Technology Prognostication

I recently posted some reflections on the first two chapters of David Nye's book, Technology Matters: Questions to Live With. In his third chapter, he asks "is technology predictable", answering his own question that he believes technology is inherently unpredictable.

Nye differentiates among three varieties of prognostication:

• predicting (the unknown)
• forecasting (possibilities) and
• projecting (probabilities)

I am not sure his subdivision of prognostication is widely accepted, and I suspect that there is something circular in saying the prediction relates to the unknown, and deciding that one can not predict technology. On the other hand, the chapter includes a number of examples of technology prognostication, beautifully but briefly described. He clearly makes the case that many business leaders fail to prognosticate technological developments that came to critically impact on their businesses.

I was somewhat disappointed with his treatment of the diffusion of personal computer and Internet technologies. In both cases there was a virtuous cycle. As more and more killer applications appeared for PCs and the Internet, more and more people found the investment worthwhile. As the volume increased and economies of scale were realized, it became less and less expensive to acquire and utilize the technology. As the market expanded, more and more people worked on developing killer apps. Moreover, there were "network economies", such as the increasing value of the Internet to each user as it connected that user to more and more people and information.

Nye is certainly right in his view that experts in technology often provide poor predictions of how their technologies will be used. Nye does not use the example, but consider the people in developing countries who used the early personal computers as status symbols (or doorstops), but did not utilize any of their application software packages.

Nye does not address the prognostication of needs, but that has important technological implications. Thus the prediction of global warming is driving research in energy conservation technology, in renewable energy technologies, in technologies to capture greenhouse gases, and in technologies to ameliorate the negative impacts of global warming when they occur.

Similarly, Nye does not address the prognostication of availability of resources. I suppose that people started to develop coal technologies historically as it the prediction of depletion of forest resources became more obvious. Now, as it seems that oil reserves will eventually be used up, research and development is focusing on alternatives to petroleum.

One might also consider prognostication of the discovery and harnessing of properties. Bell Labs began research on solid state physics based on the prognostication that properties would be found in that research that would allow for the development of good alternatives for vacuum tubes in the communications field. Lee Howard, then Director of the Office of Health at USAID, supported research toward a malaria vaccine on the belief that eventually properties of the human immune system and/or the Plasmodium would be found that would allow immunization against the disease (even though immunization had only been applied successfully to viral and bacterial diseases and malaria is a parasitic disease causedby a more complex organism).  So too IAVI began supporting research on an HIV vaccine based on the prognostication that properties would be found allowing HIV immunization (even though HIV is a highly variable retrovirus that attacks cells in the immune system itself). We don't hear of the prognostications of this type that fail, but those that succeed are very important.

For several decades a part of my job was getting scientific advice for USAID. I think an important part of that function related to prognostications from the S&T community for the bureaucracy. Some successes:

• In the 1970s I chartered an NAS workshop on tropical deforestation helping to draw attention to the rapid rate of environmental degradation that was occurring (and would continue) and the problems that would create for development in the affected areas.
• In 1981 I chartered an NAS workshop on the implications of biotechnology for development, focusing on biomedical, agricultural, and energy technology implications of the field.
• In 1981 I chartered a series of NAS workshops and monographs on the personal computer and the implications of PC technology and its diffusion for developing nations.
• In the mid 1980s I helped organize a seminar at the AAAS Annual Meeting on the AIDS epidemic and its likely impact on social and economic development.
• In 1991 I chartered a workshop on computer networking and the implications of the Internet for developing nations.

In all of these cases, it was not possible to predict in detailed accuracy the future developments under study, but in all of these cases it was possible to identify issues that should have been addressed by policy makers. Unfortunately, those issues were seldom adequately addressed.

The problem may not be with prognostication, but with getting people in leadership positions to attend to those prognostications. We might call this the Casandra principle, after the Greek myth of Casandra, a woman granted with the gift of prophecy, but inflicted with the curse that no one would ever believe those predictions.

Casandra, attacked by Ajax in the Temple of Athena

From a house in Italy (Source)

A couple of oldies but goodies

The American Association for the Advancement of Science is concerned with improving literacy in science, technology and mathematics in the American public. This is a long term concern, and one of the key instruments for such improvement is the school system. Thus the AAAS seeks to improve teaching and learning of these subjects. A couple of old but still valuable resources it has put on the Internet are:

• Science for All Americans Online
  
• Atlas of Science Literacy, Volumes 1 and 2.

How does an organization learn

I want to extend the previous posting which focused on technology to discuss how an organization learns. I defined technology as a body of knowledge about how to accomplish useful purposes embodied in devices, materials (such as pharmaceuticals and seeds), facilities and infrastructure, people and institutions. I will focus on the corporation, and indeed the formally organized business corporation.

Organizational learning is then a change in the knowledge embodied in an organization, and indeed I would suggest that "learning" implies either a change that directly improves performance or has the potential to improve future performance. We would not suggest that acquisition of new knowledge that is unrelated to any useful task would be organizational learning. (An employee picks up a piece of gossip about a movie star. Is that organizational learning? I define it not to be.)

Knowledge in an organization can be embodied in devices, materials, facilities and infrastructure, people, and institutional knowledge within the organization. Such knowledge may be technological, but it may also be of other kinds related to the organization's operation, such as knowledge of the market in which it sells its products, or the markets from which it obtains goods and services, or knowledge of government regulations, the general evolution of the economy, or many other topics. By "institutional knowledge" within the organization I mean knowledge embodied in its structure and procedures, formal or informal.

Given the previous discussion of technology, let us start with that kind of knowledge. Clearly it is important for organizations to gain technological knowledge. A common means of doing so is to acquire new facilities that allow for improved production. Even when such acquisitions are "turn key", they involve people in the organization learning to operate the new facilities, and changes in the organization's processes and structures to deal with the new facilities.

A process of critical importance to technology intensive firms is learning by acquiring new employees whose technological knowledge adds to that of current staff, and bringing that new knowledge to bear on issues where it benefits the firm. However, technology intensive organizations often improve performance by reorganizations which move people around to bring people with critical technological knowledge to work where they are most needed; this kind of reorganization too can be a form of organizational learning.

