the default of this program assumes that dates are given in two digit years not four. Today the notion of a default has spread beyond computer science to the culture at large. It seems such a small thing, but the idea of the default is fundamental to the technium.

It's hard to remember a time when defaults were not part of life. But defaults only arose as computing spread; they are an attribute of complex technological systems. There were no defaults in the industrial age. In the early days of computers, when system crashes were frequent, and variables a lot of trouble to input, a default was the value the system would automatically assign itself if a program failed or when it first initiated. It was a smart trick. Unless a user, or programmer, took the trouble to alter it, the default ruled, ensuring that its host system would probably work. So electronic goods and software programs were shipped with all options set to defaults. The defaults were preset for the expected norms of the buyers (say the standard voltage of the US), or expected preferences (subtitles off for movies), or best practices (virus detector on). Most times presets work fine. We now have defaults installed in automobiles, insurance programs, networks, phones, health care plans, credit cards, and anything that is customizable.

Indeed, anything with the slightest bit of computational intelligence it in (that is any complex modern artifact) has defaults embedded into it. These presets are explicit biases programmed into the gadget, or system, or institution. But a default is more than the unspoken assumptions that have always been present in anything made. For instance most hand tools were "defaulted" to right hand use. In fact assuming the user was right handed was so normal, it was never mentioned. Likewise, the shape of hand tools assumed the user was male. Not just tools: early automobiles were designed assuming the driver was male. Anything manufactured must make a guess about its presumed buyer and their motivations; these assumptions are naturally designed into the technology. The larger the scale of the system, the more assumptions it has to make. A careful examination of a particular technological infrastructure will reveal the broad assumptions that are buried in its design. So American optimism, high regard for the individual, and penchant for change are all wrapped up in the specific designs of the American electrical system, railroads, highways, and education.

But while these embedded biases, common to all technology, share many attributes with the concept of a default, they are not a default proper. A default is an assumption that can be changed. The assumption of right-handedness in a hammer, or pliers, or scissors, could not be switched. The assumption of a driver's gender as manifested in the seat position in an automobile could not be altered easily in the old days. But in much of modern technology it can be. The hallmark of flexible technological systems is the ease by which they can be rewired, modified, reprogrammed, adapted, and changed to suit new uses and new users. Many (not all) of their assumptions can be altered. The upside to endless flexibility and multiple defaults lies in the genuine choice that an individual now has, if one wants it. Technologies can be tailored to your preferences, and optimized to fit your own talents.

However the downside to extremely flexible techniques is that all these nodes of exploding possibility become overwhelming. Too many mind-numbing alternatives, and not enough time (let alone will) to evaluate them all. The specter of 99 varieties of mustard on the supermarket shelf, or 2,356 options in your health plan, or 56,000 possible hairdos for your avatar in a virtual world produces massive indecision and paralysis. The amazing solution to this problem of debilitating over-abundant choice are defaults. Defaults allow us to choose when to choose. For example, your avatar is given a standard default look (kid in jeans) to start out. You can alter every default description later. Think of it as managed choice. Those thousands of variables — real choice — can be managed by adopting smart defaults, which "make" a choice for us, yet reserve our full freedom to choose in the future when we want to. My freedoms are not restricted but staggered. As I become more educated I go back to my preferences and opt in, or opt out, or tweak a parameter up or down, or ditch one thing for another. But until I do, the choices remain veiled, out of sight, and house-trained, obediently waiting. In properly designed default system, I always have my full freedoms, yet my choices are presented to me in a way that encourages taking those choices in time — in an incremental and educated manner. Defaults are a tool that tame expanding choice.
Contrast that expansion to the classic hammer, or automobile, or 1950s phone system. Users simply had few choices in how the tool was used. World-class engineers spent years honing a fixed universal design to work best for the most people, and there's still an enduring beauty in those designs. The relative inertness of industrial artifacts and infrastructure was compensated with elegant and brilliant access for the average everyman. Today you may not actually make a lot more choices about your phone than 50 years ago, but you could. And you'll have more choice in where to make those few choices. These unfolding potential choices are nested within the adaptive nature of mobiles and networks. Choices materialize when summoned. But these abundant choices never appeared in fixed designs.

Defaults first arrived in the complex realms of computation and communication networks, but they aren't excluded from hammers, or cars, or shoes, or door knobs, for that matter. As we inject adaptability into these artifacts by manufacturing them with traces of computer chips and smart materials, we open them up for defaults as well. Imagine a hammer handle made of some kind of adaptive material that would reform itself to your left hand, or to a woman's hand. You might very well have the option to designate your gender, or age, or proficiency, or work environment, directly into the small neurons of the hammer. And if so, then the tool would be shipped with defaults.

But defaults are "sticky." Many psychological studies have shown that the tiny bit of extra effort needed to alter a default is enough to dissuade most people from bothering, so they stick to the default, despite their untapped freedom. Their camera's clock blinks at the default of 12:00, or their password remains whatever temporary one was issued them. The hard truth, as any engineer will tell you, is that most defaults are never altered. Pick up any device, and 98 out of 100 options will be the ones preset at the factory. I know from my own experience that I have altered very few of the preferences available to me; I've stuck to the defaults. I've been using a Macintosh from the day it was introduced 25 years ago and I am still discovering basic defaults and preferences I had never heard of. From an engineering perspective this default inertia is a measure of success, because it means the defaults work. Without much change, products are used, and their systems happily hum on.

Therefore the privilege of establishing what value the default is set at is an act of power and influence. Defaults are a tool not only for individuals to tame choices, but for systems designers — those who set the presets — to steer the system. The architecture of these choices can profoundly shape the culture of that system's use. Even the sequences of defaults and choices make a difference too. Retail merchandisers know this well. They stage stores and websites to channel decisions in a particular order to maximize sales. If you let hungry students make their desert choice first rather than last, this default order has an impact on their nutrition.

Every element of a complex technology, from its programming language, to the user interface design, to the selection of its peripherals, harbors a multitude of defaults: Does the system assume anonymity? Does it assume most people are basically good or basically up to no good? Are its defaults set to maximize sharing or maximize secrecy? Should its rules expire after a set period by default or renew automatically by default? How easy is to undo a choice? Should the process of control be an opt in or opt out process? Recombining four or five different default parameters will spawn systems with hundreds of different characteristics.

Identical technological arrangements — say two computer networks constructed of the same hardware and software — can yield very different cultural consequences simply by altering the defaults embedded in the system. The influence of a default is so powerful that one single default can act as a very tiny nudge that can sway extremely large and complex networks. As an example, most pension investment programs, such as corporate 401k plans, have very low participation rates in part because the plans have an overwhelming number of sub-options to choose from. The behavioral economist Richard Thaler relates experiments whereby making enrollment automatic with a default choice ("mandated choice") dramatically increased savings rates for employees. Anyone could opt out the program at any time, with full freedom to change the specifics of their plan, but simply shifting the default from "having to sign up" to "automatic enrollment" changed the entire tenor of the system. A similar shift happens if you make the donation of organs upon death automatically an "opt out" choice (it happens unless you refuse beforehand) versus "opt in" (it does not happen unless you sign up). A opt out donor system greatly increases the number of organs donated.

The tiny default is one of the ways that we can bend the inevitable unrolling of a technological innovation. For instance, an elaborate continent-wide technical system, such as 110-volt AC electricity, may gather its it own momentum as it acquires self-reinforcing support from other technical systems (like diesel generators, or factory assembly lines), and that accelerating momentum may steamroll over prior systems, but at every node in the electrical body, a default resides, and with the proper alignment and deft choices, those slim defaults can be used to nudge the gigantic system toward certain states. The system can be bent towards making it easy to add new but less secure innovations , or making it difficult to change, but more secure. The tiny nudges of defaults can shape how easy the network expands, or not. Or how well it incorporates unusual sources of power. Or whether it tends to centralize or decentralize. The shape of a technological system is set by the technology itself, but the character of the system can be set by us.

Systems are not neutral. They have natural biases. We tame the cascading choices we gain from accelerating technology by introducing small nudges — by deliberating embedding our own biases (also called a default) into the system here and there. We wield biases within inevitable technologies to aim them towards our common goals — increasing diversity, complexity, specialization, sentience, and beauty.

Defaults also remind us of another truth. By definition a default works when we — the user or consumer or citizen — do nothing. But doing nothing is not neutral, since it triggers a default bias. That means that "no choice" is a choice itself. There's is no neutral, even, or especially, in non action. Despite the claims of many, technology is never neutral. Even when you don't choose what to do with it, it chooses. A system acquires a definite drift and clear momentum from those inherent biases, whether or not we act upon them. The best we can do is nudge it.

Future Fossil of the Technium

Thu, 18 Jun 2009 09:54:09 -0800

Last year I posted an ode to the Anthropocene -- the period in Earth's long history when humans are the dominant geological force. That would be the last 20,000 years or so. One anthropocenic question brought up by Jan Zalasiewicz, a geologist from the University of Leicester, is, as he puts it, "What Legacy Will Humans Leave in the Rocks?." He speculates that we'll leave fossil cities as the debris of our civilization is pressed into rock.

Reader Brett Lovgren was reminded on this on a walk along Wassenaar Beach in the Netherlands a few weeks ago. He tells me: "We were on a field trip with my son's 2nd grade class from the American School of the Hague. His science teacher had them identifying the shells, jellyfish and seaweed that wash up on the beach. The kids found this bit of barnacle encrusted plastic cup. It made me feel like an archaeologist from the future discovering a layer of the Technium."

The Fifth and Sixth Discontinuity

Mon, 15 Jun 2009 21:04:48 -0800

Philosopher Bruce Mazlish claims that the eyes of science have overthrown humanity's view of itself in a series of revelations. At each unveiling, we descend one notch. In the first removal, Copernicus dethroned our common-sense assumption that our world stood at the center of the universe. Astronomy eventually revealed, with a shock, that we were a minor tribe huddled on a small speck circling a nondescript star at the outer edge of an immense average galaxy floating among a trillion others in one small corner of the universe. The noble distinction between us and the rest of the universe was eliminated to reveal a continuous continuity of existence. Our perceived exceptionalism was demoted to the ordinary. Within the universe, we were not set apart, but dwelt in a continuum.

The second break from the exalted was launched by Darwin, who revealed that the exceptional discontinuity we perceived between ourselves and other animals or plants was equally illusionary. We are one continuous life, one evolution. Our position as humans is only one twig on a million-twigged tree, each terminal equally evolved. Within life we were not set apart, but dwelt in a continuum.

According to Mazlish the third discontinuity was located in our heads. Freud began the on-going process of overcoming the specialism we attribute to the idea of "I." Psychology and neurology discovered that the "I" is a handy fantasy constructed to facilitate daily life, but that there is no central decider at home; rather there are many "i"s operating in our mind, and those parts are not distinguishable from our physical body, or even at times from other minds. Our own consciousness has been dethroned from central emperor to a field of cognitive tricks. Within sentience, we are not set apart, but dwell in a continuum.

We are now in the middle of dispatching the fourth discontinuity. The venerable distinction between machines and living creatures is receding so fast that it is becoming increasingly clear to everyone that a grand continuity connects the world of the made and the world of born. Nature and machine are two faces of the same extropic force. I've previously written a long argument in support of this continuity, and I assume its validity here on this blog. The question today is not so much whether the technium shares its roots with biological evolution, but whether it will displace its parent, or cohabit with it. Either way within the technium we, the living, are not set apart but dwell in a continuum.

But as the arc of evolution continues beyond these four continuums, what future smoothings can we expect? I propose that the next exceptionalism to be broken by science, the fifth discontinuity so to speak, is the special status we give to the physical. We feel the universe to be a place full of physical material that pushes back and presses against us. Things have weight, size, and duration. That's what the universe is in everyday experience -- the real stuff that can be really measured, felt, and sensed. Our world of matter and energy follow a set of laws to such an exacting degree that we can manipulate it to make rockets and computers. Matter's consistent refusal to be bullied outside its own laws adds to the sense of it being "real." Real means physical.

Information, on the other hand, lacks physicality. Unlike energy, which we can at least measure with physical instruments, a digital bit is disembodied. It weighs nothing. It takes up no space. It flows as mysteriously as a gremlin. We don't have good measures for information. (If I make an exact copy of your song, am I increasing the amount of information in the world, or decreasing it because I am adding nothing new?) We are not yet sure if the total amount of information in the universe is conserved, nor if it is finite. Yet, we have come to see that life, even our own life, is a pattern of intangible information, rather than material form. Evolution – that great engine of creation -- is a pattern of information. And mind, especially the mind, is a type of information flow. So we know that the most powerful forces in the universe (that we are aware of) are constructed of the most intangible things we can detect: bits.

There stands the discontinuity: atoms vs bits. But lately, physicists have begun to suspect that atoms are composed of information in some way we don't understand. As legendary physicist John Wheeler puts it, "its are bits." The deeper we inspect the interior of sub atomic particles and their quirky behavior, the more they can be explained as information flows. Many physicists expect that when we get to the bottom of how matter works that we'll find primarily a structure of information and the absence of anything "material." Atoms will be understood as elaborate, dynamic arrangements of intangible signals. In an article published by the American Journal of Physics, entitled "What is quantum mechanics trying to tell us" solid-state-physicist David Mermin writes "matter acts, but there are no actors behind the actions; the verbs are verbing all by themselves without a need to introduce nouns. Actions act upon other actions. [There's] no duality between the existence of a thing and its properties: properties are all there is. Indeed: there are no things."

As this discontinuity between the realm of the physical and the realm of the immaterial is erased, scientists have began to re-envision the laws of physics as complex algorithms of code. Energy also, is being restated in terms of information. The pulsating stars and iron planets will gradually be seen by science as wisps of intangible nothings. Organisms and technologies, including mega structures such as skyscrapers, starships, and floating cites, will be defined as structures of computation, equivalent to software. Eventually the boundary between the tangible and intangible will be completely permeable, and the special status we assign to our physicality will be seen (again) as only one station on a long continuum. Within the realm of the real, we, the physical, are not set apart, but dwell in a continuum.

On the immense journey in front of us there will undoubtedly be many more smoothings ahead beyond the five we can already see. I don't know if it will be the sixth, seventh or nth discontinuity, but another boundary that is already being challenged is the unique place we give to the past, to causation, and to objectivity. Physical phenomenon are caused via a long chain of actions originating in the past, and we, the observers, remove ourselves from the chain of causes in order to study the phenomenon. For instance, scientists do controlled experiments and double-blind experiments so that they remain objective, removing their own observational biases from the causes they are studying. Science, which has brought us so far, clearly holds the "outside" unbiased observer to be an essential position. In fact by many definitions, science is the invention of the objective.

Further, science holds that causation must originate in the past. An event in the present is the last result of a chain of actions begun in the past. That seems logical and intuitive – as did the circling of the sun. But the weirdness of newly discovered quantum effects is rapidly breaking down the discontinuity between object and subject, past and future. With new instruments scientists can shoot quantum wave/particles through two tiny slits to measure the pattern of their arrival on a screen. Wheeler investigated exactly this experiment. True to its dual nature sometimes the wave/particle passes through the slits as a wave and sometimes it passes through them as a particle. But the particular form the wave/particle assumes as it passes through the two slits is decided upon measuring or observing the results. This is called the delayed-choice experiment because it means that the wave/particle chooses which form to pass through the slits after it has already passed through. Theoretically, if the slits were far enough away from the screen, the choice of whether the wave/particle was a wave or a particle could be delayed by billions of years after it had already happened. And this inversion of the ordinary arrow of causality is being driven by the observer.

Paul Davies suggests "the novel feature Wheeler introduced via his delayed-choice experiment was the possibility of observers today, and in the future, shaping the nature of physical reality in the past, including the far past when no observers existed." Minds today could, in theory, shape the very foundational laws of physics in a delayed-choice action, since Wheeler claimed, "so far as we can see today, the laws of physics cannot have existed from everlasting to everlasting. They must have come into being at the big bang." Since the laws of physics and information reside inside the cosmos, that gives mind a possible subjective role in shaping the cosmos via delayed choice. But since our minds and life are products of that cosmos, there is a necessary recursive loop. Davies writes: "Conventional science assumes a linear logical sequence: cosmos -> life -> mind. Wheeler suggested closing this chain into a loop: cosmos -> life -> mind -> cosmos." The universe was self-synthesizing. You can start anywhere along such a recursive loop. Wheeler observed: "Physics gives rise to observer-participancy; observer-participancy gives rise to information; information gives rise to physics." Wheeler called this subjective self-creation, "the participatory universe."

When I asked the Piet Hut, a theoretical astrophysicist at the Institute for Advance Study at Princeton, what innovations in the practice of science he expected to see in the future, he surprised me by suggesting "the return of the subjective." In order to get a more complete picture of reality, he said, we need to focus on the subjective. "We have painted ourselves in a corner, scientifically, by describing the whole world in objective terms, and finding less and less room for ourselves to stand on. We are now reaching the limits of a purely objective treatment. In various areas of science, from quantum mechanics to neuroscience and robotics, the pole of subjective experience can no longer be neglected." A more recognizable thinker echoes the thought: "The histories of the Universe depend on what is being measured," Stephen Hawking said recently, "contrary to the usual idea that the Universe has an objective, observer-independent history."

The notion that minds in the future might evolve to the point that they could subjectively influence the laws of their own physicality is of course, only the most extreme speculation. But the delay-choice experiment is not. It happens now every time our minds observe something. I delve into the details of this frontier chiefly to illustrate how technology continues to level distinctions we once thought crucial, and how technology continues to forge a kind of unity in knowledge.

Breaking the discontinuity between the objective and subjective won't be the last great unification either. As the technium advances, and mind expands, additional distinctions are primed to be blurred and unified. Looking ahead we can imagine that the keen distinction and superior status we assign to consciousness, versus the inert or non-unconsciousness (even if intelligent) of the rest of the material world could be unified into a continuum via technology. Likewise the discontinuity between reality and unreality (the imaginary) could likewise disappear with sufficient advanced technology.

It was not until we invented telescopes and mathematics that we could peer way past the Earth and see that it was not at the center of a revolving universe. It was not until we invented digital computation and could replicate life processes on intangible computer software that we realized that intelligence and life are not tangible. It was not until we devised sophisticated atom smashers that we began to perceive the true otherworldliness of our material world. Lasers, electron guns, charged coupler sensors, electronic chips – all these technologies made quantum mechanics visible. And once the quantum realm was visible, the paradoxes of the subjective mattered. Thus, through the medium of advanced tools, we saw a continuum where discontinuities had been seen before. In this way, as we expand the technium, upping our knowledge, we continually remove discontinuities in our perceptions.

The universe, as the sages in every religion teach us, is really one vast continuum. But to utilize knowledge of this universal continuum we need to expand our technology, which is really a way of expanding our collective mind. Technology's long term evolution moves science – that is the interconnected, accumulated body of knowledge of all human minds – towards unity, or consilience. Consilience is a term coined in the 1840 by philosopher William Whewell and resurrected recently by E.O. Wilson to indicate the unity of knowledge. Consilience would entail, among other things, a common set of axioms that can be used to adequately explain (and predict) the phenomenon we experience in the ecology of a tundra, the interior fusion of stars, the behavior of teenage social networks, the physics of quantum computing, and the mutation of viruses. Today science is far from consilience.

In addition to uniting the principles of different scientific fields, consilience will also need to bind unrelated bodies of knowledge together, some of it ancient knowledge. Advances in communication technology and the scientific method are doing that.

We casually talk about the "discovery of America" in 1492, or the "discovery of gorillas" in 1856, or the "discovery of vaccines" in 1796. Yet vaccines, gorillas and America were not unknown before their "discovery." Native peoples had been living in the Americas for 10,000 years before Columbus arrived and they had explore the continent far better than any European ever could. Certain West African tribes were intimately familiar the gorilla, and many more primate species yet to be "discovered." Dairy farmers had long been aware of the protective power of vaccines that related diseases offered, although they did not have a name for it. The same argument can be made about whole libraries worth of knowledge – herbal wisdom, traditional practices, spiritual insights – that are "discovered" by the educated but only after having been long known by native and folk peoples. These supposed "discoveries" seems imperialistic and condescending, and often are.

Engraving by Samuel Calvert of the new gorilla display at the National Museum published in The Illustrated Melbourne Post of 25 July 1865.

Yet there is one legitimate way in which we can claim that Columbus discovered America, and the French-American explorer Paul du Chaillu discovered gorillas, and Edward Jenner discovered vaccines. They "discovered" previously locally known knowledge by adding it to the growing pool of structured global knowledge. Nowadays we would call that accumulating structured knowledge science. Until du Chaillu's adventures in Gabon any knowledge about gorillas was extremely parochial; the local tribes' vast natural knowledge about these primates was not integrated into all that science knew about all other animals. Information about "gorillas" remained outside of the structured known. In fact, until zoologists got their hands on Paul du Chaillu's specimens, gorillas were scientifically considered to be a mythical creature similar to Big Foot, seen only by uneducated, gullible natives. Du Chaillu's "discovery" was actually science's discovery. The meager anatomical information contained in the killed animals was fitted into the vetted system of zoology. Once their existence was "known," essential information about the gorilla's behavior and natural history could be annexed. In the same way, local farmers' knowledge about how cowpox could inoculate against small pox remained local knowledge and was not connected to the rest of what was known about medicine. The remedy therefore remained isolated. When Jenner "discovered" the effect, he took what was known locally, and linked its effect into to medical theory and all the little science knew of infection and germs. He did not so much "discover" vaccines as much as he "linked in" vaccines. Likewise America. Columbus's encounter put America on the map of the globe, linking it to the rest of the known world, integrating its own inherent body of knowledge into the slowly accumulating, unified body of verified knowledge. Columbus joined two large continents of knowledge into a growing global consilience.

The reason science absorbs local knowledge and not the other way around is because science is a machine we have invented to connect information. It is built to integrate new knowledge with the web of the old. If a new insight is presented with too many "facts" that don't fit into what is already known, then the new knowledge is rejected until those facts can be explained. A new theory does not need to have every unexpected detail explained (and rarely does) but it must be woven to some satisfaction into the established order. Every strand of conjecture, assumption, observation is subject to scrutiny, testing, skepticism and verification. Piece by piece consilience is built.

In this way consilience is a type of technology, expanded by technology. Unified knowledge is constructed by the mechanics of duplication, printing, postal networks, libraries, indexing, catalogs, citations, tagging, cross-referencing, bibliographies, keyword search, annotation, peer-review, and hyperlinking. Each epistemic invention expands the web of verifiable facts and links one bit of knowledge to another. Knowledge is thus a network phenomenon, with each fact a node. We say knowledge increases not only when the number of facts increases, but more so when the number and strength of relationships between facts increases. It is the relatedness that gives knowledge its power. Our understanding of gorillas deepens and becomes more useful as their behavior is compared to, indexed with, aligned into, and related to the behavior of other primates. Our consilience is expanded as their anatomy is related to other animals, as their evolution is integrated into the tree of life, as their ecology is connected to the other animals co-evolving with them, as their existence is noted by many kinds of observers, until the facts of gorillahood are woven into the encyclopedia of knowledge in thousands of criss-crossing and self-checking directions. Each strand of enlightenment enhances not only the facts of gorillas, but also the strength of the whole cloth of human knowledge.

And as in any networked system, the larger the pool of nodes that are being linked up in the network, the more powerful it is. Doubling the number of nodes more than doubles its value. To a rough approximation, as the nodes of a network increase linearly, its value grows exponentially. This exponential growth in power means that one larger network is vastly more valuable than two smaller networks with the same total number of members. Let's say that community "A" has integrated 10 facts into its pool of knowledge. If each fact is related in some way to the others, then the collective knowledge swells exponentially by 10^2, or 100 assertions. At the same time on another part of the planet, community "B" has integrated a different set of 10 facts with a similar value. If a Columbus or encyclopedist were able to combine those two pools of knowledge, the 10 A nodes with the 10 B nodes, and then interrelate those 20 facts into a single integrated web of knowledge, the value of that unified pool is twice the value (400, or 20^2) compared to the sum of the two isolated pools (2 x 100). The mathematics favors a single seamless carpet of knowledge over separate disjoined knowledge. When a self-contained patch of information can be woven into a global consilience it increases the value of all parts.

Today there remain many unconnected pools of knowledge. The unique wealth of traditional wisdom won by indigenous tribes in their long intimate embrace of their natural environment is very difficult (if not impossible) to move out of their native context. Within their system, their sharp knowledge is tightly woven, but it is disconnected from the rest of what we collectively know. A lot of shamanic knowledge is similar. Currently science has no way to accept these strands of spiritual information and weave them into the current consilience, and so their truth remains "undiscovered." Certain fringe sciences, such as ESP, are kept on the fringe because their findings, coherent in their own framework, don't fit into the larger pattern of the known.

The perceived divisions between types of knowledge, between levels of knowing, and between distinctions in our own standing in the universe are all being steadily leveled by the advance of the technium. Bit by bit technology illuminates the continuum that connects everything. In the usual self-amplifying circle of upcreation, each advance in knowledge also facilitates new inventions, unleashing yet more revealing technology. While our system of science can increase ignorance faster than it can increase knowledge (see the Expansion of Ignorance), new instruments amplify our ways of seeing and powers of systemic thinking. New tools fatten our collective memory and deepen our understanding. Just as the technium is currently in the process of connecting all humans to each other (via the internet), and all devices to each other (ditto), it is also in the process of connecting each idea to all other ideas, so that there is a one unified body of knowledge.

Over the long haul, as the technium becomes more complex, accelerated and sentient, technology tends toward consilience.

