Our past and future: global warming, politics, and singularity.
- James W. Kirchner. 2002. “The Gaia Hypothesis: Fact, Theory, and Wishful Thinking.” Earth and Environmental Science 52(March): 391-408.
- Paul Pierson. 2000. “Increasing Returns, Path Dependence, and the Study of Politics.” American Political Science Review 94(June): 251-267.
- Ray Kurzweil. 2005. “The Six Epochs” (chapter 1), “Epilogue”, and “The Law of Accelerating Returns Revisited” (Appendix). The Singularity Is Near. Viking.
- Peter Turchin. 2006. “The Matthew Principle” (chapter 10). War and Peace and War. Plume.
- Film: Koyaanisqatsi (screened May 9, ZDVD 3803)
Entries (RSS)
May 16th, 2007 at 12:31 pm
This week’s readings appeared to blend the initial Capra readings with the readings on wealth and inequality in a way the effectively synthesized some of the concepts we have discussed thus far. Pierson’s comparison of Economics and Politics illustrates a more reckless tendency toward path dependence in the political model than in the economic model, which was not a finding I initially expected. An example of this recklessness may be Pierson’s discussion of social security policy, in which politicians avoid protecting social security out of their immediate desire for reelection, thus ensuring that a positive feedback loop bound toward the program’s demise is essentially guaranteed. Kirchner’s point about the adaptive processes of the both the earth and the organisms inhabiting it, suggesting that perhaps that Gaia should be considered the co-evolution of climate and life, suggests a way of viewing the earth as system without considering the earth itself to be a “living” organism. The Turchin article on the Matthew Principle suggests both the utility and practicality of using mathematical models to understand social processes. In my attempt to apply his findings to the United States, the model seems, in general, to hold, although one might argue that the use of the media to establish the current status of wealth inequality as normative to the general populous as normative might curtail any attempted uprisings as was seen pre-industrial England. It would be interesting to see the method Turchin uses to model this inequality, in order to see how it may be adapted to apply to each nation or country as a world citizen of a global economy. As England itself became an industrial economy, which later transitioned to a service economy prior to an economic downturn, it would be interesting to see if the model would make similar predictions about the future of the United States.
Finally, although I had of course heard of the singularity, until now I hadn’t read any of Kurzweil’s opinions on the subject. Reading his first chapter, I drew an eerie parallel to Battlestar Galactica—a TV series in which humans had created intelligent robots that eventually rebel and seek to eliminate human life in their attempt to demonstrate their superiority. While I buy the notion that technological advances may progress exponentially, I am not sure that this progress will continue to be uninhibited. If we, for example, come up against material setbacks prior to certain advancements, we might never achieve a technological advance necessary to sustain human life, thereby acting as a severe negative feedback process in the positive technological advancement loop. I agree that we cannot simply look to the rate of advancement taking place in the past to predict the future, but just as Kurzweil demonstrates past scientists’ inability to predict the future of science, I would suggest we are equally incapable. The most difficult concept for me to grasp, is why these super-human computers would want to preserve human life at all. Why would computers, at some point, continue to allow humans to be implanted with nonbiological intelligence? Many of Kurzweil’s predictions about the future, such as his “foglet nanobots,”still appear to be somewhat arbitrary given the many directions our advancements could take. And, given the rapid advancement computer intelligence will undergo, how are we to predict the decisions made by minds millions of times more advanced than our own?
May 16th, 2007 at 1:58 pm
One additional comment I wanted to make, given that the general focus for the week is technology and history, is that history appears to be largely ineffective in predicting the future outcomes of technology. While our readings on the environment, economics, politics, and income inequality have allowed us to see how past cycles in these domains my affect the future through positive or negative feedback, it is difficult for us to predict the rate of technological increase for the future, as we broach a new frontier of technological research. It appears that we have little to compare our advances in information technology to in historical scientific endeavors. And, as Kurzweil makes apparent, past predictions about the future were often wrong, as ours are likely to be. As we have a tendency to look to the past to predict the future, but our technological advances, in broaching a new domain, have no empirical forebearer, our predictions tend to be off. In applying the concept of path dependency to technology, however, we are able to bypass our inability to look at history in predicting the future. While I am still not sure I buy into the precise predictions that Kurzweil makes, he is likely looking in the right direction in looking at feedback processes to estimate our expectations for future advances.
May 16th, 2007 at 4:43 pm
While I agree in principle with Siobhan’s comment about history, I think that Kurzweil makes a subtly different point that still uses history as a fundamental tool. Indeed, instead of looking at rate of change, one looks at the rate of rate of change of history, and one sees the exponential growth pattern, rather than something that looks vaguely linear. Indeed, Kurzweil relies heavily on history (and graphs) to make exactly his point: that we’re heading to the knee of some exponential curve that can only be charted using historical data. Without it, his argument has much less of a leg to stand on. Instead, he can only talk about how much information is going to combine, and he can’t really say why that happens. Indeed, he’s telling us to look at history, but to do so his way.
