Walter Derzko's Smart Economy - innovation, entrepreneurship

Walter Derzko has a weblog Smart Economy which is worth checking out. I put a permanent link in to it and stole his photo from his profile to put at the left here.

His weblog is subtitled:

A Forum for discussing emerging smart discoveries and emerging technologies with built-in intelligence or embedded smarts. The Smart Future is already here, just the last page hasn't been written yet! Every advance brings benefits as well as intrusions. Have your say !! Read, enjoy, explore, speculate, comment !!

And he describes himself this way:

I'm a futurist and business development consultant interested in emerging smart technologies, scenario planning, and opportunity recognition and lateral thinking

And a current activity:

[C]ollecting materials for a new certificate program that I will be teaching on Entrepreneurship and Innovation this Fall at the University of Toronto, School of Continuing Studies...

He seems a very high-energy, 3 espresso person, with a Boing-Boing scan of the horizon for new things that might be interesting.

...

.Strategy without action is a day-dream; action without strategy is a nightmare" - old Japanese proverb

......Ours is the age that is proud of machines that think and suspicious of men who try to." - H. Mumford Jones

"Without changing our patterns of thought, we will not be able to solve the problems we created with our current pattern of thought." A. Einstein

"Change is difficult, but complacency and stagnation are showstoppers..." Walter Derzko

"Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world; indeed, it's the only thing that ever has." - Margaret Mead

His Welcome page starts this way

Welcome to this discussion Forum on the Smart Economy-where you can discuss the impacts of new emerging smart technologies-technologies that have built-in intelligence or smarts. I'll be posting examples of new and emerging smart technologies at least once a day.

The Smart Economy is quietly booming !

People have tried to label the post-industrial economy in many ways: the Knowledge economy, the information economy, the Internet economy, the bio economy, etc. One denominator that they all have in common is that smart objects play an increasingly influential role- hence what I call the “Smart Economy”

My Comments

There's no question that many "things" that used to be "dumb" are becoming "smart", in the sense that they are developing a little more robust awareness of their own surroundings and showing adaptive response to that in real-time.

That is the same kind of behavior I've been describing for "feedback control loops", that I'm increasingly thinking are a good candidate for the building block of Life, even more so than DNA, because the "song" is the same even if the loop is implemented in silicon or water-levels in a glass or any other medium.

Well, so here's a thought along those lines. If self-aware, goal-seeking feedback control loops are taken as the basic primitive unit of "life" -- the atom from which everything else that's alive is built -- then we should be noticing that the world around us is being flooded with new protoLife at an accelerating rate.

These loops, as I've described them, will have a natural tendency to be "self-organizing" and "self-assembling", in order to work more stably and survive (always a goal) and to thrive. Also, sooner or later I suspect that, like teenagers and Science, intelligence discovers that it's not as intelligent as it thought once, and even that it can't even tell what it's doing wrong without outside independent perspective. (We're trapped by the problem Godel noted -- there is no way we can assess our own blind spots.)

And so, we have to find "friends" to hang out with and spot for each other and compare notes.

In other words, both what Derzko calls "smarts" and what I'm terming "proto-life" are naturally self-organizing but moreover tend to reach out and try to organize on the next higher level as well, seeking out peers to work together with.

So, OK, I have a background in Computer Science as well as Information Technology (IT) (two very different fields by the way) and this issue is interesting to both. First, from Computer Science's point of view - this whole thing is a huge connectionist computational device that is working out some problem and carrying out some process. Aspects of that can be simulated and we can rush ahead and predict some possible alternative outcomes and what determines which of those outcomes will occur. That may suggest social action in some way.

Second, like it or not, this whole thing we're assembling, or finding ourselves in the middle of the assembly plant for, is importantly a hybrid beastie -- part DNA, part Silicon, and a lot of "control loops."

It's also hybrid across scales -- part genes trying to make new genes, part people trying to make new people, part organizations trying to Terra-form a world for them to thrive in, part nations trying to Terra-form the planet to suit their own growth needs.

And it's also hybrid across species -- our "human" bodies, when we look inside them, are actually, well, kind of micro-societies of a lot of different organisms. If we killed off everything except the human body, we'd probably die too. We need all these intestinal bacteria to protect us and to digest food properly.

And, most of the time, all these hybrids get along fine. There are probably millions or billions of kinds of bacteria, and only 100 or so don't get along well with us, and most of that is because they are themselves making mistakes or getting infected by viruses.

Academic fields and people keep trying to divide the beast apart into different pieces as if the pieces existed independently of each other, which they don't. In the end, you can't separate personal health from population health, and as our antibiotics run out of steam and TB and AIDS and other pathogens return, we'll all pay for the billions of people who we've neglected to care for, who we perceive as "them" and "not us".

You can't separate corporate health from personal and community health and they should be allies, not mortal enemies, in any rational, stable, sustainable solution. Yet we see Public Health often attacking corporations as if they were the devil incarnate, and corporations acting as if "people were the problem" and if only there were no people, business would boom. Well, looking around southeast Michigan as the Big-Three auto industry fades and lays off more and more people, I don't see personal health getting suddenly much better, as if a huge burden had been removed from the people, now that GM and Ford are "letting up." I see things getting worse.

And, you can no longer separate the use of computers and "smart" components from the growth of all of that beast. I keep laughing at all these books on Toyota and The Toyota Way, that emphasize people, people, people. Yes, it's true, and I have been the first to go on too long about it, we shouldn't dream of "systems so perfect that no one needs to be good." But, on the other hand, we shouldn't try to "be good" and think that will remove the need for systems to manage the details a planetary-scale organism. We need both.