Technophilia

Mon, 08 Jun 2009 11:02:35 -0800

An acquaintance of mine has a teenage daughter. Like most teens in this century she spends her day texting her friends, abbreviating her life into 140 character hints, flinging these haikus out to an invisible clan of mutual texters. It's an always-on job, this endless encapsulation of the moment. During dinner, while walking, on the toilet, lounging in bed, or in any state of wakefulness, to chat is to live. Like all teens, my friend's daughter tested the limits of her parents' restrictions. For some infraction or another, they grounded her. And to reinforce the seriousness of her misconduct, they took away her mobile phone. Immediately the girl became physically sick. Faint, nauseous, and so ill she couldn't get out of bed. It was if her parents had amputated a limb. And in a way they had. Our creations are now inseparable from us. Our identity with technology runs deep, to our core.

According to psychologist Erich Fromm (and famed biologist E.O. Wilson) humans are endowed with biophilia, an innate attraction to living things. This hard-wired, genetic affinity for life and life processes ensured our survival in the past by nurturing our familiarity with nature. In joy we learned the secrets of the wild. The eons which our ancestors spent walking to find coveted herbs in the woods or stalking a rare green frog were bliss; ask any hunter/gatherer about their time in the woods. In love we discovered the boons each creature could provide, and the great lessons of hurt and healing organic forms had to teach us. This love still simmers in our cells. It is why we keep pets, and potted plants in the city, why we garden when supermarket food is cheaper, and why we are drawn to sit in silence under towering trees.

But we are likewise embedded with technophilia, the love of technology. Our transformation from smart hominid into Sapiens was midwifed by our tools, and at our human core we harbor an innate affinity for made things. We are embarrassed to admit it, but we love technology. At least sometimes.

Craftsmen have always loved their tools, birthing them in ritual, and guarding them from the uninitiated. As the scale of technology outgrew the hand, machines became a communal experience. By the age of industry, lay folk had many occasions to encounter complexifying technology larger than any natural organism they had ever seen and they began to fall under its sway. In 1900 the historian Henry Adams visited and revisted the Great Exposition in Paris, where he haunted the hall showcasing the amazing new electric dynamos, or motors. Writing about himself in the third person he recounts his initiation:

To Adams the dynamo became a symbol of infinity. As he grew accustomed to the great gallery of machines, he began to feel the forty-foot dynamos as a moral force, much as the early Christians felt the Cross. The planet itself seemed less impressive, in its old-fashioned, deliberate, annual or daily revolution, than this huge wheel, revolving within an arm's-length at some vertiginous speed, and barely murmuring — scarcely humming an audible warning to stand a hair's-breadth further for respect of power — while it would not wake the baby lying close against its frame. Before the end, one began to pray to it.

Each summer tens of thousands of enthusiasts make a pilgramage to a nearby town along the Pacifica coast where I live to collectively bestow affection upon beautiful machines. The love-in, called Dream Machines, draws smitten fans of self-powered vehicles: cars, airplanes, steam engines. Rows of restored 1950s Chevys, and vintage Packards, in candy-color deliciousness woo their admirers. Rare species of airplanes, rivets gleaming, recline in a field, their painted propellers and exposed engines beckoning. A parade of oddly mutant motorcycles stream by. Behind one roped-off area a dozen old guys in overalls and greasy baseball caps tend noisy, hissing contraptions. This is the steam-powered zoo. Unlike modern machines, the innards of steam machines are visible, a kind of living transparency which solicits admiration for their mechanical honesty. One capped fellow demonstrates an insanely dangerous steam-powered cross-cut saw. Its naked teeth, as long as fingers, rake across a sacrificial log in a reptilian frenzy. The onlookers nod in approval.

I was there to witness the love. I was born lacking the normal male gene for car-madness. I am oblivious to the subtle differences in automobiles; I can't tell one sedan from another. I don't even know the model of the old van I drive. But I came to see others venerate classic technology. So it was weird to discover in one corner of this teeming rendezvous, three magnificent machines that snagged my soul as I tried to walk by. In an instant I was bewitched. I felt these were the most intoxicating vehicles I had ever seen. I had no idea what they were. A metal circular logo affixed to the front grill on each declared that they were Blastolenes.

Blastolenes are custom-built fantasies. They are oversized car-like monsters that retained the rough proportions of ordinary vehicles, only at a disturbing larger scale. Imagine your car three times its current size. One Blastolene was strapped down to a flat bed truck as if it were a trophy wild gargantuan captured by hunters, and it might bust its chains at any moment and zoom off. Like many vehicles it was animalish: the Blastolene's exposed circulatory pipes suggested guts, its rounded wheel cases were muscular hunches, and its chrome tie rods were obviously bones. People crowded around, sighing in satisfaction at its remarkable beauty. I was seized with a deep affinity for the creature.

The second Blastolene on display was a convertible sedan built around a hulking M7 Patton Tank motor. The motor emitted percussions rather than sound. Its gigantism was irresistible. I suddenly realized that for 40 years I had been driving baby cars; this was the daddy car. Timidly creeping up to it (can I touch it?), I felt a childlike awe. I could feel its abnormal density; the solid gravity pulling me in toward it, yet its intimidating scale, like an elephant, warning me away.

No doubt much of the attraction of these machines are the way they ape, so to speak, animal life. Maybe our technophilia is merely biophilia in disguise. But some of the magnetism that draws us to them is also due to the dynamo that peeks from their interior. Its rotational energy twirls us. Many decades ago California writer Joan Didion made a pilgrimage to the Hoover Dam, a trip she recounts in her anthology, The White Album. She, too, felt the heart of a dynamo.

Since the afternoon in 1967 when I first saw Hoover Dam, its image has never been entirely absent from my inner eye. I will be talking to someone in Los Angeles, say, or New York, and suddenly the dam will materialize, its pristine concave face gleaming white against the harsh rusts and taupes and mauves of that rock canyon hundreds or thousands of miles from where I am.

…Once when I revisited the dam I walked through it with a man from the Bureau of Reclamation. We saw almost no one. Cranes moved above us as if under their own volition. Generators roared. Transformers hummed. The gratings on which we stood vibrated. We watched a hundred-ton steel shaft plunging down to that place where the water was. And finally we got down to that place where the water was, where the water sucked out of lake Mead roared through thirty-foot penstocks and then into thirteen-foot penstocks and finally into the turbines themselves. "Touch it," the Reclamation man said, and I did, and for a long time I just stood there with my hands on the turbine. It was a peculiar moment, but so explicit as to suggest nothing beyond itself.

…I walked across the marble star map that traces a sidereal revolution of the equinox and fixes forever, the Reclamation man had told me, for all time and for all people who can read the stars, the date the dam was dedicated. The star map was, he had said, for when we were all gone and the dam was left. I had not thought much of it when he said it, but I thought of it then, with the wind whining and the sun dropping behind a mesa with the finality of a sunset in space. Of course that was the image I had seen always, seen it without quite realizing what I saw, a dynamo finally free of man, splendid at last in its absolute isolation, transmitting power and releasing water to a world where no one is.

Of course dams inspired dread and disgust as well as awe and admiration. Soaring, breathtaking dams frustrate the return of single-minded salmon and other spawning fish, and they indiscriminately flood homelands. In the technium revulsion and reverence often go hand in hand. Our biggest technological creations are like people in that way; they elicit our deepest loves and hates. On the other hand no one has ever been revolted by a cathedral of redwoods. In reality no dam, even Hoover dam, is eternal under the stars since rivers have a mind of their own; they pile up silt behind the dam's wedge so that eventually their waters can crawl over it. But while it stands, the artificial wins our admiration. We can identify with the dynamo revolving forever, as we feel our living hearts must do.

Passions for the made run wide. Almost anything manufactured will have adoring fans. Cars, guns, cookie jars, fishing reels, tableware, you name it. Their fans lavish attention by comprehensively collecting all variants of the technology, or modifying the standard form, or by imitating their own version. Not surprisingly, fans of a feather gather together. I tallied up the number of online forums for manufactured items commonly adored. One might think of these as churches. I found over 40,000 online congregations dedicated to honoring various cars, more than 10,000 different fan groups enamoured of motorcycles, 6,000 assemblies really into boats, 5,000 fellowships serving avid gun owners, and 1,000 denominations obssessed with all types of cameras. The list for other artifacts, tools, and machines commanding their own smitten followers would run into the hundreds.

MIT sociologist Sherry Turkle calls a particular specimen of technology that is revered by an individual an "evocative object." These bits of the technium are totems that serve as a springboard for identity, or for reflection, or for thinking. A doctor may love his/her stethoscope, as both badge and tool; a writer might cherish a special pen and feel its smooth weight pushing the words on their own; a dispatcher can love his ham radio, relishing its hard-won nuances, as a magical door to other realms that opens to him alone; and a programmer can easily love the root operating code of a computer for its essential logical beauty. Turkle says, "we think with the objects we love, and we love the objects we think with." She suspects that most of us have some kind of technology that acts as our touchstone.

I am one of them. I am no longer embarrassed to admit that I love the internet. Or maybe it's the web. Whatever you want to call the place we go to while we are online, I think it is beautiful. People love places, and will die to defend a place they love, as our sad history of wars prove. Our first encounters with the internet/web portray it as a very distributed electronic dynamo – a thing one plugs into -- and that it is. But the internet is closer to the technological equivalence of a place. An uncharted territory where you can genuinely get lost. At times I've entered to web just to get lost. In that lovely surrender, the web swallows my certitude and delivers the unknown. Despite the purposeful design of its human creators, the web is a wilderness. Its boundaries are unknown, unknowable, its mysteries uncountable. The bramble of intertwined ideas, links, documents, and images create an otherness as thick as a jungle. The web smells like life.

It knows so much. It has insinuated its tendrils of connection into everything, everywhere. The net is now vastly wider than me, wider than I can imagine, so in this way, while I am in it, it makes me bigger too. I feel amputated when I am away from it.

I find myself indebted to the net for its provisions. It is a steadfast benefactor, always there. I caress it with my fidgety fingers; it yields up my desires, like a lover. Secret knowledge? Here. Predictions of what is to come? Here. Maps to hidden places? Here. Rarely does it fail to please, and more marvelous, it seems to be getting better every day. I want to remain submerged in its bottomless abundance. To stay. To be wrapped in its dreamy embrace. Surrendering to the web is like going on aboriginal walkabout. The comforting illogic of dreams reigns. In dreamtime you jump from one page, one thought, to another. First on the screen you are in a cemetery looking at an automobile carved out of solid rock, the next moment, there's a man in front of a black board writing the news in chalk, then you are in jail with a crying baby, then a woman in a veil gives a long speech about the virtues of confession, then tall buildings in a city blow their tops off in a thousand pieces in slow motion. I encountered all those dreamy moments this morning within the first few minutes of my web surfing. The net's daydreams have touched my own, and stirred my heart. If you can honestly love a cat, which can't give you directions to a stranger's house, why can't you love the web?

Our technophilia is driven by the inherent beauty of the technium. Admittedly, this beauty has been previously hidden by a primitive phase of development that was not very pretty. Industrialization was dirty, ugly, and dumb in comparison to the biological matrix it grew from. A lot of that stage of the technium is still with us spewing its ugliness. I don't know whether this ugliness is a necessary stage of the technium's growth, or whether a smarter civilization than us could have tamed it earlier, but the arc of technology's origins from life's evolution, now accelerated, means that the technium contains all of life's inherent beauty – waiting to be uncovered.

Technology does not want to remain utilitarian. It wants to become art, to be beautiful and "useless." Since technology is born out of usefulness, this is a long haul. Robots will proliferate in a million different varieties and levels. Most will never be as smart as a grasshopper, and only few droids will surprise us with their intelligence. But the goal of every robot, and every machine and tool, is to exist for its own sake. To exist not only because it is useful, but because its existence is beautiful. There is evidence of that back on the fields of the Dream Machines, in the rows of mechanical glamour. While the Blastolene and lollipop 1950s Chevys are potentially useful – as transport – few are actually used that way. They are coddled, nursed and nurtured, repaired and improved, adored and honored, and sculpted into longevity by the sheer love of their innate beauty. They are art.

Today, at the start of the 21st century, there are tens of million species of tools and technologies at loose in the world. Assuming a modest increase of only 5% additional new tools and kinds of artifacts every year, by the end of the century our planet will be overrun by manufactured possibilities. Our own human needs are not expanding at this rate. The continual rise in technological variety is propelled by the needs of other technologies. You have a house, then you get a car. Now your car needs a house, too. It doesn't have hands like you do, so it needs a garage-door opener for its house. It needs check up equipment to keep it healthy, and add ons to keep it comfortable. The same goes for other kinds of hardware. Handheld devices need jackets, houses need paint, computers need peripherals. I estimate that about half of the denizens of the technium are technologies serving other technologies. If you remove a keystone technology from your home – say the computer – how many other devices and equipment would immediately become redundant? Remove your car, and what else can go? Remove your stove, and then count the pieces of gear no longer needed.

But we won't let these subordinate technologies go, based on the evidence so far. We don't "need" a lot of what we maintain. We keep specific technology around not only because it may be useful, but because we like to have it around. The gear, devices, networks form an interdependent ecosystem of interrelated parts, and we have a technophilia for its survival. We love the jungly mesh of the technium, and the way we can lose ourselves in it. We rebel at the negative costs of this interrelatedness, and its negative externalities such as pollution (global warming is a type of pollution), but we have a deep affinity for its web. We continue to manufacture new ideas and new artifacts, not because we always need them, but because the technium needs them, and because we find the technium attractive.

Most evolved things are beautiful, and the most beautiful are the most highly evolved. Cities display this principle clearly. Newborn, unrefined cities lack depth, and so, throughout history humans find new cities ugly. The first few versions of London were considered heinous eye sores. But over generations, every urban block in that city and all others are tested by daily use. The parks and streets that work are retained; those that fail are demolished. The height of buildings, the size of a plaza, the rake of an overhang are all adjusted by variations until they satisfy. But not all imperfection is removed, nor can it be since many aspects of a city – say the width of streets -- cannot be changed easily. So urban workarounds and architectural compensations are added over generations. Additionally, every available opportunity to build within a city is grabbed. The tiniest alley way is utilized for public space, the smallest nook becomes a store, the dampest arch under a bridge filled in with a home. Over centuries, this constant infilling, ceaseless replacement and renewal, and complexification – or in other words, evolution -- creates a deeply satisfying esthetic. The most beautify places are those that reveal layers of time. They accrue forms uniquely fitted to that place. Every corner in a city carries the long history of the city embedded in it like a hologram, glimpses of which unfold as we stroll by it.

The superb special effects magicians working for Hollywood discovered how to exploit the principle of evolutionary beauty when filming made-up worlds. Their fantastic cities and convincing props of the future are in reality new items, having been imagined only days earlier. To give them the convincing heft of reality, and the attractive richness we associate with beautiful things, the effects wizards devise a layered evolutionary backstory for each item or place. Model makers layer on "greeblies," or intricate surface details that reflect a fictitious past history. This artificial evolution produces objects and places that exhibit what George Lucas calls the "used future." For instance a detailed ray gun arrives at its current design via an imaginary backstory in which its predecessors were once longer and powered by a different energy source; the gun thus contains vestigial ridges and tubes. We feel authenticity. A backstory assumes that a 22nd century city had been bombed in a previous age; its earlier primitive steel ruins under gird the foundation of recent crystalline towers. It looks beautiful.

Evolution is not just about complications. One pair of scissors can be highly evolved, and beautiful, while another is not. Both scissors entail two swinging pieces joined at their center. But in the highly evolved scissors, the accumulated knowledge won over thousands of years of cutting is captured by the forged and polished shape of the scissor halves. Tiny twists in the metal hold that knowledge. While our lay minds can't decode why, we interpret that fossilized learning as beauty. It has less to do about smooth lines and more to do about smooth continuity of experience. The attractive scissors, or beautiful hammer, or gorgeous car, carry in their form the wisdom of their ancestors.

Not all stuff will attract our emotions, and the same life-likeness and sentience will often infuriate us. Professor Sherry Turkle has spent her professional life studying (and worrying) about the human propensity towards technophilia. For the past three decades MIT engineers have designed a series of robots that increasingly take on attributes of human personality. The latest one is called Nexi. When Nexi is not on, the researchers pull a curtain around it. One day a student came in late to work on the robot, but found no one else around, so she pulled back the curtain. She was startled and confused to find Nexi blindfolded. What did it mean? As Turkle relates the story: "It raised the question in the mind of the perplexed student, are we protecting the people around the robot, or are we protecting the robot? The blindfold immediately brought up the fantasy of torturing the robot. You know, if it's alive enough to need a blindfold, then maybe it's alive enough to be tortured."

We are so eager to love technology that Turkle is worried this love blinds us. In her laboratory Turkle observes how ordinary people feel about anthropic technology. She has been surprised at how little encouragement humans need to surrender love for machines. The merest suggestion of human-like eye movement, the tiniest hint of active eyebrows, and the roughest ready smile on an otherwise obviously metal machine can make a person melt before it. Even feel bad about turning it off. Humans will treat any minimally anthropomorphized droid like it not only deserves our affections, but in some strange way is returning our love. That worries Turkle because she is concerned whether we will diminish our own humanity in order to match this minimal humanity we spy in our creations. If we let robots take care of the elderly as they want do in Japan, will the elderly become robot like to meet them? As computer scientist Jaron Lanier, another worrier of technophilia, puts it: "We make ourselves stupid in order to make computers seem smart. I don't worry about computers getting intelligent, I worry about humans getting dumber."

In the future, we'll find it easier to love technology. Machines win our hearts with every step they take in evolution. Like it not, anthropic robots (at the level of pets at first) will gain our affections, since even minimal life-like ones do already. The internet provides a hint of the maximal passion possibilities of the technium. The global internet's nearly organic interdependence, and emerging sentience make it wild, and its wildness draws our affections. No human can turn away from the trick of anthropomorphism, and not be seduced by the humanity we project onto look-alikes, but the attraction of highly evolved technology is not only in its reflection of our faces. We are deeply attracted to its beauty, and its beauty resides in its evolution. Humans are the most highly evolved organs we have experienced, so we fixate on imitations of this form (quite naturally), but our technophilia is fundamentally not for anthropy, but for evolution. Humanity's most advance technology will soon leave imitation behind and create obviously non-human intelligences, and obviously non-human robots, and obviously non-earth-like life, and all these will radiate an attractiveness that will dazzle us.

As it does, we'll find it easier to admit that we have an affinity for it. In addition the accelerated arrival of tens of millions more artifacts will deposit more layers onto the technium, polishing existing technology with more history, and deepening its embedded knowledge. Year by year, as it advances, technology, on average, will increase in beauty. I am willing to bet that in the not-too-distant future the magnificence of certain patches of the technium will rival the splendor of the natural world. We will rhapsodize about this technology's charms, marvel at its subtlety, travel to it with children in tow, to sit in silence beneath its towers.

And this is as it should be because technology wants to be loved.

Increasing Ubiquity

Thu, 28 May 2009 12:03:53 -0800

The consequence of self-reproduction in life, as well as in the technium, is an inherent drive toward ubiquity. Given enough resources, duplication of one type will keep going until all its construction resources are consumed. All things being equal, dandelions, or raccoons, or asphalt will replicate till they cover the earth. Evolution equips a replicant with tricks to maximize its spread no matter the constraints. But because physical resources are limited, and competition relentless, no species can ever reach full ubiquity. Yet all life is biased in that direction. Technology, too, wants to be ubiquitous.

Humans are the reproductive organs of technology. We multiply manufactured artifacts and spread ideas and memes. Because humans are limited (only 6 billion alive at the moment) and there are tens of millions of species of technology or memes to spread, none can reach full 100% ubiquity, although several come close.

Nor do we really want all technology to be ubiquitous. It would be best for ourselves if remedial technology like artificial hearts never became very common. Preferably, we would engineer away the need for replacement hearts through genetics or drugs or diet. In the same way, the remedial technology of carbon sequestration (removing carbon from the atmosphere) would ideally never become ubiquitous. Best would be an energy system based photons (solar), fusion (nuclear), wind, or very least, burning hydrogen rather than burning carbon. The spread of fuels relying on zero carbon, or little carbon (wood, coal, oil and gas have a ascending percent of hydrogen per carbon in that order) would thus negate the spread of carbon sequestration technology. Thus rival technologies keep themselves in check.

Individual species of technology, like species of weeds, tend to multiply towards ubiquity to fill their available niche. But a technium packed with remedial technologies does not have a long-term trajectory, just as an ecosystem composed only of weeds will not survive as long as one with less opportunistic components. Artificial hearts do not offer as many long-term options to a person, or society, as does a natural heart kept healthy by other technologies. Remedial atmospheric solutions do not offer as many future options as superior energy sources. The niche for replacement hearts, cataract surgery, pollution reducers, data recovery, and so on are in the long run – at civilization scale – narrow places for ubiquity. Once their niches are filled, they lead no where else. They are stop gap and self-limiting. Like a small pox vaccine. Ideally a vaccine has no future if it is universally successful.

Rather than self-limits the technium favors the type of ubiquity found in open-ended technologies, that is, those technologies that effectively increase the arrival of other effective open-ended technologies. This expansion unleashes cascades of other technologies that spread pervasively.

From a planetary biosphere perspective the most ubiquitous technology on Earth is agriculture. The steady surplus of high quality food from agriculture is vigorously open-ended in that this abundance enabled civilization and birthed its millions of technologies. The spread of agriculture is the largest-scale engineering project on the planet. Nearly half of Earth's land surface has been altered by the mind and hand of humans. Native plants have been displaced, soil moved, and domesticated crops planted in their stead. Great stretches of Earth's surface have been semi-domesticated into pasture land. The most drastic of these changes – such as uninterrupted tracts of giant farms -- are visible from space. Measured in number of square kilometers, the most ubiquitous technology on the planet are the five major domesticated crops of maize, wheat, rice, cane sugar and cows.

Other more subtle technological alterations are visible in the ecological history of a place. By many experts' account, there have not been any wilderness areas on this planet for perhaps five thousand years. Most of the areas we ordinarily consider wild (like the Amazon or the Congo, or the American West) are in fact the result of thousands of years of human intervention. By setting seasonal fires, by selectively hunting certain species, or by selectively harvesting certain plants, tribal people groom the landscape for food production over the centuries. No territory on the planet has completely escaped the inquisitive and disruptive impulses of the human mind to tame the environment. Hunter/gatherers now live or have lived everywhere (except for some Antarctic areas) and wherever people dwell, they use technology to modify the "natural" ecology and terraform their continent.

The third most ubiquitous planetary technology are roads. Simple clearings for the most part, dirt roads extend their root-like tentacles into most watersheds, criss-crossing valleys and winding their way up many mountains. The web of constructed roads forms a reticulated cloak around the continents of this planet. A string of buildings follow along the dendritic branches of roads. These nodes are made of cut tree fiber (wood, thatch, bamboo) or molded earth (adobe, brick, stone, concrete) and may be fourth commonest technology.

This map of the world shows travel time to major cities, closer is lighter, farther is darker. In essence it is a map of the global road network. (via New Scientist)

Not as visible, but perhaps more pervasive at the planetary level, are the technologies of fire. Controlled burning of carbon fuels, particularly mined coal and oil, has led to changes in the Earth's atmosphere. Reckoned in total mass and converge, these furnaces (which often travel along the roads as engines in automobiles) are dwarfed by roads. Though smaller in scale than the roads they ride on, or the homes and factories they burn in, these tiny deliberate fires are able to shift the composition of the globe's voluminous atmosphere. It is possible that this collective burning may be the largest-scale technological impact on the planet.

While magnificent stone and silica cities and their sprawl symbolize our technium, they are far from ubiquitous. Their footprint is small compared to agriculture, but megalopolis have rerouted the flow of materials so that much of the technium circulates through them. Rivers of food and raw materials flow in, and debris flow out. Every person living in a developed country in moves 20 tons of material annually.

Then there are the things we surround ourselves with. From the perspective of daily modern human life, the list of near-ubiquitous technologies include cotton cloth, iron blades, plastic bottles, paper, and radio signals. These five technological species are within reach of nearly every human alive today, both in the cities and in the most remote rural villages. Each of these technologies open up vast new territories of possibilities: paper -- cheap writing, printing, and money; metal blades -- art, craft, gardening, and butchering; plastic -- cooking, water, and medicines; radio –- connection, news, and community. Fast on their tracks follow the nearly ubiquitous species of metal pots, matches, and cell phones.

Total ubiquity is the end point all technologies tend toward but never reach. But there is a practical ubiquity of near saturation, which is sufficient to flip the dynamic of a technology onto another level. In the developed world and urban places everywhere, the speed at which new technologies disperse to the point of saturation has been increasing.

Whereas it took electrification 45 years to reach 90% of US residents, it's taken only 20 years for cell phones to reach the same penetration. The rate of diffusion is accelerating. A straight line extrapolation would suggest that the rate of technological adoption should continue to accelerate until it occurs instantaneously. By the year 2100, a personal teleporter, say, should be adopted by everyone alive the year it is introduced. A new immersive VR suit the day after it is released. And a new wireless wearable communicator the hour after it is invented.

Rates of diffusion of consumer technology (via NYTimes)

However that scenario is unlikely to happen because technology specializes as fast as it becomes common, so most technology will not be adopted by most people. In fact the more complex the technology, the less likely it will reach near-ubiquity. The peak global penetration for the average technological innovation will drop over time. We can see a hint of that in the chart above. The level of peak penetration at which diffusion plateaus is falling over time. Any particular new species of communication device in the next century is unlikely to every reach the same ubiquity as machine-woven cotton cloth, or even the television.

But something strange happens with ubiquity. More is different. A few automobiles roaming along a few roads is fundamentally different than a few automobiles for every person. And not just because of the increased noise and pollution. A billion operating cars spawn an emergent system that creates its own dynamics. Ditto for most inventions. The first few cameras were a novelty. Their impact was primarily to put painters out of the job of recording the times. But as photography became easier to use, common cameras led to intense photojournalism, and eventually they hatched movies and Hollywood alternative realities. The further diffusion of cameras cheap enough that every family had one in turn fed tourism, globalism and international travel. The further diffusion of cameras into cell phones and digital devices birthed a universal sharing of images, the acceptance that something was not real until it was captured in a camera, and a sense that there is no significance outside of the camera view. The further diffusion of cameras embedded into the built environment, peeking from every city corner and peering down from every room ceiling forces a transparency upon society. Eventually every surface of the built world will be covered with a screen and every screen will double as an eye. When the camera is fully ubiquitous everything is recorded for all time. We have a communal awareness and memory. That's a long way from simply displacing painting.

