Computing: What Went Wrong

The year, 2010.  The state of computing?  Applications that build obfuscating document types that act as black boxes, hiding and separating information and intent.  File systems that store these documents largely blind of their content, of the context of their origination, and of the associations hidden in the meaning that binds them to the flow of the author's life and work.

There are but a finite set of ways that information needs to be associated.  Yet almost none of these association types are supported by our computers.  If you don't know before hand that everything you want to do will fit into the format of a linear text document, or the grid of a spread sheet, or the fields and records of a data base, well you might as well not even start.  If you want some information in one of your documents to reference information in another, well you had better be content with copying and pasting (live links are forbidden in all but the most expensive (and self-restrictive) application "suites".

Why is this true?  Why don't we yet have computers that can compute?  Mainly because the application layer is the WRONG place for the association of information.  The file system is the RIGHT place.  Information must be related and associated in a strata far below the application layer.  The only authority that should be granted to applications is user affordance – how humans are helped through the assignment, understanding, and management of the associations within their life's data.

To do this, the data (file) management layer needs to be beefed up (and the application layer slimmed down).  Where today's file systems only know a document by its wrapper (name, enclosing folder, parent application, document type, size, date, and on-disc storage address), a true data model layer would "understand" and dictate the structure of all of the ways information is related both within and between "documents".  In fact, in a data-model driven architecture, documents become arbitrary "collections", "instances", and "presentations" specific to the context of presentation or use.  The underlying data and associations between data from which documents are derived remain intact, separate, and agnostic of the documents that serve to reference, blend, display, and associate.

In the proposed data-model driven architecture, applications don't define information association, they must call on the data model to ask which types of associations are allowed and how these associations dictate data type, grammatical hierarchies, and chunking.  Applications build documents not as strings of binary, but from pointers into the information content stored according to the meta-archetectural rules of the master data model.  A document becomes instead an instance of assembled data and data associations (either frozen or live)… more like the "edit decision lists" that video and music editing professionals use to assemble linear streams of media from multiple sources.

Today's computational model's awkward emphasis on application authority and autonomy promotes an informational ecosystem that promotes informational islands dictated by the whims of application developers.

[to be continued]

Randall Reetz

The Incomputable Heaviness of Knowledge

Is the universe conceivable?  Does scientific knowledge improve our ability to think about the universe?

What happens when our knowledge reaches a level of sophistication such that the  human brain can no longer comfortably hold it, or compute on it?  For thousands of years, scholars have optimistically preached the benefits of knowledge.  Our world is rich and safe as a result.  People live longer, people live in greater personal control over the options they face.  All of this is an obvious result of our hard won understanding of how the universe and its parts actually work.  We arm our engineers with these knowledges and send them out to solve the problems that lead to a more and more desire-mitigated environment.  Wish you weren't hungry, go to the fridge or McDonnalds.  Wish you were somewhere else, get in your car and go there.  Wish you could be social, but your friends are in Prague, call them.  Wish you knew something, look it up on the internet.  Lonely, log in to a dating service and set up a rendezvous. Wish your leg wasn't fractured, go to a doc-in-the-box and get it set and cast.

But what if you want to put it all together?  What if your interests run to integration and consolidation.  What if you want to understand your feelings about parking meters as an ontological stack of hierarchical knowledge built all the way up from the big bang?

Evolution: Optimizing a Definition of Fitness

We think of evolution as a process that optimizes organisms (things) through the filter of fitness. Fitness as means - the species - as end. I have long suspected that this interpretation is wrong-headed, and results in conceptual mistakes that ripple though all of science, blinding us to much that could be understood about the Universe, process, and the basic shape and behavior of reality.

So let's flip it. We'll instead, re-frame evolution as a process that uses things (organisms, species, systems, ideas, etc.) as a means (channel, resource, armature, vehicle) for the optimization of fitness. From this inverted vantage, optimizing the criteria of fitness is the goal – species, nothing more than a convenient means.

It always feels wrong to talk of evolution's "goals".  Certainly a universe doesn't start out with a plan or agenda.  Things like plans and agendas are only possible within advanced abstraction apparatus like a brain or computer.  Universe's start out simple and chaotic.  Only chance causal interactions played out amongst a universe sized accumulation of matter and force over ridiculous amounts of time will lead to the types of rare and energy demanding structures that can "think" up things like plans and agendas.  So when I talk here of "a process that optimizes",  I make use concepts and terms that are more generally associated with self, ideation, and will – with the products of advanced abstraction machinery found in humans and maybe eventually in thinking machines.  But what I mean to convey is the direction of a process.  That processes have direction and that direction is (or can be) independent of the types of advanced computation necessary for things like planing and intent is in fact, the exact conceptual jump that the idea or discovery of "evolution" demands.  Evolution = direction without intent.

