Comment on Artificial Intelligence and Artificial Life

Evolving since John Holland's "genetic algorithms" in 1975, there is a solid literature in "Artificial Life" which goes well beyond "artificial intelligence". Search on "Chris Langton", "Symposium on Artificial Life", and "Santa Fe Institute." The work stirs deep anxiety and overt hostility from many and tends to remain low visibility.

Treading on heresy, I discount those who discount the idea that the internet and electronically mediated corporations could become "alive" or might as well be alive, because skeptics have no proven, calibrated tools which to detect e-life, or a-life, looking from the bottom up. What does it look like to a cell to be part of a human body? How does it change the cell's life? Not very much on a moment by moment basis, for sure.

You'd think those same skeptics would argue that a human body is "just cells" and there is no larger animating life (such as us) that emerges from or inhabits that active system of cells. Given that single example of multilevel-multicellularism, what possible basis is there for arguing it does NOT exist on other scales? Pure human vanity and remnants of the desire for humans to be the center of the universe and the greatest creation of God or nature are emotion not reasons.

I think the burden of proof should be the other way. What shows that we are NOT already part of a larger effectively-alive structure?

Science, please, not legend, should guide the exploration of "life". This is a rather critical question with very profound implications that most people find uncomfortable and inconvenient. We need to look at it more deeply. It is far more important than global warming.

Survival of the selfless

"The consequences of regarding evolution as a multilevel process, with higher-level selection often overriding lower-level selection, are profound." This under-statement is in the latest issue of New Scientist, in a must-read piece titled "Survival of the selfless", by sociobiologists David Sloan Wilson and Edward O. Wilson. (New Scientist , 3 Nov 2007).

Indeed. Since I've been presenting the case for multi-level co-evolution in my weblogs for the last 2 years, I am ecstatic to see some big names in the field take the same position.

This furor is about whether it is "genes" that evolve, or "individuals" or groups of individuals such as tribes or species. Views were and are still held by many otherwise rational scientists with religious fervor in the worst sense, and arouse equal vehemence when challenged, akin to that between creationists and evolution-supporters.

This matters because higher level groups may have a whole different "fitness" measure than individuals, and while individuals or genes might evolve faster by being "selfish", the whole society of individuals might evolve faster if everyone was cooperative and altruistic. This battle continues to rage today, and is a core issue in whether "competition" and "free markets" are a good idea or not. So it is tangled with social ramifications, just like all science ultimately is.

This is also a core question in whether a "Theory X" company, driven by internal competition between managers, can ultimately be out-performed by a "Theory Y" company, like Toyota, driven by massive internal cooperation. A lot of egos are at risk of being bruised. A lot of justification for public policy is at risk of being overturned. It's a big deal.

Well, which is it? Do individuals evolve by being better at beating each other, or do groups of individuals dominate by being better at collaboration?

Peeking ahead, of course, I usually argue that "or" is a bad concept, once feedback is involved, and the right solution to look at usually involves "and" and "all of the above, simultaneously, interacting." But, "all of the above, interacting with feedback" was way beyond anyone's ability to compute or analyze, and not an attractive model for most researchers or grant writers.

Well, back to this article. In the face of enormous opposition, and tacking a consensus in the field that group-level evolution is a dead concept, they really settle for the weak claim that "we cannot rule out group-level selection."

Hmm. What's this all about? The concept is fascinating, and the sociology of science is equally fascinating here. The Wilsons ask "Why was group selection rejected so decisively [ in the 1960's ] ?" What a great question in how Science works!

Now, I should note that I'm one of the casualties of what seems a similar disastrous and mistaken turn of a field, namely Artificial Intelligence ("AI"). I got hooked by a course at
Cornell in 1965, taught by Professor Frank Rosenblatt, titled "Learning and Self Reproducing Machines".He and his lab had developed a "perceptron", a maze of switches and wires that connected up to a 20x20 grid of 400 photocells, on which letters of the alphabet were projected.

