Essay #1

Nothing else in the world…not all the armies…is so powerful as an idea whose time has come. – Victor Hugo, The Future of Man

the tale of the emperor with no clothes leaves us with lessons rich in symbolism. yet hidden in plain sight, as naked as the emperor himself, is a cautionary warning. the townsfolk were each privately in possession of the truth i.e about the emperor's state of undress. yet, collectively that truth became opaque. such is the power of popular delusions, that they override individual truths. the longer a popular belief is allowed to persist, the more pervasive it becomes. and the stronger it's invulnerability for discovery.

this article is about how there are naked emperors abound. the fact that they are pervasive in every sphere of our lives and have been for a very long time, means that we the townfolk have seen them parading so long that we have become victim to the same kind of opacity of collective truth that we privately possess. it introduces a way of thinking about the world in which we find ourselves, unbidden.

there is a changing of the guard at hand. that time in our collective existence when the light shines just so, that for a brief while it illuminates the world with a special hue. a hue that radiates through everything it touches, it permeates collectively through all us townsfolk. to harness this ephemeral, divine light and let it shine through us individually and collectively, just as the words of the child rang through the crowd. so that we may see, may know what we know. just as the townfolk all knew they knew.

douglas hofstader's model of intelligence requires thiking by metaphor and analogy. this kind of isomorphic thinking is crucial when thinking in more abstract terms. where problems and their solutions are not limited by any domain. to employ such cross-functional thinking is to practice the ability to see a problem through various transmogrifications. as this skill develops, problems once isolated and intractable begin to show common traits and characteristics: a common lineage.

and, so, in order to solve a problem thoroughly, the problem needs to never have been. the best way out of a hole is to not fall in it in the first place. yet, we keep inventing better tools, stronger ladders, shinier lamps and sturdier shovels all to make the *experience* of getting out of the hole better and we term it progress. all the while, falling into the same hole over and over again. never understanding the problem we should be solving in the first place.

the korean-german philosopher byunh-hun chul talks about the concepts of vita activa and vita contemplitiva. the thinking life and the action oriented life, and how the balance has been tipping more and more to the latter in the past century. incessesant activity. action for the sake of action. vita contemplitavia is stillness, observation, introspection. our collective glorification of vita activa is the reason why we keep falling into the same hole. because solving the problem and solving the symptom of the problem require two very different ways of being

freeman dyson's famous birds and frogs metaphor, about an ecosystem needing both birds who survey the landscape, anticipating what's up ahead and frogs who are at the ground level busy with activities of immediate forest life captures this idea in some tangible terms.

one way to understand the problems we're actually trying to solve and think through them abstractly is by using the metaphor of prostheses. all our inventions  address shortcomings in our bodies and their relation to the natural world. since neither our bodies nor the laws of the natural world are wont to change, our inventions follow an isomorphic pattern.

examples:

different prostheses: eyeglasses, 

examples:

wheels throughout time

when confronted with the limitations of the natural world, we invent these prostheses and use them to help us navigate it. the form of the prostheses enables a critical glimpse into the core of the problem being solved, so that when confronted with a problem of a similar nature the prostheses can be readily applied. prostheses, while enabling, are inherently limiting since they solve one facet of the problem. 

examples:

wheel, gear, ball bearing,

prolonged use of the prostheses make us mistake the prostheses as the solution not as the intervention it was meant to be.

over time, however, the world we forge using the prostheses incur the limitations of the prostheses. and as the prostheses become pervasive to the point of being invisible, so do the limitations they have wrought. and as our lives become intertwined with the prostheses we use, the limitations of the world become an acceptable state of affairs. so that, the world we end up creating is shaped by accomodating the limitations of the prostheses itself. the world is the way it is because we created it thus. our collective embrace of our prostheses while accepting the limitations is a tacit referendum that shaped the world. good and ill.

[image of highways, parking lots, suburbs]

so that human life, is speckled with a servitude to our inventions. human activity is dominated by the manufacture of these prostheses and the scaffolding that enables it. what gets lost is the fact that we fashioned the prostheses after limitations in ourselves. so that the prostheses help us in activities that we thiink we need to solve a problem, while the actual problem may go unsolved. and since the world we fashioned is a fascimile of our prostheses, we are further distanced from the problem at hand.