I met a fellow many years ago who spent ten years wearing a tiny camera in front of his left eye. This head-mounted camera captured everything that happened in his life and transmitted it back to his website. When Steve Mann started his experiment of recording and broadcasting his life as a grad student, he was a lone eccentric. While he was standing there talking to you, with one eye open and the other filming, his unconventional approach to documentation seemed like performance art. One could not really object to it, because, well, he was such an outlier.

In the course of his years of living ordinary life as a one-eyed camera, going shopping, to school, to events with his friends, Mann discovered that ironically the more surveillance cameras a particular store, plaza, or gathering place had, the more their guards objected to individuals like him recording their own view. The watchers hated to be watched. Mann calls his inverse surveillance, sousveillance, a word coined by replacing the French "sur" for above, with the French "sous" for below, as in watching from the bottom up.

After he graduated from MIT, Mann became a professor and his grad students used the next generation of smaller circuitry to craft their own miniature sousveillance gear. Some were tiny enough to fit unobtrusively into sunglasses. The students would record each other. In the meantime, cell phones sprouted hi-res cameras and video cams connected to the net, which performed the same sousviellance actions. Suddenly, there were millions of public eyes watching each other. Sousveillance had gone from a node of one to near ubiquity. A few years ago when all this sousveillance was new, a girl on a Korean subway let her dog crap on the floor without cleaning up the mess. Her transgression was captured by several sousveillance phonecams and eventually broadcasted on national TV. She was shamed into apology by a new ubiquity.

One thousand live cameras always-on make downtowns safe from pickpockets, nab stop-light speeders, and record police misbehavior. One billion live cameras always-on serve as a community monitor and memory; they give the job of eyewitness to amateurs; they restructure the notion of the self, and a billion cameras demote the authority of authorities.

One thousand automobiles opens up mobility, creates privacy, supplies adventure. One billion automobiles creates suburbia, eliminates adventure, erases parochial minds, triggers parking problems, births traffic jams, and removes the human scale of architecture.

One thousand teleportation stations rejuvenate vacation travel. One billion teleportation stations overturn commutes, enhance globalism, introduce tele-lag sickness, re-introduce the grand spectacle, kill the nation state, and end privacy.

One thousand human genetic sequences jump-start personalized medicine. One billion genetic sequences every hour enable real-time genetic damage monitoring, upend the chemical industry, redefine illness, make genealogies relevant, unravel the packaging industry and launches "ultra-clean" lifestyles that make organic look filthy.

One thousand screens the size of buildings keep Hollywood going. One billion screens everywhere become the new art, create a new advertising media, vitalize cities at night, accelerate locative computing, and rejuvenate the commons.

One thousand humanoid robots revamp the olympics, and give a boost to entertainment companies. One billion humanoid robots cause massive shifts in employment, reintroduces slavery and its opponents, and demolishes the status of established religions.

In the course of evolution every technology is put to the question of what happens when it becomes ubiquitous? What happens when everyone has one?

Usually it disappears. Electric motors, born large, rare and obvious, quickly became invisible and everywhere. Shortly after their invention in 1873 modern electric motors propagated throughout the manufacturing industry. Each factory stationed one very large expensive motor in the place where a steam engine formerly stood. That single engine turned a complex maze of axles and belts, which in turn spun hundreds of smaller machines scattered throughout the factory. The rotational energy twirled through the buildings from that single source.

Machinery for grinding crankshafts at the Ford Motor Company, 1915. (From Hounshell)

By the 1910s electric motors started their inevitable spread into homes. They had been domesticated. Unlike a steam engine, they did not smoke or belch or drool. Just a tidy steady whirr from a 5-pound hunk. As in factories, these single "home motors" were designed to drive all the machines in one home. The 1916 Hamilton Beach "Home Motor" had a 6-speed rheostat and ran on 110 volts. Designer Donald Norman points out a page from the 1918 Sears, Roebuck and Co. catalog advertising the Home Motor for $8.75 (which is equivalent to about $100 these days). This handy motor would spin your sewing machine. You could also plug it in to the Churn and Mixer Attachment ("for which you will find many uses"), and the Buffer and Grinder Attachments ("will be found very useful in many ways around the home"). The Fan Attachment "can be quickly attached to Home Motor", as well as Beater Attachment to whip cream and beat eggs.

One hundred years later the electric motor has seeped into ubiquity. There is no longer one home motor in a household, there are dozens of them, and each is nearly invisible. No longer stand-alone devices, motors are now integral parts of many appliances. They actuate our gadgets, acting as the muscles for our artificial selves. They are everywhere. I made an informal census of all the embedded motors I could find in the room I am sitting in while I write:

5 spinning hard disks
3 analog tape recorders
3 cameras (move zoom lenses)
1 video camera
1 watch
1 clock
1 printer
1 scanner (moves scan head)
1 copier
1 fax (moves paper)
1 CD player
1 pump in radiant floor heat

That's 20 home motors in one room. A factory or office build would have thousands. We don't think about motors. We are unconscious of them, even though we depend on their work. They rarely fail. We aren't aware of roads and electricity because they are ubiquitous and usually work. We don't think of paper and cotton clothing as technology because their reliable presences are everywhere.

In addition to a deep embeddedness, ubiquity also breeds certainty. The advantages of new unknown technology are always disruptive. The first version of an innovation is cumbersome and finicky. A new fangled type of plow, waterwheel, saddle, lamp, phone, or automobile can only offer uncertain advantages for certain trouble. Even after an invention has been perfected elsewhere, when it is first introduced into a new zone or culture it requires the re-education of old habits. The new type of waterwheel may require less water to run, but also require a different type of milling stone that is hard to find, or it may produce a different quality of flour. A new plow may speed tilling but demand planting seed later, thus disrupting ancient traditions. A new kind of automobile may have a longer range but less reliability, or greater efficiency but less range, altering driving and fueling patterns. That is why only a few eager pioneers are inclined to adopt an innovation at first, because the new primarily promises uncertainty and the unknown. As an innovation is perfected, its benefits and education are sorted out and illuminated, it becomes less uncertain, and the technology spreads. That diffusion is neither instantaneous nor even.

In every technology's lifespan then, there will be a period of "haves" and "have nots." Clear advantages may flow to the individuals or societies who first risk untried guns, or the alphabet, or electrification, or the internet, over those who do not. The distribution of these advantages may depend on wealth, privilege, or lucky geography as much as desire. This divide between the haves and the have-nots was most recently and most visibly played out at the turn of the last century when the internet blossomed.

The internet was invented in the 1970s and offered very few benefits at first. It was primarily used by its inventors, a very small clique of professionals fluent in programming languages, as a tool to improve itself. From birth the internet was constructed in order to make talking about the idea of an internet more efficient. Likewise, the first ham radio operators primarily broadcasted discussions about ham radio; the early world of CB radio was filled with talk about CB; the first blogs were about blogging; the first several years of twitterings concerned Twitter. By the early 1980s, early adopters who mastered the arcane commands of network protocols in order to find kindred spirits interested in discussing this tool, moved onto the embryonic internet and told their nerdy friends. But the internet was ignored by everyone else as a marginal, teenage male hobby. It was expensive to connect to; it required patience, the ability to type, and a willingness to deal with obscure technical languages; and very few other non-obsessive people were online. Its attraction was lost of most people.

But once the early adaptors modified and perfected the tool to give it pictures and a point and click interface (the web), its advantages became clearer and more desirable. As the great benefits of digital technology became apparent, the question of what to do about the have nots became a bothersome issue. The technology was still expensive, requiring a personal computer, a telephone line, and a monthly subscription fee – but those who adopted it acquired power through knowledge. Professionals and small businesses grasped its potential. The initial users of this empowering technology were – on the global scale – the same set of people who had so many other things: cars, peace, education, jobs, opportunities.

The more evident the power of the internet as an uplifting force became, the more evident the divide between the digital haves and have-nots. One sociological study concluded that there were "two Americas" birthing, as well as two worlds. The citizens of one were poor people who could not afford a computer, and of the other, wealthy individuals equipped with PCs who reaped all the benefits. During the 1990s when technologists such as myself were promoting the advent of the internet, we were often asked what we were going to do about the digital divide? My answer was simple: nothing. We didn't have to do anything, because the natural history of a technology such as the internet was self-fulfilling.

The have-nots were a temporary imbalance that would be cured (and more so) by market forces. There was so much profit to be made connecting up the rest of the world, and the unconnected were so eager to join, that they were already paying more per minute of telecom connectivity when they could get it. Furthermore, the costs of both computers and connectivity were dropping by the month. At that time most poor in America owned televisions and had monthly cable bills. Owning a computer and internet access was no more expensive and would soon be cheaper than TV. In a decade the outlay would reach a $100 laptop. Within the lifetimes of all born in the last decade, computers of some sort (a connector really) would cost $5.

This was simply a case, as computer scientist Marvin Minsky once put it, of the "haves and have-laters." The haves (the early adaptors) overpay for crummy early editions of technology that barely works. Their purchase of flaky version 1.0 of new goods finance cheaper and better versions for the have-laters, who will get it for dirt cheap not long afterwards. In essence the "haves" fund the evolution of technology for the have laters. Isn't that how it should be, that the rich fund the development of cheap technology for the poor?

We saw this "have-later" cycle play out all the more clearly with cell phones. The very first cell phones were larger than bricks, extremely costly, and not very good. I remember an early-adopter techie friend who bought one of the first cell phones; he carried it around in its own dedicated briefcase. I was incredulous that anyone would pay that much for something that seemed more toy than tool. It seemed equally ludicrous at that time to expect that within two decades, the $2,000 devices would be so cheap as to be disposable, so tiny to fit in a shirt pocket, and so ubiquitous that even the street sweepers of India and the rickshaw drivers of China had one. While internet connection for sidewalk sleepers in Calcutta seemed impossible, the long-term trends inherent in technology aim it towards ubiquity. In fact, in many respects the cell coverage of these "later" countries overtook the quality of the older US system so that the cell phone became a case of the "haves" and "have-sooners," in that the later adopters got the ideal benefits of mobile phones sooner.

The fiercest critics of technology still focus on the ephemeral "have and have-not divide," but that flimsy border is a distraction. The significant threshold of technological development lies at the boundary between common place and ubiquity, between the have-laters and the "all-have." When critics asked us champions of the internet what we were going to do about the digital divide, and I said "nothing," I added a challenge: "If you want to worry about something, don't worry about the folks who are currently offline. They'll stampede on faster than you think. Instead you should worry about what we are going to do when everyone is online. When the internet has 6 billion people, and they are all emailing at once; when no one is disconnected and always on day and night, when everything is digital and nothing offline, when the internet is ubiquitous."

When a technology saturates, or even supersaturates, a culture, it unleashes patterns not seen in lone examples of it. A few isolated manifestations of a technology can reveal its first order effects. But it is not until technology fills a vast, thick interacting pervasion do the second and third order consequences erupt. Don't worry about those who don't have a car; worry what happens when everyone has a car. Don't worry about those families who cannot afford genetic engineering; worry what happens when everyone is engineering. Don't worry about those who don't own a personal teleporter; worry what happens when everyone has one. Most of the unintended consequences that so scare us in technology usually arrive in ubiquity.

And most of the good things as well. The trend toward embedded ubiquity is most pronounced in technologies that are open-ended: Communications, computation, socialization, and digitization. And no technology is as open-ended as the mind. The mind is nearly the definition of open-endedness since its limits are imperceptible and unimaginable. We see no closure to the possibilities of an ever-diffusing intelligence. If a human mind can upfold a greater mind, ad infinitum, this upcreation represents the ultimate open-endedness.

The all-pervasiveness of open-ended technologies settle further and further into the matrix of infrastructure. We are busy right now infusing our shoes, clothes, household appliances, vehicles, sports equipment, handhelds, pets, landscape – everything that we touch and touches us – with communication, computation and intelligence. In this ubiquity they open up more new technology, and trigger new levels of consequence.

Because of their open-endedness, the amount of computation and communication that can be crowded into matter and materials, stuffed into the environment, and invested into everything we make seems infinite. Like the magician who keeps pouring water into the bottomless cup, we can keep pouring mind, intelligence, and information into the technium without limit. There is nothing we have invented to date that we've said, "it's smart enough." In this way the ubiquity of technology is insatiable. It will absorb all mindedness.

The ever-expanding base of our creations works like a vacuum sucking technology toward it. It is constantly stretching the technium towards a pervasive presence. Pulled by open possibilities and pushed by relentless duplication, technology wants ubiquity.

Increasing Specialization

Tue, 19 May 2009 14:44:41 -0800

Evolution moves from the general to the specific. The first version of the cell was a general purpose survival machine. Over time evolution honed that one generality into multiple specialties. In the beginning the domain of life was restricted to warm ponds. But most of the planet was far more extreme; volcanoes and glaciers. Evolution devised cells that specialized in living in boiling hot water, or within freezing ice, or special cells that could eat oil, or trap heavy metals, or glow in the dark. Specialization enabled life to colonize these major, but varied, extreme habitats, and also to fill millions of niche environments – such as the insides of other organisms, or on the dimples of dust particles in the air. Very soon every possible environment on the planet sprouted a specialized variety of life making a living there. Presently there are no sterilized places anywhere on the planet that we've inspected, except in a very few temporary spots within a hospital setting. The cells of life keep specializing.

The trend toward specialization holds for multicellular organisms as well. Cells within an organism specialize. The human body has 210 different types of cells, including the specialized cells in your liver, and a different type for your kidneys. You have special heart muscle cells, different from ordinary skeletal muscle cells. The original omnipotent egg cell that initiates every animal divides into cells with greater specificity, until after less than 50 mitotic cell divisions you and I wind up with a unified assemblage of 10^15 bone cells, skins cells and brain cells.

Over evolutionary time, there is a significant rise in the number of cell types in the most complex organism. In fact, these organisms are more complex in part because they contain more specialized parts. So specialization follows the arc of complexity.

The number of cell types found in organisms over evolutionary time.

The organism itself also tends toward great specialization. Over the course of time, for one example, barnacles (comprised of 50 specialty cell types) evolve into specialty barnacles: the Six-plated Barnacle specializes in extreme high-tide locations that are flooded (with food to eat) only several times a month. Or, the Sacculina Barnacle that grows only inside the egg sack of a living crab. Birds focus into specialized type of seed eaters with specialized beaks: fine ones for small seeds, but fat beaks for hard seeds. A few plants are opportunistic (we call them weeds) occupying any disturbed soil, but most plants dedicate their survival skills toward a particular niche: dark tropical swamps, or dry, windy alpine mountain peaks. Koala bears are famously specialized on eucalyptus trees, and pandas on bamboo. Parasiticism is particularly specific and yet so common in life that some experts estimate up to 50% of living species are parasites. Most parasites, such as lice, will feed only on one species, and often only on one bodily part of one species. There are parasites that prey only on other special parasites.

The trend toward specialization in life is propelled by an arms-race. More specialized organisms (such as a clam feeding in sulfuric emissions in lightless deep sea vents) present more specialized environments for competitors and prey (crabs that feed on them), which breed more specialized strategies (parasites on the crabs), and solutions, and in the end yet more specialized organisms.

This urge to specialize extends into the technium. The original tool of the hominids, a roundish rock with a broken edge, was a general purpose tool used for scrapping, cutting, and hammering. Once taken up by Sapiens, the general tool morphed into specialty tools: a separate scraper, cutter, or hammer. The variety of tool species increased over time as specialty tasks increased. Sewing required needles; sewing hide required special needles, sewing woven fabric another. When simple tools were recombined into composite tools (string + stick = bow) specialization increased further. The astounding diversity of manufactured items today is primarily driven by the need for specialized parts of complicated devices.

At the same time, just as in organic life, tools tend to start out useful for many things and evolve toward specific tasks. The first camera with photographic film was invented in 1885. Once incarnated, the idea of the camera started to specialize. Within years of its birth inventors devised tiny spy camera, extra large panoramic cameras, compound lens cameras, high-speed flash cameras. Today there are hundreds of specialty cameras, including those for use deep underwater, to cameras designed for the vacuum of space, or those to capture the infrared, or the ultraviolet. There are telephoto cameras for the very far and microscopic cameras for the very close. While one can still purchase (or make) the original general purpose camera, they count for an increasing smaller proportion of cameradom.

This sequence from general to specific holds true for most technologies. Automobiles start off broadly appealing and over time, they evolve to specific models, while the general purpose variety fades. In cars you choose among compacts, SUVs, vans, sporty models, sedans, pickups, hybrids, and so on. Scissors are specified for hair, paper, carpet, mesh, or flowers.

As we look into the future, specialization will continue to increase. The first gene sequencer sequenced any gene. The next step is a specialized human DNA sequencer, which only does humans or another species, say the mouse for researchers. Then we'll see sequencers that specialize in racial genomes (for African-Americans or Chinese), or extremely portable ones, or ones that are extremely fast and sequence in real time, letting a person know whether pollutions are damaging their genes right now. The first commercial virtual reality consoles will serve up virtual realities for all purposes, but over time, VR consoles will evolve special versions with special gear for games, or military practice, or movie rehearsals, or shopping.

At the moment computers seem to be headed in the opposite direction. They seem to becoming evermore general purpose machines, as they swallow more and more functions. Entire occupations and their worker's tool have been subsumed by the contraptions of computation and networks. Computers have already absorbed calculators, spreadsheets, typewriters, film, telegrams, telephones, walkie talkies, compasses and sextants, television, radio, turntables, draft tables, mixing boards, war games, music studios, type foundries, flight simulators, and many other vocational instruments. You can longer tell what a person does by looking at their workplace because they all look the same: a personal computer. Ninety percent of employees are using the same tool. Is that the desk of the CEO, the accountant, the designer, or the receptionist? This convergence is amplified by cloud computing, where the actual work is done on the net as a whole, and the tool at hand merely becomes a portal to the work. All portals become the simplest possible window: a flat screen of some size.

This convergence is temporary. We are still in the early stages of computerization – or rather intelligenation. Everywhere we currently apply our own personal intelligence (in other words, everywhere we work and play) we are rapidly applying artificial and collective intelligence as well, and rapidly overhauling our tools and expectations. We've intelligenized bookkeeping, photography, financial trading, metal machining, airplane piloting, among thousands of other tasks. We are about to computerize automobile driving, medical diagnosis, and speech understanding. In our rush toward large-scale intelligenation, we first installed the general purpose PC with its mass-produced small brain, mid-size screen, and conduit to the net. So all chores get the same tool. To complete the dispersion of intelligenation into all occupations will probably require another decade. Silly as it now sounds, we will put artificial intelligence into hammers, dental picks, fork lifts, stethoscopes, and frying pans. All these tools will gain new powers by sharing the universal intelligence of the network. But as their newly augmented roles become clear, the tools will specialize. We can see the first glimmers in the iPhone, Kindle, Wii, and netbooks. As display and battery technology catches up to chips, the interface to ubiquitous intelligenation will diverge and specialized. Soldiers and other athletes who use their full body want large-scale enveloping screens, while mobile road warriors want small ones. Gamers want minimal latency, readers want maximum legibility, hikers want waterproofing, kids want indestructibility. The portals into computation, or the net, will specialize to a remarkable degree. The keyboard, for one, will loose its monopoly. Speech and gesture input will gain a major role. Spectacle and eyeball screens will supplement walls and flexible surfaces.

When we pick up a smart hammer, the handle will contain its smartness. A very smart air hammer pounds in nails at the right speed, of the correct type, for that immediate material and job. Computational intelligence will mostly disappear into the tool itself, so we only deal with the interface. The interface for tools will specialize as the jobs specialize. The ultimate specific technology or technique is customized to a particular use by a specific user for a specific time. Very niche-y functions may summon devices that are assembled for only that task and then unassembled. Ultra-specialized artifacts may live for only a day like a mayfly. Specialization may be reckoned in half-lives.

All the things we make with our mind, and the creations of artificial minds, will all tend over time to become more niche based. The "long-tail" is not merely a characteristic of media, but of technological evolution itself: the tail of niches gets longer and longer. We can imagine the future of almost any invention working today by imagining it evolving into dozens of narrow uses. Technology is born in generality and grows to specificity. Technology wants specialization.

Increasing Diversity

Sat, 16 May 2009 12:17:59 -0800

The diversity of the universe has been increasing since the beginning of time. In its very first seconds the universe contained only quarks, which began to assemble into a variety of sub-atomic particles within minutes. By the end of the first hour, the universe contained dozens of types of particles but only two elements, hydrogen and helium. Over the next 300 million years drifting hydrogen and helium atoms found each other and their micro-gravities bound them together into masses of growing nebula that eventually collapsed into fiery stars. Star fusion built up the hydrogen and helium with additional particles until they emerged as dozens of new heavier elements, and so the diversity of the chemical universe increased. Eventually some "metallic" stars exploded into supernova spewing their heavy elements into space, to be swept up again over millions of years into new stars. In a kind of pumping action, these second and third round star-furnaces added yet more neutrons to metallic elements to create more varieties of heavy metals until all 100 or so varieties of stable elements were created. The increasing diversity of elements and particles also created an increasing variety of star species, galaxies types, and varieties of orbiting planets. On planets with active tectonic crusts new kinds of minerals increased in time, as geologic forces reworked and rearranged the elements into new crystals and rocks. The diversity of crystallized minerals on Earth, for instance, increased even further with advent of life.

Two different studies (1982 and 1992) reveal increasing diversity in evolution of life on Earth

The invention of life greatly accelerated the diversity in the universe many fold. From a very few species 3.8 billion years ago, the number and variety of living species on Earth has increased dramatically over geological time to the 30 to 100 million now present. This rise has been uneven in several ways. At certain times in Earth's history large-scale cosmological disruptions (such as asteroid hits) have wiped out gains in diversity. And in specific branches of life diversity sometimes did not advance very much, or even retreated. But overall, in life as a whole over geologic time, diversity has widened. In fact life's diversity has doubled since the dinosaurian era, only 200 million years ago. The growth of biological differences, as a whole, is expanding exponentially, as this rocketing increase can be seen in vertebrates, plants and insects.

Exponential increase in diversity in (A) terrestrial plants (B) vertebrates, and (C) insects.

The trend toward diversity is further accelerated by the technium. The number of species of technology invented every year is increasing at an increasing rate. It's difficult to precisely count the varieties of technological invention since innovations don't have the defined borders of breeding that most living organisms do. We might count ideas, which underlie each invention. Each scientific article represents at least one new idea. The number of journal articles has exploded in the last 50 years. Each patent is also a species of idea. At last count there were 7 million patents issued in the US alone, and their total has been increasing exponentially as well. Considering that humans have named and identified only 1.6 million living species, as far as we know, the "made" now outnumber the "born" four to one.

Exponential increase of scientific articles

Exponential growth in US patents

We see increased diversity everywhere in the technium. Manufactured species of underwater organisms such as 70-foot submarine parallel living organisms like a blue whale. Airplanes ape birds, so to speak. Our houses are but better nests. But the technium explores niches that the born never ventured into. We know of no organisms using radio waves, yet the technium has produced hundreds of varieties of radio communicating species. While moles have been digging up earth for millions of years, two-story tunnel digging contraptions are so much larger, faster, and less daunted by solid rock than anything born that we can truly say they occupy a new niche on Earth. X-ray machines have a type of sight unknown among the living. And there is simply no biological analog to an Etch-a-Sketch, a digital watch, or a Space Shuttle, to name a few examples. Increasingly the diversity of the technium has no counterpart in biological evolution, and so the technium has truly increased diversity.

Diversity of spark catchers for train locomotive smokestacks, from The Evolution of Technology

The diversity of the technium has already surpassed our skills of recognition. There are so many varieties of things that one individual can't name them. Cognitive researchers have discovered there are about 3,000 easily recognizable noun categories in modern life. This total includes manufactured objects and living organisms such as: elephant, airplane, palm, telephone, chair - things that are readily discernable in a flash without thinking. Researchers came up with the estimate of 3,000 based on the number of nouns listed in dictionaries, how many objects are found in the vocabulary of an average 6-year-old child, and the number of objects that a primitive expert system (20q) can recognize. They estimated there are, on average, ten named varieties for each noun category. Ten kinds of chairs, ten kinds of fish, ten kinds of phones, ten kinds of beds that ordinary people might be describe. That gives a rough estimate of 30,000 objects in most peoples lives, or at least 30,000 that they would recognize. Even when we name a form, most of the variety of life and the technium goes by us without a specific name. We may recognize a bird, but not which species of bird. We know a grass, but not which grass. We know it is a cell phone, but not what model. When pressed we can discern a chef's knife from a Swiss Army knife from a spear point, but we may or may not be able to discern a fuel pump from a water pump.

Of course there are many more than 30,000 varieties of manufactured things in the technium, but it is fair to ask whether some of their variety is important. In biological terms the 30,000 varieties of common nouns represents a type of meta diversity called disparity. Disparity indicates a difference in basic design forms, or a basic body plan, or form type, such as "elephant" or "palm" or "chair." The actual variety of chair, or elephant can vary in details, and this local variation is what we call diversity. Disparity increases much more slowly than diversity, and is a more significant kind of variation. One is always more impressed with a brand new kind of invention (it's a light bulb!) rather than a variation of known invention (another spark catcher!). In biological evolution disparity can decrease (fewer new ways to make an animal) while diversity increases (more new kinds of already-invented elephants and horses).