The directionality we see in evolving systems (all systems) is blatantly and obviously non-random.  Our job then is to understand, explain, and ultimately, exploit this understanding. Because we humans have trouble imagining non-random direction coming from systems without a brain, a soul, an agenda, we are left with a slim set of emotionally acceptable options; anthropomorphizing the universe and evolution, inserting a deity, or simply rejecting evolution (or reality) out of hand.  The non-emotional option, the science option, evolution, recovers from this dissonance through the application of inductive logic, physical evidence, and frankly, by simply offering a emotionally dissonant option.

The thesis of this essay is the suggestion that evolution might be agnostic to optimization of species and is instead simply using species as a conduit for the optimization of this thing called fitness.  That fitness might in fact be more real, and species, ethereal.

This entire domain is so fraught with potential miss-interpretation.  I feel a constant urge to over-explain, to be extra careful, to make sure the reader isn't thinking one thing when I mean something else.  For instance I feel a need to define the term "species", especially because I am using it in a more general way than is usually required within the boundaries of its original domain, biology.  This is because I am convinced that evolution is a universal process, that it has nothing in particular to do with biology or life, that it happens in all systems, all of the time, an unavoidable aspect of any reality.

So when I write "species"  I mean the thing or system that is "evolving" – the animal, the planet, the culture, the idea, the group attitude in line at the post office this morning.  And in the context of this essay, I use "species" to mean the thing upon which "fitness" acts (as judge, jury, pimp, or executioner).  Species is the thing, fitness the criteria that molds the thing.

But by this definition, species is corporal and measurable, suggesting that fitness is… is what?  If we are talking about something, shouldn't we have some way of examining it, measuring it, comparing it, holding it in our hands, flipping it over, squeezing it, spitting it open and looking at its parts?  That seems a more reasonable proposition for species than for fitness.

We like to think we can man-handle a thing like species, take it to the lab and do lab things.  But maybe that is more illusion than truth.  We can dissect a frog, but that particular frog isn't really the species "frog".  The species "frog" is an average, a canonical concept, a Platonic solid, a moving target, an arbitrarily bounded collection, a gelatinous arrow through foggy potentialities.

I was in route to show that "fitness" is a real thing, but all I accomplished was a picking away at the real-ness of "species".  Maybe that will end up being more helpful anyway.  The colloquial image of species, even amongst evolution theorists has always seemed more visceral, more thing-like than fitness.  We point to a single nervous animal on the savanna and declare, "that is gazelle".  Worse, we often fail to make a semantics distinction between that declaration and the categorical; "gazelle is that".  That fitness is a much harder thing to point to, really doesn't mean it is less real, or as I have shown, that real-ness applies to either.

Now that I've reduced both species and fitness to the realm of concept, it should be easier to argue my thesis.

Even at the concept level, "species" is a thorny concept fraught with pedagogy and hubris.  It is hard to look at a penguin, a porpoise, or a planet and imagine something more amazing, more evolved than its current form.  Which probably goes a long way to explain why we have a natural tendency to overlay onto the concept "species" notions of perfect form, of an apex, a pre-determined goal.  But this certainly has less to do with species and more to do with the limits of our cognitive facility.  It would be absurd to assume that this particular now is in some way special, that forms are complete and that we just happen to inhabit the planet just at the point when evolution has finally and completely finished its big 14 billion year project.

OK, the apologies have been met out, the slippery territory marked, the standard arguments abutted, the inconsistencies delineated, the usual misinterpretations admitted. These are standard precursors to any serious discussion in the study of evolution and bare witness to both the complexity of the subject and the apparent inability of the brain to readily make sense of its many dimensions.

So why should I want to reorder the relative hierarchy of fitness and species?  For one, I have always felt the standard Darwinian definition of evolution to be a bit circular.  Wow, before that comment ruins my standing, I had better get to work defending Darwin.  I am a "standard model" realist.  Darwin got most or all of evolution correct.  Especially if you restrict your focus to biology.  Darwin is the dude!  The positions I detail here are meant as additions, as icing on the cake Darwin baked.  But Darwin built his theory around life and his bio-centrist focus on evolution restricts and warps the applicable idea-space it scopes.  I always say that Darwin explained the how of evolution with regard to biology, and that I am interested in the why of evolution with regard to all systems.

To restrict the scope of evolution to biology, is to somehow draw a line in the sand between life and not-life, a special sauce within life that categorically separates it from all other systems.  I can't find that line.  So I am left with the responsibility of understanding and defining evolution as a domain independent attribute of any system or system of systems.

Structurally, all systems are ordered as hierarchical stacks.  Each level receives aggregate structures from lower (previously constructed) levels and produces from these, new super-aggragates, that it in turn passes to the next higher level.  That this process of aggregate layering is historically dependent is obvious.  The non-obvious mapping is to energy.  The lowest levels of the hierarchy, the earliest levels, represent high energy processes, energy levels that would rip apart aggregates at higher levels.  In this universe, all systems are built upon the aggregation processes laid down in the earliest moments, aggregations that occur at the upper limits of heat and pressure –  strings, quarks, sub-atomic particles, atoms, molecules.  Each corresponding to a matching environmental energy level, an energy level that is cooler and less pressurized than the ones that came before it.  The universe gets cooler and more dispersed.  Always.  The growth of complexity, evolution, is dependent upon this predictable and unavoidable dissipation of energy over time.

