“first, you assume a spherical cow”: Biologists are very much against the idea of the spherical cow: “If biologists are much like physicists in stretching the limits of experimental reductionism, they are also like engineers in revelling in the enormity, variety and sheer complexity of the systems they study. No interest in spherical cows here.” John Doyle, “Computational Biology: Beyond the Spherical Cow,” Nature 411 (2001): 151–52, http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v411/n6834/full/411151a0.html.
the biologist Steven Benner notes: Steven A. Benner, “Aesthetics in Synthesis and Synthetic Biology,” Current Opinion in Chemical Biology 16, no. 5–6 (2012): 581–85.
obsolete legacy code, just as technology: Obsolete legacy genetic code is similar to the “cruft” found in software: extra material that is no longer necessary for the current version’s function, yet can last far longer than we might wish.
a number of honey locust trees: Whit Bronaugh, “The Trees That Miss the Mammoths,” American Forests, Winter 2010, http://www.americanforests.org/magazine/article/trees-that-miss-the-mammoths/.
Biology handles legacy code differently: Obsolete legacy software code may not be pruned away by natural selection, but it can be removed via periodic purges and cleaning of the code, making it a bit more similar to biology.
field biologists for technology: The term “digital biologist” is used in a somewhat similar manner by the historian George Dyson in “A Universe of Self-Replicating Code,” Edge, accessed February 5, 2015, http://edge.org/conversation/a-universe-of-self-replicating-code.
initial steps in the discovery: “RNAi,” NOVA, July 26, 2005, http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/body/rnai.html.
Isaac Asimov is reputed to have noted: Howard Wainer and Shaun Lysen, “That’s Funny,” American Scientist 97, no. 4 (2009): 272, http://www.americanscientist.org/issues/pub/thats-funny.
one way that new drugs are created: Dan Hurley, “Why Are So Few Blockbuster Drugs Invented Today?” The New York Times Magazine, November 13, 2014, http://www.nytimes.com/2014/11/16/magazine/why-are-there-so-few-new-drugs-invented-today.html. This point about what we can learn from testing pharmaceuticals was made to me by Edward Jung.
Stewart Brand noted about legacy systems: Stewart Brand, The Clock of the Long Now: Time and Responsibility (New York: Basic Books, 1999), 85.
a partial meltdown at the Three Mile Island plant: Peter G. Neumann, Computer-Related Risks (New York: ACM Press, 1995), 122.
elaborates on the structure of the pantheon: Neal Stephenson, Cryptonomicon (New York: Avon Books, 1999; repr. 2002), 802–3.
Corky Ramirez: Note that in the episode “The Van Buren Boys,” someone is referred to as “Ramirez” in a bar (though I believe his name is stressed differently than Kramer’s pronunciation of Corky Ramirez). Perhaps he is visible in the room, but it is unclear. Seinfeld superfans: please send me mail.
delightfully evocative term: “greeblies”: : Or, alternatively, “greebles.” Kelly, What Technology Wants, 318.
the mathematician Benoit Mandelbrot: Benoit B. Mandelbrot, The Fractal Geometry of Nature (New York: W. H. Freeman and Company, 1982), 1.
Recall “Funes the Memorious”: Borges, “Funes, His Memory,” in Collected Fictions, 131–37.
“The patterns of a river network”: Philip Ball, Branches, vol. 3 of Nature’s Patterns: A Tapestry in Three Parts (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2009), 181.
researchers analyzed the United States Code: William Li et al., “Law Is Code: A Software Engineering Approach to Analyzing the United States Code,” Journal of Business and Technology Law 10, no. 2 (2015): 297–372.
The ideas of these philosophers: Jonathan Barnes, ed. and trans., Early Greek Philosophy (London: Penguin Classics, 1987). Also see The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, http://plato.stanford.edu/.
“evaporated by the sun”: Barnes, Early Greek Philosophy, 72.
the idea of the Greek kosmos: The discussion of the nature of kosmos and arche is from Barnes, Early Greek Philosophy.
According to Philip Ball, anomalies and eccentricities: Ball, Curiosity, 98–99.
a strong penchant in the early days of science: Lorraine Daston, “The Language of Strange Facts in Early Modern Science,” in Inscribing Science: Scientific Texts and the Materiality of Communication, ed. Timothy Lenoir (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1998), 20–38.