There are branches of the technium where the diversity of technological species is dwindling; today there are fewer innovations in spark catchers, buggy whips, hand looms, and ox carts. I doubt anyone has invented a new manual butter churner in the last 50 years. (Although many people are still inventing "better" mousetraps.) Handlooms will always be around for art. Ox carts are not extinct and will probably never go extinct globally as long as oxen are born. But because oxcarts encounter no new demands, like all artifacts hovering near obsolescence, they are remarkably stable inventions, continuing over time unchanged, like horseshoe crabs. But technological backwaters like these are overwhelmed by the mind-numbing avalanche of innovation, ideas, and artifacts throughout the rest of the expanding technium.

One hardware wholesaler, McMaster-Carr, lists "over 480,000 products" in its catalog. There you can find 2,432 varieties of wood screws alone. Amazon carries 85,000 different cell phones and cell phone products. So far humans have created 500,000 different movies and about one million TV episodes. At least 10 million different songs have been recorded. The largest database of bar codes lists 2.7 million different products for sale in Europe and the US, which EAN, the issuing agency, says is "only a small fraction" of the product codes that have been issued. Multiplying that small fraction up gives a grand total of about 100 million different products in circulation.

All these quantities are rising as diversity of the technium increases over time. The number of new technological "species" in many branches of the technium - food products, media creations, consumer gadgets, tools, and material types -- seem to be growing by 10% annually. That means that in 50 years, when the next generation is in middle age, there will be 12 billion different produced products for sale, including 10 million different types of cell phone-like thingies, and 1.1 billion (!) different songs to listen to. There will still be a top 40 hit song list, but the existence of 1 billion alternative songs will bend our culture.

The problem with this cornucopia of diversity and abundance is not the problem of how we can individually absorb it; even if you listened to a song only once, (or watched a movie, tried a tool) in a non-stop marathon during your waking hours for your entire life, you could not make a dent in the totality. The real problem with ultra-diversity is in not being able to grasp the whole of it, not being able to search through it, to track your navigation in this space of billions, and to (re)find the best when you summon it.

A billion songs by 2060 (how many a century later?), 12 billion products for sale in 50 years (how many in two centuries?) seem outrageously large, perhaps unlikely. Surely, compound growth doesn't keep going. It is true that growth of all species, both made and born, follow an "s" curve as they slowly rise in numbers, then increase rapidly, and eventually taper off in a plateau, to be replaced by another species. So cell phones are unlikely to ever reach 10 million varieties simply because long before 50 years hence they will be replaced by a different device. And perhaps the format of songs, too, might peak in popularity to be replaced by some unit of music unknown to us now, just as the 90-minute movie was unknown a century ago. Nonetheless, the total diversity of these new replacements plus the peak diversity of the old yields absolutely increasing numbers of new things in the technium.

Some researchers question the economic assumptions of technological ultra diversity. How many different phone designs can a market support, even a global market? Or shoes? (Zappos carries 90,000 different shoes today. In 50 years, at current rates of diversity growth, there should be 10 million choices in shoes. Talk about a long tail!) Who would design, finance and market this diversity? One answer: prosumers drive ultra diversity. The buyers are the makers of diversity. Right now major book publishers are fighting to remain economically viable. A big-time New York book publisher may produce 200 titles per year. But Lulu, a prosumer company that enables authors to publish their own paper books is releasing 5,000 titles per week. A slew of other companies are pioneering the expansion of diversity by enabling mass customization, in which items can be personalized and customized by manufacturing means (instead of customized by hand). A small industry of long-tail mass-customization exists at the margins of the economy. Blurb makes photo books; Café Press, hats and mugs; Threadless, t-shirts; Infectious, decals; CD Baby, music CDs. Within the next 50 years personal fabricators in local shops will begin to permit individuals to create personally diversity tangible artifacts, manufactured in units of one. The world of 1 billion species of tools, 100 billion unique varieties of products is plausible.

A few iconoclasts believe this ultra-diversity is toxic to humans. In the "The Paradox of Choice", sociologist Barry Schwartz argues that the 285 varieties of cookies, 171 kinds of salad dressing and 85 brands of crackers for sale in the typical supermarket today is paralyzing consumers. They enter the store looking for crackers, see a bewildering wall of cracker choices, become overwhelmed with trying to make an informed decision and finally walk out not purchasing any crackers at all. "Whether people are choosing jam in a grocery store or essay topics in a college class, the more options people have, the less likely they are to make a choice," says Schwartz. Similarly, in trying to choose a plan of medical benefits plan with hundreds of options, many consumers give up because of the complexity of choice is paralyzing and instead resign from the program, whereas programs that included a default choice of options (no decision necessary) had much higher enrollments. Schwartz concludes: "As the number of choices grows further, the negatives escalate until we become overloaded. At this point, choice no longer liberates, but debilitates. It might even be said to tyrannize."

It is true that too many choices may induce regret, but "no choice" is a far worst option. Civilization itself is a steady move away from "no choice." As ever, the solution to the problems that technology brings, such overwhelming diversity and choices is better technologies. The solution to ultra-diversity will be choice-assist technologies. These better tools will augment humans in making choices among bewildering options. Diversity, in fact, will produce tools to handle diversity. (Diversity-taming tools will be among the wildly diverse-making 821 million patents that current rates predict will be filed by 2060.). We are already discovering how to use computers to augment our choices with information and webpages (it's called Google), but it will take additional learning and technologies to do this with tangible tools, and idiosyncratic media. At the dawn of the web some very smart computer scientists declared that it would be impossible to select from a billion web pages using key word search, but we routinely do just that on 100 billion web pages today. No one is asking for fewer web pages.

Difference powers the world. It is the absolute difference in temperature between cold space and hot stars that powers not only life on earth, but syntropy anywhere. No delta, no life, no stars, no galaxy, no nothing. Maintaining a difference is what living systems and minds do. When a difference can be maintained over time, it can begin to multiply and increase differences elsewhere. If it a diverse ecosystem is in good health it will, over time, increase its own diversity. Evolution increases differences. Culture is about accentuating differences. The technium runs on differences.

That may sound strange to many, because the stereotypical image of increasing technology is one of standard products, world-wide sameness, and unwavering uniformity. Yet, paradoxically, diversity can be unleashed by uniformity. The uniformity of a standard writing system (like an alphabet or script) unleashes the unexpected diversity of literature. Without uniform rules, every word has to be made-up, so communication is localized and inefficient. But with a uniform language sufficient communication transpires in large circles so that a novel word, phrase or idea can be appreciated, caught, and disseminated. The rigidity of an alphabet has done more to enable creativity than any brain-storming exercise ever invented.

The standard 26 letters in English have produced 28 million different books in English. Words and language will keep evolving of course, but their evolution rides on basic fundamentals that are conserved and shared; unvarying (over the short term) letters, spelling, grammar rules enable creativity in ideas. Increasingly the technium will converge upon a few universal standards - perhaps English, and western musical notation, mathematical symbols, but also widely adopted technical protocols, from the metric system to ASCII and Unicode. The modern infrastructure of the world today is built upon a shared system woven from these kinds of standards. That is why you can order machine parts in China to be used in factories in South Africa, or have research done in India for drugs released in Brazil. This convergence of fundamental protocols is also why the youth of today can speak to each other directly in a way not possible even a decade ago. They use cell phones and netbooks running common operating systems, but they also employ standard abbreviations and increasingly share common cultural touchstones by watching the same movies, listening to the same music, studying the same subjects in school, and pocketing the same technology. In a curious way the homogenization of shared universals allows it to transmit the diversity of cultures.

In a world of converging global standards, a recurring fear among minority cultures is that their niche differences will be lost. They need not be. In fact, the increasingly common carrier of global communication can heighten the value of their differences. The distinctive foods, medicinal knowledge, and child rearing practices, say of the Yanomamo tribe in the Amazon, or the San Bushman in Africa, were only esoteric, local knowledge before. Their diversity commanded a difference that did not make a difference outside the tribe because their knowledge was not connected to the rest of cultures. But once connected to standard roads, electricity, communications, their differences can potentially make a difference to others. Even if their knowledge could only be applied in their local environment, wider knowledge of their knowledge made a difference. Where do wealthy people travel to? Places that retain differences. What eateries attract customers? The ones with distinctive differences. What products sell in a global market? The ones that think different. If such local diversity can remain distinctively different while it is connected (and this is a very big IF) then that difference becomes steadily more valuable in a global matrix. Maintaining that balance of connected-but-different is a challenge of course, because much of this cultural difference and diversity originated via isolation, and in the new mix it no longer will be isolated. Cultural differences that thrive without isolation (even if they were born out of it) will compound in value as the world becomes standardized. Of this stance I am reminded of Bali, Indonesia. The rich, distinguished Balinese culture seems to deepen even as it becomes interconnected to the modern world. Like other inhabitants of old and new, the Balinese may wield English as their universal second language while speaking their own tongue at home. They make their ritualistic offerings from flowers in the morning and study science at school in the afternoon. They do gamelan and google.

In this way the technium can both become more homogenized and more diverse at the same time. Take languages, mentioned earlier, as an example. In 100 years it is very likely there will be at least one common language spoken by at least half the people on the planet. But the same people will also retain their regional tongue as well, perhaps even more widely than is spoken today, since some fading languages such as Gaelic have revived. Yet we are currently loosing dozens of tribal languages every year, reducing diversity. On the other hand, millions of earthlings have learned newly created computer languages. These are entirely new types of languages. I would argue that the global diversity of languages has decrease but its global disparity has increased.

Costume is another. The most widely dispersed manufactured technology in the world today is not a steel blade nor a cell phone (although these are extremely prolific) but manufactured cotton cloth. In the most remote regions of the world, in the swamps of Papua New Guinea, or the desert plateau of Tibet, you'll find very few imported iron knives or metal pots, but you'll find people wearing generic machine-made t-shirts or pants. This is one technology that has penetrated every tribe on Earth. A lot of this is cast-off clothing from developed countries, but a lot is new clothing made in nearby capital cities. Machined cotton fabric is so cheap to make per piece, so easy to transport, and so much superior to labor intensive rough home-spun, that traditional clothing is often reserved for occasional celebrations in both poor and wealthy places. However, the very same qualities that make manufactured cloth so ubiquitous also makes it easy to modify or customize. Bolts of machine cloth are printed in local patterns, dyed in local colors, cut in local designs, and sewn into distinctive style. In the cities of the planet new kinds and types of machine-made clothing is increasing the disparity of cloth. Fancy fashion shops, sports catalogs and outdoor stores sell inventive new kinds of fabric and wholly new concepts in clothes. The degree of diversity that is lost by traditional hand-weaving is gained by new styles, even though particular designs may disappear - though they rarely do. On the whole, the variety of traditional clothing may have decreased in local regions but overall the disparity of clothing design has increased around the globe.

We can go down the list: cuisine, ceremonies, art, and music. In every case there may be a loss of diversity in some local regions over time (as there has always been) but a gain of globally disparity. Local losses hurt, but we are increasingly a global species. We seek maximum diversity because it is the source of innovation, evolution, and ultimately progress. And it is also the product of all those, too.

Diversity is the currency of progress. The things that we desire - freedom of choice, options and difference - are types of diversity, and in a loop of upcreation, more diversity produces more of the things that we desire.

Beginning from the white dawn of creation, diversity in the universe has been increasing. Its rate of increase has been ramped up by life, and is now being further accelerated by the technium. What technology wants is greater diversity.

Infinite In Some Directions

Wed, 13 May 2009 09:56:54 -0800

Where are we headed? Where does technology want to go?

We frequently evaluate a questionable practice by extrapolating it into the future. If a phenomenon continues as it has been, then where does it lead? Where does the daily use of antibiotics on farms get you in 100 years? Where does hourly use of cell phones for everyone get a society in 500 years? If the technium continues another thousand years as is, is it a world we want or not? Indeed can it even continue another 1000 years as is?

Setting aside the human psychological barriers to future shock and endless cultural shift, are there physical limits to technological development? Is there enough energy, matter, time and space for technology to keep expanding? Or, is technology self-limiting, like a candle flame, that must burn itself out over time? Are there inherent constraints within the basic thermodynamic laws governing technology that might shape its future? Is it physically possible for technology to keep accelerating forever?

One way to answer that question is to engage in a thought experiment that considers all technology as a type of computation. While we think of computation as the domain of computers, it is really a formal arrangement of matter and energy that can occur in every substance. Computers have been built with tinkertoys and molecules. In a strict mathematical sense the long helix of DNA "computes" the genetic heredity of chromosome by moving molecules around in the organized logic we call 'computation." In fact biochemists have designed bacterial DNA in laboratory test tubes to compute answers to tough computer science problems that are difficult for digital computers to solve. In this computational view, living organisms are just slow computers. So are spiral gas clouds. Everything in the universe, and the universe itself, is invisibly "computing" something at different speeds and scale. The "answer" which each computes is what the system does.

The reason we would like to view stuff through the lens of its computational potential is that pure computation is the most extreme form of energy use per matter that we are aware of. An ideal computer chip (none exists) uses a minimal bit of energy to flip one particle (from one state to another, as in zero to one). That minimal thermodynamic ideal sets the theoretical limit of computation, and also the theoretical limit of how much "technology" can be squeezed from a hunk of the material world. So if the matter and energy on this planet were re-organized as an ideal computer, this planet-scale computer would represent the outer limit of how much technology this planet could produce. Likewise, the thermodynamic limit of computation for the total matter and energy in the universe sets the theoretical limit on how much technology it might hold.

In 1999 Seth Lloyd calculated the theoretical power of the "ultimate laptop" computer. In Lloyd's theoretical laptop every single atom in the laptop (not just selected parts as in chips today) performs calculations. Each atom of the one-kilo device flips on or off 10^51 times every second. In essence this is the densest computer chip possible. His imaginary chip is the size of a laptop, and its supreme density of one atom/one bit is independent of any specific technological architecture. Lloyd figures the ultimate laptop would deliver 40 orders (that's a gazillion times) better performance than your present laptop. But it would only take 250 years of uninterrupted technological advance at current rates of improvement (Moore's Law) to reach that level of computational density. The main problem with the ultimate computer, however, is that its core chip would run at a billion degrees and would be hotter than the sun. In fact, says Lloyd the chip would deliver "a little piece of the Big Bang!" For obvious consumer design reasons, our technology is unlikely to ever reach its theoretical limits. But the destination of smaller, hotter, more powerful does suggest one trend that computation -- and technology - will follow. Although we'll never get to blazing plasma laptops, we'll head in that direction.

But a similar calculation suggests an opposite trend. Several decades before Lloyd's paper, the physicist Freeman Dyson ran a parallel thought experiment to calculate the specifications of how far and long technology could expand in the universe. Using similar techniques of extrapolating entropy and energy consumed by technology Dyson determined that the technium could expand indefinitely if it spread wider, and slowed down. In his famous 1979 paper, "Time Without End," Dyson calculated that as long as the universe continues to expand, and the background radiation temperature fall, life, and its offspring the technium, will have enough energy to never cease. Surprisingly a technological civilization does not need infinite energy to continuously expand. "The energy resources of a galaxy would be sufficient to support indefinitely a society with a complexity about 10^24 times greater than our own" Dyson wrote. But the price of galactic-scale expansion of technology is that its rate of "computation" slows down. As galaxies stop spinning and stars blink out, the temperature difference between the hottest things in the universe and the coldest background radiation diminishes the free energy available. But if the computation of a society can be spread wider through intergalactic communication, and the cycles of work run slower, then technology, in theory, can keep going forever. Dyson summed up: "Life and intelligence are potentially immortal, with resources of knowledge and memory constantly growing as the temperature of the universe decreases and the reserves of free energy dwindle. And maybe, intelligent beings in different parts of the universe can keep alive forever a network of communication, exchanging their ideas and constantly increasing their circle of acquaintances." This vision was not a prediction, but a stake to mark the outer limit of what is possible. Dyson's figures say that an unceasing expansion of the technium is not impossible. So at least for the near future - say the lifespan of our sun - the universe is open to continual technological evolution.

The complexity of the technium (and life) is slowly built up from the continuous fall-down decay of entropy in all things. Technology is a device to concentrate the flow of entropy and waste so that energy and matter can re-order themselves into greater complexity in a narrow range. A modern laptop is powered by a battery, charged by a large generator burning tons of coal fossilized by the compression of billions of photosynthetic solar cell collectors (plants) spending years gathering photons and depositing burnable carbon. This cascade of funnels focuses a steady flow of high difference from the thermonuclear fission of the sun toward sustainable complexity in a microscopic (compared to the sun) device. In fact it takes a wide flow of entropy and energy to support a small amount of complexity. The smaller the initial energy difference (as on a planet far from a star), the shorter the fall, the wider the span of energy capture needed to create additional structure.

But it is important to remember that increasing complexity and the technium can only be a localized thread of light in any otherwise darkening universe. When Freeman Dyson says "I have found a universe growing without limit in richness and complexity, a universe of life surviving forever," that infinite richness is limited to a minority of space.

This paradox of the "limited infinity of technology" can be explained this way. Every technological threshold that opens up new possibilities also locks in constraints. Technology settles on operating standards (110 volts AC), communication languages (ASCII), or technical conventions (right turning screw threads), and as long as they work, we retain these constraints. This dynamic began in evolution. Biologically we keep our primeval reptilian brains, billion-year-old Krebs cycles, and often unoptimized archaic proteins. We carry those restraints forward - because they work and are "expensive" to change -- which means that certain other potentials will not be reached. While DNA opened up a seemingly limitless number of possible organisms, the bodily forms that DNA can make are neither infinite nor limitless. In the context of the range of all possible body forms in the universe -- the astronomical number of ways a kilo of atoms could be arranged -- the number of DNA organisms is very small. Furthermore, from any point in the evolution of a DNA-controlled organism, there is more constraint and less absolute potential that at the previous point of evolution. Every success in life and technology negates potential in the absolute. In effect, novelties enlarge the scope of that which is "impossible."

In fact, the impossible has been expanding since the big bang. When the very first quantum bits congealed into specific physical particles, their materialization reduced the space of the possible atoms combined from particles, and so confined those unrealized alternative possibilities into the realm of the "impossible." As soon as physics favored matter over anti-matter, entire portions of absolute anti-matter potential were closed off. As actual atomic elements came to dominate, they generated a particular kind of chemistry that would govern all the rest of matter's interactions, and therefore confined alternative chemistries to the impossible. When the periodic character of the elements was set in the earliest moments of the universe, the special place of carbon and water were set, too, expanding the what was possible with organic molecules but also increasing the space of the "impossible."

Each step in the ratcheting sequence of complexity -- starting with the creation of atoms, and flowing into systems such as galaxies, stars, life, mind, technology -- opens up possibilities in the real, but also simultaneously closes off potential in the absolute. This reduction tends to move innovations along an increasingly narrow path, which can also be understood as the source of inevitabilities. Theoretician Stuart Kauffman puts it this way: "The biosphere, and the universe as a whole, may well be kinetically trapped into an evermore astonishingly small region of the entire space of the possible it might have reached."

From the perspective of absolute infinite potential - let's call that God's view - each innovation in evolution or technology reduces the choices of what can be made next. Actual possibilities in the absolute are shrinking. The more complex we make our technologies, the more constraints we introduce on what we can invent next. But from the perspective of the technium itself - let's call that selfish technology's view - each innovation we create makes it easier to make another idea, and the more complexity we introduce the more room technology can expand into. Measured from the beginning of no-technology, the space of possible technologies is constantly increasing, and that newly manufactured territory is self-created by our previous inventions. From technology's view, it is expanding, as Freeman Dyson suggest in his book title, "infinite in all directions." From the absolute's view, the technium is expanding infinite in some directions.

This duality might be thought of as the "conservation of possibilities." An innovation in any direction opens up several more possibilities not in reach previously. Over time an organism or an artifact can be pictured as stepping from one adjacent possibility to the next. But at the same time, that movement into adjacent possibilities creates a web of inherent constraints (see Ordained-Becoming) that closes off other possibilities. So, as actual possibility is reached absolute potential is reduced. The more complex an organism or technology, the more restrictive its path becomes, and the more potential forms it ignores. An enabling invention, such as electricity, will open up continents of new ideas now made possible by its discovery, but as these notions take physical form with actual charges, real currents, and specific voltages, they make alternative forms employing electrons in alternative ways harder to reach.

If evolution is like a tree of life, then the original massive trunk of life tapers into complexity as it grows over time; the trunk narrows into branches that taper into twigs that dwindle into branchlets that thin into leaf stems. The longer the evolutionary tree grows, the thinner the tapers of the twigs, until they become hairs of infinite thinness. The fine twigs in this picture are specific organisms or technologies. Yet at the same time, the branches of evolution are ever splitting, reticulating, fanning out in dendritic variation, so that the mass of these infinitely thin lines fill out the space in one fashion, becoming an infinite tangled web.

David Hilllis' Tree of Life map.

Technology of a particular time can not make all possible things that could exist. Its power is hampered by its previous history and the established standards that run it. In the realm of "what could be" the technium can only populate a relative small region of possibilities. There may be, for instance, esoteric technologies that require a belief in spiritual beings to achieve, a belief our modern science no longer holds. This blockage would prevent the technium from crossing the series of adjacent steps needed to reach such spiritual technologies. Perhaps "unreachable" technologies require an unusual combination of adjacent technologies that are unlikely to exist on the same world at one time.

Yet the technium differs from biological evolution in this key way: minds can jump over adjacent possibilities to inhabit distant possibilities unlike anything near by. For nearly 4 billion years life has had to transverse possibilities step by step, never looking ahead, never jumping beyond the next viable form. An organism born with genes was bound by the heavy constraints inherent in DNA and homeobox genes and developmental history. The greater the complexity of the living creature, the more it was bound in the choice of its next possibilities.

The evolution of minds changed all this. A mind can imagine possibilities far removed from the next adjacent evolutionary step. A being with a mind, even a DNA-based mind, can steer evolution with more choice. The mind, through its body of technology, is a freedom-making instrument. Imagine a planet where life evolved for 8 billion years, twice as long as it has on earth. In that time life on that planet may have produced a hundred million more varieties of fantastic creatures than are found on Earth. This exuberance of life might include organisms creatively inhabiting niches unknown on this planet - perhaps warm-blooded plants, or nest builders who construct city-scale skyscrapers, or lighter-than-air blimp creatures -- and maybe hundreds of thousands different kinds of very smart animals. But if none of them were to develop an imagination able to deliberately jump to distant possibilities, or to return to possibilities from the past, then that entire brimming world would be confined to the inherencies in its biology. It would be a world without technology and with limited free will. "The tyranny of genes has lasted for 3 billion years and has only been precariously overthrown in the last hundred thousand years by a single species, Homo sapiens. We have overthrown the tyranny by inventing symbolic language and culture... We have stolen back from our genes the freedom to make choices and to make mistakes," writes Freeman Dyson.

Free will is expanded by complexity. A primeval cell gains more choices in its behavior than simpler organelles do. An organism with light sensors and wagging flagellate for motion has more options for behavior than a primeval cell. A giraffe has more degrees of freedom than bamboo. The more parts, highly structured, the more ways a system can fail, or vary. The more variation, the greater freedom of choices.

Everything in the universe has some degree of free will. Even quantum particles. An elemental particle "decides" which way to spin. A cosmic ray decides when to decay. Not consciously, but choose they do. Mathematician John Conway, inventor of a cellular automata demonstration known as the Game of Life, and others scientists including Freeman Dyson, argue that you can't explain the spin or decay of particles by anything less than small doses of free will. In a 2009 paper Conway co-authored called The Strong Free Will Theorem he says if "we humans have free will, then elementary particles already have their own small share of this valuable commodity... Indeed, it is natural to suppose that this [particle] freedom is the ultimate explanation of our own." Conway then frames an elaborate mathematical proof to establish that the decisions of a particle can neither be explained by randomness nor are they deterministic, so free will choice is the only option left. If sub atomic particles have free will, then everything assembled from a mass of them must as well.

Evolution compiles complexity which increases the freewill of matter. The elementary free will in the smallest quantum particle is amplified by the increasing options of behavioral choice in evolved creatures. A flat worm choosing to move toward food was something new in the universe, a level of choice never seen in the inert world of chemistry. The arc of increasing complexity is thus the story of an increasing manifestation of free will. Technology's arrival upped the degree of free will to a new and game changing level. A self-conscious mind could use the tools of technology to fiddle with its source code, reprogram its genes, extend its phenotype, transfer its substrate, and in essence rewrite its history. Self-consciousness also illuminated the fact that it had a free will to conjure with.

As we accelerate technological development we accelerate new ways to manifest free will. A major consequence of creating cheap and ubiquitous artificial minds would be to infuse higher levels of free will into our built environment. Of course we'd endow robots with minds, but we would also implant cars, chairs, doors, shoes, and books with slivers of choice-making intelligence. We would be unleashing inanimate objects from their shackles of hereditary inertness and "stealing back their freedom to make mistakes," just as humanity did for itself. Since it is probable that a superorganism-scale intelligence will emerge from the global internet (see Evidence of a Global SuperOrganism), the scale and pattern of free will and freedom embedded in a global superorganism will be new for this planet. It/we will be able to make mistakes of a new type.

Even without the benefit of a global intelligence, we'll use technology to learn how to make new kinds of mistakes. In fact asking ourselves how humanity might make entirely new kinds of mistakes is probably the best metric we have for discovering new possibilities of choice and freedom. Engineering our genome is primed to make a new kind of mistake, and therefore indicates a new level of free will. Geo-engineering the planet's climate might also indicate a new arena of choice. Also, connecting every person to every other person alive in real time via cell phone or wires also unleashes new powers of choice and potential for mistakes.

We wrested our destiny back from genes and are now acquiring powers to remake ourselves at will. But the lessons of evolution and the technium remind us that we cannot be everything, nor anything we choose. There are limits to our future course. The technium is constrained by many factors. Because of inherent biases in the system we can't make everything we can think of, and we probably can't think of everything possible. The more complexity we manufacture, the more we bind our technological path in certain directions. For every enabling technology we invent in order to open up new horizons of novelty, we simultaneously close off other avenues of novelty from our reach. The long-term path of technology is guided in some sense by inherencies and inevitabilities buried deep in the nature (and our particular history) of the technium and evolution. To a remarkable degree, what happens in the technium is preordained.