Those who would argue that life is special, that evolution is exclusive to it, well they are obligated to draw a definitive boundary between life and everything else, and because life, like everything else, is dependent upon the historical layering of aggregate systems, will have to draw that line historically.  They will have to show a moment in time before which there was not life or evolution and after which there was life and evolution.

There are many ways to define life in order that such a line could be drawn.  If you say, as most do, that life is that set of systems that incorporate and utilize both R and D Nucleic acids, well there is surely some moment in the past which would accurately delineate those earlier systems which didn't have both RNA and  DNA, from the later systems that did.  Such a definition is some what arbitrary, but all categorical definitions are.  But if you seek instead to hinge your definition of life to the process of evolution, then you are faced with a tautologically intractable problem.  Either you must accept the nonsensical proposition that the universe started with RNA/DNA preformed, or the more rational causal proposition that evolution is independent of and proceeded biology, preparing over vast periods of time, the aggregate ingredients necessary for the super-aggregate we call life.  If you insist despite this logic, that evolution is a property exclusive to biology, then you are left with the thorny problem of defining aggregation processes happening simultaneous to and independent of biology.  Processes that continue to produce atoms, molecules, stars, planets, galaxies, cultures, ideas, sand dunes, ocean currents, etc. And, you must also show how these continuous and omnipresent processes are qualitatively different when they happen outside of systems that use RNA and DNA from those that do.  But that isn't enough, you must also show either that no system after biology will ever evolve, of that the entire future of evolution will happen within the confines of biological systems.

The evidence and logic weighs overwhelmingly on the side of life being an arbitrarily bounded category, and evolution defining a process unbounded by domain, history, or complexity. Both of which are difficult concepts for humans to accept.  We like to think we belong to a category made exclusive by some secret sauce, some magic that applies in some measure only to life, and which has reached its zenith in the human form or spirit.  We like to imagine evolution to be that process that shaped the shapeless gasses of primal soup into the perfect form that we now enjoy.  Wow.  The ego and hubris drips and pools.

If I may, back to fitness.  The above arguments are crafted to shake we humans free of our innate bio/human/self centrism and to show how such hubris works to emphasize contemporary corporal form over timeless ephemeral process, placing a sort of artificial spotlight on species and downgrading the in contrast, fitness.  Its only natural.  And it is wrong.

The tendency to focus on species is easy to understand.  If you are looking at an animal and asking questions about evolution and process it is only natural that the scope of your thinking would be restricted to that animal, that species, that family of life and its struggle to survive.  Even when you back your self out to a vantage wide enough to include all of life, the full fan of Linnaean Taxonomy over the full 4.5 billion year crawl, the focus is still thing, still survival, still some sort of cosmic engineering project.  It is only when you back all the way out, when you look at all that is, the entire Universe, every moment since the big bang, life and the stuff between, in, and of it, that you might be forced to ask questions big enough to frame the why of evolution.

The why of evolution has to be big enough to comfortably hold all change, all systems, any aggregate and any aggregate chain, not just those that succeed, not just those that are fit, not just things that can be called things… everything!  Any process that explains the existence of one system should also be able to explain every other system.  Universality, at this depth of scope demands a bigger reason than can be explained by the concept "species".  Darwin's big how in biology then becomes a local mapping to a specific domain.  It isn't wrong, it just isn't universal.  You can know everything about pianos, but won't really understand music until you know enough about enough instruments that you begin to see the formative patterns that unite, from which all instruments are informed.

Species, be it a valid concept at all, must be but a subset, an example, a non-special representative, a member of a perfectly inclusive, and domain independent set.  Sets that include everything are not informative as a set.  So we look elsewhere.  That species, as a label, pointing to the subject of evolution, can equally be applied to any thing, forces us to look elsewhere for that which explains the big why of change. Change must not reside in thing, product, tailings, result, or even detritus.  If the big why isn't thing, but has to explain thing, any thing, all things, than the big why must be a process or action or modifier or pressure.  Some common attribute of any change regardless of domain.  What process is agnostic to domain?

In a word, entropy. In an attempt to determine the maximum work that could be extracted from any source of energy, steam era engineers teased apart the relationship between source and output and found an intriguing and strangely universal leakage.  Energy, when used, degrades, diffuses, is no longer as useful or available to the original process.  When scientists discovered the same leak, this time with structure, a strange universality began to appear.  Energy and information, force and structure, an unexpected symmetry.  Then Einstein revealed the exact relationship between energy, time, space, and mass, allowing thermodynamic transforms on all physical terms.  Despite initial objections by Stephen Hawking (and others attracted to the notion that nooks and crannies of the universe might provide respite from the second law's rigid causal prescriptions), Leonard Susskind and others have brought both the quantum world of the impossibly small and the black hole world of the impossibly big, together under a shared entropic umbrella.  What we are left with, like it or not, is a universal.  A universal that is universal to all physical domains and dimensions, regardless of scale.  Wow. That doesn't happen very often in nature.  That hasn't happened in science.  Ever.  Significant?