Still on the topic of looking at rates of progress and such, a lot of these readings (especially the political science piece) make the point to varying degrees that positive feedbacks (especially in the form of path dependence) derive from things that are short sighted. A lot of evolutionary “decisions” (i.e. outcomes of natural selection) are very short sighted, as Kirchner sort of alludes to, which leads to a very nice argument against the Gaia hypothesis. Beings aren’t looking to maintain the long term homeostasis of Gaia, but only their short term progeny. It seems that anything else is the province of a new breed of humans. The Pierson article of course discusses this the most: poly sci is most susceptible to path dependence because there are very few places where you can evaluate performance, or determine outcomes. Budget shortfalls seem to be a pretty ok noisy metric, but in general it’s hard to see how the ultimate course of one election or one decision is going to go.
This is in some part Siobhan’s point: we can’t really expect history to be a very good guide for making decisions. However, I think very few contest the idea that you should act based on past experience.* It’s just not ideal. Unfortunately, in the case of the Earth, and perhaps in the case of empires, the non-ideal is its own doom. Something imperfect can only stumble along for a little while before it collapses into one of the many equilibria. Perhaps this is why it’s a non-ideal outcome in the first place: because it leads to doom.
* As Jorge will attest, there are some philosophers that advocate acting randomly in the face of incredibly noisy metrics, since they will result in outcomes that are at least as good, and are more “fair” that way. Jorge and I both don’t like these philosophers, though that may be for different reasons.
May 16th, 2007 at 5:30 pm
While we’re on the topic of history and shortsightedness, I’d like to pull from Pierson to demonstrate my two cents on the whole thing. He talked about how strongly positive feedbacks affect political decisions. But this alone does not accurately describe the trend. Only getting toward the end of his article did he qualify this claim with the observation that, our (and others’) political situations are not so entrenched as we might expect them to be under such influences. That is, we would expect that for all reasons Pierson cited that once a party is strongly in power, for example, they will rest in power immovable. This does not happen. In fact, our political system oscillates with striking regularity, on average. This reminds me of the famous Belousov-Zhabotinsky oscillating chemical reaction. The obvious answer is that there are strong negative feedback loops in place as well, resulting in what seems to be perhaps a periodic chaotic system.
I propose that this negative feedback is not unlike what we saw last week from traditional economics. That is, whatever trend, it naturally oversteps it’s boundaries, in some way, shape, or form, and inevitably collapses upon itself. This is what happens even with monopoly companies who’s ride to the top is facilitated by swift positive feedback. This is eventually what happens to political parties who find themselves in power. This is also, if we turn to Kirchner, what happened to the Daisies one the earth got hot. In other words, we are staring to see that all positive feedback is bounded in practice, perhaps intrinsically. That does not mean on a more local level (in politics or elsewhere) the positive feedback is not problematic. Only that it does not imply such a certain, steadfast future.
Apply this to the singularity hypothesis. Often people have assumed that science would hit a dead-end, if only because they could not see beyond their current epistemic horizon. The limits of knowledge at this cusp, in the past, have proved to be nonexistent, and so science marched fervently along. Assume, now, that knowledge has no limit, and science could in principle “go” forever. I propose that there are many other factors that may prevent us reaching such singularity — a stalling not unlike what we saw in all the above examples. As the knowledge we gain grows exponentially, there are issues of manpower, resources, time, redundancy, communication, which may make it more and more difficult to pursue and discover new ideas at an equaled pace. I think this is something that would be interesting to talk about, if even not in class, because I would like to hear what opinions people have about “progress” in the academic world, and especially compared to other points in history. Perhaps the singularity hypothesis is also an instance of short-sightedness. Perhaps not.
‘Til doom inevitably stumbled upon, let’s ride the wave baby!
May 16th, 2007 at 5:33 pm
Whoever in charge of WordPress decided that blindly replacing my text with SuperFun! smileys was a good idea should be shot. Repeatedly. It was originally “(others)”, with an apostrophe after the ’s’.
May 16th, 2007 at 5:53 pm
Two aspects of positive feedback were made especially clear by the Kirchner and Pearson readings.
The first is that a very important condition that leads to non-ideal path dependence is the fact that benefits for individuals and benefits for the general whole are not necessarily linked. The Gaia Hypothesis and Liebowitz/Margolis ignore this fact, the former with the example of Daisyworld and the latter with the assumption that individuals will generally be able to capture the benefits of long-term investments. If we ignore this fact we won’t be able to account for trees shading their shorter neighbors from sunlight or spatial agglomorations of industry.
The second is that positive feedback becomes entrenched — once you go down a path it is costly/rare to move off of it. Of course, that doesn’t mean that we stay on the same path forever. I think the Kurzweil reading comes in here in an interesting way by pointing out that one factor that is moving us off paths that we are already on — whether it be institutions or beliefs or old technology — is the rapid growth of technology, which is itself a positive feedback loop. In essence, Kurzweil is saying that this technological path dependence will subsume all other path dependencies that we have.