But to an equally remarkable degree, technology is ever increasing the power of free will and choice. We have more power now, and will have more in the future as we invent more ideas, to determine own future course. But because of the nature of complexity and the complexity of nature we don't have full choice to be anything at all. As I hope I showed, both in the short term and in the very long term, evolution, life, and mind are constrained and limited even as our choices expand.

Freeman Dyson has written more about the long-term trends in mind and technology than anyone else, so I will quote from him again: "No matter how far we go into the future there will always be new things happening, new information coming in, new worlds to explore, a constantly expanding domain of life, consciousness and memory." I agree with Dyson that the universe is inherently optimistic. But I think Dyson is wrong in claiming that mind is infinite in all directions.

Life and mind tend to expand in certain directions. That is why the perception of progress is more visible now than earlier in history - because the constraints and closing off of possibilities channel where we are going, and give articulation to our movement. We are headed toward increased degrees of freedom, greater manifestation of free will, more choices (but in a limited range), greater specialization, more evolvability - all particular, specific directions out of a gazillion potential ones (which are no longer open). If I am in right then in the future we will have a greater of a sense of progress because our path will be even more articulated, more specific. In the image of the ever-thinning branches on the tree of options, our futures become more narrow as they also expand in volume. This is the duality we are headed towards: The technium is infinite in some directions.

The Arc of Complexity

Thu, 07 May 2009 12:20:36 -0800

"Everyone knows" that evolution has become more complex over the past 3.8 billion years. One species has spawned 30-100 million species. Organelles, multicellularity, tissues, and social systems have all appeared in life forms over this span. And everyone knows that technology has increased that complexity further. It is obvious that the mechanical complexity of the technium has increased in our lifetimes, if not in the last hour. The only problem with this conventional wisdom: we have no idea what complexity is, or how to define it.

What's more complex, a cucumber or a Boeing 747? The answer is unknown. We have no way to measure the difference in order and organization between the two and don't have good working definition of complexity to even frame the question. Seth Lloyd, a quantum physicist at MIT, has counted 42 different mathematical definitions of complexity. Most of them are not universal (they only work in small domains not across broad fields like life and technology), and most are theoretical (you can't actually use them to measure anything in real life.) They are more like thought experiments.

Yet we have an intuitive sense that "complexity" exists, and is increasing. The organization of a dog is much more complicated that a bacteria, but is it ten times more complicated, or a million times? Most attempts to distinguish complexity aim at the degree of order in the system. A crystal is highly ordered to the point that a large hunk of diamond could be described mathematically with a small set of data points: you take carbon and repeat it X times in configuration Y over three dimensions. A bigger piece of diamond (or any crystal) has the same repeating "order" just extended further in space. Its structure is very predictable, and therefore simple, or low in complexity. What could be simpler than a homogenous bit of stuff?

On the other hand, a heterogeneous, mixed-up piece of granite, or a piece of plant tissue, would offer less predictable order (you could not determine what element the adjacent atom would be), and therefore more complexity. The least ordered, least predictable things we know of are random numbers. They contain no expected pattern, and therefore by this logic (less order = more complexity) they would be the most complex things we know of. In other words a messy, randomly ordered, chaotic house would be more complex than a tidy, well-ordered house. For that matter, a chopped up piece of hamburger would be more "complex" that the same hunk of meat in the intact living cow. This does not ring true for our intuitive sense of complexity. Surely complexity must reflect a certain type, a special kind of order/disorder?

Crystals just repeat the same pattern over and over again. So an extremely highly ordered sequence, like the repeating pattern in a crystal, can be reduced to a small description. A trillion digits of this sequence, 0101010101010..., can be perfectly compressed, without any loss of information, into one short sentence with three commands: print zero; then one, repeat a trillion times. On the other hand a highly disordered sequence like a random number cannot be reduced. The smallest description of a random number is the random number itself; there is no compression without loss, no way to unpack a particular randomness from a smaller package than itself.

But the problem with defining randomness as the peak of complexity is that randomness doesn't take you anywhere. The "pattern" has no depth. It takes no time to "run" it because nothing happens while it runs. A highly ordered sequence, such as 0101010101010 doesn't go far either, but it goes further than randomness. You at least get a regular beat. A meaningful measure of complexity then would reckon the depth of pattern in the system. Not just its order, but its order in time. You could measure not only how small the system could be compressed (more compression = less complexity), but how long the compression would take to unpack (longer = more complexity). So while all the complicated variations, and unpredictable arrangements of atoms that make up a blue whale can be compressed into a very tiny sliver of DNA code (high compression = low complexity), it takes a lot of time and effort to "run" out this code (high complexity). A whale therefore is said to have great "logical depth." The higher complexity ranking of a random number is shallow compared to the deeper logical complexity of a complicated structure in between crystalline order and messy chaos.

"Logical depth" is a good measure for strings of code, but most structures we care about, such as living organisms or technological systems, are embodied in materials. For instance, both an acorn and an immense 100-year old oak tree contain the same DNA. The code held by tree and its seed can both be compressed to the same minimal string of symbols (since they have exactly the same DNA), therefore both structures have the same logical depth of complexity. But we sense the tree - all those unique crenulated leaves and crooked branches -- to be more complex than the acorn. So researchers added the concept of "thermodynamic depth" in quantifying complexity. This metric considers the number of quantum bits that are flipped, or used, in constructing the fully embedded string of code. It measures the total quantum energy and entropy spent in making the code physical, either in a small acorn or, with more energy and entropy, in a majestic spreading tree. So a tree with more thermodynamic depth has more complexity than its acorn.

But when it comes to quantifying the complexity of a cucumber versus a jet these theoretical measures don't help a lot. Most artifacts and organisms carry large hunks of useless, insignificant, random-like parts that raise the formal complexity quotient, but don't really add complexity in the way we intuitively sense it. The DNA string of the cucumber (and all organisms) appears to be overrun with non-coding "junk DNA" while most of the atoms of a 747 - in its aluminum - are arranged purely at random, or at best in mini-crystals. Real objects are a grand mixture of chaos and order, and tend to hover in a sweet spot between the two.

It is precisely that goldilocks state between predictable repeating crystalline order and messy chaotic randomness that we feel captures real complexity. But this "neither-order-nor-non-order" state is so elusive to measurement that Seth Lloyd once quipped that "things are complex exactly when they defy quantification." However Lloyd, together with Murray Gell-Mann, another quantum physicist, devised the 42nd definition of complexity in the latest attempt to quantify what we sense. Since randomness is so distracting, producing "shallow" complexity, they decided to simply ignore it. Their measurement, called effective complexity, formally separates the random component of a structure's minimal code and then measures the amount of regularities that remain. In effect it measures the logical depth after randomness is subtracted from the whole. This metric is able to identify those rare systems (out of all possible systems) that cannot be compressed, yet are not random. An example in real life might be a meadow. Nothing much smaller than a meadow itself could contain all the information, subtle order and complexity of myriad interacting organisms making up a meadow. Because it is incompressible, a meadow shares the high complexity quotient of shallow randomness; but because its irreducibility is not due to randomness, it owns a deep complexity that we appreciate. That difference is captured by the metric of effective complexity.

We might think of effective complexity as a mathematical way to quantify non-predictable regularities. DNA itself is an example of non-predictable regularity. It is often described as a non-periodic crystal. In its stacking and packing abilities it shares many predictable regularities of a crystal, but rare among crystals, it is non-repeating (non-periodic) because each strand can vary. Therefore it has a high effective complexity.

But the increase in effective complexity in life's history is not ubiquitous, and not typical. While a rise in complexity can be seen retrospectively in the broad lineage of life, it usually can't be seen up close in a typical taxonomic family. There's no factor associated with complexity that will consistently gain across all branches of life all the time. Scientists intuitively expected larger and later organisms to acquire more genes. In broad strokes that can be true, but on the other hand a lily plant or ancient lungfish both have 40 times the DNA base pairs than humans. Many "laws of acceleration" have been proposed for evolution and all of them disappear when inspected quantitatively in a specific range. One of the earliest laws proposed, Cope's Rule, posited in the 1880s, says that over time life evolved larger bodies. While a trend toward large body size is true within some lines (notably dinosaurs and horses), it is not true of life as a whole (we are much smaller than Tyrannosaurus Rex), and it is not true for all dinosaur lineages, or all branches of ancestral horses. More importantly, in most orders of life, the largest organisms may tend to grow larger, but the mean size of the organisms remains constant. The smallest stay small. Stephen Gould interprets this as "random evolution away from small size, not directed evolution toward large size."

A second proposed universal law says that over evolutionary time longevity increases for the lifespan of a species. Over time, species are more stable. And in fact at certain epochs in the past, the longest-lived species did live longer. But the mean longevity did not increase. This pattern is repeated throughout the tree of life. Maximum diversity increases, but the mean diversity does not. Maximum brain size increases in many animals over time, but the mean brain size does not. When we apply the feeble measurements we have for complexity, we find that maximum complexity increases over evolutionary time, but mean complexity does not.

Typical pattern of increasing size among foraminifera (similar to plankton)

Nowhere is this more evident that in the makeup of the bulk of primeval life on earth. Life began 3.8 billion years ago, and for the first half of that time -- its first two billion years -- life was bacterial. This first half of life's show was the Age of Bacteria, because bacteria were the only life.

Today, in an expanded biosphere crammed with 30-100 million species, bacteria still make up the bulk of life on earth. [ck] Maverick scientist Thomas Gold estimates that there is more bacterial mass living in the crevices of solid rock in the earth's crust than there is in all the fauna and flora on earth's surface. Some estimates put the total bacterial biomass (in terms of sheer weight) within soil, oceans, rocks, and in the guts of animals to be 50% of all life on this planet. Bacteria are also significantly more diverse then visible life. The bacterial world is where gene hunters go to find unusual genes for drugs and other innovations. There is nowhere bacteria have not colonized. Bacteria thrive in more extreme environments - cold, dry, pounding deep pressure, scorching heat, total darkness, toxic elements, radiation intense - than any other kind of life. They produce most of the oxygen for the planet. They underpin most ecosystems. They dwarf the rest of life in genemonic variety. The bacteria breeding between the interstitials of loamy soil and in the depths of the ocean and in the warm tub of your own intestines are all as highly evolved as you are. Each bacteria is the result of an unbroken succession of 100% successful ancestors, trillions of generations long, and each is the product of constant, hourly, adaptive pressure to maximize its fitness to its environment. Each bacteria is the best that evolution can do after several billion years.

In every biological way we can measure, bacteria are the main event of life on earth. If an exploring probe from another galaxy landed on earth and began a life census, they would quickly and correctly deduce that after 3.8 billion years of evolution this planet was still in the Age of Bacteria.

As far as we can tell most bacteria are the same as they were a billion years ago. That means for the bulk of life on earth, the main event has not been a steady increase in complexity, but a remarkable conservation of simplicity. After billions of years of steady work, evolution produces mostly more of the same.

It would entirely fair, then, to represent the long arc of evolution much as Stephen Gould has in this diagram above. As he renders it, the main event in both epochs - early and late -- is the reigning pyramid of simple bacteria. In the middle of the sloping bulge are the mid-size organisms - the grasses, plants, fungi, algae, coral of the world. Not as simple or collectively massive as bacteria, these semi-simple organisms nonetheless constitute the bulk of life that interacts with us directly. They don't form the infrastructure; this middle life forms the architecture. These simpler organisms introduce the change and variety in our lives. At the bottom edge, extending to the right, is the thinning, minor "long tail" of the more complex organisms These are the scarce charismatic organisms that star in nature shows. The message of this sketch, Gould concludes, is that "the outstanding feature of life's history has been the stability of its bacterial mode over billions of years!" Not just bacteria, he reminds. Horseshoe crabs, crocodiles, and the coelacanth are famously stable in geological time.

But it takes a peculiar kind of blindness to see stability as the chief event in this movie. In scene one there is a nice hill of simple bacteria. In scene two, the hill has enlarged and grown a long tail of weird, complicated, improbable beings. They seem to come out of nowhere, and because of their complexity, must be more surprising and unexpected that the arrival of life itself. Sure, in a quantitative, almost autistic kind of reckoning, nothing much happened because the hill of bacteria is basically the same. This is true! The veracity of this observation is the foundation of the orthodox arguments against a trend for complexity in evolution. The drive in evolution is to keep things simple and thus the same.

Everything is the same, except for, well,,,, the addition a few little meaningful details. This blindness reminds me of a quip by Mark Twain on the consequential difference "between lightning and a lightning bug." Apes, proto-humans, and humans are all basically the same. Nothing really happened between scene one, Homo erectus and scene two, Homo sapiens. The genes between the two are likely to be 99.99% conserved. When the long thin tail of language appeared in one ape, it was a minor alteration compared to the bulk of everything else about apes that remained stable. Yet, how that additional 'bug" changes the meaning of everything else! So by the reckoning of the imagination, everything has changed over time.

To be fair to the orthodoxy, I don't think Gould and others would deny the power of very small changes to have profound effects. The contention is whether these small changes (like occasional lines of increasing complexity) are the main event or simply a side effect of the main event. To rephrase Gould, are we really just witnessing random evolution away from simplicity, rather than random evolution directed towards complexity? If this kind of evolutionary complexity is a minority thread, then how can we claim it is being driven, pushed by evolution?

The evidence lies in deep history. The two scenes in the cartoon diagram above are not beginning and end, but the middle. Their action takes place in Act Two of a long movie, the great story of the cosmos. The first Act begins long before this sequence appears, and the third Act follows it. The long arc of complexity beings before evolution, then flows through the 3.8 billion years of life, and then continues into the technium.

Seth Lloyd, among others, suggests that effective complexity did not begin with biology, but began at the big bang. (I argue the same in different language in The Cosmic Origins of Extropy and The Cosmic Genesis of Technology.) In Lloyd's informational perspective, fluctuations of quantum energy (or gravity) within the first fempto seconds of the cosmos caused matter and energy to clump. Amplified over time, with gravity, these clumps are responsible for the large-scale structure of galaxies - which in their organization display effective complexity. Recently three researchers (Ay, Muller, and Szkalo) determined that effective complexity is primed to generate phase changes. A phase change is the weird transformation, or restructuring, that the molecules of an element like water undergoes as it assumes three very different forms - solid ice, liquid, or steam. Systems (like a galaxy) can also exhibit phase changes, producing new informational organization with the same components.

In Lloyd's scheme, "gravitational clumping supplies the raw material necessary for generating complexity," which in turns generates new levels of effective complexity in the form of self-regulating atmospheric planets, life, mind and technology. "In terms of complexity, each successive revolution inherits virtually all the logical and thermodynamic depth of the previous revolution." This ratcheting process keeps upping the effective complexity over deep time.

This slow ratchet of complexity preceded life. Effective complexity was imported from antecedent structures, such as galaxies and stars, that teetered on the edge of persistent disequilibrium. And as in the organizations before them, effective complexity accrues in an irreversible stack. Lloyd observers, "This initial revolution in information processing [in galaxies and clusters of galaxies] was followed by a sequence of further revolutions: life, sexual reproduction, brains, language...and whatever comes next."

In 1995, two biologists, John Maynard Smith and Eors Szathmary, envisioned the major transitions in organic evolution as a set of ratcheting organizations of information flow. Their series of eight revolutionary steps in evolution began with "self-replicating molecules" transitioning to the more complex self-sustaining structure of "chromosomes." Then evolution passed through the further complexifying change "from prokaryotes to eukaryotes" cell type and after a few more phase changes, the last transition moved it from language-less societies to those with language.

Each transition shifted the unit that replicated (and upon which natural selection worked). A first, molecules of nucleic acid duplicated themselves, but once they self-organized into a set of linked molecules, they replicated together as a chromosome. Now evolution worked on both nucleic acid and chromosomes. Later, these chromosomes, housed in primitive prokaryote cells like bacteria, joined together to form a larger cell (the component cells became organelles of the new), and now their information was structured and replicated via the complex eukaryote host cell (like an amoeba). Evolution began to work on three levels or organization; genes, chromosomes, cell. These first eukaryote cells reproduced by division on their own, but eventually some (like the protozoan Giardia) began to replicate sexually, and so now life required a diverse sexual population of similar cells to evolve. A new level of effective complexity was added: Natural selection began to operate on populations as well. Populations of early single-cell eukaryotes could survive on their own, but many lines self-assembled into multicellular organisms, and so replicated as an organism, like a mushroom, or seaweed. Now natural selection operated on multicelled creatures, in addition to all the lower levels. Some of these multicellular organisms (such as ants, bees, termites) gathered into superorganisms, and could only reproduce within a colony or society, and evolution emerged at the society level as well. Later language in human societies gathered individual ideas and culture into a global technium, and so humans and their technology could only prosper and replicate together, presenting another level for evolution and effective complexity.

At each escalating step, the logical and thermodynamical depth of the resulting organization increased. It became more difficult to compress the structure, and at the same time, it contained less randomness and less predictable order. Each upcreation was also irreversible. In general, multicellular lineages do not re-evolve into single cell organisms, sexual reproducers rarely evolve into parthenogens, social insects rarely unsocialize, and to the best of our knowledge, no replicator with DNA has ever given up genes. Nature will simplify, but it rarely devolves down a level. However nature is nothing but a collection of exceptions. There is no rule in biology that is not broken or hacked by some creature, somewhere. Yet here the trend is mainstream and representative of the mean. When life does complexify in levels, it does not retract.

Just to clarify: within a level of organization, trends are uneven. A movement toward larger size, or longer longevity, or higher metabolism, or even general complexity may be found only in a minority of species within a family, and the trend may be subject to reversal on average. So when biologists search for a measured increase in some body characteristic over evolutionary time they typically find patchy distribution as soon as their survey widens beyond a narrow taxonomic branch. Consistent directions of evolution are absent across unrelated subjects in similar epochs. The trend toward greater effective complexity is visible only in the accumulation of large-scale organizations over large-scale time. Complexification may not be visible with ferns, say, but it appears between ferns and flowering plants (recombining information via sexual fertilization).

We can take the second panel of Gould's diagram as a wonderful and ideal illustration of this escalation. The long thin tail of increasing complexity is actually the trace of the major transitions in evolution. The shift to the right is a shift in the number of hierarchical levels that evolutionary information must flow through. Not every evolutionary line will proceed up the escalator (and why should they?), but those that do advance will unintentionally gain new powers of influence that can alter the environment far beyond them. And, as in a ratchet, once a branch of life moves up a level, it does not move back. In this way there is an irreversible drift towards greater effective complexity.

The arc of complexity flows from dawn of the cosmos and into life. Complexity theorist James Gardner calls this "the cosmological origins of biology." But the arc continues through biology and now extends itself forward through technology. The very same dynamics that shape complexity in the natural world shape complexity in the technium.

Just as in nature, the number of simple manufactured objects continues to increase. Brick, stone and concrete are some of the earliest and simplest technologies, yet by mass they are the most common technologies on earth. And they compose some of the largest artifacts we make: cities and skyscrapers. Simple technologies fill the technium in the way bacteria fill the biosphere. There are more hammers made today than at any time in the past. Most of the visible technium is, at its core, non-complex technology.

But as in natural evolution, a long tail of ever complexifying arrangements of information and materials fills our attention, even if they are small in mass. Indeed, demassification is one avenue of complexification. Complex inventions stack up information rather than atoms. The most complex technologies we make are also the lightest, least material. For instance, software in principle is weightless and disembodied. It has been complexifying at a rapid rate. The number of lines of code in a basic tool such as Microsoft's Windows has increased ten fold in thirteen years. In 1993, Windows entailed 4-5 million lines of code. In 2006, Windows Vista contained 50 million lines of code. Each of those lines of code is the equivalent of a gear in a clock. The Windows OS is a machine with 50 million moving pieces.

Increasing complexity of software

Throughout the technium, lineages of technology are restructured with additional layers of information to yield more complex artifacts. For the past two hundred years (at least) the number of parts in the most complex machines has been increasing. The diagram below is a logarithmic chart of the trends in complexity for mechanical apparatus. The first prototype turbo jet had several hundred parts, while a modern turbo jet, 30-50 times more powerful, has over 22,000 parts. The space shuttle has tens of millions of physical parts yet it contains most of its complexity in its software, which is not included in this assessment.

Complexity of manufactured machines, 1800 - 1980

We can watch our culture complexify right before our eyes. As an almost trivial yet telling example, author Steven Johnson has noted how the plot lines of movies and TV have become more complex within his own lifetime. The number of characters involved in a story has doubled, the number of twists increased, the frequent insertion of complicated literary devices such as flashbacks has increased the levels of engagement. If a movie is a program (as in a computer program), then over time these narratives accumulate the equivalent of subroutines, parallel processing, and recursive loops, elevating the story into a more adaptive, living thing.

Our refrigerators, cars, even doors and windows are more complex than two decades ago. The strong trend for complexification in the technium provokes the question, how complex can it get? Where does the long arc of complexity take us?

Three scenarios of complexity for the next 1,000 years:

Scenario #1. As in nature, the bulk of technology remains simple, basic, and primeval because it works. And it works well as a foundation for the thin long tail of complex technology built upon it. If the technium is an ecosystem of technologies, then most of it will remain highly evolved as microscopic and plant equivalents: brick, wood, hammers, copper wires, electric motors and so on.

Scenario #2. Complexity, like all other factors in growing systems, plateaus out at some point, and some other quality we had not noticed earlier takes its place as the prime observable trend. In other words, complexity may simply be the rosy-colored lens we see the world through at this moment, the metaphor of the era, when in reality it is a reflection of us rather than evolution.
Scenario #2A. Complexity plateaus because we can't handle it. While we could make technology run faster, smaller, denser, more complicated forever, we don't want to beyond some point because it no longer matches our human scale. We could make living nano-scale keyboards, but they won't fit our fingers.

Scenario #3. There is no limit to how complex things can get. Everything is complexifying over time, headed toward that omega point of ultimate complexity.

If I had to, I would bet, perhaps surprisingly, on scenario #1. The bulk of technology will remain simple or semi-simple, while a smaller portion will continue to complexify greatly. I expect our cities and homes a thousand years hence to be recognizable, rather than unrecognizable. As long as we inhabit bodies approximately our size - a few meters and 50 kilos -- the bulk of the technology that will surround us need not be crazily more complex. And there is good reason to expect we'll remain the same size, despite intense genetic engineering and downloading to robots. Our body size is weirdly almost exactly in the middle of the size of the universe. The smallest things we know about are approximately 30 orders of magnitude smaller than ourselves, and the largest structures in the universe are about 30 orders of magnitude bigger. We inhabit a middle scale that is sympathetic to sustainable flexibility in the universe's current physics. Bigger bodies encourage rigidity, smaller ones encourage empheralization. As long as we own bodies - and what sane being does not want to be embodied? - the infrastructure technology we already have will continue (in general) to work. Roads of stone, buildings of modified plant material and earth, not that different from our cities and homes 2,000 years ago. Some visionaries might imagine complex living buildings in the future, for instance, but most average structures are unlikely to be more complex than the formerly living plants we already use. They don't need to. I think there is a "complex enough" restraint. Technologies need not complexify to be useful in the future. Danny Hillis, computer inventor, once confided to me that he believed that there's a good chance that 1,000 years from now computers might still be running programming code from today, say a unix kernel and TCP/IP. They almost certainly will be binary digital. Like bacteria, or cockroaches, these simpler technologies remain simple, and remain viable, because they work. They don't have to get more complex.

At the same time, there is no bound for the most complex things we will make. We'll boggle ourselves with new complexity in many directions. This will complexify our lives further, but we'll adapt to it. In fact, ongoing complexification - even in the thin bleeding edge - suggests a fourth scenario.

Scenario #4. Complexity gets more complex. We make or discover technological systems that require new, more complex definitions of complexity. Not merely, as I quoted Seth Lloyd above, because our definitions of complexity indicate ignorance, but because in fact we are finding/making things more complex and need new definitions. "Logical depth" won't be enough for a definition as we keep making software more complex. As an example in the financial world, the invention of stock ownership added complexity to a marketplace. Then we invented making bets on those shares (stocks), and then we invented making bets on those bets (a derivative) and then bets on the bet on the bet (second order derivative), each layer of relation between bits adding complexity, and requiring new ideas about complexity. We keep adding new levels and ways to complexify our economy, till the complexity exceeds our ability to measure it (or understand it). Over time we are increasing the complexity of complexity itself, by inventing/finding new ways for bits of information to relate to other bits. It is those intangible relations that form complexity. As far as we can see, there is no limit to the new ways bits can relate. Keep in the mind the "spooky at a distance" entanglement between quantum bits to understand how complicated complexity could get. In a thousand years, the concept of "complexity" will probably be as dead as the old notion of "metaphysics" because it will have turned out to be too blunt for the dozens if not hundreds of concepts it probably contains.

A movement towards complexity is what I call the "least objectionable theory" of the universe. Not everyone agrees with the trend, but not everyone agrees on anything at this scale. However fewer people in both science and faith disagree about the large scale movement toward greater complexity (whatever that is) over time. Defined as an irreversible escalation of increasing relations among the information flowing through structures, then complexity is rising.

The great "least objectionable" story so far: The arc of complexity begins in the ultimate simplicity of the big bang creation of something/nothing, and steadily sails through the universe, pushing most of it slowly towards complexity in the news levels of life, while at a few edges it accelerates through technology, making complexity itself ever more complex.