The perceptron, a model of human vision and learning, was slowly learning to tell the letters apart and identify them. At the time, this was astounding, and many scientists confidently argued that this could never be done. Later, of course, Kurzweil and others carried this technology forward and made OCR text-scanners that are now about 99.5% accurate or better and can read license-plates at an angle from a speeding car. But, in 1965, telling "A" from "B" was a big deal, especially if the "A" wasn't always exactly straight up and down, or in the same place on the grid.

The perceptron's insides were a network of wires and "nodes", a model of our brain's neurons, where the total strength of signal coming into each node was added up, multiplied by some factor, and either triggered or didn't trigger an outgoing signal to the next layer. The system learned by changing these multiplicative factors, searching for some set of them that would ultimately trigger the highest level "A" node when an A was projected on its primitive retina, and trigger at "B" when a B was projected, etc.

Then, the field was devastated by a very authoritative and persuasive paper, ultimately retracted, by highly regarded MIT professor Marvin Minsky that this approach "could never work." Funding dried up, and researchers moved on to other projects. Labs closed.

It took over a decade until somone finally figured out that Minsky had simply proven that a two-level neural net had irrecoverable gaps in its logic, and was not "complete". What he failed to look at, or see, was that these gaps went away when you got to three-levels or more.

Wikipedia has this quote:

Its proof that perceptrons can not solve even some simple problems such as XOR caused the virtual disappearance of artificial neural networks from academic research during the 1970s, until researchers could prove that more complex networks are capable of solving these and all functions.
(source: Hassoun, Mohamad H., Fundamentals of Artificial Neural Networks, The MIT Press, 1995. pp. 35-56.)

Oopsie.

Anyway, it appears to this observer that a similar phenomenon has occurred in socio-biology. Some very persuasive people published papers "debunking" multi-level evolution, well before there was enough computer power to actually simulate it and see what happened. ( In 1978, the mainframe computer I was programming had 4,000 bytes of memory to work with. Not 4 Gig, or 4 Meg, but 4 thousand. Any cell phone today has more than that.)

The social climate at the time made this debunking seem a better idea. World Communism was the mortal enemy of all that was good and holy, threatening "our way or life", justifying huge military expenditures, and anything that suggested communal good or community was more important than individuals was instantly suspect and risked being dragged before the House UnAmerican Activities Committee, where the proponent had to renounce their views or be thrown out of their jobs or locked up as being "unAmerican." Everyone was building bomb-shelters for protection against that day's terror threat.

In addition, religions had held for thousands of years that there was really nothing of importance between man and God, and man was God's noblest creation, so the idea that something larger than humans but smaller than God mattered was suspect dogma. (These days, the evolution of the earth and global warming is in fact dominated by such a larger life-form, "corporations", which have more or less hijacked the role individuals used to play in influencing governmental decisions and policies. But that observation lives in world "A", and discussions of evolution live in world "B", and the two don't talk to each other or trade notes.)

Then, of course, some people didn't like the idea of evolution in any form, and rejected it and most of biology and science based on that view.

So, for many reasons, some good, some not so good, the idea of group evolution as a dominant or even important force was denounced, rejected with emotion, and painted as an example of wrong thinking to be avoided at all costs.

Now, by what the Wilson's say, the whole question is being raised again, this time in a climate with much more powerful computers, where cooperation and collaboration in corporations are not always dirty words, and where the old theories, frankly, didn't explain why there was just so much altruism and goodness in people.

As I say, I'm delighted.

Also, finally, as I've posted on before, finally "feedback" and dynamics are starting to be considered in models, and finally multi-level causality keeps on increasingly showing up in how individuals behave, to the point where the National Institutes of Health and the Institute of Medicine talk about the necessity of using multi-level models to understand social interactions and how the things we see around us, like poverty, are held in place by many subtle but very powerful forces at different levels.

Fascinatingly, this gets us back to what Charles Darwin himself said in The Descent of Man, published in 1871, and the lead sentence in the Wilson's article:

Although a high standard of morality gives but a slight or no advantage to each individual man and his children over the other men of the same tribe ... an advancement in the standard of morality will certainly give an immense advantage to one tribe over another.

The Wilsons say that group evolution, versus individual evolution, doesn't yet explain the observed rise in altruism, although they can computer a visible imact.