“The first scientific facts”: Daston, “Language of Strange Facts,” 38.
examined hundreds of millions of interactions: Johan Bollen et al., “Clickstream Data Yields High-Resolution Maps of Science,” PLoS ONE 4, no. 3 (2009): e4803.
first originated in computing education: Nicholas Donofrio, Jim Spohrer, and Hossein S. Zadeh, “Research-Driven Medical Education and Practice: A Case for T-shaped Professionals,” MJA Viewpoint, 2009, http://www.ceri.msu.edu/wp-content/uploads/2010/06/A-Case-for-T-Shaped-Professionals-20090907-Hossein.pdf.
difficult to educate T-shaped people: On the growth of specialization, Thomas Homer-Dixon has written of a “narrowing of expertise.” Homer-Dixon, The Ingenuity Gap, 176.
As business professor David Teece has noted: David J. Teece, “A Dynamic Capabilities Perspective on Building Firm-Level Competitiveness,” slide 43, Tusher Center on Intellectual Capital, http://faculty.haas.berkeley.edu/lyons/teecetusherslides.pdf.
the title character of Hild: Nicola Griffith, Hild: A Novel (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2013).
science bookseller John Ptak notes: John Ptak, “A Cloud Map (1873),” JF Ptak Science Books, January 13, 2015, http://longstreet.typepad.com/thesciencebookstore/2015/01/a-cloud-map-1873.html.
CHAPTER 6: WALKING HUMBLY WITH TECHNOLOGY
“for man’s intellect indubitably has a limit”: Moses Maimonides, The Guide of the Perplexed, vol. 1, trans. Shlomo Pines (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1963), 65–66.
“queerer than we can suppose”: J. B. S. Haldane, Possible Worlds and Other Essays (London: Chatto & Windus, 1928), 286.
limitations to what we can know: For a further discussion on scientific humility, see Marcelo Gleiser, The Island of Knowledge: The Limits of Science and the Search for Meaning (New York: Basic Books, 2014).
video game designer and writer Ian Bogost: Ian Bogost, “The Cathedral of Computation,” The Atlantic, January 15, 2015, http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2015/01/the-cathedral-of-computation/384300/.
a perfect and immaculate process: This is discussed further in Bogost, “Cathedral of Computation.”
the “humble programmer”: Edsger Dijkstra, “The Humble Programmer.” Communications of the ACM 15, no. 10 (1972): 859–66.
“Wisdom starts with epistemological modesty”: David Brooks, The Road to Character (New York: Random House, 2015), 263.
nevertheless see a “glorious mess”: Carl Zimmer, “Is Most of Our DNA Garbage?” The New York Times Magazine, March 5, 2015, http://www.nytimes.com/2015/03/08/magazine/is-most-of-our-dna-garbage.html.
The book includes maxims: These examples are all from Appendix I of John Gall, The Systems Bible: The Beginner’s Guide to Systems Large and Small, 3rd ed. (Walker, MN: The General Systemantics Press, 2003).
a number of points similar to those: Gall even admonishes his readers to “cherish your system-failures,” just as biologists collect interesting observations (Gall cites Charles Darwin’s example approvingly), and he headlines the admission that “large complex systems are beyond human capacity to evaluate.” Systems Bible, xx, 68.
humility in the face of systems: See also Robert Herritt, “When Technology Ceases to Amaze,” The New Atlantis 41, Winter 2014, 121–31, http://www.thenewatlantis.com/publications/when-technology-ceases-to-amaze.
the designer Don Norman: Donald A. Norman, Living with Complexity (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2010), 117–18.