This brings up the problem of what is meant by "within an organization". I would suggest that bringing in a consultant to advise for a limited time on a specific issue may be seen as organizational learning. The consultant brings knowledge which he/she has gained to bear on the problems of the firm while being paid by the firm. Of course, the organization may "forget" that information when the consultant goes on to other corporations, unless he/she teaches the information to staff members who stay behind.

Incidentally, forgetting can be valuable. Think of "unlearning" things which prove counterproductive or which were once useful but are outdated.

Note that a number of pharmaceutical firms have chosen to buy biotechnology from small research and development organizations rather than try to develop strong biotechnology capacities within the firm. We would see the purchase of such a biotechnology as technological learning by the pharmaceutical firm. So too would be purchase of a small biotech firm by a large pharmaceutical firm to acquire its technology and technological capacity.

 I would suggest, however, that there is something like a market for such new biotechnologies, with a number of firms seeking to develop and sell biotechnology, and a number of other firms seeking to purchase the technology. In any market or market-like institution there is learning both by those who would sell and those who would buy. In some cases the lessons are simple; in others they are complex, difficult and sometimes very expensive to learn. Thus even the decision to outsource, with the obvious element of losing knowledge that once was incorporated within an organization, normally will involve acquisition of other new knowledge.

Here is a metaphor. Someone has been preparing full meals at home from raw materials. The person discovers that it is possible to prepare better meals less expensively by purchasing per-prepared ingredients from several sources. Over time, the person loses some of the skills that once were used in preparing meals fully from raw materials, but has learned how to prepare better meals more efficiently. This kind of learning goes on all the time in McDonalds.

Banks have long been inventing software for different purposes. The "dusty deck" software remains even when the people who developed it have gone on to other jobs in other firms. Some of the knowledge involved in carrying out those purposes is embodied in the software (and in the people who use it, and the organizational procedures and structures utilized by those using the software.) Now some banks are consolidating there many data bases into a common software platform, and in so doing either buying the platform from outside or employing outside consultants -- both forms of organizational learning, as is the introduction of a new platform with greater technological capacity.

What shall we say about the voluminous data held by such banks? If the bank does not have the capacity to mine the data it is hard to say that it has knowledge. If, however, the new software allows the bank to now mine and utilize that data better, in some sense the data has been better internalized as "knowledge" and we can say learning has taken place.

I suggest that the border distinguishing an organization from the rest of the world is a fuzzy concept, and perhaps the border is best seen as somewhat amorphous. As mentioned above, consultants and contractors can be seen as within an organization sometimes, and other times as outside its border.

Consider an organization's website. Since the website will provide information about the organization to its visitors, clearly the servers and software in some sense embody knowledge of the organization. Most organizations also utilize their websites for automated transactions, and one may conceive as the knowledge of how to conduct such transactions for the organization to be embodied in the hardware and software providing the website. However, the users of the organization's website also must learn in order to more effectively find the information that they seek or to perform the transactions from their side. Some of that learning is transferable to other websites, but some of it is specific to one organization. Is it appropriate to attribute part of the user learning as "organizational learning" and part as more general learning of the user?

Some organizations will create technological knowledge by internal invention, deepening of craft skills and understanding, and research. This is especially true for large, high technology firms. Any firm or organization will be likely to create only a small part of the technological knowledge it comes to embody. Thus in technology, as in other forms of knowledge, a key issue is how the firm comes to obtain technological knowledge from outside itself.

I would suggest that as organizations grow larger, they need to duplicate embodiments of the same or similar knowledge. A firm will need more workers with similar skills and knowledge as it increases production. Each of the office workers in a firm may need his/her own personal computer and software, embodying copies of some of the firms knowledge, and as the office workforce increases more copies of that embodied knowledge will be employed. I suppose these too are forms of knowledge acquisition or learning.

We should be long past the idea that organizational decision making in large organizations is centered in one person or a small group of people. So the control of organizational learning should be considered a distributed function. On the other hand, organizations and especially formal organization, do have structures of authority, and some decisions related to organizational learning are more centralized than others. The board of directors with the advice of the leading operational officers may make decisions as to whether to buy a new plant or merge with another firm, while each employee will make some decisions independently on what job related skills or information to seek to acquire in what time frame.

It is a truism that the world is changing ever more rapidly and that as a consequence organizational success depends on learning to learn better and more rapidly. Figuring out how an organization will respond to this challenge is of course a hugely complicated task, but one facilitated by recognizing the complexity of organizational knowledge systems, the complexity of the embodiments of organizational knowledge, and the processes of organizational change.

A thought on reading Technology Matters

I am reading Technology Matters: Questions to Live With by David Nye. In his first chapter he defines "technology", providing a useful brief history of such definitions.

I continue to prefer to think of technology as a body of knowledge about how to accomplish useful purposes. I can then think of this knowledge as embodied in devices, materials (such as pharmaceuticals and seeds), facilities and infrastructure, people and institutions. We can impose categories on this knowledge, such as the technologies in a given system (e.g. the Internet and Internet based applications, roads, vehicles and their support) or in a given domain (e.g. chemical technology, electrical technology). There are also networks of related forms of technological knowledge:

• Some devices are in fact built out of other devices, as a car includes an engine, a drive chain, wheels and steering. These in turn are built of other devices, as an internal combustion engine requires fuel pump, carburetor, etc.
• Steel is made in mills, using furnaces, etc. The mills in turn are furnished with devices, each of which is produced by another process, and these factories are in turn equipped with devices made is still other factories.

Thus the body of technological knowledge is highly structured, and this structure in part determines the growth of the body of technology. So too does the real world and the needs it imposes on mankind, as well as the properties of nature that are available to mankind with which to build devices.

In Nye's second chapter he considers technological determinism -- the idea that technology determines social and economic relations and that technological change drives social and economic change. Again, he provides a brief but useful history of the evolution of the concept of technological determinism.

Considering technology as a global body of information (exhibiting different patterns of embodiment in different geographic regions and different cultures), it seems clear that there is no institution capable of controlling the changes in technology. Indeed, as Brian Arthur points out in The Nature of Technology: What It Is and How It Evolves, the body of techological knowledge evolves under its own imperatives, beyond control. Of course, many governments seek to stimulate invention and technology deepening, especially within their borders and to promote economic growth within their own economies. There is some controversy over their success in such efforts, but even the most powerful states control only a portion of global technological invention and deepening.