Immodestly, I'll suggest that they need, like Minsky, to look at three levels, not two, to see the effect start to dominate.

In fact, all around us, we see corporations trying to survive and be more fit than competition, by pouring resources into internal cooperation and collaboration. So while individuals may continue to follow "greedy algorithms" and seek their own advancement, the corporation is making the playing field non-level and rewarding collaboration as the method of getting ahead personally. In that sense, Corporate policy is serving one role of religion - seeing the larger picture, thinking globally, and then trying to shift the local context so that relatively less visionary individuals, acting locally, will do the right thing if they just follow the rules.

This "think globally, act locally" function is the key role that "unity" has to handle, and it works best if people stop fighting the behaviors and yield and embrace the behaviors instead.

People have to let go of their own ego, "die to themselves" as it were, only to be "reborn" where their ego now includes the other people in the larger village or familiy or corporation they now have committed to belong to. In some sense, they now are just selfish at a whole larger level, as now those villages or corporations or religions or nations start competing, and the whole cycle begins again at a higher level, as they too have to learn that collaboration beats competition hands down in the long run, even if it doesn't seem obvious locally.

This phase transition is one we should be looking for and supporting. It's built so deeply into the fabric of space and time and control loops that it is inevitable and always working in the background, at ever higher levels, simultaneously. At least, that's how I see it.

Of course, that would imply that it won't be long before earth discovers we're just one inhabited planet of millions such planets, and we have to deal with the whole unity/diversity and competition / collaboration thing all over again at an even larger scale and scope.

Which is a model that some people don't like, so this can get emotional again. Still, I think we need to get used to the idea that we are not on top of God's creation, just below Gods ourselves, but maybe quite a few levels lower than that. Earth is not in the center of our galaxy, nor in the center of the universe.

It's a very scary concept to some people, if the world is seen as a place where competition and dog-eat-dog dominates. That belief leads to an imperative to dominate the world, before someone else dominates you. On the other hand, if the world is a place where cooperation and collaboration dominate, then it is a far less scary place, and we should "get with the program."

Already our corporations, internally, are undergoing this transformation. Kicking and screaming, often, but they cannot deny that the Toyota model outshines the GM model.

We need to speed the transition on the level of nations and religions as well, and find that sweet spot where cooperation and collaboration work so much better than competition for dominance and attempts at mutual destruction.

All of those struggles are tied up in this question of the way nature, life, and/or God operate here and what the design principles are that we can rely on to work. The cells in our bodies don't triumph in "beating" each other, but in collaborating with each other. It's a good model, and it's been field tested, and it works.

We should stop fighting it and use it.

Wade


The New Scientist article says of itself:

This is an edited, abridged version of a review in the December issue of The Quarterly Review of Biology. Further reading: D. S. Wilson's book Evolution for Everyone: How Darwin's theory can change the way we think about our lives describes multilevel selection theory for a broad audience. D.O. Wilson and B. Holldobler's forthcoming book The Superorganism analyzes how insect colonies can be seen as products of colony-level selection.

When are all of us smarter than some of us?

This mornings New York Times article "A compass that can clash with modern life" discusses the problems Islam is having relating the words of the Prophet Muhammad, written or spoken, to modern life.

Since Islam doesn't have a single, official clergy, anyone can take it upon himself to start issuing "fatwas" or statements or rulings connecting the two. Some of the results are embarrassing and need to be retracted. Sometimes the results is to split the faith into competing sects, rallied around different interpretations of some passage. We see this in Iraq and it is and expensive and deadly problem.

Is there some better way? Does " modern science" offer any insights that could be helpful? Do we, collectively, know anything relevant today, that we didn't know 500 years ago, or 50 years ago, or last week? Or are we spending our society's bank account trying to get to the moon while our own roof still is leaking and our own people are still in need?

One way to approach "this problem" is first to figure out what kind of problem it is. How many other people have "this" problem? And did any of them figure out how to solve "it" yet? Or, if not, could we join forces, pool notes, and work on our common problem together?