“percent-
done progress indicators”: Daniel Engber, “Who Made That Progress Bar?” The New York Times Magazine, March 7, 2014, http://www.nytimes.com/2014/03/09/magazine/who-made-that-progress-bar.html.
divorced from the underlying process: Kate Greene, “How Should We Program Computers to Deceive?” Pacific Standard, September 3, 2014, http://www.psmag.com/nature-and-technology/technology-deception-elevator-crosswalk-programming-robots-lie-89669.
friendly user interface of TurboTax: Philip Guo tweeted: “i wonder how many layers of nested if-statements are in the code for TurboTax,” March 26, 2014, https://twitter.com/pgbovine/status/448988621778194432. I thank Dan Katz for the insight of TurboTax as an interface for the law.
tools that, in Gingold’s words: Chaim Gingold, Miniature Gardens and Magic Crayons: Games, Spaces, and Worlds, master’s thesis, Georgia Institute of Technology, 2003, 62, http://levitylab.com/cog/writing/Games-Spaces-Worlds.pdf.
systems are so completely automated: For further reading, see Nicholas Carr, The Glass Cage: How Our Computers Are Changing Us (New York: W. W. Norton, 2014).
“concealed electronic complexity”: Winner, Autonomous Technology, 285.
component of the telephone system: Eytan Adar et al., “Benevolent Deception in Human Computer Interaction,” CHI ’13: Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, Paris, France, April 27–May 2, 2013 (New York: ACM Digital Library, 2013): 1863–72.
the computer game SimCity: For more on SimCity and how it can shed some light on how a complicated system works, read Doug Bierend, “SimCity That I Used to Know: On the Game’s 25th Birthday, a Devotee Talks with Creator Will Wright,” re:form, October 17, 2014, https://medium.com/re-form/simcity-that-i-used-to-know-d5d8c49e3e1d.
Near the end of Average Is Over: Cowen, Average Is Over, 227–28. Cowen is speculating specifically about the future of economics and other social sciences, but we could need such “interpreters” for our future understanding of anthropic systems as well.
a glimmer of intuition into complex systems: These interpreters will likely work in conjunction with machines, as Cowen suggests. We might become like “centaurs,” but half machine instead of half horse. Clive Thompson, Smarter Than You Think: How Technology Is Changing Our Minds for the Better (New York: Penguin, 2013).
David Cope of the University of California, Santa Cruz: David Cope, “Experiments in Musical Intelligence,” accessed April 30, 2015, http://artsites.ucsc.edu/faculty/cope/experiments.htm. See also Ryan Blitstein, “Triumph of the Cyborg Composer,” Pacific Standard, February 22, 2010, http://www.psmag.com/books-and-culture/triumph-of-the-cyborg-composer-8507.
His computational creations can provide him: Cope even writes the following on his website, extending pride of parentage to all humanity: “The music our algorithms compose are just as much ours as the music created by the greatest of our personal human inspirations.” Cope, “Experiments.” And he is quoted as saying the following: “All the computer is is just an extension of me. They’re nothing but wonderfully organized shovels. I wouldn’t give credit to the shovel for digging the hole. Would you?” Blitstein, “Triumph of the Cyborg Composer.”
naches is also a framework: The roboticist Hans Moravec has referred to our more powerful descendants as “mind children,” and a similar approach characterizes a short story by the science fiction writer Ted Chiang, in which technologically enhanced humans have long surpassed “regular” humans in their ability to make scientific discoveries. In the end, little to nothing is understood by (nonenhanced) humanity. But that’s okay, because “We need not be intimidated by the accomplishments of metahuman science. We should always remember that the technologies that made metahumans possible were originally developed by humans, and they were no smarter than we.” See Luke Muehlhauser and Nick Bostrom, “Why We Need Friendly AI,” Think 36, no. 13 (Spring 2014), 41–47; and Ted Chiang, Stories of Your Life and Others (New York: Tor Books, 2003), 203.
understand the most complex parts of the world: In many cases, we might even want to have a technology too complex to understand, because it means that it is sophisticated and powerful.
a grab bag of intriguing ideas: The World of Wonders: A Record of Things Wonderful in Nature, Science, and Art (London: Cassell, Petter, and Galpin, exact year of publication unknown), https://archive.org/details/worldofwondersre00londrich.
We tell ourselves simplifying stories: This kind of simplifying storytelling is discussed by Philip Ball in “The Story Trap,”Aeon, November 12, 2015, https://aeon.co/essays/why-story-is-used-to-explain-symphonies-and-sport-matches-alike.
Don Norman has written of the delight: Norman, Living with Complexity. 15.
the definition of an infield fly: MLB.com, “Official Rules: 2.00 Definition of Terms,” accessed February 24, 2015, http://mlb.mlb.com/mlb/official_info/official_rules/defi nition_terms_2.jsp.
to conflate mystery and wonder: This is my own personal distinction between these two terms. No doubt there are many others.