Nye gives a couple of famous examples of rejections of the use of technology -- the Japanese Giving Up the Gun: Japan's Reversion to the Sword, 1543-1879 and Mennonite rejection of the use of many modern technologies. Note that the Japanese did not give up knowledge of guns, nor of how to make guns, and indeed guns were stockpiled in armories, but simply not used. So too, the Mennonite community rejection of automobiles and telephones is done on the basis of knowledge of those devices, and with the possibility of reversing the decision at any time and purchasing devices and learning to use them.

Thus these two examples are of institutions involving a single culture in limited geographical areas choosing collectively to give up the use of specific devices. Of course there are many examples of cultural differences in the way technological knowledge is embodied. Europeans, Americans and Indians use quite different kinds of motor vehicles; French, Chinese and American kitchens use quite different devices for the preparation of food.

It seems clear that any reading of history would suggest that social and economic organization have been different in different ages, and that the technology available during an age limits the forms of organization possible in that age. One could not have large nation states without transportation and communications technology, embodied in transportation and communications infrastructures, capable of sustaining government authority over a large region. Similarly, one could not have markets covering large geographic areas without technologies and their embodying technologies capable of sustaining such large markets. It seems quite reasonable to believe that where technologies make large scale infrastructures capable of increasingly efficient governance and economic institutions possible, they will tend to evolve, even over the objections and in spite of counter efforts of existing power elites.

In short, it would seem that technology, culture and socio-economic institutions co-evolve. Each influences the other. All are evolving influenced by the planning of many individuals in many organizations, and each evolving beyond the deterministic control of any individual or group. It is only in the relatively constrained geographic and cultural contexts can decisions be made effectively to limit the use of specific technologies. Even in these cases, power is constrained. The choice of Mennonites to limit agricultural technologies will affect the ability of their communities to export agricultural products into larger markets; the choice of the Japanese to give up the gun proved not to survive the opening of Japan by foreign military forces.

The U.S. leadership in high technology may be threatened

Source: Main Science and Technology Indicators (MSTI): 2010/1 edition, OECD

Note that the United States ranks quite low among OECD nations in terms of the portion of GDP devoted to research and development in the private sector. While the United States ranks high in military R&D, that may well not yield as much benefit in terms of quality of life, economic growth, and international competitiveness.

The United States Did Not Support "Water as a Human Right" UN Resolution

Source: "Why The United States Did Not Support "Water as a Human Right" Resolution," Mark Leon Goldberg, UN Dispatch, July 28, 2010

The United Nations General Assembly recently voted for a resolution that declares that access to water and clean sanitation to be a human right. From the UN News Center:

Safe and clean drinking water and sanitation is a human right essential to the full enjoyment of life and all other human rights, the General Assembly declared today, voicing deep concern that almost 900 million people worldwide do not have access to clean water.

The 192-member Assembly also called on United Nations Member States and international organizations to offer funding, technology and other resources to help poorer countries scale up their efforts to provide clean, accessible and affordable drinking water and sanitation for everyone.

The Assembly resolution received 122 votes in favour and zero votes against, while 41 countries abstained from voting.

One of those 41 abstentions was the United States. In an explanation of the United States vote, John F. Sammis, U.S. Minister Counselor to the Economic and Social Council, argued that "This resolution describes a right to water and sanitation in a way that is not reflective of existing international law; as there is no "right to water and sanitation" in an international legal sense as described by this resolution."

Here is the full explanation of vote by Sammis.

Explanation of Vote by John F. Sammis, U.S. Minister Counselor to the Economic and Social Council, on Resolution A/64/L.63/Rev.1, the Human Right to Water, July 28, 2010

Mr. President,

The United States is deeply committed to finding solutions to our world's water challenges. We support the goal of universal access to safe drinking water. Water and sanitation issues will be an important focus at this September's Millennium Development Goal Summit. The United States is committed to working with our development partners to build on the progress they have already made in these areas as part of their national development strategies.

Water is essential for all life on earth. Accordingly, safe and accessible water supplies further the realization of certain human rights, and there are human rights obligations related to access to safe drinking water and sanitation.

The United States supports the work of the UN Human Rights Council's Independent Expert on the issue of human rights obligations related to access to safe drinking water and sanitation. In fact, we co-sponsored the resolution on Human Rights and Access to Safe Drinking Water and Sanitation last September at the Human Rights Council in Geneva. We look forward to receiving the next report of the Independent Expert. We also look forward to a more inclusive, considered, and deliberative approach to these vital issues in Geneva than we have unfortunately experienced on this resolution in New York.

And I would just add to my prepared remarks that these concerns are not alleviated by the fact that just this morning, we have seen an amendment made to what the lead sponsor viewed as the core operative paragraph of the resolution from the floor. This again is an imposition on all of us. We haven't had sufficient time to really consider the implications of this, and I think that it would have been far better, under the circumstances, not to bring this resolution forward for action today.

The United States had hoped to negotiate and ultimately join consensus on this text, on a text, that would uphold and support the international process underway at the Human Rights Council.

Instead, we have here a resolution that falls far short of enjoying the unanimous support of member States and may even undermine the work underway in Geneva. This resolution describes a right to water and sanitation in a way that is not reflective of existing international law; as there is no "right to water and sanitation" in an international legal sense as described by this resolution.

The United States regrets that this resolution diverts us from the serious international efforts underway to promote greater coordination and cooperation on water and sanitation issues. This resolution attempts to take a short-cut around the serious work of formulating, articulating and upholding universal rights. It was not drafted in a transparent, inclusive manner, and the legal implications of a declared right to water have not yet been carefully and fully considered in this body or in Geneva.

For these reasons, the United States has called for a vote and will abstain on this resolution.

Comment: Clearly adequate amounts of drinking water are essential to life, and thus access to drinking water must be considered a fundamental human right. Safe drinking water and sanitation are fundamental elements of public health. Indeed, water born and water washed diseases remain major causes of illness and death in developing nations. Drawing water remains a huge burden on the time and strength of millions in developing nations. Clearly potable water supply and sanitation should be a focus of major efforts of developing nation governments and foreign aid. Lets hope the diplomats can figure a way to support such efforts in the United Nations.