In his 1927 book, The Nature of the Physical World, Sir Arthur Eddington, put it this way:

"The law that entropy always increases, holds, I think, the supreme position among the laws of Nature. If someone points out to you that your pet theory of the universe is in disagreement with Maxwell's equations - then so much the worse for Maxwell's equations. If it is found to be contradicted by observation - well, these experimentalists do bungle things sometimes. But if your theory is found to be against the second law of thermodynamics I can give you no hope; there is nothing for it but to collapse in deepest humiliation."

Any theory or assessment of evolution that is not written in response to thermodynamics, information theory, and entropy would seem to be a theory not particularly interested in validity.  That the laws of thermodynamics and evolution both direct their unblinking stares upon the domain of change would seem to me an invitation to at least begin to consider the possibility of a concerted union between the two.

[more to come…]

Randall Reetz

The Life And Times Of Your Average Paradigm

Systems are in constant state of flux, they change all of the time, over time, and even when they don't or can't, the environment around them changes in response to their behavior or simple presence.

Systems evolve. The super-systems in which they live, evolve. It's what happens, it is the only thing that can happen. Stuff constantly adjusts its behavior in response to the stuff around it. And things can not help but mess with the things near them. Change is inevitable. But more than that, change has pattern that can be teased out, measured and described.

These patterns are generalizable and can be found in all systems regardless of domain. All systems evolve. All evolution is similar. What Darwin described in biology, once generalized, can just as accurately describe the interaction of gases or the layered persistent structure of ocean currents, or the way I came to these thoughts and decided to write them down.

An interesting aspect of systems is the way they are made up of layers of subsystems each bound by unique structural and behavioral rules, and all of this can exist simultaneously across many dimensions. These 'layered grammars' are perhaps easiest to see in language, where symbols are assembled in ever more complex aggregates (phonemes, words, phrases, sentences, paragraphs, themes, sections, volumes, collections, etc.), each governed by its own rules of construction.  Of course an utterance can be parsed by the layered rules of symbolic grammar (as above) or any other set of layered grammars… take for instance it's semantics or meaning.

But what interests me today is the life span of a system. Though it is problematic to do so, it is often useful to define, at least loosely, the beginning, middle, and end of a system's life span, the arch of its development through time. Individual humans have life spans of course, and from a more distant vantage, so too does a culture, and though the arch of of these classifications hasn't run its course, the human species. From ever wider vantages, one can talk of the stacked life span of hominids, great apes, primates, mammals, chordates, multi-celled animals, eukaryotes, and biota itself.

What interests me here are the patterns can be teased from any life span? More to the point, the patterns that are universal across all life spans. What, for example, is there that can be accurately, and predictively said, of the difference between the first half and the second half of any life span? What is it about the beginning of an individual human's life that is similar to the beginning of the life span of the human species or the beginning of the life span of life itself?

A reasonably robust set of these life span meta-patterns might work well as a way to better define the boundaries that give meaning to the most general concept; "system" ("category", or "thing").

But what I find most valuable about this strategy, is the possibility of predicting the relative age of a system without ever having witnessed the full arch of a life span, as example. Is the system of focus in its infancy, is it a teenager, or is it middle aged, old, or nearly dead? Are there reliable parameters that can be mapped over a system to help us determine such things? I am convinced there are. My confidence in this guess stems from the dramatic symmetries that have been exposed over the past century and a half in the fields of information theory, thermodynamics, classical physics, and quantum dynamics, linguistics, and logic. What this work has exposed is equivalence transforms that show causal connections between energy, mass, time and distance, and importantly, information. This overarching symmetry hints at symmetries in systems themselves and in stacks of systems, and the way systems change through time.

It is this knowledge these profound symmetries, uniting such apparently separate systems, that best describes the most important contributions of the last century of scientific exploration. Wielding this knowledge, we can use the same language and logical tools to examine any system, be it physical, behavioral, or descriptive, or cognitive.

The slippery and ghostly similarities we have noticed across domains, the ones we previously chocked up to metaphor, have been shown in fact to be causal and real (and we have the math to prove it!).

It is frustrating, that the topics I am most interested in, require the assembly of so much preliminary conceptual scaffolding. All these words, and I haven't even gotten to my main point. Here goes.

I talk often of what I call "productivity paradigms". They are ethereal and mercurial economic entities defined by some factor that gives rise to previously unachievable levels of the value of an average hour of labor.

As systems, productivity paradigms should avail themselves to the kinds of 'life span' parsing we would apply to any system. So, we can ask things like: can we determine the relative age of a given productivity paradigm?