As I understand it, the Exam of Life is "open book", "open notes", and it's OK to consult with each other when we don't know the answer. Unfortunately, this is almost exactly the opposite of what is taught in most school systems today, so we're not very good at this.

Well, if we view this as a problem of trying to maintain constancy despite change, it is a familiar problem to any religion, any nation, any organization, and, well, hmm, just about anything that's alive. In fact, this is the core problem of survival of the pattern of "identity" over time, despite decay, changes in the outside world, and developmental growth. This is the "homeostasis" or "allostasis" or "feedback control loop" problem I've been talking about.

So, this is a pretty important problem to solve. Despite that, very few "scientific" resources have been focused on it, explicitly, as a problem.

The same problem is true of any legal system, or for that matter, any "regulatory" system -- to what standard or goal or identity do we return when the outside world has changed, or time has passed and we've "grown up" ?

Another faced of this issue is that we, all Living things, need something like "love" that is "always the same, but always new." Always exactly the same is boring, and gets old very fast, and doesn't seem like a solution. The constancy evolving life needs isn't "constant" but is more "a loop invariant" in terms I used previously.

I think I had used technical mathematics from the theory of General Relativity to support the case that there is machinery to compute what happens when things are "context dependent" and, worse, where they both cause and are caused by context. Maybe one other person followed that, so I need a better example.

An easier example is simply "perspective". If I see you now, and you are facing me, I may see your two eyes. If you turn to the side, suddenly I see only one eye. Or none. Have you suddenly changed and lost your eyes? No - we all know that it's "the same" person, just a different "viewpoint" - and every viewpoint is, like a shadow, a very limited slice of a three dimensional scene -- from one viewpoint, by one observer with biases and preconceptions and limited vocabulary, at one point in time, expressed and conveyed in words that mean different things to different people at different times.

So, we essentially all have "fragments" of wisdom. And, like the three blind men in the Sufi tale, we have felt different parts of the elephant and have very different ideas of what shape the elephant must be - a tree? A rope? A huge leaf? A spear?

The question of assembling fragments into a larger image is, by no coincidence, the subject of my patent in "Image Processing," which I pursued because this is such a core problem to our survival. (United States Patent 5,613,013 - "Glass Patterns in Image Alignment and Analysis.") It is fair to say that I have spent 20 years or so working on this problem, from the perspective of science, from the perspective of business and organization theory, from the perspective of Computer Science algorithms, from the perspective of Public Health, and, lately, from the perspective of "goal-driven, self-aware, self-repairing feedback control loops."

In other words, while I see these other perspectives as helpful, it really seems to me that the self-aware control loop is the best "primitive" element that is common to all manner of organization of effort and people and cells and health care organizations, and solitons, and composite Life in general.

This is why I'm bouncing from foot to foot with frustrated excitement to try to convey to anyone who will listen that,

• We can map almost every major biological, social and business and religious organization into this framework, and
• People known as "control system engineers" already understand that problem and how to measure, analyze, design, and repair such things - but THEY still are looking at building better jet fighters or cruise-control systems for cars - not "social engineering" or worse "Planetary Completion Engineering."

To quote a line from the movie Ghostbusters "Oh, we have to get these two together."

• This is where Science and Religion come together and join forces instead of clashing. This is, in my mind, where they see the differences between them not as "me" and "enemy" but as, "Oh, look, I'm male and you're ... uh ... female and, ... uh... there are other things we could be doing besides trying to kill each other off." We each bring something of great value to the table, that we've each spent a thousand years, at least, trying to preserve and protect and nurture against all enemies without and within. For what? Why did we do all that? Why have a billion people died protecting this precious cargo - one clearly worth dying for?

Is there a way to make this long story short? Looking ahead at where I come out on this.

• Everyone's right and no one's right.
• In complex adaptive systems the answer is usually "AND" not "OR".
• If you want to align images, an area in which I seem to be a documented expert, it really does help if you hit the fragments with a two step approach.

Here's how I aligned microscopy images at Parke-Davis to get both a wide field of view, to see entire blood vessel cross sections, and high resolution of details, using only a single microscpe with a digital camera. I go over this as non-technically as I can, because it's more than an analogy, it's an "algorithm" or a process that can be used in other areas of life. So, bear with me, this is relevant. Extremely relevant, I think.