“sad inertness of a world”: Hubert Dreyfus and Sean Dorrance Kelly, All Things Shining: Reading the Western Classics to Find Meaning in a Secular Age (New York: Free Press, 2011), 88.
we strive to eliminate our ignorance: For a discussion of managing our ignorance of our technology, see Herritt, “When Technology Ceases to Amaze.”
shifting the car into neutral: “Customer FAQs Regarding the Sticking Accelerator Pedal and Floor Mat Pedal Entrapment Recalls,” Toyota Pressroom, accessed April 27, 2015, http://pressroom.toyota.com/article_print.cfm?article_id=1861.
isn’t the worst thing to tell someone: I am thankful for this insight, as well the insights related to limitative theorems, from discussion with folks from the Department of Philosophy at the University of Kansas.
incomprehensible systems are the new reality: For example, just because we might not fully grasp all the details of a self-driving car, that doesn’t mean that it can’t be much safer than one driven by a person. And by the way, we already don’t really understand the car driven by a person, let alone the driver himself!
the “unthinkable present”: Quoted in Carlin Romano, America the Philosophical (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2012), 501.
Index
The page numbers in this index refer to the printed version of this book. The link provided will take you to the beginning of that print page. You may need to scroll forward from that location to find the corresponding reference on your e-reader. Page numbers beginning with 187 refer to notes.
abstraction, 163
biological thinking’s avoidance of, 115–16
in complexity science, 133, 135
in physics thinking, 115–16, 121–22, 128
specialization and, 24, 26–27
technological complexity and, 23–28, 81, 121–22
accretion, 65
in complex systems, 36–43, 51, 62, 65, 191
in genomes, 156
in infrastructure, 42, 100–101
legacy systems and, 39–42
in legal system, 40–41, 46
in software, 37–38, 41–42, 44
in technological complexity, 130–31
unexpected behavior and, 38
aesthetics:
biological thinking and, 119
and physics thinking, 113, 114
aggregation, diffusion-limited, 134–35
algorithm aversion, 5
Amazon, 5
American Philosophical Society, 90
Anaximander of Miletus, 139
Apple, 161, 163
Apple II computer, 77
applied mathematics, 143
arche, 140
Ariane 5 rocket, 1996 explosion of, 11–12
Aristotle, 151
Ascher, Kate, 100
Asimov, Isaac, 124
atomic nucleus,
discovery of, 124, 141
Audubon, John James, 109
autocorrect, 5, 16
automobiles:
self-driving, 91, 231–32
software in, 10–11, 13, 45, 65, 100, 174
see also Toyota automobiles
Autonomous Technology (Winner), 22
Average Is Over (Cowen), 84
awe, as response to technological complexity, 6, 7, 154–55, 156, 165, 174
bacteria, 124–25
Balkin, Jack, 60–61
Ball, Philip, 12, 87–88, 136, 140
Barr, Michael, 10
Barrow, Isaac, 89
BASIC, 44–45
Bayonne Bridge, 46
Beacock, Ian, 12–13
Benner, Steven, 119
“Big Ball of Mud” (Foote and Yoder), 201
binary searches, 104–5
biological systems, 7
accretion in, 130–31
complexity of, 116–20, 122
digital technology and, 49
kluges in, 119
legacy code in, 118, 119–20
modules in, 63
tinkering in, 118
unexpected behavior in, 109–10, 123–24
biological thinking, 222
abstraction avoided in, 115–16
aesthetics and, 119
as comfortable with diversity and complexity, 113–14, 115
concept of miscellaneous in, 108–9, 140–41, 143
as detail oriented, 121, 122, 128
generalization in, 131–32
humility and, 155
physics thinking vs., 114–16, 137–38, 142–43, 222
technological complexity and, 116–49, 158, 174
Blum, Andrew, 101–2
Boeing 777, 99
Bogost, Ian, 154
Bookout, Jean, 10
Boorstin, Daniel, 89
Borges, Jorge Luis, 76–77, 131
Boston, Mass., 101, 102
branch points, 80–81
Brand, Stewart, 39–40, 126, 198–99
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