And, is it possible to can we know this from the rising or falling rate of growth resulting from that paradigm?

Are these questions, addressed as I have, to a subset of systems, or are all systems productivity paradigms, making my questions universally applicable? Is there such a thing as a non-productivity paradigm? Can a system ever become a system if it doesn't follow some sort of life-span arch? Is productivity, as I suspect it is, a perquisite for the existence and persistence of a system?

Lets assume it is. Now what? How can we extend this assumption in order to acquire something salient to say about a system?

Productivity Stalemate: Post Industrial World Caught With Its Pants Down

If a hundred trillion dollars* falls down in a forest, and nobody has anything to spend it on, does it make a sound?

In what might be the most embarrassing moment ever completely ignored, the post-industrial west is missing the greatest opportunity… ever.

It snuck up on us, yes. But that doesn't make it any less embarrassing. It still hasn't been acknowledged, sure. But that doesn't mean it hasn't (isn't) happening. What happened? Well, while we weren't looking, the so called second and third world made some money, a lot of money, and they came running to the west to spend it. Why wouldn't they? We're the experts. We know how to put big money to work… right?

Unfortunately, and at the same time, we, the west, the so-called 'first world', well, we slammed into what I call the productivity wall. Sure we were (are) way ahead of the rest of the world. But we aren't moving forward, and haven't for about 15 years. The lack of upward motion has caused the unthinkable to happen – we ran out of things to productively spend money on. We don't have reasonable investments in which to sink new capital. We ran out of ways to ingage new forms of production at the pace demanded by all of the new capital finding its way into our securities and investment markets. It's as if we never in our wildest dreams anticipated the second and third world adding significantly to the global capital pool. We outsourced. We ran up unheard of trade imbalances. We sold bonds by the trillions to China. The world changed. It was right in front of our noses, yet we never saw it, never bothered to model its implications to our increasingly outmoded economic models.

Pants well down. The whole world watching. Just standing here. Clueless.

Money flowing in. Unprecedented quantities of new capital. Accelerating. And here we sit – without any 'shovel ready' places to invest it.

What? you ask. How can this be? Surely there are people who would love to use someone else's money to build something and sell it. Right? And yes, the demand for capital is always there. There is always someone with some big plan and a need to go out an buy some parts, a factory, and the right people to run it. But what if nobody on the other end of the assembly line has any money to buy that new thing you just spent capital to produce? Or more to the point, what if there is nothing about the resultant goods or services that catalyzes the production of other goods and services? What if the only remaining places to spend capital don't make it easier and cheaper and faster to make other things. What if in effect, the existence of your factory and the widgets it produces, doesn't result in any real growth in consumption or wealth? What if you just spent good money to make things that the economy simply can not afford to purchase?

Unthinkable. Or is it? The value of currency, the purchasing power of the people who earn it, these are determined by productivity. Productivity is just the value of an average hour of labor. Productivity changes over time. Usually it increases. Sometimes, as when a new and powerful infrastructure is established – mechanized farming, electricity, telephonic communication, global integrated transportation – it increases in grand leaps. In between these technology driven epochs of growth, there are periods in which the full landscape of opportunity within that domain are exploited. Growth during these in-paradigm epochs slows as the possibilities made possible by that advancement approach its limits.

We in the west have not jumped productivity paradigms in a while. We are running out of productive ways of exploiting the current set of infra-structural advantages. As a result, an odd thing happens, an unintuitive thing happens, we find that throwing more fuel in the economic fire no longer buys greater productivity.

Sure, we can continue to spew out ever greater quantities of goods and services, but if things we spew do not increase the value of that all important average hour of labor, there will not be more money available to consume to our new levels of production.

Production does not equal productivity. Consumption does not equal productivity. Production plus consumption does not equal productivity. Productivity, the value of that average hour of labor, is determined by the effectiveness of the infrastructure.

The classic example of a productivity jump is the introduction of mechanized farming. Mechanized farming has allowed such yield (per hour of labor) that we can afford to feed all of the people with less than 4 percent of us spending our labor on food production. This single fact freed up the remaining 96 percent of us to do other things.

Unfortunately, just as the rest of the world got to the point where it could contribute capital fuel to our economic engine, we ran out of ways to put that capital to productive use.

Holly crap! China and Brazil and India and the Philippines and, and, and, they all have some extra money to pour into global capital markets, and just when they do, we run out of productive ways to spend it!

Has any greater opportunity ever presented itself to a people unprepared to take advantage of it?

So what did the west do instead? We faked it. We gladly accepted the money and spent it on crazy layered real estate loan stocks and layered stock schemes that were nothing but new plays on the same age-old shyster speculation scheme that has substituted for capital investment every time real productivity is elusive. And the real estate boondoggle isn't the first of our fakes. We started with energy deregulation and when the inevitable crash happened there, we moved quickly on to the dot-com boondoggle, and when that crashed, we faked it again with real estate and "mortgage backed securities". And now that this crash caused a global economic shock wave leaving double digit unemployment in the strongest economies and a fallout into the third world we are only now beginning to acknowledge.