• First, get a broad overview picture with a low-power lens, a survey picture.
• Second, take a set of high-resolution images, recalling if you can roughly where you were in the broad overview map when you took each one, and recording that. Some of these detailed pictures may be rotated or offset from where we thought the microscope stage was, since it's not very accurate at this resolution -- so take positions as "fuzzy" or approximate data.
• Third, blow up the size of the low-resolution image until it covers the desk at the same scale as the detailed images, but blurry and short on detail.
• Fourth, put each of the small images roughly where it should go, if you remember, and roughly with the North side towards the north if you can. (I used the "Fourier transform" matching to get the best position automatically.)
• Fifth, allowing some flexibility around that estimated position, (attach it to that place with rubber bands, not with steel bolts), search each pair of neighboring images for parts that overlap really, really well. As you find the best place, using something like the easy method in my patent or something harder, lock that pair together into one larger piece of the puzzle.
• Sixth, keep on working on the next best fit, until all the pieces are aligned or irrelevant (like, the center of a blood vessel with nothing in it.)

And, Voila - a beautiful full-size, high-field of view, high-resolution image that can be analyzed by the next process or person in the chain.

That works in practice. I did a lot of those for our investigation of drugs at Parke-Davis in routine daily research.

There are two amazingly powerful and wonderful keys that unlock the process and change it from almost impossible to almost trivial.

1) there is something called the "crumpled paper theorem" that says, basically, if you take two pictures of the same thing, and crumple one up into a ball and throw it on top of the other one anywhere, you can be guaranteed that at least one point in the bottom image will be directly below the corresponding point in the crumpled image. (Actually, it work for stretching as well, or any "affine transformation.")

2) There are things called "Glass patterns" that are formed when two images are on top of each other on transparent media, so you can see through them both, that are sort of like "Moire patterns." These are "higher order" patterns, that are there, but aren't, but are -- very much like the simple moire pattern I showed a few days ago. With overlapping images that are within about 6 degrees of aligned with each other's angle, you'll see large "circles", even if the images are noisy. You'll see them even if there are no edges or "fiduciary points" to align with, like nice obvious corners. You'll see them in sand dunes, or water waves, or grass, or trees, or stars or laser-speckles off a surface, or just random noise. They're always "there" in higher-order vision land. Once you know that, they're easy to find. Then you can complete the "registration" process and get the images perfectly aligned by just watching the big circles instead of the actual images as you slide them around. (or, in my patent, I just find three points that match in each image, connect them with mathematical rubberbands, and "pull" the images into alignment with those.)

OK, enough on the images already. So there is a "massively parallel" method of aligning fragments correctly so we can automate the assembly of the jigsaw puzzle, even if the individual fragments are somewhat rotated and stretched and different scales. It uses two key facts of life to reduce an impossibly difficult algorithm into a very fast algorithm.

Now, back to social organizations. Suppose we assume that everyone at a meeting, or in an organization, or in a society or religion has some wisdom, some fragment of truth, and can see one side of some tiny local part of the world, but really really well. And we would like to "assemble" all these fragments into a larger picture so that we end up with both a huge field of view and huge depth of detail at the same time.

Here I look at the quotation from Jesus in Mathew that I listed a few days ago, that is common to Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. Basically, first of all love God, and second, love your neighbor as yourself. There is, in my mind, more than an analogy here to the image processing solution of -- first get the big picture, even if blurry, approximately right and get your North end pointing North, then, deal with aligning with your nearest neighbors on all sides -- and voila.

I'm not sure what exactly the "voila" picture will be, but I'd love to see it before I die. I think it will be Beautiful beyond our ability to express it.

Except, in the case of living stuff, Life, cells, people, organizations, societies, legal systems, etc., the "pictures" we need to "align" are these basic "self-aware, self-repairing feedback control loops" that I need a shorter name for. Maybe "sloops". Sounds nautical.