Upcreation

Tue, 05 May 2009 10:49:12 -0800

Upcreation is my term for the peculiar, profound, and still mysterious way by which complex structures appear in the universe. By complex structures I mean galaxies, stars, planets, life, DNA, termite mounds, rain forests, human minds, and the internet. These complexities tend to "emerge" from simpler systems (clouds of gas, pools of molecules, nodes of communication) in a fashion we broadly call self-organization. But in the right circumstances self-organization can often also be legitimately called self-creation. Without an outside agent, the parts cohere into a new organization that brings forth an "emergent" level or self not present before. Since the new emergent level of complexity encompasses, without destruction, the previous "lower" levels of organization, I call this self-creation of higher levels "upcreation." A set of entities lifts itself up to a new level of organization in a new entity. By this perspective, DNA chemistry "upcreates" life, and life upcreates minds, and a mind might upcreate a supermind. Upcreation takes place in smaller increments as well: Honey bees upcreate a hive, protists upcreate multicellular organisms, corals upcreate a reef, shoppers upcreate a market, web surfers upcreate Google PageRank.

But while this emergence usually "happens" in an almost passive way in the past, we humans would like to be able to make it happen on command. We would like to upcreate artificial minds and artificial life. However, much to our dismay, upcreation turns out to be something very hard to imitate. For some goals, like making a human-like artificial intelligence in computers, bumping a system up to the next level of complexity has so far been a total failure. A large part of the difficulty lies in our lack of a good understanding of what happens during emergence. What does it mean to make a new level, how do we recognize one, and what are its preconditions?

These are ancient questions, and big in scope. The arc of complexity stretches across the cosmological realm, runs deep through the biological world and extends into the technological sphere. If we understood the dynamics of upcreation we could better craft our technology to upcreate more often. Or at least we could prepare preconditions for it. But science has no good theory of upcreation that can be applied across the board to cosmology, biology, anthropology, evolution, computer science, or mathematics. Instead two dozen specialty theories from different fields of science capture different aspects of upcreation.

The list below is a first step to unify the mechanics of upcreation. I've borrowed these ideas from the fields of chemistry, physics, biology, cosmology, mathematics, sociology, philosophy and computer science. Each one is properly used in a narrow area of inquiry. But I've been struck by their recurring themes and parallel concepts, and I believe all these concepts are reaching for a similar goal: to explain how upcreation happens. I gather them here together to suggest that like the blind men feeling the elephant, they are all describing the same phenomena.

The Mechanics of Upcreation

Goldilocks States – An upcreation system may collapse if the system's physical parameters vary outside a very narrow range. Many creative forces operate on a fine threshold of not too much, not too little.
Phase Change – The shift in levels birthed by upcreation has its analog in the chemical shift an element undergoes as it suddenly changes from one phase (solid) to another (liquid or gas). Complex systems, too, exhibit sudden distinct phases of organization.
Critical Point -- In chemistry this is the specific, precise juncture of pressure and temperature at which a system changes its phase, or state. Until a system crosses that point, there is no hint of the other state. It comes on "spontaneously." Many other complex systems can display phase changes and critical points. For instance, the addition of a few grains of sand to a growing pile of sand can trigger an avalanche (a phase change) that alters the slope of the pile. The falling avalanche readjusts the pile of sand so it continues to rest at the almost-avalanching point. In this way the slope is maintained at near-disequilibrial critical point.
Attractors – Dynamical systems with vast numbers of possible phases (versus the three or four phases available to chemical elements) will cycle through these countless possibilities at random but return to a few phases again and again, as if the system is attracted to them.
Fractals -- At critical points, systems of upcreation display a type of self-similarity known as 1/f noise or fractals. Visually this can be pictured as a twiggy tree that looks the same no matter what scale you view it at. Whether you draw the reticulation at the lower level of leaves or the higher level of the tree, the branch patterns are self-similar. Many living systems (and many inert processes, too) display "scale invariance" behavior. The pattern of the whole is contained at each level.
Power Laws -- Scale-invariant and scale-free patterns are found in other aspects of upcreation. The distribution of phenomenon can follow a long-tail curve, rather than the normal "bell" curve typical of most matters. (Many physical and inert systems also display power laws.) Distribution of words in a language, letters in DNA, metabolic rate in animals, all obey a power law (also called Pareto or Zipf's Law). At critical points and in the midst of phase changes, the distribution of order in a system can be self-similar, or scale-free, or scale-invariant, suggesting again, the constant pattern is held in the whole and not in the parts.
Scale-Free Network – Networks whose nodes are arranged scale-free (like networks of interacting proteins in a cell, or servers on the internet) are more robust against the destruction of its parts than other network arrangements. Scale-invariance provides a coherence to the whole, a tendency to favor the whole, and a propensity to generate increasing returns (the rich get richer). (wiki)
Universal Computation – All computation is fundamentally identical. This means a very small network of logic nodes is capable of performing the same calculations that a much large computer or brain does, only slower. Given enough time and space, your digital watch can do the work of a supercomputer. When very small networks capable of universal computing are distributed inside larger systems, their computation "emerges" from that matrix, in a step similar to upcreation. In computer science the simplest possible networks of off-on switches can upcreate universal computation, suggesting that many types of networks are capable of emergent computation and upcreation.
Optimal Evolvability – An evolutionary system must balance order and chaos, change and stability. It must replicate infallibly but innovate without fail. Systems that can keep evolving over millions of years must tune their rate of evolution to an optimal goldilocks amount. That rate must shift as environments shift. It is neither maximum change, nor maximum preservation. Rather optimal evolvability requires a complex network capable of changing itself. It is self-organized change, which manifests itself as new levels.
Sweet Spot -- A network's connections can be arranged so that it generates optimal evolvability while maintaining maximum longevity. Remarkably, the zone of optimal evolvability can be shown mathematically to be the same zone necessary for generating universal computation. This suggests evolution is both a type of computation, and an emergent optima and a product of the sweet spot.
Edge of Chaos -- Optimal evolvability in a network or system is found at a point of criticality. Too much to one side, and the system seizes up in rigid order. Too much towards the other side, and the system collapses into chaos. The optimal zone is a narrow goldilocks band between the two phases of order and chaos, right on the edge of both. This sweet phase transition zone along the "edge of chaos" is the root of upcreation.
Persistent Disequilibrium – When a system is self-organized to its "sweet spot" it is not stable. It is constantly almost-collapsing in chaos, almost-unraveling, almost-seizing up in crystalline order, but never falling down. Most disequilibrial systems collapse quickly. Most persistent systems rest in equilibrium without change. A very few systems can maintain the rare balancing act of persisting along the "edge" of a phase transition. A galaxy is a very large system maintaining disequilibrium. So is a fire, although it does not last long. On the other hand a star maintains a persistent fire (disequilibrium) for billions of years. A living organism maintains persistent disequilibria (the slow fire of metabolism) for many years. (A fire would burn the fuel in an organism in a few minutes.)
Syntropy – Syntropy is a type of complexity. Technically it is defined as a sort of anti-chaos, or negative entropy, but it also can be defined as "effective complexity," which is a measure of the depth of complexity. Persistent disequilibrial systems (as stars and many chemical reactions show) build up complexity and syntropy, while generating maximum entropy as well. The long-lived nature of a syntropic and persistent system increases the density of power consumed over its lifespan, and this controlled energy enables the construction of higher levels of organization.
Emerging Units of Selection – Meta-organization is sharpened and articulated by the action of evolution. Adaptive pressure transforms emerging levels into the new units of natural selection. For instance, originally natural selection worked on cells, but after cells symbiotically joined into colonies, natural selection worked on the level of colonies or organisms. The history of evolution is the story of evolution moving from one unit as the basis of selection to the next higher unit.
Non-Zero Sum – In closed system, such as fire, or an isolated marketplace, trade-offs rule: gain on one side is offset with a loss on the other. But persistent disequilibrial systems (like life, societies and minds) are energy- and information-open and zero sum accounting does not pertain. In these open systems, a gain on one side can generate a new gain on the other side. That is positive sum, or non-zero, accounting. This is particularly true for systems tuned to optimal evolvability and the sweet spot. Here the growth of one species can create opportunities for more species to grow. Energy channeled to one creation enables, rather than diminishes, another. An idea given away is not lost but can still be given to another. Positive sum dynamics is why upcreation is a net gain. It is an additive process and never subtractive. The persistent viability of one system creates a positive opportunity space for another. In this way, upcreation in a never ending cascade flowing uphill.
Infinite Game – The tendency of a persistent disequilibrial system is to keep going to create other persistent disequilibrial systems. The aim of upcreation is to create something that will keep creating. The object of a great game is not to win, but to keep playing. A system that "wins" is a finite game. A system that generates new systems is an infinite game. A series of ever-escalating upcreation is an infinite game.
Autocatalysis – Early life had to be an autocatalytic set. A series of chemical compounds in which molecule A catalyzed B, and B catalyzed C, and so on… until eventually Y catalyzed Z, that in turn catalyzed A, in a complete circle. Suddenly the self-perpetuating loop snaps into place. Suddenly, the loop creates itself. Suddenly something new is in the world. This strange loop is present wherever and whenever we find new levels of being. Strange self-causing loops are behind the emergence of life (self-assembling DNA), consciousness (thinking about thinking), behind Gaia (life tilting the climate to favor life), and technology (technology making the world safer for technology). Autocatalytic sets set into motion strange loops of self-causation – which are nothing more or less than upcreation.
Necessary Paradox – At the foundation of every loop of self-causation is a paradox. Where does it come from? From itself, but where does that come from? Which came first, Z or A? What is the cause and what is the effect? These and a thousand more quandaries are the necessary paradoxes of upcreation. The ultimate questions of origin are muddled. Cause and effect, shunted aside. Life is the cause of DNA. Consciousness is the cause of the brain. Technology is the cause of humans. With each upcreation a new set of paradoxes are generated, each of them strange and unanswerable, but necessary.

There are obvious limits to these definitions, analogies, and metaphors. Some of these concepts overlap, while others are clearly limited in their application. For example, certain metals exhibit emergence, in the form of superconductivity, without spawning self-organization. Self-organization itself does not promise upcreation. Proteins self-organize when they fold; membranes, lipid bilayers, colloidal crystals and some reaction-diffusion chemical reactions all self-organize, but none of these examples raise the level of information. And there are huge gaps in explanation waiting to be bridged.

Green galaxy

At the moment there is no single scientific theory that will bridge all these gaps. We lack a Darwin or Einstein of information. The best I could do was string together these hints and bits of technical jargon. When they are all lined up, I believe these summaries suggest a momentum and direction operating in the universe. They reveal an emerging view across many scientific disciplines. In broad strokes this grand story says that the ingredients for bootstrapping self-creation are widely present. Systems can assemble themselves, tune their networks for optimal evolution, and start to upcreate more complex structures over time. Persistent systems of creation are driven by energy flows to keep the larger system favorable to creation. The dynamics are biased toward positive sums, where possibilities breed more possibilities, and where self-creation becomes the norm. The whole long unrolling parade of ever-more-complex structures becomes an infinite game whose self-made purpose is to keep the game expanding. This entire complex of upcreation is now sitting at our feet. It is ready to create the next level. We can watch it, or ride it.

And we are far from the end.

Adaptive Basins and Strange Peaks

Wed, 29 Apr 2009 21:41:44 -0800

Biologists talk about adaptive landscapes. In these metaphorical places, species climb uphill towards optimal fitness. Going up is a struggle. Climbing takes energy. Optimal peaks can be hard to attain. Many species are distracted by getting stuck on sub-optimal false peaks, or waylaid by the intervening rugged landscape.

In this standard picture, the form of the peaks is created by the environment – say, the high peaks of fitness needed to survive in a desert. But of course, in real life, optimal fitness is a moving target, or a moving peak so to speak, that is formed in part by other organisms and by variation and behavior of the current organism itself. This is the view of co-evolution. In the new picture, constraints and self-organization can shape peaks, too. Either way, reaching an apex is the key effort.

But on the other side of science, in physics, the landscapes are inverted. Here physicists talk about basins in the landscape of thermodynamics. Strange attractors create deep wells that suck down entities. Getting out of the well is a struggle. Reversing out of the inverted peak is what takes energy. Reaching the bottom is the key effort.

I suggest the at times the same forces which create peaks in evolutionary landscapes can also be thought of as wells, and we might better understand the path of a species in time not as an uphill climb onto an adaptive peak but a downhill fall into an adaptive well. An optimal form may sometimes work like a tractor-beam that pulls in an entity and keeps it there for a duration despite disruptions. Only a severe hit of energy and outside perturbations can dislodge it from a well and move into another form-basin.

This inverted view might illuminate inevitabilities as wells that complex structures fall into.

Ordained-Becoming (Part 2)

Sat, 25 Apr 2009 09:51:26 -0800

(....please read the previous post first.)

The Positive Constraints of Epigenetics

When scientists first compiled the genetic sequences of wildly diverse organisms they were stunned and confused by a very unexpected discovery. Organisms as starkly different as a human and a fruit fly shared many similar gene clusters. Two organisms, of vastly different scale, with vastly different niches, and vastly different heritages seemed to be made of the same code. No biologist was expecting this. The conventional expectation was that humans were wired with distinctive and specialized genes. Everyone certainly expected humans to contain a lot more genetic information than the miniscule fruit fly. It was inconceivable humans would have roughly the same number of genes (29,000) as flies. Where, for instance, was that vast instructional manual for building a brain? Ernst Mayr, the grandfather of modern evolutionary synthesis, once declared "the search for homologous genes is quite futile except in very close relatives." But now modern genetic sequencing shows that homologous genes are everywhere. Despite the apparent difference in complexity between the smidgen of a fruit fly and human with its powerful mind, both organisms are built from the same set of "standard" informational blocks. The development of animal eyes, limbs, heads and hearts, though obviously different in every phyla from fly to reptile to fish, and long believed to have evolved independently, are all governed by the same genes. A common set of bits to code us all, at least among animals. Humans and chimps, for instance, share so many identical genes, that by the normal statistical measure of 99%, we should be declared identical species.

What's going on? According to modern Darwinian theory every gene on every chromosome should be under constant, daily scrutiny by evolutionary pressure, and should therefore be in constant churning flux. The genotypes of organisms should reflect the diversity of their phenotypes. Primitive flies without gigantic brains, pancreas, and five fingers like us should not have our genes, nor we theirs! Yet, the new tools show that genes are conserved faithfully, stubbornly. Many – if not most – of our genes were cast hundreds of millions of years ago, long before anything like a human walked on land. They should not be called human genes. While the continents shifted, poles reversed, extreme climates came and went, and orders of creatures appeared and disappeared, complexes of genes persisted unchanged for millennia. As evolutionary geneticist Sean Carroll notes, the basic "tool kit" of genes spawning the myriad bilateral creatures which burst forth in the Cambrian, predated the Cambrian, "the mammalian tool kit predated the rapid diversification of mammals in the Tertiary period, and the human tool kit long predated apes and other primates."

We are built from ancient potential. Evolutionary potential, in the form of stable ancestral gene kits, precedes the particular genetic arrangement of a species. It requires the long hard scrubbing of natural selection to move organisms into the potential opened by the genetic tool kits. As Carroll continues in his remarks, "It is clear that genes per se were not drivers of evolution. The genetic tool kit represents possibility – realization of its potential is ecologically driven."

The basic kit of evolution is not a gene, but a "homeobox," which is a cluster of about 180 genes. (The genes in a homeobox cluster are abbreviated to "hox" genes.) These are the bricks. The creative power of the dual homeobox processes of evolution and development (called evo-devo) resides in the 3% of genes which regulate the hox genes. As a single fertilized egg develops into a billion diverse cells, the intricate web of switching genes activate and deactivate the hox genes, so that the proper sequences of universal bricks are powered up to make the proteins to make the tissue to make the organism. In response to changes in the environment, natural selection will deactivate (without deleting) homeoboxes, or re-order their sequence, or shift the whole cluster to a new place in line, or rewired the web of their controlling routines. Re-arranging the boxes by means of switches has no effect on the function of box (maintaining continuity), and no effect on the durability of other switches, so this modular system is incredibly robust. Carroll who authored a popular book on evo-devo, Endless Forms Most Beautiful, says "the key to the making of 'endless' forms (i.e. diversity) is in the astronomical number of possible combination of regulatory inputs and switches" among the homeoboxes.

Over time evolution graduates to evolving larger "chunks" which is the main way it can navigate large possibilities spaces. If monkeys can only type letters, it takes forever before they randomly type out Hamlet; but if their typewriters type of only full words, the wait is much less. If they type full sentences, it's quicker still. Homeoboxes are like typing whole random intact paragraphs. Pretty soon you'll have a story of some sort. In computer terms this strategy is the equivalent of evolving whole subroutines instead of merely mutating words in a program.

However the effect of evolving life via chunks of code tightly linked into webs is that these webs produce both negative constraints due to their embodiment, and positive constraints due to emergent patterns. I want to address both consequences here.

Every book, even one created by random mixes, carries within its pages a different long message. The text is its intangible code, and the ink stamped on sheaves of bound paper is the code's tangible embodiment. But as media theorist Marshall McLuhan noticed, the form of the book itself – the medium – carries its own message regardless of the book's content. Other media do the same. The alphabet and its literacy changed how we think, independent of what we read. Regardless of what is being shown on television, the physical display of scanned raster lines on a screen, the repeated interruptions of 30-second commercials, the rapid sequence of frames, and all the semiotic conventions of a TV show also carry a signal, sometimes one that is more powerful than its mere particular content. In McLuhan's words, the medium itself (alphabet, book, TV, blog, twitter) is the message.

Genetic information is transmitted, like a ghost, from generation to generation. However, like all intangible information, genetic information must be embodied in tangible atoms to be transmitted and expressed. Those atoms of informational embodiment -- whether electronic blips or chemical signals -- constrain what can be said and often add an implicit meaning. In other words the medium itself carries a message.

The medium for genetic information is an extremely complex set of molecules, which operates at many levels of embodiment as base pairs, codons, genes, homeoboxes, chromosomes, and genome. At each structural level there is a tangled web of interactions, and multiple pathways. Consider for instance that all the specialized cells in your body, from heart cell to brain cell, have a very different biochemical form but are run from the same DNA "blueprint." So the same blueprint can build more than one kind of building. A single gene can code more than one protein, and one protein can fold more than one way. The critical additional information for determining what kind of cell to develop at each juncture is often carried implicitly in the physical organization of the gene. The order by which genes appear on the chromosome make a difference, even though this order may not be prescribed in the genetic information itself. This order influences the ability of some genes to inhibit or active other genes, which is how a general fertilized egg cell differentiates during morphogenesis into a vast multi-varied cellular creature. The developmental path from pure DNA code to viable holistic body is a long, complicated, interacting, self-referential circuit. This web of interconnecting self-regulating genes and developmental paths is its own complex adaptive system. In some ways it is as complex as evolution itself. So, in addition to the specific code carried by particular DNA sequences, then, there is another level of messaging that is carried by the physical network of DNA, genes and chromosomes. This message-of-the-medium is called epigenetic.

Epigenetics entails all the influences genes exert outside of the information they carry within DNA. Examples of this dynamic include paramutation, wherein the physical presence of an allele (counterpart gene) can influence development without changing the heritable information. Or a gene may be silenced when its position on the chromosome is physically shifted even a small amount. In insects, sex is often determined by silencing the entire paternal genome. There are types of cell memory wherein a cell "bookmarks" genes before cell division, and the bookmarks are passed on to daughter cells, thus carrying gene expression instructions outside of the DNA. These are simple cases, but epigenetic regulatory circuits yield deep complexity in the style of "this gene inhibits that gene, except when those genes are activated by these genes regulated by that first gene." This reflexive web of links sprouts emergent patterns that are beyond our understanding at the moment, even though their effects are real and visible. In short, the epigenome system can shift, bend, and create potential forms, while the underlying genome remains unchanged.

Homeoboxes, which may be hundreds of million years old, are like train tracks "in the tree of life". At the fork where each new species divides the line, the track keeps running the durable "trains" of commonly shared homeobox genes in parallel. As evolution keeps diverging, constant parallel tracks of identical hox genes keep organisms returning to similar and seemingly universal solutions. Biologists call this surprising constancy "parallelism" because the genetic structures are propagating and enduring in parallel.

Therefore one way in which epigenetic structures promote convergent evolution is by conveying the same enduring parallel solutions contained in primeval hox genes. Legs and limbs, antennas and horns, snouts and noses, eyes and compound eyes keep reappearing because the primeval "tool kit" for each form has been retained deep in operating system. Combinations of these lego-like units are recombined in a mash-up fashion, or selectively suppressed, to produce innovative expressions of familiar forms.

But what conserves the genetic bundles? Why are homeoboxes so inexplicably durable despite evolution's ceaseless adaptive scrubbing? Genetic homeoboxes remain unchanged for hundreds of millions of years primarily because their genes are arranged in networks. They are like miniature internets, with genes linking to many other genes. Some regulatory genes turn on (or off) other genes, which in turn may regulate yet others, so the entire web of interacting genes forms an extremely complex genetic ecology that is self-sustaining, and often self-repairing. We know from both experiments in the lab and from computer simulations that complex networks of self-regulating nodes – such as genomes – generate internal dynamics and "order for free." That is, even randomly wired-up networks will produce the same recurring order – certain behaviors or forms – no matter how the nodes are arranged. In other words, types of emergent order are inevitable for that kind of network, and this order, or structure, will be produced outside of, or on top of, the structure produced by adaptive evolution.

These recurring emergent forms are much like the self-sustaining tornado that appears in draining water under proper conditions. As long as the suitable conditions continue, the inherent form is sustainable and available to be appropriated by natural selection. The emergent attractor pushes/pulls evolution to work down its path, and in this way acts as a positive constraint.

The ability of self-regulating networks to manifest emergent structures is well known and can be seen in many types of systems. The pioneering discoverer of this effect is the theoretical biologist Stuart Kauffman, who wrote the classic tome "The Origins of Order." Inspired in part by Kauffman's insight I also wrote a big book about how "out of control" decentralized systems can generate new levels of useful order. Complex systems as diverse as galaxies, human societies, brains, computer networks, and artificial evolution all display the ability to generate emergent, self-sustaining structures where none existed before. Kauffman brought a mathematical rigor to these intuitive hunches and proved brilliantly that these intensely networked systems – such as genomes – would inevitably generate recurring forms. Just as important, Kauffman and others also proved in theory and practice that these emergent recurring forms tended to hover at maximal evolvibility and flexibility. Which is why the homeobox clusters selected by genetic networks are primed to keep the organism evolving even while they keep its genome intact.

The key insight gained by the last three decades of research on complex adaptive systems is that the variation presented to natural selection is not random. Random mutations are often not random; variation is constrained by geometry and physics (see above); and most importantly, variations are often shaped by the possibilities inherent in the complex system (a la vortex). Once upon a time this was heresy, but as more and more biologists run computer models, the idea that variation is not random has just about become a scientific consensus.

Epigenetic networks regulating themselves tend to dictate what genes cannot do, but the same networks also favor certain kinds of complexes which can be built. This flips the traditional view. In the classical theory of evolution, an internal source (mutation) generates variation which natural selection then steers in random (but adaptive) directions. The new view is that the engine of external natural selection pushes change forward, but internal sources channel the not-completely random variation. In the old, the internal created, while the external steered; in the new, the external creates, while the internal steers. And when the internal directs, it re-directs. As early paleontologist W.B. Scott put it, epigenetic networks and the complexity of evolution create "Inherited channels for preferred change."

In the textbook version of evolution, evolution is a mighty force propelled by a single, simple, near-mathematical mechanism: random mutations selected by adaptive survival. But the two new widely-adopted biological tools I've mentioned above – cheap genetic probes and strong computer models – reveal two additional legs for evolution's power. We can now see that the creative engine of evolution stands on three legs: the adaptive, the contingent, and the inevitable.

The Tripod of Evolution

The adaptive force is good ol' natural selection delivered by an organism's environment. Not every convergence is driven by the internal push of constraints. Often times two isolated lineages of organisms in similar environments will re-invent solutions for the familiar reason that survival steadily requires the selection of similar adaptations. Forms converge because their environments converge.

For instance, the defensive venomous sting has been evolved 10 times: in the spider, the stingray, the stinging nettle, the centipede, the stone fish, the sea anemone, the male platypus, the scorpion, the cone shell mollusk, and the snake. A close examination in four very different animal phyla reveals that the poisons from all four disrupt the potassium channels in the neurons of the injected attacker, making a tidy case of convergence. However, the potassium pathway is apparently fairly susceptible to disruption because the four different groups were able to devise four different chemical hacks to block it. Their distinctive molecular makeup and unrelatedness make it clear each lineage evolved the hack separately, but it is not clear what they are converging upon except the vulnerability of the potassium channel.

For many evolutionists, this is all the explanation needed. Adaptation by natural selection can explain everything. But as Niles Eldridge once observed, "Any theory that explains everything, explains nothing."

But as I believe new tools and insight have demonstrated, there are other dimensions of evolution at work beside the adaptive nature of the environment. One of those is the role of contingency – pure luck. Gould's "Wonderful Life" is the most persuasive defense of this evolutionary factor. As he elegantly argued, a lot of what happens in evolution comes down to the lottery. A species, or even family of species, can be extinguished by drastic climate change, tectonic drift, asteroid impacts, or other "acts of God." Whether these extinctions are a result of "bad luck" or "bad genes" is always a debate, but at smaller scale, certainly much of the fine detail of speciation is a result of contingency. That is, rewind life's tape and it plays out different. No one argues that the individual spots on a Monarch butterfly are inevitable, or that humans had to have 32 teeth. Contingency and random luck operate in evolution; the question is, how deep into the course of evolution does it go?

The third leg of evolution's tripod is structural inevitability. Whereas contingency can be thought of as a "historical" force, that is, a phenomenon where history matters, the structural component of evolution's engine can be thought of as "ahistorical" in that it produces change independent of history. Run it again, and you get the same story. This aspect of evolution pushes inevitabilities.