Two Graphs from the July 31 issue of The Economist

Source

Globally, the recession is over, due I suppose to the concerted action of the governments of the world to save their countries' financial institutions and their economic stimulus policies. Of course not all countries are doing equally well. Let us hope that there is no double dip as has happened in the past.

Source

This is really very impressive, reflecting both the economic success of Brazil in the last two decades and pro-poor policies. There may be some things disguised in the data, such as inflation and changes in exchange rates, but the trend is so large, and continued over various governments that there has probably been a real major reduction in poverty. Of course, there is a huge variance in poverty rates among the geographic regions of Brazil.

Why is the United States not a member of the BIE?

The convention creating the International Bureau of Expositions (BIE from the title in French) was created in 1928.

What is the role of the BIE?
The role of the BIE is to regulate the frequency of exhibitions under its jurisdiction, to ensure their quality and to guarantee that they are organised in compliance with international law. These exhibitions include all international exhibitions of a duration superior to three weeks (excluding fine arts exhibitions) and of non-commercial nature, organised by a state and for which the invitations are sent to other states by the diplomatic channel. Fairs are thus not included, and commercial activities are seriously regulated in the Expos organised under the auspices of the BIE.

There are 157 nations that have ratified the convention and are now member states of the BIE. The United States, however, is not among them. After several decades of participation, the United States' membership lapsed in 2002 after two consecutive years of non-allocation of funds by the American congress. It is unclear why the congress chose not to fund the United States' membership in the BIE, particularly since it is only $25,000 per year.

Of course, the reason most countries participate is that membership facilitates holding a world expo in the country, an event that not only draws tourists but contributes to exports and industry. So too, membership makes it possible for our diplomats to work to see than U.S. interests are promoted in all world expos.

If you agree that the United States should rejoin, I suggest that you contact your representatives in the congress and you senators and send a short message. You can do so by visiting the following sites:


http://www.house.gov/writerep/

and

http://www.senate.gov/general/contact_information/senators_cfm.cfm

Brain Gain through wise immigration policy

I quote from the Brookings Institution website on "Brain Gain":

Many of America’s greatest artists, scientists, inventors, educators, and entrepreneurs have come from abroad. Rather than suffering from the “brain drain” of talented and educated individuals emigrating, the United States has benefited greatly over the years from the “brain gain” of immigration. These gifted immigrants have engineered advances in energy, information technology, international commerce, sports, arts, and culture. To stay competitive, the United States must institute more of an open-door policy to attract unique talents from other nations. Yet Americans resist such a policy despite their own immigrant histories and the substantial social, economic, intellectual, and cultural benefits of welcoming newcomers. Why?

U.S. Mood Throughout the Day inferred from Twitter

This website is a good illustration of the way one can illuminate a complicated phenomenon using inventive graphics.

Mining Twitter posts for indications of a social condition is a great example of an investigation that is unlikely to influence what is being studies nor inconvenience the people providing the information.

Incidentally, it is interesting to observe that the sunny parts of the United States seem happier than the North East, and that the country is less happy during business hours and happier in the evening.

A thought about risk

Andrew Lo has an interesting talk posted by MIT in which he sets forth a taxonomy of uncertainty and risk, crossed with levels of action. He suggests that physics is a field in which 3 laws are enough to predict 97 percent of what is of interest to physicists, while economics is a field where 97 laws are enough to predict 3 percent of what interests economists.

I got lost in the discussion thinking about whether it is the same to bet $5,000 on the flip of a coin, or to give someone $5,000 and get either nothing or $10,000 back according to the flip of a coin. Of course, from a formal point of view the bet is the same, but somehow it doesn't seem the same. In discussing the bet, Lo doesn't focus on the fact that people are risk adverse, and that they hate to give up what they already have.

Lo's fundamental point is that economic models that were originally postulated for academic (and didactic) purposes are used in the real world. Indeed, it has been charged that the quants who developed models for making bets in the financial world assumed too often that those models were good predictors of behavior, and we all got into trouble when investors got into behaviors at the bursting of the real estate bubble that was not accurately predicted by the equations.

Now I was trained as an engineer, and engineers can be seen as our means of reducing uncertainty. Think about auto transportation. A century ago, auto transportation was a risky business. Now automotive engineers have produced auto drive trains that companies can guarantee for five years or 50000 miles. Automobile tires last reliably for tens of thousands of miles. The engineers have developed seat belts and air bags that make survival of crashes more likely even in the increasingly rare events of auto crashes. Civil engineers have developed roads that not only reduce the likelihood of breakdowns and punctures, but which reduce the probability of accidents. The improved reliability of aircraft is even more notable.

Some of the techniques to reduce uncertainty are brute force. When designing a structure, engineers will figure out how much steel to use to carry the heaviest expected loads, and then they will multiply the strength in the design to achieve a safety factor.

It seems to me that we need "financial engineers" to design financial instruments and systems to reduce uncertainty. Lo pointed out that actuarial analysis seems able to do this for life insurance. Perhaps we could apply the same approach to other financial matters.

Final Comments on The Nature of Technology

I finished reading Brian Arthur's The Nature of Technology: What It Is and How It Evolves. The final chapter exploits the picture he has drawn of the body of technology evolving by its own logic, unpredictable and beyond any simple control, on a skeleton of social institutions.

Technological knowledge is growing faster than ever before. The $70 billion global economy and population of 6.7 billion people is greater than ever before, and the more people and more wealth, the faster the body of technology grows. Indeed, globalization has resulted in a greater portion of the world's population and economy developing technologies that would be useful to those of us moderns as might read this blog. Science has grown and continues to grow exponentially, and the body of phenomena available to be incorporated into technology also grows exponentially. So too do the number of niches to be filled by new technologies. I would also guess that the greater the cultural diversity, the more different cultural approaches would be brought to technology. Finally, there has been an important development of institutions that support technology development, including such things as research intensive universities, industrial research laboratories, agricultural field stations, government programs for research funding, intellectual property rights, and professional societies and journals. Arthur points out that there is a "messy vitality" to this self-directed growth of technology, and that the vision he has drawn is likely to be even more applicable in the future than in the past.