And how did we respond to the mortgage securities crash? By faking it again of course. We said, "Sure we acted like shysters, but that was the past, we have changed, give us your money and we will spend it wisely this time!" And what wise thing did we do with that money? Did we go looking for the root of the problem? Did we attempt a wholesale rethinking and scientific understanding of the economy and what makes it work? Hell no! We sent quants back to their million dollar basements and told them to be better, bigger, and faster shysters! And what they came back with was a thing called "micro-second trading".

Micro-second trading is stock trading like any other stock trading, except that it is done and can only be done by high speed computers with exclusive access to the main trading computers operated by the various trading firms (NYSE, NASTEC, NIEKO, etc.) under the auspices of the Federal Trade Commission and other international policy bodies. Micro-second trading exploits a loophole in trading regulation that allows certain exclusive trading organizations access to trading data before the trades are made. Yes you read that correctly. Insider-trading on steroids. The loophole allows this peak into the future before it happens but only for a fraction of a second and only of course to those few companies who have somehow gained physical access to space in the computer server farms that operate the stock exchanges. Imagine what kinds of profits on futures trading you could make if you knew exactly what the future was?

When you read that the trading firms that lost the most money at the end of the real estate fiasco are currently giving out hundreds of millions of dollars in bonuses to their employees, and you wonder how they are doing it, where they are getting the money, well now you know.

And all of it, each of these fake investment schemes, one after the other, happened exactly and only because we, the most powerful, most educated, most economically potent people who have ever lived… well, we ran out of ideas. We came to a wall. We hit the end of the current paradigm and either couldn't figure out how to jump to the next one or weren't as a culture prepared to think in paradigm jumping terms.

I suspect that humans are just not very smart, that in mass, we are limited in the exact ways that the current circumstance and our reaction (or lack there of) so dramatically illuminates. That so many of us exist. That all of us are so well educated. That we live in and by so protected and fecund an infrastructure, and that not one of billion of us were not in a position to see this happening and plan around it tears at credulity.

Or maybe we are all of us so greedy and shortsighted that misfortunes like this happen despite the obvious cognitive capacity of our species? Either way, whether we are more in it or of it, we have to react to it. We have to do something to get productivity up and running again. And to do this we have got to build an understanding of economic systems big enough to include and predict the foibles of which we have recently been apart. Until we have such an understanding, we will not be able to avoid the future missteps as destructive and anti-productive as the bubble/bust cycles that have so plagued the last 15 years.

And what would it have looked like if we had been prepared to productively spend this windfall of new investment money rushing towards us? What, capitalization opportunities, had they been in place, would have allowed us to avoid the malevolently inventive 'creative financial products' that led directly to the string of bubble/bust cycles that have so devastated the global economy? What, one might reasonably ask (though few have) would or should the next (and long overdue) productivity paradigm look like?

I have invented a word, "productclivity" to describe a general framework of a scaffolding of a shadow of a description of an outline of the criteria that might be used to judge a new productivity paradigm. Productclivity is the propensity of a system to produce productivity. It is to economics what fitness is to evolution. In the longest run of time, it doesn't so much matter if you have a good set of legs as it matters that you have a good set of leg building algorithms… a good set of adaptation optimization algorithms, even better. Same goes for economic systems. Any successful scheme (mechanized farming, electric power grid, broadcast television, general purpose personal computing, cell phones, etc.) pales in productclivity comparison to things like public education and national or international research and development programs. Such systems tend to produce a continuity across productivity epochs.

Pop-economists and economy pun-dents are fond of terms like "the multifier effect", which is meant to describe investment and business activity that causes an out-fall of other investment and business activity. Investments in transportation and education and communication infrastructures are said to have this special something that produces productive systems that could not have been anticipated and would not have existed in their absence.

So lets look at the current paradigm. We already have mechanized farming. We have a decent communication system. We have a world class materials market and the transportation system to get those materials anywhere in the world in less than a week (a day if you are willing to pay for air freight). We have a decent data network (the internet) and the gateways, switchers, data storage and servers to make it all zing. We have programmable computers built into the fabric of every part of our daily lives and the things that make our lives long and rich. Through trickier and trickier programming we have automated our manufacturing, factories have become robots in them selves. The result has been a level of productivity unheard of in human history. It has given us time to screw around and the products and services to upgrade our "down time" to the level of "entertainment" and "leisure". What is left? What more could there be? The simple fact that the question seems so reasonable is evidence that we are in this particular problem for the full count.