The iconic image of evolution is the ever-branching tree. From the base of the trunk of life, heavy arms fork up into multiple lighter branches of new divergent species, and these branches divide again into multiple twigs, each of which further diverges into yet tiny twiglets, and so on, the entire tree reticulating in infinite fractal division. The picture-book theme of evolution is ceaseless divergence. Yet the third structural corner of evolution, made up of convergence, parallelism, epigenetic, material constraint, and emergent order is non-diverging. This internally driven order plays a counterforce to the relentless diverging energy of natural selection. It gathers, re-enforces, re-turns, re-runs, and moves along an inherent path.

Here is another way to explain it. Adaptive natural selection excels at supremely optimizing a form to a constantly shifting niche. That adaptive process is always very specific, very local, and very contingent on tiny historical details and chance. But adaptive optimization presents an ancient conundrum to a species: if they perfect themselves for where they are at present, they can get stuck if the environment shifts quickly – which over the span of geological time is certain to happen "frequently." Ideally, a species should seek a balance between optimization of the present and flexibility for the future. Yet, by definition natural selection works only in the present and cannot anticipate the future. The forces behind convergence and emergence, however, keep species near optimal evolvibility, rather than optimal adaptation, and occasionally skip across optimization (good enough is better). Converging on emergent forms, remixing durable ancient subroutines, resisting over-optimization, can keep species primed for the future.

Charted, the tripod of evolution might look like this. Classical neo-dawinism diagrammed evolution as a single force:

Stephen Gould emphasized contingency, once a neglected corner, as a vital force in evolution to be reckoned with, particularly on the scales of eons.

Kauffman, Conway Morris and a few other heretics reconsider the spectrum of evolution and show that it contains a third axis of structural constraints (both negative and positive) leading to the unfashionable idea of inevitabilities.

All three dynamics are present in varying proportions at different levels, counterbalancing and offsetting each other. Without the converging nature of structural emergence, it is hard to see how evolution proceeds as it has over the long term. The third dynamic can help explain how major transitions in evolution are achieved (via inherent forms ready to be exploited), and why evolution seems to have an arrow.

A metaphor comes to mind: Triple forces mold the landscape of evolution. The structural dynamics of internal constraints and emergent order carve out a deep river valley in the metaphorical landscape through which a river (adaptive selection) can meander opportunistically, but within bounds. The adaptive pressure of evolution pushes the water (evolving species) forward, but the gravity of genes keep the river within its banks at the large scale, and the sands of convergence give the meanders their distinctive universal S-shape. The detailed "particularness" of that river, all the fine contours along the shore and bottom, comes from contingency (never to be repeated), but the universal "riverness" of the river (recurring in all rivers) comes from the gravity of convergence and emergent order.

Dinosaur-ness may be a metaphorical river. Six separate dinosaur lineages have followed the same morphological pathway in evolution. Over time each of the six dino lineages displayed a reduction in their side toes, an elongation of the long bones in their paws, and a shortening of their "fingers." Bob Bakker, the model for the dino guy in Jurassic Park, and real-life dinosaur expert claims, "this striking case of iterative parallelism and convergence … is a powerful argument that observed long-term changes in the fossil record are the result of directional natural selection, not random walk through genetic drift."

Way back in 1897, paleontologist Henry Osborn, an early dinosaur and mammal expert, wrote: "My study of teeth in a great many phyla of Mammalia in past times has convinced me that there are fundamental predispositions to vary in certain directions; that the evolution of teeth is marked out beforehand by hereditary influences which extend back hundreds of thousands of years."

It is important to outline what is "marked out beforehand." In most cases, the details are contingent. The river of evolution determines the broadest outlines of form only. One might think of these as archetypes: tetrapods, snake form, eyeballs, coiled gut, egg sacks, flapping wings, repeating segmented body, trees, puffball, finger. These are general silhouettes, not individuals. Like other recurring archetypes they are patterns your brain perceives without you even noticing it – "oh, it's a clam" it says to itself, letting you determine the particulars. On the other hand adaptive selection breeds the noticeable patterns, the flashy flourishes, the idiosyncratic specifics that belong to individuals and individual species. The weird stuff. Convergence generates the boring stuff.

The Cosmic Imperative

Baked into the very nature of nature are constraints that shape life and its unfolding in evolution. In a very indirect, yet very real, way the foundational laws of physics determine what kind of fish can swim in the oceans, or the form of animals in the tundra. The only uncertainty is how much of fishy-ness is predetermined? Is it merely their streamlined shape, air bladder, and fins (all which have evolved more than once), or does the determinacy reach down to their egg-laying, gills, and schooling behavior? Or even further to the concentric rows of teeth in a shark's and the electrical field of the eel (which has evolved more than once)? Once unleashed, life invades all domains, never retreats, and so a water planet with life will have "fish" of some sort. Their shape will be guided in part by geometry, physics, and structural constraints. Those are constant (perhaps on other worlds, too.) The laws of physics also dictate the character of oceans themselves, and of tundras and meadow (and even whether there are oceans, tundras, and meadow), so more of life is dictated by the initial conditions of the universe than we normally appreciate.

How the goldilocks zone (gray color) of Earth is narrowing over cosmological time.

That fact has led a few to examine the initial conditions of the universe to see whether it too has a tilt towards life, or particular forms of life. There are many indications the universe is biased to life, at least in our neighborhood. Our planet is just close enough to the sun to be warm but far enough to not burn. Earth has a large nearby moon which slows down its rotation to lengthen the day and to stabilize it over the long-term. Earth shares the sun with Jupiter, which acts as a comet magnet. The ice of those captured comets may also have given Earth its oceans. Earth has a magnetic core which generates a cosmic ray shield. It has the appropriate level of gravity to retain water and oxygen. It has a thin crust which enables the churn of plate tectonics. Recent research even suggests that there's a goldilocks zone in the galaxy as well. Too close to the center of the galaxy and a planet is bombarded with constant lethal cosmic radiation; too far from the center and when the planetary mass condenses from star dust it will miss the heavy elements that are needed for life. Such a list can quickly get out of hand to include every aspect of earth. It's all perfect! It soon resembles one of those phony "Help Wanted" ads engineered to stealthily fit only one favored person.

Some of these factors may indeed be essential for life of any type, but many, if not most, will turn out to be simply coincidental. It will take examination of more planets, and more examples of life to know. But there is an even a stronger assertion about the nature of nature. This claim asserts that not only do the laws of nature shape life, but that, in Paul Davies' phrase, "the laws of nature are rigged in favor of life." In this view "life emerges from a soup in the same dependable way that a crystal emerges from a saturated solution, with its final from predetermined by the interatomic forces." Cyril Ponnamperuma, an early pioneer in biogenesis (study of the origin of life), believed "there are inherent properties in the atoms and molecules which seem to direct the synthesis" toward life. Stewart Kauffman and many others believe, based on their models, that when conditions are right, the emergence of life in inevitable. Mathematician Manfred Eigen wrote in 1971, "The evolution of life, if it is based on a derivable physical principle must be considered an inevitable process."

Christian De Duve, a Nobel prize winner for his work in biochemistry, believes life is a cosmic imperative. He writes in his book Vital Dust: "Life is the product of deterministic forces. Life was bound to arise under the prevailing conditions, and it will arise similarly wherever and whenever the same conditions obtain… Life and mind emerge not as the result of freakish accidents, but as natural manifestations of matter, written into the fabric of the universe."

If life is inevitable, why not fishes? If fishes are inevitable, why not mind? Simon Conway Morris speculates that "What was impossible billions of years ago becomes increasingly inevitable." As the subtitle of his book makes clear, we are "inevitable humans."

One way to test the cosmic imperative before we make (or don't make) contact with ET or detect life on a comet, is to rerun the tape of life. (I should finally mention that "rewinding the tape", like "dialing the phone," or "cranking the engine," is a skeuonym, an action continued from a technology no longer practiced; for you young readers, it means to re-run an unfolding sequence from the same starting point.) Gould called rewinding the tape of life the great "undoable" experiment, but he was wrong: it turns out you can.

The new tools of sequencing and genetic cloning make replaying evolution possible. You take a simple bacteria (E. coli), select an individual and make dozens of identical clones of that one particular bug. Genetically sequence the genotype of a clone. Put each remaining clone into exactly identical incubation chambers, with exactly identical settings and inputs. Let the cloned bacteria multiply freely in parallel pots. Let them breed for 10,000 generations. Then 20,000 generations. Let them run for 20 years and you'll have 40,000 generations and noticeable evolution. At each 1,000 generation milestone, take a few out, freeze them for a snapshot, and sequence their evolved genomes. Compare the parallel evolved genotypes across all the pots. You can re-run the tape of evolution at any time along the way by retrieving a frozen snapshot specimen and redeploying the bug in another identical chamber.

Richard Lenski, at Michigan State University, has been performing this very experiment in his lab. What he has found is that in general, multiple runs of evolution produced similar traits in the phenotype – the outward body of the bacteria and what it does. Changes in the genotype occurred in roughly the same places, though the exact coding was often different. This suggests a convergence of broad form with details left to chance. Lenski is not the only scientist doing experiments like this. Others show similar results from parallel evolution: "the convergence of multiple evolving lines on similar phenotypes." As geneticist Sean Carroll concludes, "Evolution can and does repeat itself at the levels of structures and patterns, as well as of individual genes… This repetition overthrows the notion that if we rewound and replayed this history of life, all outcomes would be different." We can rewind the tape of life and when we do, it often turns out roughly the same. The big themes in life seem inevitable, and perhaps in technology as well.

In Gould's last book before his death, his wordy, 1200-page opus of everything he knew, he began to backtrack a little on his former adamant denial of any direction, or ahistoricity, in evolution. I think several things changed his mind. The correct re-classification of the bizarre Burgess Shale organisms from examples of bizarre unknown phyla to bizarre examples of known phyla and the continued accumulation of "surprising" convergent forms played only a small part. The main impetus for re-casting his view of "the structure of evolutionary theory" (the title of his last book) was new scientific tools and techniques. In the past twenty years genetic analysis became cheap enough that even poor paleontologists and field biologists could sequence the genomes of organisms in great detail. Secondly, cheap, immensely powerful computers arrived on desktops, and the computational perspective of Kauffman's "order for free" became unavoidable. In these simple simulations, when you ran the tape of life again, you kept finding inherent forms, and new internal evolutionary forces. These illuminated the tilt in evolution. It made it clear that evolution had tendencies, established forms, and a direction.

At the close of his majestic Wonderful Life, Gould imparts his final sermon on greater lessons to be gained from the Burgess Shale – and on this he was not changing his mind. He concluded, "Biology's most profound insight into human nature, status, and potential lies in the simple phrase, the embodiment of contingency: Homo sapiens is an entity, not a tendency."

Stephen Jay Gould got it precisely, but elegantly, backwards. If we re-run his sentence again, but this time from back to front, I can't think of more succinct phrase that sums up evolution's message better than this:

Homo sapiens is a tendency, not an entity.

Humanity is a process. Always was, always will be. In most respects we have just started our evolution as Homo sapiens. Nothing at all in evolution is fixed. Every organism is on their way to becoming. In evolution all becoming is constrained by past successes, and tilted towards future ones. Much of what happens in evolution is inevitable. We, therefore, are nothing more and nothing less than an ordained becoming.

We are ordained becoming within a framework that is, in Paul Davies' wonderful phrase, rigged to favor life. Plain logic demands we ask, what rigged it? There is no satisfactory answer to that yet existential question, although there are many candidates. These include: the cosmic evolution of randomly generated rigging rules, or forking multiverses, or subjective anthropomorphic appreciation (it only looks rigged because we are here), or, an eternal favorite, God. Unraveling that quandary of genesis is too large a story to be sorted out here.

Rather than be concerned with the nearly unanswerable quest for the cosmic imperative's origins, I am far more interested in its destiny. Where is evolution headed ? What technologies are inevitable? And if we are ordained becoming, then what are we ordained to become?

Ordained-Becoming

Fri, 24 Apr 2009 23:38:41 -0800

Technology is evolution, accelerated. In order to see where technology is speeding towards we need to understand where evolution has taken it so far.

Because this is a very long post (13,000 words -- my blog software made me post it into two parts), let me tell where I end up so you can judge whether you want to come along: The course of evolution is not random. It has an inherent direction, shaped by the nature of matter, and this direction induces inevitabilities in the shape of life. These tendencies are extended into technology, which means aspects of the technium are also inevitable. My argument for technological determinism begins at the beginning.

Four billion years ago the first DNA molecule began ceaselessly replicating with occasional modification. In the four billennia since, DNA has modified itself uncountable times. The 100 billion separate species that are estimated to have lived on earth so far each represent only a tiny fraction of that prolific variation. Fifty thousand years ago this ever-busy little molecule unfolded the first conscious mind. Further uncountable variations over the last 50,000 years enabled this same molecule to produce one hundred billion human minds (the number of humans that have ever lived), which unfolded the millions of species of technology that now surround us. Even though in retrospect there are many discontinuities that appear to "change everything" along the way – human language being one example -- day by day evolution spreads incrementally and without gaps. The path from the very first DNA molecule to the pixilated screen in front of you is one long continuous arc.

Every species of technological machinery operating today can trace its roots back in an unbroken line of variations to primeval life. Yet between the first variation of the double helix and the latest variation of the microscopic computing chips running the internet are many fossils. Literal fossils. Bits of weird creatures long extinct buried and squeezed between rocks. As we expose, catalog, classify, and analyze these preserved capsules of living variations, we are discovering a pattern of structured change that, in broad strokes, applies not only to organic life but to technology as well.

In 1974 Simon Conway Morris, a paleobiology graduate student at Cambridge University, began an intense study of obscure fossils hidden in an obscure location: a narrow outcrop of 500 million-year old shale crammed between two small peaks high up in the Canadian Rockies. The organisms he examined were very bizarre. There appeared to be nothing like them in the history of the life. One worm-like species, which he named Hallucigenia, as in hallucinogenic, was so unearthly bizarre that he concluded they walked on two parallel rows of needle spikes. Another organism had five eyes, and one sported a mouth with a circular row of teeth.

Conway Morris believed some of these long-gone species were outliers, exemplar specimens of phyla previously unknown to science. He cataloged not just one species, but dozens of hitherto unknown phyla – an entire underwater world of new body-designs for creatures that greatly expanded the known categories of animals. They were stunningly different in basic design from anything alive today. This layer of ancient life frozen in great detail by the fine-grained limestone dating from the Cambrian period later became known as the Burgess Shale fossils. Dissecting them was tedious work. The fossils were so minutely detailed, so weird, that he needed to tease apart their fragile remains with pin pricks under a microscope. But Conway Morris's revelations began to overturn our understanding of evolution.

The wild disparity of the basic body designs of these ancient and long-gone creatures greatly outnumber the variety of animal forms we have now. It seemed as if life was more varied, more diverse long ago, and its choices have only narrowed since then. Conway Morris was only 23 years old when he started dissecting these curious fossils but in his youthful exuberance he believed they hinted at a new way to see the world.

Simon Conway Morris's work on the Burgess Shale became the centerpiece of Steven J. Gould's literary-science masterpiece Wonderful Life. To explain the emerging paradox of diversity, Gould introduced a metaphor in this book so elegantly stated that it is now unavoidable in biology. What if, Gould asked, we could rewind the tape of life? Would the story of evolution play out the same, or different? Gould mustered reams of paleobiological details to demonstrate that evolution is contingent on millions of lucky random forks in the road, and that if we re-run life we'll get a different outcome each time. In particular, he suggests that the appearance of humans – our form, particularly our intelligence – is due wholly to unrepeatable chance. Replay evolution a thousand times and we'd never get anything close to a thinking ape. Or to put it in Gould's masterful prose: "if we could perform the great undoable thought experiment of 'rewinding the tape of life' back to the Cambrian and 'distributing the lottery tickets' at random a second time, the history of animals would follow an entirely different but equally 'sensible' course that would almost surely not generate a humanoid creature with self-conscious intelligence." (Natural History) In this view, absolutely nothing is inevitable in evolution. And since technology is an extension of evolution, we should not expect inevitabilities, or direction, in culture either.

Exhibit A in Gould's argument for the inherent contingency of evolution were the ancient Burgess Shale fossils that Simon Conway Morris spent decades toiling over. These novel body designs were eradicated wholesale 530 million years ago. Only 35 out of several hundred basic designs from that time survived to become the foundational design for all later animals today. Had historical accidents been different, Gould argued, and the tape of life re-run, the basic designs pioneered in the Burgess shale animals could have survived, and much of what is alive today would be vastly different. We would not be here, or rather "we" might have an exoskeleton, or four arms, or another pair of eyes on the back of our head, if we even had a head.

This view of the fundamental contingency of evolution is now the orthodoxy in science. Every textbook on evolution today acknowledges the historical "lucky" aspect of evolution. A profound consequence of this contingency framework is that there can be no direction to evolution. There is no steady slow march toward higher complexity or anything else. There is no widening "cone of diversity" expanding outward into time. In fact, Gould argues, the cone of diversity is reversed, reducing the range of innovation (or disparity) as time passes. Broadly unique morphological designs (which Conway Morris and others believed they had found in the Burgess Shale) will sometimes be eliminated not because they are unfit (as usually happens in natural selection), but because an accidental perturbance, such as an asteroid hit, or extreme climate change, removes them for no more reason than pure bad luck. In those serendipitous accidents there is no chance for natural adaptation to work. In a truly contingent world, diversity is eliminated in a lottery fashion, forcing evolution to follow less optimal possibilities. Thus evolution ricochets around aimlessly without advancement.

Possible trends in disparity by Simon Conway Morris. A is greater, B is diminishing, C is constant, and D is step-wise gain.

We only think there is a swelling rise of increasing complexity because our brains are hardwired to find patterns, so we tend to see trajectories anywhere we look. Therefore the apparent evolution of life towards greater complexity is a mere illusion. As Gould explains in another brilliant metaphor, a drunken man wandering aimlessly away from a wall will sooner or later fall into a ditch. Not because some force pushed him toward the ditch but because he can't walk through the wall, so he is free to move in one general direction only, making his eventual arrival at the ditch statistically expected. In biology, the wall is simplicity (primitive organization), and the ditch is complexity. The first bacterium can't get any simpler than it already is so it must randomly try things that are more complex and so it drifts away from the wall of ultimate simplicity. Evolution is the drunk that must stagger around until it falls into complexity. Life's trend, if we want to call it that, is aimless randomness.

Convergences

However, today there is an emerging view running contrary to Gould's magisterial claims of orthodoxy. The contrarians say that our intuitive sense of evolution is true, and it really has, without illusion, moved toward greater complexity and diversity over its grand sweep. Continuing Gould's metaphor, in the contrary view the ground between the wall and ditch is tilted. An almost imperceptible slope carries life away from the simple and towards the more complex and diverse. Wherever on the slope of evolution an organism sits, it will tend to slip toward more complexity, however slightly. Over time that mild tilt supplies evolution with a decided direction.

But wait! This raises a whole bunch of alarming questions: If evolution has a direction, does it have a destiny? What is steering this tend, and where does this force reside? And does this mean that life repeats itself if you re-run it, so that aspects of life are inevitable?

Inevitable! Now there's a word we don't find in textbooks anywhere.

Can anything be inevitable in a free-willed world? The same currents that govern evolution also govern its seventh kingdom, the technium. If the evolution of life has a direction, than the evolution of technology must as well, since the technium sped out of evolution only recently and still depends on its biological parents (us). This ignites a similar set of even more alarming questions: If technological progress has a direction, where is it headed? Where does this guiding force reside, if not in us? And not least, are some technologies inevitable? If so, which ones?

In other words, if the ground of the technium is sloped to impart a bias to the advance of technology, then where does technology want to go? What does it want? We dare ask such questions only if life's evolution is bent in certain directions. Evidence that replaying the tape of life produces similar designs would give us permission to ask the same questions in technology. If we re-ran the evolution of the technium would the exact same technologies occur again and again?

We can only begin to answer such a question by beginning with the essential antecedent question: is there any such evidence that the morphological forms of life are inevitable?

In tracing the origins of his conclusion that there is no direction to evolution Gould said, "I developed my views on contingency and the expanded range of Burgess diversity directly from Conway Morris's work and explicit claims." (web) How great the irony then that the scientist who has so far amassed the most evidence against the orthodoxy of contingency, and has emerged as the major spokesman for the view that evolution is full of inevitabilities is none other than Simon Conway Morris.

Conway Morris did what scientists are supposed to do, but rarely do: he changed his mind. Further work by other paleontologists on the species that Conway Morris enthusiastically heralded as wildly new entrants into the flux of life demonstrated that they were misidentified. His Hallucigenia was not a new kind of worm walking on spikes but a weird old worm with common legs and spikes down his back. "We made some mistakes," he says. "With the benefit of hindsight, we can see that we had exaggerated the diversity of these supposedly bizarre fossils and needed to reconsider their evolutionary relationships." In many cases the unearthly alien creatures of the Burgess Shale turned out to be new species in old familiar lineages. Their inclusion did widen the diversity of the existing categories, but they forced no radically new categories.

But it was the publication of Gould's majestic book about his own work that first planted a seed of doubt in Conway Morris's mind. With his own expert paleontological eyes, Conway Morris found that the scientific examples that Gould used for contingency could also be interpreted in the opposite way -- just as he himself mistakenly described Hallucegenia as belonging to a new phyla when he actually had the organism upside down! The more he looked at the evidence of historical contingency the more he saw evidence for inevitabilities. His investigations into the deeper structure of evolution led him to eventually write, "Everything we know about biology argues that it is seeded with inevitabilities."

Inevitable Forms Most Beautiful

When Charles Darwin was working out his theory of natural selection, the eye worried him. He found it very hard to explain how it could have evolved bit by bit, because the eye's retina, lens, and pupil seemed so finely perfected toward the whole, and so utterly useless at less than whole. Critics of Darwin's theory of evolution held the eye out as a miracle. But miracles, almost by definition, happen only once. Neither Darwin, nor his critics, appreciated the fact that the camera-like eye evolved not just once – miracle though it may seem – but six times over the course of life on earth. The remarkable optical architecture of a "biological camera" is also found in certain octopus, snails, marine annelids, jellyfish, and spiders. These six lineages of unrelated creatures share only a distant camera-eyeless common ancestor, so each lineage gets credit for evolving this marvel. Each of the six manifestations is an astounding achievement; after all it took humans several thousands of years of serious tinkering to cobble together the first artificial one.

But does the six-time independent self-assembly of the camera eye signal a supreme degree of improbability, sort of like tossing 6 million penny-heads in a row? Or does the six-time invention mean that the eye is a natural funnel that attracts evolution, like water in a well at the bottom of a valley? And then there are the 8 other types of eyes, each of which has been evolved more than once. Biologist Richard Dawkins estimates that "the eye has evolved independently between 40 and 60 times around the animal kingdom," leading him to claim, "It seems that life, at least as we know it on this planet, is almost indecently eager to evolve eyes. We can confidently predict that a statistical sample of [evolutionary] reruns would culminate in eyes. And not just eyes, but compound eyes like those in an insect, a prawn, or trilobite, and camera eyes like ours or a squid's…. There are only so many ways to make an eye, and life as we know it may well have found them all."

Landscape of possible eye forms by Michael Land.

Are there certain forms – "natural" states -- that evolution tends to gravitate towards? Millions of experiments done on computers show that complex adaptive systems, such as evolution, tend to settle (all other factors begin equal) into a few recurring patterns, known in mathematics as "attractors." Even though the system may start out in different initial states, if one runs the program enough times, it tends to attract itself to a few repeating patterns. These patterns are not found in the parts and so the structure that appears is considered both "emergent" and dictated by the complex adaptive system. Since the same structure will appear again and again – like a vortex in a draining tub – they are also considered inevitable.

In the bottom drawer of their desks biologists have long held an ever-growing list of cases of identical phenomenon that have appeared more than once on earth. These curious cases – sort of vortexes in the river of life -- are usually filed and forgotten. But a few scientists believe they are biological attractors. The 30-100 million species presently co-inhabiting earth are running millions of experiments every hour. Out of this exhaustive recombination, constant tweaking, and ceaseless interaction the complex adaptive system of evolution keeps converging upon similar characteristics in far flung branches in the tree of life. This attraction is called convergent evolution. The best of these examples show that highly adaptive designs can originate independently in separate lineages. The more taxonomically separate the lineages, the more impressive the convergence.

Old World primates have full color vision and inferior smell compared to their distant second-cousins the New World monkeys. These spider monkeys, lemurs, and marmosets all have a very keen smell but lack tricolor vision. All, that is, except for the howler monkey, who in parallel to the Old World primates, has tricolor vision and a weak nose. The common ancestor to the Howler and the Old World primates goes very far back, so howlers independently evolved tricolor vision. By examining the genes for full color vision, biochemists discover that both Howler and Old World primates used receptors tuned to the same wavelengths, and they contained exactly the same amino acids in three key positions. Not only that, the diminished olfactory senses of howler and apes was caused by the inhibition of the same olfactory genes, turned off in the same order, and in the same details. "When similar forces converge, similar results emerge. Evolution is remarkably reproducible," says geneticist Sean Carroll.

List of convergent evolution compiled by Connie Barlow.

Depending on how one measures the concept of "independent," the catalog of visible examples of independent convergent evolution is hundreds long, and counting. Any list will certainly include the three-time evolution of flapping wings in birds, bats and pterodactyl (reptiles of the dinosaur era). The last common ancestor among these three lineages did not have wings, which means that each evolved their wings independently. Despite their vast taxonomic distance, the wings in each of these three cases are remarkably similar in form: skin stretched over bony limbs. Navigation by echo-location has been found four times in bats, dolphins and two species of cave-dwelling birds (the South American oilbird and Asian swiflets). Bipedality recurs in humans and birds. Anti-freeze compounds were evolved twice in ice-fish, once in the Artic and once in Antarctic. Both humming birds and sphinx moths evolved to hover over flowers sucking nectar through a thin tube. Warm-bloodedness evolved more than once. Binocular vision many times in distant taxon. Bryozoa, a family of coral, evolved distinctive helical shaped colonies six different times over 400 million years. Social cooperation evolved in ants, bees, rodents, and mammals. Seven widely separated corners of the plant kingdom evolved insectivorous species – eating insects for nitrogen. Succulent leaves multiple times evolved across taxonomic distance. Jet propulsion twice. Buoyant swim bladders evolved independently in many varieties of fish, mollusks, and jellyfish. Flapping wings constructed of taunt membranes over skeleton frames arose more than once in the insect kingdom. While humans have technically evolved fixed-wing aircraft and spinning wing aircraft, we haven't yet made a viable flapping wing craft. On the other hand, fixed wing gliders (flying squirrels, flying fish) and spinning wing gliders (many seeds) have evolved a number of times. In fact, three species of rodent-like gliders also display convergence: the Flying Squirrel, and the Squirrel Glider and the marsupial Sugar Glider, both of Australia.