The final chapter of the book suggests that the managers of enterprises will be increasingly challenged in finding ways to adapt their enterprises to this messy vitality, as will those who lead and make policy for our governments and societies. I would add that the intellectuals who, like Arthur, seek to make sense of our society and our world will also be increasingly challenged to deal with the messy vitality not only of technology and the economy, but of the way people and society respond to a more rapidly evolving techno-economic system.

As more and more phenomena are incorporated in technology, and as more and more of us live in a man-built technological world, our view of nature changes. Certainly we experience nature more as technology-captured phenomena, and certainly there are many who see nature primarily as a source of phenomena to be captured and resources to be exploited. Yet, it is the most technologically advanced societies that seem most concerned with the environment, indeed most interested in preserving the natural heritage of mankind and the world's wild places. Our modern technology allows us to protect ourselves from the dangers faced by "natural man" of our species distant past, while enjoying the most diverse and rewarding natural sites the globe has to offer.

The series of postings I have produced on The Nature of Technology: What It Is and How It Evolves indicates how closely I have read the book. I have not always agreed with the author, but I suspect he would be pleased by a reader challenging and probing the theory of technology he advances. The book is deceptively easy to read -- short, lovely prose, filled with illuminating examples -- but worthy of serious consideration, Brian Arthur is a very impressive person, trained as an economist and an engineer, with a serious body of contributions to our thinking even before this book, which is obviously much influenced by his work with the Santa Fe institute. I recommend the book wholeheartedly!

Here are my previous postings on the book:

• Is the economy an expression of its technology?
• An example of science leading to the recognition of technological needs
  
• Still More on Brian Arthur's The Nature of Technology
• The Perceptual Illusion About Technology
• Some Reviews of The Nature of Technology
• More on the Nature of Technology
• Technology Deepening
• HIV/AIDS and the links between science and technology
• Thoughts on invention on reading Brian Arthur's book
• Classification and Technology
• A Thought About Engineering and Technology
• More on Arthur's Nature of Technology
• The Nature of Technology

Is the economy an expression of its technology?

The penultimate chapter of The Nature of Technology: What It Is and How It Evolves begins with Brian Arthur defining technology as "the set of arrangements and activities by which a society satisfies its needs." He then states that "the economy is an expression of its technologies." The then proceeds to give an elegant explanation of the way in which technology and economy co-evolve. I suspect that this is a discussion that it would benefit many economists to read. At a minimum it combats the tendency of economists to treat technological change as exogenous to economic models, treating such changes as both induced by economic needs and creating economic forces.

The word "need" always bothers me since it is sometimes used to mean "something without which we can not live" and some times "something someone thinks we should have". In the latter sense, there seem to have been many situations in the past where donors have used the concept of "need" to provide something other than that which the recipient wants most. I suspect that what Arthur means by "need" in the sentence is "something which society will devote resources to obtain if possible".

Arthur is an economist and has an expansive view of the economy. I would suggest that there are needs -- such as the need for love and nurturing that is met by the family and community or the need for religious belief and support that is met by religious institutions -- that are not economic. There are technologies that play economic roles within the institutions of the family (e.g. household technologies) and church (e.g. construction and architectural technologies) but there are aspects of both that I would prefer to see as other than economic.

This is one of a number of postings on The Nature of Technology.

• An example of science leading to the recognition of technological needs
  
• Still More on Brian Arthur's The Nature of Technology
  
• The Perceptual Illusion About Technology
• Some Reviews of The Nature of Technology
• More on the Nature of Technology
• Technology Deepening
• HIV/AIDS and the links between science and technology
• Thoughts on invention on reading Brian Arthur's book
• Classification and Technology
• A Thought About Engineering and Technology
• More on Arthur's Nature of Technology
• The Nature of Technology

How to Make a Faceted Classification and Put It On the Web

Source: Denton, William. "How to Make a Faceted Classification and Put It On the Web" Nov. 2003. http://www.miskatonic.org/library/facet-web-howto.html.

I too like to think about things in terms of many facets, each of which reveals some aspects of those things, and which must be used together to get a good idea of that which is observed. Here is the definition from the papet:

What are facets? Consider a common example, wine. Each wine has a certain colour. It comes from a certain place. It is made from a particular kind (or blend) of grape. Its year of vintage is known. It has been guaranteed to be of a certain quality by its country's wine authorities. It comes in a container of a given volume. It has a price. A list could be made of all wines, but it would be enormously long and unwieldy. On the web, it would mean scrolling through screen after screen of endless subdivisions— hard to use, and hard to search. With facets, we can set up a handful of categories that will combine to fully describe the wines: colour, origin, grape, year, appellation, volume, price. Each category is populated with the right terms and organized in an appropriate way. Then each bottle of wine is classified by picking and choosing the right terms from each category. This is a faceted classification: a set of mutually exclusive and jointly exhaustive categories, each made by isolating one perspective on the items (a facet), that combine to completely describe all the objects in question, and which users can use, by searching and browsing, to find what they need.

Lab Safety

Source: "Danger in School Labs: Accidents Haunt Experimental Science," Beryl Lieff Benderly, Scientific American, August 2010.

There is a movement to improve laboratory safety in American universities. The article holds that there is a culture of safety in American industrial labs, but not in American university research labs. Even though there is little data on university lab accidents, the article cites anecdotal evidence that such accidents occur, sometimes involving students, and sometimes fatal.

My own experience in a small commercial research company many years ago suggested that there were severe problems. I recall a large gas canister, the regulator broken off, breaking loose and flying down the building breaking through lab walls. I recall an accident in a Florine research project that hospitalized two people, one for months. I recall a flock of animals killed by an accidental gas release. And I recall a B52 crashed in a test of an experimental flight warning system.

I suspect that there are more lab accidents per laboratory in developing nations, since in many developing nations safety procedures are relatively underdeveloped.

It seems to me that laboratory safety is an ethical issue for scientists, for university and research laboratory administrators, and for funding agencies. Indeed, it is one of several ethical issues including the ethical treatment of human subjects, the ethical treatment of animals involved in the research, and the containment of risks to others created by research (containment of poisons, pathogens and pests, containment of dangers to the environment).