Toyota does have an amazing culture. Yes. They also have amazing robots. Let's not forget that little thing. For interpersonal communication, and overcoming secrecy and failure-hiding, having a visual system with bright colors and an "andon cord" is GREAT -- way better than nothing. But, if you shut off all the computers, Toyota would shut down too.

In fact, yesterday, in my second last slide, I show a "double helix" of human / DNA based life, and IT/computer based proto-life, growing up like Morning Glories around the guiding trellis of the hierarchy of organizational control levels.

There's only one planet here, guys. There's only one human race. We're all in the same lifeboat, us, corporations, people, our genes, our nations -- and it gets worse, not better, if we kill each other off or try to pretend each other doesn't exist or doesn't matter.

Once again, I'll reemphasize these key points:

1) If we don't solve everything, we haven't solved anything.

2) That's not as hard as it looks, extrapolating upwards, because those are the wrong variables to use to deal with everything, and we need to come down from above to find the intrinsic, easy variables and easy equations to manage with and plan around. There's a second easy place to work at the top end. (see the diagrams in Scale and Scope Creep)

3) Regardless, if we use symmetrical constructs that are scale-invariant, the whole "everything" collapses into a few vertical constructs - the ones Ken Wilber calls "halons". We can reduce even an infinite series of terms that have a constant relationship to the neighboring term into the final sum, without having to look at every one or do an infinite amount of work.

Example for the brave : we can determine the sum 1+1/2+1/4+1/8 +1/16 .... without having to add them all up, once we see the pattern. Well, someone can. That has to use ideas from "limits" and "Taylor series", and "infinite series" stuff. ( if you care the sum = 2, and any series shaped like 1 + r +r*r + r*r*r etc. converges on a sum = 1/(1-r) , and in our case r = (1/2) so the sum is 1 over (1/2) which, yes I'll do it for you, "2".

The point is that certain kinds of infinite series collapse nicely, mathematically, into a single value or a single relationship. Symmetrical ones tremendously reduce the complexity of the problem, or, in computer science terms, the "order of the algorithm", often changing an impossibly hard problem to an easy problem. (for them.) That's why I'm always going on so excitedly when I find some way to find a symmetry in the problem.

Second digression. Symmetry is incredibly powerful. Science asserts that the laws of physics are symmetrical, that is, don't change, regardless what time you start your clock, or whether your lab is facing north or west, or whether your lab is here or in another galaxy. There are symmetries over time, angle, and position. Big deal you might say. The big deal is that from that alone you (well, very smart "they") can conclude that therefore, energy, angular momentum, and momentum must be conserved quantities. Again, you may say "big deal" but knowing that is most of physics. So, if I'm arguing that there is also a symmetry over "scale", that would probably mean there's another constant waiting for someone to do equivalent math. If that's your thing, go for it. I think all the equations you need are in Mechanics by Landau and Lifshitz, Pergammon press, 1960, chapter 2, on "Conservation Laws". If you don't understand what a "Lagrangian" is, don't go there. It would almost seem as if the evolution of complexity and integration at ever larger scales would have something akin to "momentum" and would be a thing that would continue at a given rate unless an outside force acted on it to accelerate it (faster, slower, or change in direction.) I'm too rusty to do the math myself. I'm sure there's someone who could glance at this and go, "oh, yeah" and write down the answer.


So, I'd add to Derzko's notes on all the pieces becoming smarter, that this is "turtles all the way" upwards as well as downwards. Not only are the pieces becoming smarter, but all the aggregate beings (like corporations and nations) are becoming smarter too.

The pivotal question that determines whether we will all die here shortly, is whether they are becoming wiser.

Because they sure are becoming stronger and ever more capable of devising ingenious new methods to kill each other. Even our bombs are becoming "smart". Smart is not good enough.

Smart without "wise" is worse, not better.

And, to a very large extend, "wise" means that we have expanded our horizons, in time, distance, and scale, and can see the "big picture." We stop "sub-optimizing" and chasing false flashes of prosperity or success that only look that way locally, and, seen from a better perspective, are large-scale disasters and lose-lose strategies.

It would be great if the smartness happens fast enough that we stop destroying the lifeboat Earth and expand our horizons enough to see that the toe we're about to bite is attached to a foot that is attached to a leg that is attached to a body that is ... oopsie ... our own body. This isn't some kum-ba-ya, let's all sing and be brothers soft stuff -- this is very real connections on a deterministic level.

We're all "one" whether we like it or not, even with those idiots in Marketing. Even with Lawyers. Even with people of different skin color. Even with corporations and corporate executives, or labor and labor organizers. Even with capitalists and communists and socialists and Christians and Muslims. Even with machines. It's a very small world, and dense with feedback loops. Everything is impacting everything else. We need a theory of everything that cuts through all that and gives us some stable guidance amid the change.

The "loose couplings" between us, amplified by feedback loops, turn out to be "tight couplings" after all, when we trace them out.

But, big can be easier. We can't predict water molecule motion well, even with quantum mechanics, but we can predict "water" well enough to build plumbing. Up is down.

So, it's time to really think about "Theories of everything" that include more than subatomic particles and string theory and quarks or whatever is in that pot these days.

"Everything" is what you see when you look out the window. We know more than nothing about it. We need to get together, pool our notes, and see what they add up to. We need to get to know who "we" are, and realize that the bond is even tighter than "brothers." We actually are each other.

We can like it or hate it, work with it or against it, but I think the math holds up under scrutiny.

We're going to have to accept that even sufficient money does not give us the "freedom" to not have to learn how to get along with other people, cultures, and nations.

It would really help if we'd stop shooting holes in each other's ends of the lifeboat, as if their sinking would "help" us. Yeah, we'd be "higher" than them at last ... for a few seconds.

As T.S. Eliot, in the Four Quartets , said

We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.

Wade