There are two dimensions along which these need to be aligned. One is "vertical" along social structure lines of the hierarchy of life. Cells need to align their health with their local tissues which need to align with organs which need to align with the body, which needs to be aligned with the department or work team, which needs to be aligned with the corporation which needs to be aligned with the national good. There are zillions of non-aligned ways to assemble these multi-scale fragments, but probably very few fully-aligned ways, so maybe the "right" way, or rotated and scaled variants of the "right" way, will become obvious. ( I think Toyota's Lean production system is getting close, although that doesn't explicitly consider impact on each employee's physiological health.)

The other dimension is horizontally. This question of "merger and acquisition" on all scales is a harder one, that doesn't happen with"billiard balls" or mechanical models of the world. Almost by definition, two "objects" when put near each other don't attract, rotate like little magnets, and pull each other together. I suspect LIFE is different, and there is a "click" or a "notch" or a resonance or a "snap to grid" option, where two different life-forms suddenly can form such a tight bond that they then operate as one.

There are many examples at the corporate and biological levels, the most startling being "slime mold" where "individuals" flow together, become "one" large thingie to move to a new place, then "dissolve" back into individuals again. How cool is that!

The mathematics of two loops merging into one is undoubtedly tricky. There's been a lot of work done on what happens when two "vortices" collide - and a vortex is getting close to a self-sustaining, energy absorbing control loop. (Think "tornado" or "hurricane".)

There's also some great on-line videos of what happens when two ring-vortices collide. Did you know that whales and dolphins blow "bubble rings" which are like "blowing smoke rings"? And they seem to do it on purpose, just for fun. Here's a link to some amazing on-line dolphin and whale and human videos.

OK, close the loop, Wade. I started with problems with Islamic fatwa's and ended with dophins blowing bubble rings. The theme here is that most of our social problems seem to involve us trying to get a lot of small feedback loops "aligned" or "merged" in a win-win fashion so as to preserve the precious cargo each of them carries in the merger. I suggested that the mathematics involved is the same as that I solved for aligning digital camera images, but instead of pixels, basically, we have these small feedback loops that are central to each "living" thingie at any scale or level -- from cells to nations.

And I suggested that the visual tools for analyzing such interactions are already available in control system engineering, and we should expect the results to be at least as complex as what happens when two "bubble rings" collide and merge. (as in this video.) Except that, bubble rings aren't fully homeostatic, and don't each repair the damage done by the collision and discover they are now linked like links in a chain, or both occupying one larger feedback loop and identity now, or whatever set of operations we find such things tend do do when simulated.

Then I suggested that this massive-parallel solution technique needs a top-down context component and a bottom-up interaction-with-neighbor component to work efficiently. I noted such components in the Toyota Way and in the Abrahamic religions.

All of which continues my brazen advocacy for putting more eyes and research effort and dollars into understanding how this self-assembly process in society could be facilitated, catalyzed, and made 100 times easier.

We've become unbalanced with too much "specialization" and not enough "reintegration" in our social cycles, both in religions and in legal systems and in corporate structure and in health care systems and hospitals.

This "integration" and reaching across silos without destroying the values carried by each silo is, in my mind, THE key social problem right now.

And it's a bootstrap problem, in fact. If scientists or theologians could get better at working with each other ON this problem, then they would make more progress on reaching the solution. Given that some sociologists and behavioral scientists are reading this, I better include them too. The very same equation is at the core of everything from short-term business meetings or town planning meetings that are effective to large scale political and governance processes that are effective, to military operations that draw on the wisdom of every pair of eyes out there.

How do we make a bigger ONE from many? How do we have unity with diversity? How do we comply with both "In God we trust" and "e pluribus unum"?

That's a problem that's common to us. It's common squared, because it also impacts our abilityto even discuss this problem, which needs to co-evolve as wel work on the problem.
It's larger than "interfaith", it's both faith and science and commerce and public health working together on the very same equation, the very same problem.

Well, off to class. I know this should be 12 posts with pictures. Later.

Wade

How does that help me? - Average American

"They complained in the East,
They are paying too high.
They say that your ore ain't worth digging.
That it's much cheaper down
In the South American towns
Where the miners work almost for nothing...