I note that UNESCO has a program focused on the ethics of science, but has apparently never undertaken an effort to reduce these research-related risks in developing nations. Capacity building and policy advice are areas in which UNESCO might be useful.

Mathematical Modeling is an Art!

The Economist has an article challenging the use of dynamic, stochastic equilibrium models of the economy for economic forecasting and policy analysis. The point is not that such models are not useful, or even that they have been stretched from their original academic purposes for use in economic policy making, but that a variety of model types should be used to develop a more complete understanding of the economy. The article cites a recent Congressional hearing on the topic.

Any mathematical model is at best a representation of reality. There is always a trade-off between the complexity of the model and the cost of model development and data collection versus the verisimilitude of the model's results, a trade off which should be made on the basis of the uses intended for the model. Indeed, there is always a question of whether to use one or several models.

The idea that the economy is in equilibrium has been very powerful, and equilibrium models are often useful. On the other hand, they tend to fail when the economy is not in equilibrium, as is the case when there is an economic bubble and especially when the bubble bursts.

Governance in Africa

Source: The Economist

The lack of government responsiveness to the needs of their populations is, I am pretty sure, a good part of the reason for the economic backwardness of Africa. Unfortunately, the cultural changes needed to make government work better seem to be very hard to achieve!

People spend a lot of time talking about things they don't know much about

So 92,000 documents were posted on Wikileaks relating to the U.S. conduct of the war in Afghanistan. If one person can screen 100 documents a day (12 1/2 per hour for 8 hours), it would take 920 person days to do an initial screening of the corpus of documents. Of course, one could use electronic screening to search for specific names or terms much faster, but to figure out what the body of documents means requires a lot more than that.

Thus 31 people could do an initial screening of the 92,000 documents in 30 days. Figuring a 25 day working month, it would take 37 people. I wonder whether the New York Times, the Guardian, or Der Spiegel devoted that kind of manpower to doing the initial screening of the corpus of documents.

How long would it take to do a serious analysis of the documents to ascribe a reasonable measure to their credibility, and to derive the important implications if one were starting from an initially screened corpus of 92,000 documents? I would think that this would be better done by a small team working over a longer period of time. I would guess months at a very minimum would be required to do this well.

So how come we are hearing so many "talking heads" expounding on what the body of documents says and means? Some of course are spokespersons for the affected government or their military forces, who have both the advantage of having seen these documents in the past and formed organizational views of their import as well as having huge staffs to put to work on the documents. Still these official spokespersons are likely to be spinning the news as seems most advantageous to their organizations, and this is a much easier task than the real analysis of the documents.

The rest of the talking heads should be ashamed of themselves, as should the news agencies that put them forward.

Why I was off line for several days

There was a very severe thunder storm three days ago, which resulted in power failure affecting more than a quarter million people. Trees were down all over the place, knocking down power lines and four electric substations were knocked out by the storm (and three people died in the storm). Hundreds of traffic lights went out, leading to massive traffic jams during the extra long rush hours.

The electric company took days to get people back online. My house and home office went dark on Sunday at about 3pm, and electric power was not restored until Tuesday at 11:20 pm. The Internet connection went down with the electric supply. So, even with a battery powered laptop, I was off line.

I am reminded that without electric power we d0 not have electric light nor air conditioning, and the fans and air purifiers in the house don't work. Neither do clocks, the refrigerator, freezer, stove and microwave (fortunately some local shopping centers had power, and we could eat out, and we could buy ice and store food in ice chests.). There was of course no television, but our radios work on battery power. The telephone land line went out before the power returned (making it impossible to get the updates on the expected return of power), but we our cell phones. I am impressed how much we depend on household technology, and on the resilience of the technology system due to the complex redundancy we can afford in our wealthy country.

An example of science leading to the recognition of technological needs

In 1896 Svante August Arrhenius published a scientific paper indicating that the emissions of Carbon Dioxide from the burning of fossil fuels had the potential to change the climate. From that start, a century of research has added more an more evidence that anthropogenic global warming was indeed a serious threat. The research has illuminated the nature and amount of other greenhouse gas emissions, the effects of changing land use on the albedo of the surface of the earth, the mechanisms of absorption of greenhouse gases, the changes in cloud cover to be expected, and the impacts that can be expected from global warming. The evolution of scientific technology has facilitated this research, but I direct attention specifically to the introduction of satellite remote sensing which has allowed collection of data on a global scale, and the evolution of the digital computer and computer networking has allowed the analysis of the huge masses of data accumulated, the modeling of atmospheric and oceanographic phenomena, and the projection of trends in atmospheric pollution and temperature response.

I really believe that without the synoptic view of global warming provided by science over this century long effort, mankind would not have recognized the problem of global climate change. Indeed, many people still do not recognize the problem, nor do many political systems.

Nonetheless, the partial recognition of the problem of global warming has unleashed an avalanche of efforts to develop new technologies, including focus on renewable energy sources such as biomass, solar and wind, expanded efforts to improve nuclear energy, efforts to develop thermonuclear power technology, technology to conserve energy or reduce greenhouse gas emissions, and technology to sequester carbon. There will also be efforts to develop technology to ameliorate or respond to global warming, such as water conservation technologies, technologies to combat sea level rise, and agricultural technologies to respond to changing growing conditions created by global warming.

(Incidentally, I understand there is new resistance to raising the funds necessary to complete the ITER project -- the internationally supported effort to develop the first thermonuclear experiment that would generate more power than it consumes. I can't evaluate the technical merit of the project, but the cost does not seem excessive if the project would really produce a significant step forward in the development of the technology. It is estimated as costing $19 billion, which might be compared with a global economic product in excess of $70 trillion. Thus, over the several years needed for the project, the cost per year would be a small portion of the global economy. It has been suggested that the funds might be better directed to the development of other energy technologies, but I think that is the wrong comparison. There are a lot of areas of expense, military spending for example, that would better be cut than expenditure to develop a huge and pollution reducing source of power for mankind.)

Of course, the recognition of the threat of global warming is but one of many factors influencing this torrent of technology development, and importantly the prior development of these technologies itself leads to further technology development as it introduces new possibilities and leads to improved technology development capacity.

