Let me just ask what you’re excited about these days.
What you’re personally working on or thinking about.
Well, as I’m sure it’s pretty clear, I'm
excited that we’re -- we meaning
myself and a number of other people in economics
are having a stab at
generalizing the field to this adaptive nonlinear point of view
So that greatly excites me. The other thing I’ve been looking at
and this has been quite a long time, it’s a long-term project,
is that I got very interested in the whole question of where
economies came from
How does an economy come about?
And you could tell some stories
maybe I breed sheep and you chisel
some sort of obsidian and then you and I can meet
I will trade you wool for a sharp edge
obsidian objects and things like that, and there’s a certain amount of
that going on. But if you look at
economies over the long term, say
there’s a lot of agriculture and then in Europe
the Industrial Revolution comes along around the 1780s
so new textile machinery and steam
engines and railroads and still later
heavy engineering and steel works and industrial chemicals
and then mass production and then
electronics and then the digital economy and photonics
etc. Biotech, nanotech,
What you see is that what really drives the economy and forms the economy
is its technologies.
So I studied this for about 12 years
My background is as an engineer, so this is something
that greatly interested me. And I wrote a book, The Nature of
Technology on this, about
it came out about 3 or 4 years ago.
What interests me is that in economics
a lot of people, just to go back a little bit a couple of hundred years
ago, good economists would all have said yes,
the economy emerges from its technologies
So that wasn’t in contention a couple of hundred
years ago. But if people tried to look at how
an economy builds itself out of its technologies, then
they have to say, well, where do technologies come from? And that
looks like an amorphous hodge podge. It’s just a sludge
of technologies and --- little new ones
pop up invented supposedly by
geniuses. What fascinated me
and what I discovered is that there’s a huge amount of structure
to how technology evolves. That new technologies
are always combinations of
previous technologies. Xerox PARC where I work
invented the laser printer, plus an awful lot of other things
A laser printer is put together from the computer
processor and a laser and a Xerox machine
The computer tells the laser where to point,
and the laser paints images
or objects on a Xerox drum, and the rest is
just copying. So you get this combination
and it turns out that’s true for all technologies, that they're
all combinations of other technologies
that are already in use. It’s not a very obvious thing
It takes a lot of persuading, but this is true.
Now if that’s true, then technologies aren’t just blurping
up or out of the mud of
technologies. Technologies are actually a vast network of
things. Individual technologies that
are coming together to create new technologies. So
there’s a network of ancestry in technologies.
You could then say, well, you’re talking
really about the theory of evolution for technologies. Isn’t that Darwinian?
And my answer is no, it’s not at all Darwinian
or not quite Darwinian. Darwin would have said
that novel things, novel species come out of
the inheritance of small accumulated changes
so you get a new finch beak coming out from
accumulation of changes to previous finch
beaks. You don’t get a new jet engine coming out of
tiny accumulations of piston engines
Jet engines come by combining
certain things that were out there already. So
what I wound up with was saying that
yes, a great deal of biology happens by
Darwin’s accumulation of small changes. A great
deal of biological evolution works that way. But most of
technological evolution, the big leaps, happen by new combinations
of technologies doing something quite different
and quite new, according to some slightly different principle. Doesn’t that happen
in biology also? Yes, it does. It happens with
what’s called the major transitions of biology. So
you get small parts of bacterial
cells or bacteria that maybe can come together
to create a eukaryotic cell. You get simple cells
single cells coming together to make multicellular organisms
and so on. Most of the major transitions
in biology are caused by combination and then
we get Darwin again. The big steps in
technology, the jet engine, the laser printer,
those are all done by combination, and then once those are
around, once you get a jet engine that can specialize by small
changes a la Darwin. So what excited me
I’m going on a bit here, but this is very much what interests
me, is that there are two different mechanisms
to evolution. There’s Darwin’s accumulation via
mutation or recombination
and then selection, but there’s also
large combinations
and then selection, so in fact, let me repeat
that, I didn’t say it very well. So
there’s two different mechanisms in evolution, one I would call
Darwinian. The Darwinian one is
small changes accumulating, and then you get something that bifurcates
that’s new. This other mechanism that has interested me
and I’m calling combinatorial evolution
happens when quite different things are combined and then
that gives you something very different. And something like that
does happen I think in horizontal gene transfer
and has happened through the ages in the archaea
and early on and still happening, but in the
so-called higher organisms, there isn’t that much
maybe every few hundred million years you get some sort of
new sets of combinations coming together.
These are two very different mechanisms, but up until now, people
have been saying, well, technologies do evolve
from ancestral technologies, and therefore
that’s Darwinian. No, it’s not. There’s quite a lot of Darwinian evolution
in technology, but the things that really
counter new combinations -- So people in biological
evolution talk about the goal of having a predictive
theory of evolution. Do you think there could be a predictive
theory of technological evolution? No I don’t think so at all.
Yes
I think prediction here is
We have to be careful of what we say. This is a great question.
Predictive -- I think in all of -- this one’s through all
of complexity. You can’t predict where particular
cellular automaton is going to bring you
if that happens to be one of the more complicated ones.
What you can predict, though, is there
is phenomena you might see
in fact some of your own work has been very much along those lines
with the computational types of automata
you can make theories of what can
happen in general, even if you can’t say in particular
what’s going to happen. So let me express that in biological terms
We don’t know what species we’re going to have in five hundred million years
If any, right? Nor do I greatly care.
At this stage. But we don’t know what. We can’t
predict what that will be. What we can predict, though,
is that most of the mechanisms
and phenomena that we understand in biology will still be around.
The DNA mechanisms,
the protein regulations, those regulatory networks
so those will likely be around. So the rules of the game
and phenomena may not change that much
but the way that that all works out in detail
will change and technologies the same way. Yes, there
can be a theory of evolution of technology. I’m not expecting
that to change, or the mechanisms to change, but every
so often we mine into new phenomena. We didn’t expect
to get radios, say, in 1850, yet 50 years
later radio was around
so we don’t know what new phenomena will come along and be captured
and once those are captured, then there’s lots of combinations. We can’t predict
the details, but we can predict the mechanisms. Right.
Well thank you so much, Brian. I’ve really enjoyed talking to you. I’m
delighted. Great questions. It’s a wonderful course.
Thank you.