But there are hints and there is hope that more might come, that there is still something of worth, something, "Not unbecoming men that strove with Gods" (Tennyson). We have the machines, the communication channels, the materials, the transportation, the manufacturing and materials, the educated labor, the social infrastructure (or, um, a bill of rights anyway), and the standard plumbing, mini-malls, and big box stores… everything one might need if one was packing for a trip to next-paradigm land. Which is another way of saying that we know and can list all of the things that make up the current infrastructure, all of the things that work, all of the things that brought us this far, all of the things the next productivity paradigm will need, and won't be.

And this is where I am obligated to insert a cautionary explanation. New paradigms do not, though they are frequently accused, replace that which came before them. But wait, you might say, everyone can come up with with a counter-example or two. Horse drawn carriages were replaced by automobiles… right? Paper mail has been replaced by email (or is doing a good job trying). The computer has replaced ledger sheets. Yes, yes, and yes. But none of these qualify, in my estimation, as paradigm shifts. The fact that they look like paradigm shifts, only results in confusion. In all three cases, the introduction of a new tool, process, or technology expediates or in some other significant way, improves a solution that already existed before. The car, like the buggy, accepted human passengers and transported them from one site to another. Same transform can be applied to most so-called "paradigm shifts". Better, ain't different. Paradigm shifts then, are caused by solutions to problems more fundamental than the problems that structure current solutions. If, for instance, an affordance was invented that gave people all of the benefits of being somewhere else, without actually being transported there, well that technology would qualify as a true paradigm shift.

Does double digit growth in second and third world economies mean they have jumped paradigms? Scooped the first world? Beat us at our own game? N0. Not even close. Lets not loose perspective. No need for hysteria or blame. Non-western economies don't have to jump paradigms, they have only to adopt the paradigms the west had already defined and refined. Their economies are growing fast, true, but this is the simple result of the efficiencies and advantages of moving their production and infrastructure up to modern industrial levels and then amortizing these advantages across the huge number of people (hours of labor) at their disposal Nothing magic, just productivity gains multiplied across huge populations.

In the west, we face a task far more complex. We can not play the same catch-up game being played in the 'rest of the world' (ROW). We already played that game… played it to the limits possible within this paradigm. No, now have to invent the next one, the next (productivity exploding) paradigm. Nothing else will work. This should be obvious by now. Even the notion that we could tap into old paradigm gains in that part of the world with rapidly growing populations of consumers is wrong headed and won't work. Yes, the global consumer base is expanding, yes this is happening in the second and third world. Yes the numbers are astonishing. But in order to sell to the rest of the world, we have to produce at efficiencies only allowable through the use of discounted ROW labor and materials rates. The only way we can get back to growing the rate of growth in the first world, our world, is by playing the paradigm-shift game.

And what does that mean? Given the current state of the first world, what are the parameters that would define a true paradigm shift? We start with the obvious statement; the next paradigm can't be anything we already have or do. More than that, it can't be an extension of or improvement on what we already have or do. It has to solve problems that are more fundamental to, that actually cause, the problems that provide the market and demand upon which the current economic paradigm feeds.

But before we go there, let's add another few items to the "how to tell a real paradigm shift in productivity from simple extension of the current paradigm" list.

First way to tell if what you are doing isn't a true solution is when you notice that the more you do the less you get out… this is the law of Diminishing Returns. When gains in productivity become more expensive, even while the energy or investment required by a new scheme increase. Shale oil, right-now manufacturing, team building exercises, on-line shopping, hybrid drive technology, cloud computing, web 3.0, ultra-sized wind turbines, commuter freeway lanes, customer relations management software, etc. These are all great examples of what I would call skimming; finding ingenious ways eek out the last few percentage point gains available within the current paradigm. Where a new paradigm should result in fold increases in productivity, skimming only yields percentage gains. These drop off to nothing as the full potential of that paradigm reaches its natural zenith.

And then there is the law of scales. This happens as a paradigm matures, when all the easy problems have been solved, and the only remaining solutions end up being solutions that work in ever smaller and ever more isolated domains. Come to think of it, scale is a good criteria upon which to compare true paradigm shifts with the range of lesser influencers. A true paradigm shift will expose entirely new markets, new sources, new methods, new materials, new activities and uses… solutions that scale both vertically and horizontally without apparent limit (at least at first). Stove-piping, the tendency of solutions to only work vertically and for these vertical markets to become narrower and more isolated over time… these are good indicators that the current paradigm is greying, robust, reaching maturity… that all of the easy to reach has been picked, that the investment in taller ladders can not be amortized across any other markets (fruit picking ladders have become so specialized that they are useless to firemen and painters).

In converse, true paradigms tend to be expansive, to open things up, and as I have suggested earlier, they tend to result in what many call a "multiplier" effect; from their seed, other opportunities bud and grow and multiply simply because the paradigm provides such a rich foundation for effective novelty.

OK, back to guessing. What will the next paradigm be? If it has to rooted at a deeper foundational level than current solutions, how much deeper? What does deeper mean?