Still the developing recognition of the problem of global warming, based on accumulated scientific evidence (itself partially the result of improved technology applied to the scientific effort) seems a good example of the way science helps create recognition of problems to be solved by the development of technology.

This posting is one in a series triggered by Brian Arthur's book, The Nature of Technology: What It Is and How It Evolves

We need to update proverbs and figures of speec

A lot of the things we say refer to ways of thinking of the past. They are as outdated as a car phone or an 8-track (not a buggy whip). It is really time to update this language. Here are some suggestions:

On persistence: You have to go through a lot of spam to find a worthwhile email.

Adding strength to strength: He is like a Buffett to my Gates

On naivite: He would believe a Nigerian get-rich quick email

On scams: Pulling a Madoff

On behavior: He posts his heart on Facebook

On old people: He's as old a Strom Thurmond

On efficiency: She goes through work the way Google goes through websites

Don't work all night, outsource it to India.

Still More on Brian Arthur's The Nature of Technology

Reference: The Nature of Technology: What It Is and How It Evolves

I am morphing Brian Arthur's model of technology as a growing and adapting structure of technological information. As Arthur points out, technologies are means of harnessing properties to achieve human purposes. They are interconnected, with technologies formed by collections of other technologies, and perceived as grouped by domains. There are portions of this structure, the relatively mature technologies, that are relatively static. Other portions, such as information technology and biotechnology today, that are growing quite rapidly. Still other portions of technology, such as those relating to traditional crop cultivars, are decaying and disappearing.

This technological information includes some that is disembodied, in the sense that it is published and available to all. Most however is embodied in devices, supplies, people (knowledge, understanding, skills, craft, etc.), and institutions. We find some regions are very rich in the embodiment of specific technologies; Silicon Valley is rich in the embodiment of information on information technology and biotechnology and Amsterdam is rich in information on the diamond jewelry industry.

The body of technological information in its various embodiments, is analogous to an ecosystem, the individual technologies to species, and the processes of change in that information analogous to species evolution and ecological evolution (or devolution).

The body of technological information is linked intimately to a body of complementary information about properties, resources, and problems. Much of this information is scientific, but much might also be considered ethno-science, coming out of cultural approaches to the understanding of the world that are not those of modern science. Some too are craft understanding, embodied in the information intrinsic to a craft or profession.

The body of technological information and its body of complementary information differs from region to region. That of the Central African Republic is different than that of Silicon Valley. It may be useful to consider the ratio of the quantity of information in a given geographic location to the number of people in that location. Clearly, the quantity of technological information in a region is a function of the investment that has been made in facilities and devices in that region, in the investment in education, and the investment in institutional development.

As an aside, one might differentiate the explicit from the implicit information embodied in an institution. A formal institution such as a formal business organization or a formally organized market may be easier to reconstitute if it fails or replicate because the information embodied by the formal institution may be more explicit as compared to an informal institution. Consider for example the traditional institutions which govern planting, pest control and water distribution in Bali. No one could describe the overall system nor how the subsystems interrelated. When that system was disrupted by the control of people from Java and the Indonesian Ministry of Irrigation, rice yields fell precipitously. Yet it was hard to see how to regain the yields, either by improving the “modern” management with traditional practice nor by restoring the key elements of the traditional practice.

The bodies of information and their embodiment are found within an environment of larger systems or networks. The economic system is one portion of this surrounding field. As Arthur points out, the economy and its technology co-evolve as technological change drives and enables changes in economic organization and as economic change drives and enables technological change. However, I would suggest that the relevant surround is not only economic, but also social, political, and cultural not to mention demographic. Thus, for example, economic growth and technological improvements drive increases in life expectancy, which drive other social, political and cultural changes, all of which drive further technological and economic changes.

The differences in these bodies of information explain significantly the differences in industrial cultures and in economic productivity among regions. A key question in international development is how to move poor regions and countries toward greater productivity. This model suggests that a major part of that effort should be to change the body of technological and complementary information in the region or country involved. The model also suggests how very difficult it may be to change the body of information in a poor nation in such a way as to increase economic productivity.

I would suggest that part of the problem is finding an appropriate balance of information embodied in people versus facilities and devices, versus institutions, and the related problem of how best to balance investments in improving the stock of information embodied in each of these areas. All too often development assistance has left a project with technology which people don't know how to use properly ot maintain. In developing nations all too often we find health service providers trying to function without the supplies embodying advanced technology -- vaccines and other pharmaceuticals -- that they need. We find people trained abroad who return to their home country and find themselves without the equipment that they were taught to use in their work.

Arthur argues persuasively that the technology chosen to achieve a particular purpose is seen as a combination of other technologies to achieve subordinate purposes, as those subordinate technologies are themselves combinations of still more subordinate technologies. Technology development in a specific region must necessarily be based on the technologies already there, or must include the transfer or development of all of the new technologies required for the success of the final technological product.
Moreover, the technological information required in people, facilities and devices, and institutions must all be available embodied in the right places, as well as the complementary information. Thus the coordination of technological development appears quite complex and difficult, as well as vital for the increase in productivity which underlies economic success and all the progress that economic success implies.

Arthur believes that the body of technology grows and will continue to grow without end. This seems to be clearly too optimistic. If one considers the technology developed by the Anasazi, for example, it seems clear that some of that disappeared in the collapse of their civilization caused by environmental changes. Today’s pueblo people, who are thought to be the descendents of the people of Chaco Canyon and other Anasazi towns, have had to recapture technology of or parallel to that of their ancestors. There are many other examples of civilizations that have crashed, and it seems clear that in the crash of a civilization part of the technology on which the civilization is built is lost.

There are less extreme examples of loss of technology. Think of the failed states, and the likelihood that much of whatever modern technology was held by Somalia or Zimbabwe has been lost. Many poor countries face serious problems of brain drain and deterioration of technological infrastructure. I recall that Uganda, for example, has lost the use of several of the railroads it once had, and many of its ports on Lake Victoria.