"The summer is gone,
The ground's turning cold,
The stores one by one they're a-foldin'.
My children will go
As soon as they grow.
Well, there ain't nothing here now to hold them."

North Country Blues (1963)
Bob Dylan

( photo credit: spoon )

So, The New York Times had a story "Couple learn the high price of credit" by John Leland about a typical family in Ypsilanti, Michigan, and a graph of the personal savings rate of the average American. Like most of the other economic indicators, the back broke in about 1982 and it's just been plummeting ever since. The big news is that 2 years ago the rate crossed zero, and now we have a graph where the "average savings rate" of Americans is negative. I asked in economics once what that meant, and the professor said it was "dissavings." I asked again, what if the family has no savings left? Then what does it represent? He stared at me blankly, as if this concept was absurd, and went on.

The last time the personal savings rate was negative was in 1933. (Source EBRI Databook, US Department of Commerce.) The blue line on the chart is the personal savings rate, as a percentage of disposable income. The chart goes from 1930 to 2007. It is clear that whatever is going on is structural, a consistent pattern over 75 years, not just some blip that will turn around next year.



The dismal point this graph makes is that the economic pain, and the mental, medical, and social problems that this pain brings, is not going to go away anytime soon and, in fact, will probably get worse over the forseeable future.

For a serious structural trend, we'd expect to see this not just in personal data, but in national level data. What's that look like?

A similar story is in "Measuring the Moment - Innovation, National Security, and Economic Competitiveness" (Nov 2006).

US Trade Deficit (From BEA, quoted at invisibleheart. "Does the Trade Deficit Destroy American Jobs, Russell Roberts, George Mason University, Nov 2006.)



The left scale goes from +100 million per year to -900 million per year and the time from 1960 to 2005. Again, the whole picture changed about 1982, and the overall trend is accelerating downward into debt as a whole nation.

As a whole nation, we're buying way more than we can afford to pay for, and it's not getting better - in fact, it seems to be getting worse.


This raises an hypothesis that doesn't seem to be discussed much in public health - that the reason the US health care bill is skyrocketing is not only because the charges per unit of care are going up, but because we are, frankly, as a nation, getting sicker.

That is a crucial distinction, because it means that the major problem we have is not really getting more insurance to pay for damage repair, or lowering the cost per repair job.

The real problem facing public health, as we trek upstream to see where this problem is coming from, is "Why are the American people getting sicker and how can we prevent that and reverse that trend, on a personal, local, state, regional, and national level, simultaneously?" Blaming doctors or hospitals or drug companies won't fix this. Pitting individuals against corporations won't fix this. Blaming China or Japan won't fix this. It's deeper.

Part of the problem, in my model, is that so many people in corporations think that the problem is one of dividing the pie between "consumers" and "corporations", or between managment and labor, or between the rich and the poor. I don't think that's the problem at all, although it certainly is a source of conflict.

The problem is that the pie is shrinking, in any real measure. The wind has gone out of the sails of the American dream. We've lost a positive direction and now are on the decline curve instead. Squabbling over who gets the remaining food in the cupboard won't address the larger question, which I want to look at.

The key question is where does the pie come from in the first place. What creates wealth, and why isn't it working any more?

I'd say the universe (or Universe) clearly supports a wonderful overall design, whether accidental or intentional, for the hierarchy of life to evolve in ever more ways, at least on large scales and long timeframes -- but something seems to be interfering with out ability to ride that tide right now, on every level.

Surrounded by opportunity, we are failing to thrive. Surrounded by water, we are dying of thirst. With more computing power on our desktop than the entire planet had 50 years ago, we are unable to solve even basic problems of getting along and making things work. So, maybe, more technology is not the answer. We don't use 1% of what we have now.

I'm not sure where "the tracks" are, but I am pretty sure that our train has left them.

We have a "failure to thrive" problem here, a global depression that has gripped us on multiple levels simultaneously, causing despair and self-destructive behaviors on all scales.
By all our models and insights, what we're doing "should" work, but it clearly doesn't. That suggests that one of our basic, cherished assumptions is wrong.