In science, the trend has been towards theories (understandings) of the laws of nature, and for ways these laws are inherited from yet deeper and more general layers of meta-laws. Work in pure information theory is providing what might eventually work as the foundation of all, indeed any, natural system. Understanding the deepest layer(s) of nature allows one to predict, indeed derive, all of the laws above it (and show why they are the only possible laws). In business, this deeper understanding is phrased "knowing your market". Same thing. The deeper you tap into the causal strata that supports a system, the more control you have over and knowledge of the whole system. The deeper you tap into the causal strata, the more of that system's complexity becomes salient and controllable. In science this phenomenon is called "elegance". A theory is elegant to the extent that it can comfortably inform and predict the behavior of a large number of other theories or theories of theories. Elegance it is argued is a basic attribute of any evolving system. The universe has evolved, therefore it is fundamentally elegant. Any physics, any any descriptive abstraction of the universe will therefore be accurate to the extent that it is an accurate analog of the elegance of the system it describes, the universe itself, and by extension, the evolutionarily stacked layers that describe its history. But getting to elegance isn't easy. The deeper one digs into any historical or causal strata, the less like today do things appear. The promise though, is that an understanding gets more useful and profound the more deeply it is rooted. It might be easier to study legs, but you can get more information faster if you study the DNA snippets that propagate appendages across all of biology. Not only that, but an understanding of DNA in general will allow you to know things about legs that allows you to know things about ears and hearts and intestines and the production of enzymes and metabolism and growth and reproduction and evolution and information and energy and ultimately the topology of causality itself, the arch of possibility.

But digging deeper comes at a cost. Armed only with a good ruler and notebook, you can learn lots of stuff about legs, if you want to go the next bit and understand genetics, you had better build yourself a bunch of awesomely fast computers connected to some awesomely big data storage devices. And you had better find more and more robust ways of handling greater and greater amounts of complexity. The end result might be elegant descriptions but that elegance comes at great cost. The cultural and physical armature humans have had to build, in order to reach back into the causal structure of elegance is anything but elegant. Look for instance at the Large Hadron Collider. This machine is so complex that some theorists have questioned the likelyhood that it will ever actually work or work long enough for to acquire any reliable or demonstrable and supportable data. A whole branch of logic is likewise concerned with the limits of knowledge and thus the limits of abstraction. The data stream flowing from the fully operational LHC will exceed 300 gigabytes per second. Just mastering the technology and logic to store a stream that fast and wide is a challenge no previous generation could have met. Sifting through the resulting mountain of data requires logic armature of unprecedented complexity.

All of the low hanging fruit has been picked. We have measured all of the easy to measure stuff. We have stored and organized all of the easy to measure, store and organize measurements. We have built all of the equipment that that is easy to build. Even most of the stuff that is hard to build. We are increasingly, as a species, up against a complexity wall that keeps us from progress in almost every field of human endeavor.

The next productivity paradigm will have to have something to do with breaking through this wall, something to do with finding some understanding of the very shape of complexity and using that understanding to build a stable tunnel under, ladder over, or door through the complexity that vexes progress today.

Among the myriad of discoveries made over the past century, three of the most profound are the standard physical model, information theory, and evolution. Together these describe the relationship of matter to energy and to space and time, the limits of information, the equivalency of energy and information, the way both degrade over time, and how this guarantees the direction of time. All of which puts bounds around and relates reality and our abstractions of reality. Physics and cognition. The territory and the maps we can make of it. And, importantly, the physicality of maps themselves. But the complexities involved in the manipulation of this level of understanding pushes humans to the limits of their capacity (and beyond). Fewer and fewer of us have the cognitive wherewithal to make effective use of what is known.

What is needed, what is desperately needed is an automation of discovery and cognition. We need machines that do more than just help us acquire and organize the measurements we take. We need machines that work along side of us, extend cognition into realms beyond the easy reach of human minds. We've automated everything else. Cognition is all that is left to automate.

This is the next productivity paradigm. Like it or not, and from personal experience introducing these topics, most people decidedly don't, we have to push forward towards the automation of cognition.

Until then, and in the event we just can't stomach the idea of machine cognition, our only viable choice is to redirect the capital we can't viably spend – and spend it on infrastructure projects in the second and third world where in-paradigm solutions still result in productivity gains. Not to make money mind you, but to accelerate the flattening the world's markets and ready them for the eventual global jump to the next paradigm (when we can stomach it). This is especially true when that money is mostly from the emerging world in the first place. We can't fake it any more, the fake we've been doing is killing the world's economy, the fake is destroying our hard won reputation as innovators and capitalists, the fake is defacing the very idea that is capital.

Randall Reetz

* The International Monetary Fund estimates current Gross International Product (the annual sum of all human labor) at about 71 trillion dollars and rising rapidly. The greatest growth in relative wealth comes of course from the third world, where wealth building is more rapid. Because the vast majority of the world's population hails from the second and third world, small increases in individual wealth result in huge changes in gross wealth. As a result, the new money in the global investment system is coming from the third and second world. The question, the problem, the crisis is the first world's inability to make productive use of this new money.