This is one of several postings on The Nature of Technology: What It Is and How It Evolves:

• The Perceptual Illusion About Technology
• Some Reviews of The Nature of Technology
• More on the Nature of Technology
• Technology Deepening
• HIV/AIDS and the links between science and technology
• Thoughts on invention on reading Brian Arthur's book
• Classification and Technology
• A Thought About Engineering and Technology
• More on Arthur's Nature of Technology
• The Nature of Technology

The Perceptual Illusion About Technology

An Ant Hill in Australia

Brian Arthur uses the coral reef as a metaphor for technology. The reef is a structure that grows by the action of the corals that live at its fringe, but the living coral organisms do not understand the structure that they are expanding nor do they rationally plan its growth. Indeed the reef can be seen as an unintended byproduct of actions by the living coral organisms.

I suppose an ant hill might be an alternative metaphor. We perceive the structure, but we can not assume that the ants that built it had any understanding of that which they were building. Like the living coral organisms, each ant carries out its very limited activities according to very limited information and with very limited purposes. Yet a large architectural structure emerges from the independent actions of many ants.

Technology in this view is a growing body of knowledge and practice. It grows by the accretion of models and knowledge created by inventors and innovators. Those people however tend only to be aware of the portion of the body of technology related to the frontier on which they are working, and their expansion of technology is not understood as or intended to build the overall structure of human technology, but rather to solve specific and local problems .

Arthur emphasizes that new technologies are inevitably built through new combinations of old technologies,  although they may also grow through the discovery of new phenomenon to utilize technologically to accomplish human purposes. I would suggest that the body of human technology is even built on technology developed by pre-human species. Stone tools, fire, and other technologies were bequeathed to Home sapiens by the species from which we evolved.


Arthur, in The Nature of Technology, uses the term "autopoiesis", created by Chilean biologists Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela, to describe the process by which the body of technology grows. The term, as I understand it, refers to entities structured by processes that are themselves influenced by the structure they themselves are creating and modifying. "An autopoietic system is to be contrasted with an allopoietic system, such as a car factory, which uses raw materials (components) to generate a car (an organized structure) which is something other than itself (the factory)."

Science policy generally focuses on the research and development occurring at the margin of the body of technological knowledge. Arthur's analysis forces a perceptual shift, much like that which occurs in the optical illusion I used in a recent posting. He focuses on the overall structure growing by teleonomic rather than teleologic processes, and thus requiring a different orientation of science policy.

I note that in one way the metaphors are misleading. Technological knowledge is not only created, but it is also lost. We don't know how the ancient Egyptians created the pyramids, nor how the Incas formed the stone blocks in their monumental structures. Many of the traditional cultivars of major crops have been lost as have the cultivation practices used in their growth. Thus while technological knowledge is growing in some areas, and indeed growing explosively in some domains such as information technology and biotechnology, it is also deteriorating and disappearing in other areas.

This is one of a series of postings occasioned by reading Arthurs book:

• Some Reviews of The Nature of Technology
• More on the Nature of Technology
• Technology Deepening
• HIV/AIDS and the links between science and technology
• Thoughts on invention on reading Brian Arthur's book
• Classification and Technology
• A Thought About Engineering and Technology
• More on Arthur's Nature of Technology
• The Nature of Technology

Some Reviews of The Nature of Technology

Reviews of Brian Arthur's book, The Nature of Technology: What it is and How it Evolves:

• "An -ology of Technology," Dan Gordon, Issues in Science and Technology, Spring 2010.
• "Guest review of 'The Nature of Technology' by The Romantic Economist," Richard Bronk, The Enlightened Economist, 2 November 2009.
  
• see also the review by Richard Bronk on the website of the Society of Business Economists
• Review by Jonathan David Aronson, International Journal of Communication 4 (2010)
  
• "Rethinking What Leads the Way: Science or New Technology," John Markoff, The New York Times, October 19, 2009

Early Results from an Obama Administration Science Diplomacy Initiative

Bruce Alberts was appointed Science Envoy to Indonesia, Elias Zerhouni Science Envoy to Algeria, and Ahmed Zewail Science Envoy to Egypt by the Obama administration. All very distinguished scientists, they serve in their personal capacity and are not government employees (although there are science attaches in some embassys). Now, according to the American Institute of Physics, they have reported on their early experience to the President's Council of Advisors on Science and Technology. I quote from the AIP report:

Alberts has had some initial success, including the establishment of an annual “Frontiers of Science” meeting with 40 US and 40 Indonesian future science leaders, and a new US program to support university exchanges. There are presently 7,000 Indonesians in US universities and Alberts hopes to triple that number. Indonesia is considering creating a new merit-based research funding agency similar to the National Science Foundation. This is another opportunity for the US which aided China’s creation of a similar agency. Furthering science education cooperation, Indonesia recently sent an envoy of scientists and educators to a US conference on science education....


Three areas—water, food and energy security, health and environment, and how best to establish evidence and merit-based systems—have emerged as common priorities across countries. To address these issues, Zerhouni outlines common needs in these countries. Science, technology, engineering, and mathematics programs at every level are also needed; a problem compounded by unqualified teachers and large youth populations that beleaguer already thin education systems. Zerhouni also identified a need to establish stronger scientific cultures of inquiry as opposed to rote learning......


Ahmed, who called Obama’s Cairo speech “historic” and “well received,” argued for a new way of international partnership focused around science. Zewail said that he was surprised by a lack of science expertise at US embassies, a hindrance to science diplomacy. Zewail also urged Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) Director John Holdren to bring the issue of scholarships and visa issues for foreign students to the attention of the President. Zewail ended with this anecdote, “After the June speech by President Obama the expectations were so high…. In Egypt you sell dates in Ramadan… the dates that were sold in Egypt, the highest priced date was named Obama…. The expectations were extremely high, so quite frankly the people would like to see action. Time is running out….”

The stories sound quite different, and one wonders how much of the difference is due to the diplomatic and bureaucratic skills of each Envoy and how much to the differences in scientific cultures of Algeria, Egypt and Indonesia.

I hope that USAID can work with the Science Envoys to mobilize funds to make something happen. I have never worked in Algeria, but many years ago I coordinated a USAID science sector assessment in Egypt that led to a $140 million loan, and in the 1970s I coordinated a month long visit to the United States by Indonesia's Minister of Science and Technology and the chief scientific officers of a dozen other ministries. My experience indicates that there is a huge potential for fruitful scientific cooperation between each of these countries and the United States, but that money is a requirement to make that cooperation work.