And, it's not only wrong, but it's blinded us to a reality that is all around us, but we're incapable of perceiving it -- the myth is so strong that it squelches out all contrary evidence. The myth, after all, in my model, is itself alive and seeking to survive, and doing a good job of it.

Which myth? Which assumption?

Well, my model suggests that our concept of "individuality" is seriously wrong. We do not exist independently of the world around us, but are actually dependent on the world around us to survive and, in fact, we are an inseparable part of the world around us.

This is one of those ideas that varies by what size the observer is.

Darwin and others observed that individuals battled and the fittest survived, and perceived that as a global truth and a model for how humans, corporations, and nations should treat each other, basically saying "It's us or them, Jake, and there ain't room on this planet for both of us!"

However, that's poor observing, because the competition is really only local. On a larger scale, the wolf species and the deer species get along just fine. The wolves kill off the weakest deer, which, net, strengthens the deer herd. On the scale of many years and the size of species, deer and wolves cooperate and get along and help form a stable ecosystem.

That's the part of the model that seems to have gotten lost, as we try to make both corporate America and international America a one-horse show, take no prisoners. I think most CEO"s spend more time building alliances than they do attacking enemies, and many of them would rather get along and play golf than compete fiercely in a winner-take-all contest.

It may be hard to grasp at the corporate level, but the survival of corporations depends on the survival of the people who make them up. And, judging from the charts and graphs above, the people are getting very near running out of steam here.

It's not Al Qaida that's destroying us, it's our concept that the only way to structure life is as a competition, between nations, between cultures, between corporations, and between corporations and the people who make them up, unaffectionately known as "labor."

Because of the interlocking feedback loops and distant effects, there are indeed two choices - there's "win-win" and "lose-lose." Corporations, individuals, and public health can figure out how to co-exist and thrive together, which is a thought starting to emerge at the Ross School of Management, or they can go on fighting with the results shown above., and the population dying of obesity, diabetes, asthma, stress, and rampant infections.

Competition is not an "invariant". A single counter example can prove that, and here it is: The cells in our body do not spend all day with each one trying to be the "king cell" that rules all the others. They manage to cooperate, and thrive.

It's a good model. We should consider it. It's a model that does scale up, and then no one has to lose -- except the purveyors of the old myth that someone has to lose.

"Economic competitiveness" is the wrong term touse. "Ability to thrive while allowing others to thrive as well" or "jointly thriving" are better terms. Failure to thrive is a problem of the spirit, of our interest in and willingness to work together to ride the available tide of innovation, growth, and life that is all around us.

I'm unabashedly a Baha'i, and the Baha'i's believe in "spiritual solutions to economic problems"
which that link can explain better. This means, in my mind, more that the answer is in greater willingness to stop fighting and cooperate than in simply praying that things should get better while continuing our daily habits that make them worse.

A strong dose of humility can get thrown in as well, which doesn't mean walking around glum, but does mean not thinking we know it all without at least checking around first for contrary evidence, for any sign that maybe our model is wrong. As Karl Weick has pointed out in secular high-reliability organization literature, that kind of "mindfulness" doesn't come easy, but brings great rewards when it can be achieved.

Here's a tiny look at how drenched we are in this concept. People laugh at guys who would drive around for hours rather than stop and ask for directions -- although if it's a pilot and not asking directions results in using the wrong runway, this is no longer funny. Today, many families, like the one described by the Times article, are in deep debt and at risk of losing their house. Yet, if I were to suggest to them that maybe two familes could live in one house and share the mortgage costs, they'd think I was crazy.

Why is that, exactly? People would rather get lost than ask for directions? People would rather lose their home than share it with others, who, apparently, they think they would surely hate?
I'm glad I don't like ice cream because, if I liked it, I might eat it, and I hate it?

This idea that each family should have their own home and car has co-evolved with the idea that the purpose of money is so we don't have to learn how to get along with each other.

Now that the money has gone away, maybe we should revisit the idea of getting along with each other, instead of losing our homes. THAT's what I mean a "spiritual" solution - one that simply requires a change in heart, and suddenly, a new door opens where there was just disaster before.