[polio prostheses old/modern][malaria]

this adherence and overzealous intermingling of our lives and our prostheses blinds us to the fact that the solution to the problem at hand may not involve the use of the prostheses at all. or rather, the form of the prostheses that solves the problem and that of one that solves the symptom of the problem may have little resemblance. the prostheses that solves the problem requires an entirely different way of thinking and being.

one way to understand the current situation with the machines is to demystify and dismantle all scaffolding surrounding it. so that the underlying problem may be observed.

software is an invention that overcomes the limitations in our bodies and the natural world. It is a prostheses for our brain.

it is a prostheses that we have collectively, overzealously embraced. it is pervasive enough to be invisible and we have . we have collectively embraced its limitations and made a tacit agreement to forge our world in its shape. good and ill. determinism. the world is the way it is because we created it thus. software is inert. it is passive. just like any prosthesis, it requires *activation* by humans, it requires adoption and use. and so, we are complicit.

the concern behind machines taking jobs is misplaced. the outrage is not that the machine will take your job, it is that we have created a world in which it can. our deep integration with our prosthesis, its manufacture and scaffolding relating to it  has resulted in our activities being dominated by using this prosthesis to solve problems and symptoms of problems in every sphere of life. software is only eating the world because we let it.

the tragedy of using software to solve problems is that the mortal capacity of a generation is engaged in the synthesis and formulation of a prosthesis that may not solve the underlying problems at all. to employ a prosthesis without understanding the intended problem to be solved means that what we see as progress is actually our tools getting shinier yet still remaining ineffective, and the problems remain unsolved

our work in the service of this prosthesis has essentially been toil. manual, repetitive, tactical and devoid of enduring value. work, trivial enough to be threatened by an overgrown markov chain.

the thing to understand here is that this presents an opportunity. there are a wealth of unsolved or poorly solved problems that our software-blinkered eyes have been blind to. problems that software not only cannot solve, but prolongs the existence of by providing an intervention disguised as a solution.

at the intersection of the problems caused by limitations in our body and our interaction with the natural world is a set of problems as mercurial as they are perennial. this set of problems are caused by limitations in our bodies when we interact with ourselves. in complex adaptive systems when autonomous agents interact in a system these are called coordination problems. 

what makes these problems rather unique is that they are an emergent property. that is, they are more like an event than a thing. further, they are often left unsolved, unnoticed or are misattributed as another set of problems. so that instead of solving the problem, we focus on the thing that causes the problem. 

[fractal]

complexity, itself an emergent property, cannot be solved by complexity. to solve complexity, it must never have been allowed to emerge. similarly, coordination problems can only be solved by simple, often counterintuitive means. these simple means cross domains and realms of all human activity. so that, solving a coordination problem in one domain has an isomorphic solution in another.

failure to understand the coordination problem at the core of any complex problem has meant that great effort is spent in solving the wrong one, only for it remerge after a while. this persistence is a hallmark identifier of a coordination problem at the heart of any problem to be solved.

[examples of software solutions to coordination problems]

failure to address the coordination problem has also meant that we use ineffective prostheses to attempt to solve them. certain coordination problems are impervious to certain prostheses. it therefore becomes a sisyphean task to use these to try to solve them, and upon repeated failures, focus on improving the prostheses rather than changing them. a prosthetic-first approach means that we find a prosthetic shaped problem in our complex one and attempt to solve that which we can see. yet ignoring the coordination problem causing it all, impervious to the prostheses and invisible to us all.

[examples of non-software solutions to coordination problems alongside software ones]

as we enter yet another era of newly minted prostheses, the urge to dedicate activities towards them increases fervently. to search for congruent problems where they might fit. or worse, establish prostheses factories where we may manufacture these ineffectual prostheses faster and call it success.

however, the opportunity here is to think isomorphically about our domains of endeavour. to use these prostheses as probes. to augment our capacity for thought rather than mere action. the new world of work will require us to think deeply about simple things, to understand that the value lies not in the answers but the questions.

the tale of the emperor with no clothes contains a coordination problem at its core. the child uttering the words didn't tell the townsfolk anything they didn't know already. but the child did tell them something. by uttering those words aloud, the child told them that they all knew. thus, increasing the second-order knowledge of the group. increasing second-order knowledge is a simple and powerful solution to a vast number of coordination problems. 

the other detail about the solution is that it has to come from an external source not part of the system under observation. one cannot devise a solution to a problem one is a cause of. You’re not in traffic, you are traffic.

[in a traffic jam, a supercar is as fast as a sedan]

productivity is a coordination problem. improving the efficiency of collaboration between individuals is much more significant than improving the efficiency of doing a task. when you increase the efficiency of the system, you solve the coordination problem. the solution is resilient to changes in system, even in the individuals themselves. to solve a problem well, it needs to not have existed in the first place.