Because of its lone tectonic wanderings in geologic time, the continent of Australia is a laboratory for parallel evolution. There are multiple examples of marsupials in Australia paralleling placental mammals from the old world. Even in the past. Saber-canine teeth are found in both the extinct marsupial thylocosmilid and the extinct saber tooth cat. Marsupial lions had retractable claws like feline cats.

Dinosaurs, our iconic distant cousins, independently evolved a number of innovations in parallel with our common vertebrate ancestors. In addition to the parallels between flying Ptetrodactyls and bats, there were the streamlined Ichthyosaurs that mirrored dolphins, and Mosasaurs which paralleled whales. Triceratops evolved beaks similar to both parrots and octopus and squid. Snake-like Pygopodidae were as legless as reptilian snakes later were.

Convergence of streamline shape.

The less taxonomic distance between lineages, the more common, -- but less significant – convergence becomes. There are five unrelated species of dolphins that live only in rivers. Both frogs and chameleons independently evolved rapid-fire "harpoon tongues" to snatch prey at a distance. All three major phyla of mushrooms have separately evolved species that produce dark, dense, underground, truffle-like fruits; and in North America alone there are more than 75 genera that include "truffles," many of which evolved independently.

For some biologists occurrences of convergence are merely a statistical curiosity. Sort of like meeting someone else with your own name and birth date. Weird, but so what? Given enough species enough time you are bound to encounter two that cross paths morphologically. But homologous features are actually the rule in biology. Most homology is invisible, and among related species. Related species naturally share features, unrelated less so, so unrelated homology is more meaningful and noticeable. Either way, most methods used by life are used by more than one organism, and in more than one phyla. What is rare is a trait that has not been re-used somewhere in nature. Richard Dawkins challenged naturalist George McGavin to name "innovations" that have evolved only once, and he was able to compile only a handful, such as the bombardier beetle that mixes two chemicals on demand to shoot a noxious stream at enemies, or the diving bell spider, which uses a bubble to breathe.

Return to the returning eye. The eyeball retina is lined with a layer of a very specialized protein that performs the tricky work of perceiving light. This protein, called rhodopsin, transfers the photon energy from incoming light to an outgoing electrical signal sent along the optic nerve. Rhodopsin is an archaic molecule present not only in the retina of camera-eyes, but also in the most primitive lensless eye-spot of a lowly worm. It is found throughout the animal kingdom, and it retains its structure wherever it is found because it works so well. The same molecule has probably remained unchanged for billions of years. Several competing light-trigger molecules (crytochromes) aren't as efficient, or robust, suggesting that rhodopsin is simply the best molecule for seeing that can be found after 2 billion years of looking. But surprisingly, rhodopsin is another example of convergent evolution, because it evolved twice in two separate kingdoms in the deep past. Once in Archaea and once in Eubacteria.

This fact should shock us. The number of possible proteins is astronomical. There is an alphabet of 20 base symbols (amino acids), which make up every protein "word" which on average is say, 100 symbols, or 100 bases, long. (In fact many proteins are much longer, but for this calculation 100 is sufficient.) The total number of possible proteins that evolution could generate (or discover) is 100^20 or 10^39. This means that are more possible proteins than there are stars in the universe. But let's simplify that. Because only one in a million "words" fold into a functioning protein, let's vastly reduce that magnitude and agree that the number of potential working proteins is equal to the number of stars in the universe. Discovering a specific protein would be equal to arriving at a specific star.

By this analogy evolution finds new proteins (new stars) by a series of hops. It jumps from one protein to a "nearby" related one, and then hops onto the next novel form until it reaches some remote unique protein far from where it started, just as one might travel to a distant sun by hopping stars. But in a universe as large as ours, once you landed on a distant star one hundred hops away, you would never reach it again by the same random process. It is statistically impossible. But that is what evolution did with rhodopsin. Out of all the protein stars in the universe, it found this one – a protein that has not been improved upon for billennia – twice.

But the impossibility of "twice-struck" keeps happening in life. Evolutionist George McGhee writes in Convergent Evolution: "The evolution of the ichthyosaur or porpoise morphology is not trivial. It can be correctly described as nothing less than astonishing that a group of land-dwelling tetrapods, complete with four legs and a tail, could devolve their appendages and their tails back into fins like those of a fish. Highly unlikely, if not impossible? Yet it happened twice, convergently in the reptiles and the mammals, two groups of animals that are not closely related. We have to go back in time as far as the Carboniferous to find a common ancestor for them; thus, their genetic legacies are very, very different. Nonetheless, the ichthyosaur and the porpoise both have independently re-evolved fins."

What then guides this return to the improbable? If the same protein, or "contingent" form, is evolved twice it is obvious that every step of the way cannot be random. The prime guidance for these parallel journeys is their common environment. Both archaea rhodopsin and Eubacterial rhodopsin, and ichthyosaur and dolphin, float in the same seas with the same advantages gained by adaptations. In the case of rhodopsin, because the molecular soup surrounding the precursor molecules is basically the same, their selection pressure will tend to favor the same direction on each hop. In fact, the match of environmental niche is usually the reason given for most occurrences of convergent evolution. Arid, sandy deserts on different continents tend to produce large-eared, long-tailed, hopping rodents because the climate and terrain sculpts a similar set of pressures and advantages.

Yes, but why then doesn't every similar desert in the world produce a Kangaroo Rat, or Jerboa, and why aren't all desert rodents Kangaroo Rats? The orthodox answer is that evolution is a highly contingent process, where random events and pure luck change the course, so that even within parallel environments it is very rare to arrive at the same morphological solution. Contingency and luck are so strong in evolution that the marvel is that convergence ever happens. Based on the number of the possible forms that can be assembled from the molecules of life, and the central role of random mutation and deletion in shaping them, significant convergence from independent origins should be as scarce as miracles.

But a hundred, or thousand, cases of isolated significant convergent evolution suggest something else at work. Some other force pushes the self-organization of evolution towards recurring solutions. A different dynamic besides the lottery of natural selection steers the course of evolution so that it can reach a remote unlikely destination more than once. It is not a supernatural force, but a fundamental dynamic as simple in its core as evolution itself.

Evolution is driven toward certain recurring and inevitable forms by two forces of convergence:

1) The negative constraints cast by the laws of geometry and physics, which limit the scope of life's possibilities. And,
2) The positive constraints produced by the complexity of interlinked genes and metabolic pathways, which generates a few repeating new possibilities.

These two dynamics create a push in evolution that gives it a direction. Both of these forces continue to operate in the technium as well. The two dynamics shape the inevitabilities of technology. Let me address each biological influence in turn.

The Negative Constraints of Matter

Life – even in the most alien alternative we can possibly imagine – requires flexibility. Material flexibility requires chemical bonds that switch easily, electrons that can be caught or sent easily, molecules that can dissolve and precipitate without great energy expenditures. This ease of change is essential for life, and the matter in our universe is just right for self-organized change. For reasons we don't understand, the laws of the universe contain many goldilocks zones, with settings that are "not too little, not too much" for flexibility and life. Just six basic cosmological constants govern the dimensions that enable extropic, self-organizing structures in the universe. If those values settled at even a minute difference away from the values they now have this universe would not contain stars, galaxies, planets, or much of the physical organization of matter and energy that we know. A further set of some 30 cosmological constants are sympathetic towards life as we know it.

But every single one of these favorable goldilocks constants also significantly shapes what is built under their sway. For example water molecules in aggregate possess a set of peculiar characteristics. Water can hold and transport myriad other molecules, it can form a crystalline structure less dense than its liquid form, it is transparent in visible spectrums, and it wields a polar charge and high surface tension. All of water's just-right goldilocks qualities influence, however indirectly, everything made with water. Ditto for other elements and energetic forces; their quirks ripple outward. The constraints of H2O and oxygen and carbon trickle up into molecules constructed with them, and eventually their constraints indirectly govern even the organisms made with those molecules.

One example: Plants and animals come in a bewildering diversity of scales. Insects can be microscopic like lice, or giant, like horned beetles the size of shoes; redwood trees tower 100 meters tall, and miniature alpine plants fit in a thimble; immense blue whales swell as big as ships, and pygmy chameleon shrink to less than an inch long. Yet the size of each species of these plant and animal is not arbitrary. They follow a law that is astonishingly constant, dictated by the physics of matter: the mass of an organism scales to the third power of its body length. The surface tension of water, ordained by the structure of H2O, dictates the strength of a cell wall, which mandates the maximum height per width, which constrains the form. The size of a creature, therefore is linked to its mass and vice versa and no plant or animal wavers far from this constant slope. These physical forces play out not just on earth, but everywhere in the universe, and so we might expect any organisms based on water, whenever and wherever they evolve, to converge upon this same universal size ratio (adjusted for local gravity).

The metabolism of life is likewise constrained. Small animals live fast and die young. Big animals plod along. The speed of life for animals – the rate at which their cells burn energy, the speed their muscle twitches, the time it takes them to gestate, or to mature – is remarkably proportional to their life span and size. It turns out metabolic rate is proportional to mass to the 3/4 power, and its heart rate is proportional to mass to the –1/4 power. These constants derive from the fundamental rules of physics and geometry, and the natural advantages to minimize energy surfaces (lung surface, cell surface, circulatory capacity, etc). While a mouse's heart and lungs beat rapidly compared an elephant's, both mouse and elephant count the same number of beats and breaths per life. It is as if mammals are assigned 1.5 billion heartbeats, and told to use them as you like. Tiny mice speed ahead in a fast-forward version of elephant life.

The even slope of mass/length in both animals and plants.

In biology this power law was well known for mammals, but researchers recently realized a similar law governs all plants, bacteria and even ecosystems. By factoring in the "body" temperature of the physical process as well as its density, the ratio of energy use, mass, and size all converge toward a constant rate that is a multiple of a 1/4 exponent. Dilute soups of cool oceanic algae are slo-mo versions of life packed dense in a warm-blooded heart. Many living processes -- from the number of hours of an sleep an animal needs, to hatching times for eggs, to the rate at which a forest accumulates wood mass, to the mutation rate in DNA -- all seem to follow this universal scaling law. "We've found that despite the incredible diversity of life, from a tomato plant to an amoeba to a salmon, once you correct for size and temperature, many of these [metabolic] rates and times are remarkably similar," say Gillooly and West, the researchers who discovered this law. "Metabolic rate is the fundamental biological rate" they claim – "a universal clock" reckoned in energy, at which all life proceeds.

Other physical constants run through the biological world. Bilateral symmetry recurs in almost every family of life. It seems to bring adaptive advantage on many levels, from balance to redundancy to compression of code. Other geometric forms, like a tube for transport in plants or animals, or legs, are just plain good physics. Some recurring designs, such as the arboreal splay of branches in a tree and coral, or the swirling spiral of petals on a flower are based on the mathematics of growth. They repeat because the math is eternal. Biochemists Michael Denton and Craig Marshall state that "recent advances in protein chemistry suggest that at least one set of biological forms — the basic protein folds — is determined by physical laws similar to those giving rise to crystals and atoms. They give every appearance of being invariant platonic forms."

There are some branches of life that increase the frequency at which they recycle evolutionary solutions (called homoplasy, or non-independent convergence) as they diversify, almost as if the pool of possibilities in that neck of the woods was becoming exhausted. Conway Morris observes that "evolutionary novelty is often only skin deep because it relies more on co-option and redeployment than invention." For a taxonomic branch stuck in redeploying the same tricks it usually takes a discontinuous radical evolutionary breakthrough to shake up the family tree and generate novel solutions again.

The imaginary Groveback by Wayne Barlowe.

A "periodic table" of existing life forms graphed on a matrix of physical characters would reveal blank white spaces lacking organisms that "could be." Such "could be" life forms that obey the constraints of matter – because we see the same form in other taxon -- include a mammalian snake, a dinosaur mole, a flying spider, or a terrestrial squid. In fact, some of these could still evolve on earth, if we left the current flora and fauna alone long enough. (See Dougal Dixon's magical "Zoology of the Future" in "After Man") These speculative creatures are entirely plausible because they are convergent, recycling (but remixing) morphological forms that repeat throughout the biosphere.

An ET angler fish by Boulay and Steyer.

When artists and science-fiction authors fantasize alternative planets full of living creatures, try as they might to "think outside the box" of earthly constraints, many of the organisms they envision also retain many of the forms found on Earth. Some would chalk this up to a lack of imagination; we are constantly being surprised by bizarre forms found in the deepest part of the oceans on our own home planet; surely life on other planets will be full of surprises. Others, myself included, agree that we will be surprised, but that given what "could be" – that vast imaginary space of all possible ways in which one could make an organism – what we will find on another planet will only fill one small corner of what could be. Life on other planets will be surprising because of what it does with what we already know. Biologist George Wald, who won a Nobel prize for his work on eye retina pigments told NASA, " I tell my students: learn your biochemistry here and you will be able to pass examinations on Arcturus."

Dougal Dixon's reasonable terrestrial Megasquid.

Any wannabe worldbuilder intent on birthing a consistent alternative biology should immerse themselves in the 1,100 pages of D'Arcy Wentworth Thompson's classic study "On Growth and Form." In overflowing detail this in-depth analysis demonstrates how the nature of materials and geometry governs morphology across nearly every taxon. Thompson examines the growth of mollusk shells, crustacean carapace, mammal skulls and skeletons, fish shapes, the venation of insect wings, the radial patterns of diatoms, and the maximal packing patterns of leaf cells, for just a few examples. Written in 1917, long before the Burgess Shale fossils were re-interpreted, Thompson concludes in the epic's final pages that "the infinitude of possible forms is always limited," and that "plain alternatives, of physico-mathematical possibility, are likely to repeat themselves."

D'Acy Thompson's laws of morphing.

Nowhere is that physical constraint of the infinitude more evident than in the structure of DNA. The molecule of DNA is so remarkable, it is in its own class. As every student knows, DNA is a unique double helical chain that can zip and unzip with ease, and of course replicate itself. But DNA can also arrange itself into flat sheets, or into interlocking rings, or even an octahedron. This singular gymnastic molecule serves as a dynamic mold that prints the stupendously large set of proteins responsible for the physical characterizes of tissue and flesh, which in turn, by mutual interaction, generates ecosystems of complexity. From this single omnipotent quasi-crystal the awesome variety of life in all its unexpected shapes springs forth. From subtle rearrangements along its tiny ancient spiral DNA projects the majesty of a strolling sauropod 60 feet high, the delicate gem of a iridescent green dragon fly, the frozen immaculacy of an white orchid petal, and of course the intricacies of the human mind.

If we acknowledge no supernatural force working outside of evolution, then all these structures – and more – must in some sense be contained within the structure of DNA. Where else could they come from? Their possibility must be held in the greater potential of this remarkable crystal. In the same way that the filigreed details, distinctive branching, furrowed bark, and lobed leaves of a white oak tree are all contained in its acorn, the details of all oak lineages and future species of oaks are resident, in some fashion, in the original acorn of DNA. "Some potentially useful mutations are so probable that they can be viewed as being encoded implicitly in the genome," says biologist L. H. Caporale.

Of course merely inspecting this molecule reveals none of this cornucopia; we seek in vain to find a giraffe in the spiral ladder of DNA. But we can seek alternative "acorn" molecules as a way to re-run this unfolding to see if something else besides DNA could also generate similar diversity, reliability, and evolvibility. A number of scientists have searched for alternatives to DNA in the laboratory by engineering "artificial" DNAs, or constructing DNA-like molecules, or by engineering wholly original biochemistry. There's a bunch of practical reasons to wield a DNA alternative, but so far alternatives with DNA's versatility and brilliance are in short supply.

The first obvious approach in the quest for an alternative DNA molecule is to substitute slightly modified base pairs into the helix. K.D. James and A. D. Ellington write in "Origins of Life and Evolution of the Biosphere" that "experiments with alternative base pairing schemes have suggested that the current set of purines and pyrimidines [the canonical base pair types] is in many ways optimal…the unnatural nucleic acid analogues that have been examined experimentally have proven to be largely incapable of self-replication."

Of course science is rife with discoveries initially thought unlikely, implausible, or impossible. In the case of self-organizing life, we might want to be particularly hesitant to generalize about alternatives since everything we can say about it is based on a sample size (so far) of exactly one.

But chemistry is chemistry, everywhere in the universe. Carbon sits at the center of life because it gregarious and contains so many hooks for other elements to bind to. It has a particularly friendly relationship with oxygen. Carbon is easily oxidized as fuel for animals, and easily un-oxidized (reduced) by chlorophyll in plants. And of course it forms the backbone for long chains of incredibly diverse mega-molecules. Silicon, carbon's sister element, is the most likely alternative to produce a non-carbon-based life form. Silicon also is very prolific in its hooking up with all variety of elements and it is more abundant on the planet than carbon. But silicon suffers from a few major drawbacks. It does not link up into chains with hydrogen, limiting the size of its derivatives. Silicon-silicon bonds are not stable in water. And when silicon is oxidized, its respiratory output is a mineral precipitate, rather than the gas like carbon dioxide. That makes it hard to dissipate. A silicon creature would exhale bricks of sand. Basically silicon produces dry life. Without a liquid matrix it's hard to imagine how complex molecules are transported around to interact. Perhaps silicon-based life inhabits a fiery world and the silicates are molten. Or perhaps the matrix is very cold liquid ammonia. But unlike ice, which floats and insulates the unfrozen liquid, frozen ammonia sinks, allowing the oceans to freeze whole. These concerns are not hypothetical, but are based on experiments to produce alternatives to carbon-based life. So far, all evidence points to DNA as the "perfect" molecule.

For even though clever minds like ours may invent a new lifebase, finding a lifebase which can evolve itself is an entirely higher order. The synthetic lifebase we create in the lab may be robust enough to survive on its own in the wild. But an alternative synthetic life does not need to self-organize itself into existence. That after all, is the whole purpose of minds. Minds create things that don't need to be self-born. If you can skip the need of a self-made birth, you can jump to all kinds of complex systems that would never evolve on their own. Minds liberate types of complexity that evolutionary origins prevent. Robots and AIs don't need to self-organize from metal-laden rocks.

However, DNA did. By far the most amazing thing about the strangest molecule in the universe is that this potent nucleus of life put itself together. The most basic carbon-based ingredients – such as methane or formaldehyde -- are readily available in space, and even in pools on planets. But every abiotic condition (lightening, heat, warm pools, impact, freezing/thawing) we have tried as a stimulus to organize these lego-like building blocks into the elementary sugars of RNA and DNA fail to generate sustainable amounts of them. In experiments to artificially generate the components of a key sugar such as ribose (the R in RNA, and the ribo in deoxyribonucleic acid, DNA), the ribose is swamped by scores of other compounds in large quantities, which tend to degrade the small amount of ribose. All the known pathways to creating ribose are so complicated they are difficult to reproduce in the lab and (so far) unthinkable as existing in the wild. And that is just for one of eight sugars. The necessary – and potentially contradictory -- conditions to nurture dozens of other unstable compounds towards self-organization have not been found.

Yet, here we are, so we know that these peculiar pathways can be found. At least once. But the supreme difficulty of simultaneous improbable pathways working in parallel suggests that there may be only one molecule that can negotiate this maze, and self-assemble its scores of parts, self-replicate once birthed, and then unleash from its seed, the head-shaking, eye-popping, mind-blowing variety and exuberance we see in life on earth. It is not enough to find a molecule that can self-replicate and self-generate ever-larger mounds of increasing complexity. There may indeed be multiple amazing chemical nuclei capable of that. Rather the challenge is finding one that does all that and can make itself, too.

So far, there are no other contenders even close to offering that kind of magic. This is why Simon Conway Morris calls DNA "the strangest molecule in the universe." And why, if it is true, that Norman Pace says there may be a "universal biochemistry" based upon it. He speculates: "It seems likely that the basic building blocks of life anywhere will be similar to our own, in the generality if not in the detail. Thus the 20 common amino acids are the simplest carbon structures imaginable that can deliver the functional groups used in life… Similarly, the five-carbon sugars used in nucleic acids are likely to be repeated themes… Further, because of the unique abilities of purines and pyrimidines to interact with one another with particular specificity, these subunits too, or something very similar to them, are likely to be common to life wherever it occurs." To paraphrase George Wald: If you want to study ET, study DNA.

There is another hint of the unique (perhaps universally unique) power of DNA. Two molecular biologists (Freeland and Hurst) computationally generated random genetic code systems by substituting all possible single-nucleotide for all codons. Since the combinatorial sum of all possible genetic codes overwhelms the time in the universe to compute them, the researchers sampled a subset of these, focusing on those systems they classified as chemically viable. They explored a million variations (out of what they estimated to be a pool of 270 million viable alternatives) and ranked the systems on how well they minimized errors. After a million runs the measured efficiency of the genetic codes fell into a typical bell curve. Far off to one side was Earth's DNA. Out of a million alternative genetic codes, our current DNA scheme was "the best of all possible codes," they conclude, and even if it is not perfect, it is at least "one in a million."

On the other hand, biologist Harold Morowitz sorted through a database of 3.5 million organic molecules with simple criteria to search for alternative intermediates for the formation of citrates – a candidate for the universal biochemistry of life. He found the same 11 compounds that evolution arrived at and 142 other possibilities that might work, although no one has tested them yet. This set of alternatives is relatively small (out of 3.5 million), suggesting that while life's solutions may not be unique, they are limited and not at all infinite. As Morowitz notes, "There are only four different kinds of one-carbon compounds." This narrow set severely constrains what can be built with these elementary blocks.

Chlorophyll is another strange molecule. It is ubiquitous on the planet, yet not optimal. The spectrum of the sun peaks in the yellow frequency, yet chlorophyll is optimized for red/blue color. As George Wald notes, chlorophyll's "triple combination of capacities" -- a high receptivity to light, ability to store the captured energy and relay it to other molecules, and its ability to transfer hydrogen in order to reduce carbon dioxide -- made it essential in the evolution of solar gathering plants "despite its disadvantageous absorption spectrum." Wald goes on to speculate that this non-optimization is evidence that there is no better carbon-based molecule for converting light into sugar, because if there were, wouldn't several billion years of evolution produce it?

(It may seem like I contradict myself when I point out convergence via rhodopsin's maximum optimization and chlorophyll's unoptimization. But I don't think the level of efficiency is central. In both cases it is the paucity of alternatives that is the strongest evidence for inevitability. In chlorophyll's case, no alternatives appear after billions of years in spite of its imperfection, and in rhodopsin's case, despite a few minor competitors, the same molecule was found twice in an otherwise vast empty field.)

The mind is a powerful tool. No doubt someday researchers in the lab will devise an alternative base to organic DNA that is able to unleash a river of life. Accelerated vastly, this synthetic lifebase might evolve all kinds of creatures, including sentient beings. However, this alternative living system -- whether based on silicon, carbon nano-tubes, or nuclear gases in a black cloud -- would have its own inevitabilities, channeled by the constraints embedded in its original seeds. It would not be able to evolve everything, but it could produce many types of life that our life could not. Some science fiction authors have playfully speculated that DNA might itself be such an engineered molecule. It is, after all, ingeniously optimized, over-engineered, and its origins are vexing. Perhaps DNA was cleverly crafted by superior intelligences, and shot-gunned into the universe to naturally seed empty planets over billions of years? We would be just one of many seedlings that sprouted from this generic starter mix. This kind of engineered panspermia might explain a lot, but it does not remove the uniqueness of DNA. Nor does it remove the channels that DNA has laid for evolution on earth.

The restraints of geometry govern life. "Underlying all the diversity of life is a finite set of natural forms that will recur over and over again anywhere in the cosmos where there is carbon-based life," claim biochemists Michael Denton and Marshall. Evolution simply can not make all possible proteins, all possible light gathering molecules, all possible appendages, all possible means of locomotion, all possible shapes. Life, rather than being boundless and unlimited in every direction, is bounded and limited in so many directions by the bounded nature of matter itself.

We have every reason to marvel at the inventiveness and exuberance of evolution. Every day field biologists discover another organism on earth, or something new about a known species, that surprises us. We hold nature up as the paragon of ingenuity. Yet compared to what our brains could imagine, the diversity of life on Earth occupies a very small corner. Our alternative universes are full of creatures far more diverse, creative and "out there" than the life here. But most of our imaginary creatures would never work because they would be full of physical contradictions. The world of the actual-possible is much smaller than it first appears.

Indeed, as the complexity of life increases so do the limitations. The limits of chemical bonds and the constraints of thermodynamics matter most for the beginning of life. As proto-life begins to touch more kinds of chemical elements, their atomic constraints are added. As life acquires locomotion, the physics of viscosity, surface tension, dynamic resistance come into play. When organisms add eyes, they add the constraints of spectrum and light transmission. The more senses they add, the more physics they touch, the more limits are embedded.

All these constraints trickle upward and remain in place even as evolution proceeds to make more complexity. Eventually as life surrounds itself with more life, it becomes surrounded by entities exerting their own inherent constraints, so life itself acts as a limit to what is possible.

But while the web of life, and its mechanisms, can negatively constrain possibilities, the apparatus of life can also serve as a positive constraint, pushing life toward certain forms, which is the subject of this next section.

The Positive Constraints of Epigenetics

(continued in the next post.....)