May 16th, 2007 at 6:13 pm
The Douglas Adams quote that the Kirchner article starts with is a subtle, yet foundational point to the entire article. In fact, I think it points to why the Gaia hypothesis is so difficult to defend. Each individual organism has a miniscule effect on the environment as a whole. In order to change the environment in a beneficial way, organisms would need to communicate with each other regarding this very specific end. I think that in the case of humans we see that even when we have this very specific desire in mind, it is difficult to coordinate a wide-scale revival of the natural world. No single organism is really capable of having the foresight to defend and preserve its surroundings; rather, it does the best it can with what its given.
In the final analysis, the evolution of the environment is wholly dependent on the organisms that are capable of effecting change upon it. In fact, it is interesting to note (as the article did) that even when harming the environment in very crucial ways, species often cannot drive themselves into extinction. Their environment-harming acts as a population control, but not a more pernicious influence than this (because as the population decreases, the corrosive influence of the species becomes less and less present).
I would argue that it is exclusively these natural population controls that humans fear (and change in environment that would lead to an environment that would be inhospitable for us). I find that authors who present the environment as a living, unified whole are most interested in returning the environment to its former state, rather than allowing it to follow its natural course. Over the history of life on earth, the earth has undergone radical fluctuations in surface temperature, and carbon dioxide composition (the two things we seem most worried about right now). Back when volcanoes emitted huge volumes of what we would now call poisonous gasses, hardy strains of bacteria evolved to live in these climates. Eventually these organisms sapped the atmosphere of some of its carbon dioxide, allowing different organisms to evolve. It is almost ironic that now, at the peak of organismic complexity, it is precisely the level of sophistication that humans have reached that allow the to infuse the air with the carbon dioxide that was so prevalent during the earth’s youth. In fact, it almost seems reminiscent of a negative feedback loop, bringing carbon dioxide levels back to the levels they achieved billions of years ago.
If we take seriously the claim that the earth is an organism unto itself, we should respect inorganic matter and organic matter alike (and respect our own influence on the earth). In fact, I find humans’ supreme confidence that they can restore the balance of the environment almost comical. Any environment can be described as “balanced” for some subset of organisms inhabiting it. If, for example, life were to cease on earth, the rocks and oceans would become more settled and sedentary – perhaps they would achieve a more balanced life because of the new state of the earth.
Certainly I am not saying that humans should not be concerned about climate change – the many positive feedback loops cited in the Kirchner article that have not yet started to take effect present a sinister picture of the future of humankind if we do not start to seriously consider how to facilitate a more stable equilibrium on our climate. What I am saying is that Capra’s idea of deep ecology starts to lose some of its luster in the context of this article. If the earth and its inhabitants do not evolve symbiotically (rather, the individual survival of specific organisms takes precedence), there is no grand equality that humans are missing out on. We should be concerned about pollution and global warming for our own sakes, but the earth will persist in spite of us. This leads naturally to the conclusion that our goal should be to preserve biodiversity for our own confidence the beauty with which this imbues the earth. We believe the earth has achieved a pleasing state and wish to artificially slow the evolution of our environment, rather than embrace its stark changes in the face of our industrialization. This isn’t a radical idea, it’s merely one that revises the emphasis that we place on our normative sense of what is “natural.”
Now that it’s 6:10 and I’ve gotten way too caught up in the idea of environmental presumptuousness, I suppose I will limit my response to just the first article. However, I look forward to discussing the rest in class.
May 16th, 2007 at 6:18 pm
I want to talk mostly about the Gaia hypothesis, but first I want to make a brief comment about Kurzweil.
History is the best indication of future performance that we have, but, as has been pointed out, especially in science it is very hard to predict the future. Furthermore, I feel that Kurzweil is exhibitting a fair amount of “irrational exuberance” about the rate of future technological progress. To make the reference explicit, “irrational exuberance” was coined by Alan Greenspan to describe the stock-market boom of the ’90s. Everyone believed the boom would just keep going, until it crashed. I don’t want to be a pessimist about the future of technological progress, but I think Kurzweil is being overly optimistic. (Especially with respect to his predictions about artificial intelligence. Decade after decade leading scientists have made predictions about artificial intelligence that have failed to materialize. I think there are some fundamental difficulties with human-level AI that are not going to be solved anytime soon. Now don’t let Andrew Ng crucify me.)
I really liked the Kirchner article on the Gaia hypothesis (hypotheses?). He surveys the generally accepted versions of the Gaia hypothesis (life has a significant effect on the environment, therefore life and the environment coevolve) as well as the stronger forms of the Gaia hypothesis (the world is a giant organism; life optimizes the environment to create more life; and the global environment is stabilized by negative feedback from atmosphere-biosphere interactions). As the story of the puddle makes clear, it is the second version of the strong hypothesis that troubles me. Do we mold the environment to fit our needs? Or are we here precisely because we are well-suited to our environment? One view seems to ascribe intentionality to organisms. The other sounds vaguely tautological. Both are unsatisfying, I think.