Increasing Complexity
Combinatorial creativity is making the world ever more complex
Frere, John: "Account of Flint Weapons Discovered at Hoxne in Suffolk", in Archeologia, vol. 13.- London, 1800.- Pp. 204-205, public domain
Hand axes, made from flint or other stones, are the longest-used tools in human history. They were used for around a million and a half years by Homo erectus and other early humans, although only rarely by Homo sapiens. Perhaps strangely, their design persisted largely unchanged over more than a million years.
There is a clear contrast with the phone in your pocket (or in your hands if you are reading this on a phone). Phones are less than 150 years old, but there has been massive amounts of diversity in their design over this time. Most phones nowadays are smartphones. They are largely rectangular with touchscreens nowadays, but there is still a lot of variation, particularly in sizes and colours, while folding phones are becoming fashionable again.
Look beneath the surface, though, and the number of transistors within any two phones chosen at random is likely to be wildly different - the latest iPhone has 19bn transistors, while a model from ten years ago would have only had 2bn. While the growth rate is noteworthy, it is also worth mentioning that the number of hand axes ever found is in the thousands - significantly lower than the number of transistors in your phone, no matter how old.
As we mentioned in a recent blog post discussing a book called The Unaccountability Machine by Dan Davies, the world is getting increasingly more complex. This trend would have seemed completely baffling to our ancestors among Homo erectus, who were used to hand axes remaining basically unchanged for untold generations.
Some of you will probably be wondering why the world is becoming more complex. We can see why by thinking about an excellent book from Margaret A. Boden called The Creative Mind. She defines creativity as “the ability to come up with ideas and artefacts that are new, surprising and valuable.” She sees three levels to creativity: unfamiliar combinations of familiar ideas; the exploration of conceptual spaces; and the transformation of these spaces. The rest of this essay will just deal with the first level: combinatorial creativity.
Imagine there are five new things. It doesn’t really matter if they are products, services or concepts. Let’s call them A, B, C, D and E. We can combine them in 26 different ways: AB, AC, AD, AE, BC, BD, BE, CD, CE, DE, ABC, ABD, ABE, ACD, ACE, ADE, BCD, BCE, BDE, CDE, ABCD, ABCE, ABDE, BCDE, ACDE and ABCDE.
In other words, a handful of new things can quickly lead to exponential growth. As we have mentioned before, the maths behind exponential growth can be hard for brains that evolved in a slowly changing world to grasp intuitively. However, the basic idea should be easy to understand. Let’s game out a musical example.
We saw the power of combinatorial creativity in a previous essay, which discussed flamenco-fusion music. Flamenco is a conservative art-form, which has preserved musical traditions from different ethnic groups who found themselves in the south of Spain over the last few centuries. Flamenco musicians later absorbed Afro-Cuban rhythms, such as those found in rumba music, which are based on African bell patterns, into los cantes de ida y vuelta (round-trip songs) during the Spanish empire. From the 1970s, flamenco-fusion artists began to absorb influences from other traditions, including jazz, rock, and world music, creating a new style.
This experimentation has continued in the 21st century, as young Spanish artists have sought to marry the flamenco and rumba traditions with other styles of music nurtured in the Caribbean, including Latin trap and reggaetón. Each new combination carries with it the possibility of future experimentation. Not all of it will resonate with audiences, but some of it will.
The tragedy of our times is the way that complexity will tend to increase, whether we like it or not. Populists of all stripes yearn for a simpler world, which is basically impossible. The hard right is nostalgic for a largely fictional past; while the hard left is hobbled by its love of Marxist prophecies; and its pivot to theory-laden post-Marxist worldviews when its prophecies fail to come true.
Some of the smartest minds in the world are grappling with these issues. For example, on the right, Tyler Cowen is promoting state-capacity libertarianism, which involves having states large enough to enable individual freedom. Meanwhile, Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson are promoting left-leaning tech optimism in Abundance - a book we will return to in a future essay.
Have you noticed the world becoming more complex in your own lifetime? The comments are open. See you next week!
Previously on Sharpen Your Axe
Transistors in smartphones (and the failures of Marxism)
Previous essay on The Unaccountability Machine
Recent essay on flamenco fusion
Exponential growth (part one and part two)
Further Reading
The Creative Mind: Myths and Mechanisms by Margaret A. Boden
The Unaccountability Machine: Why Big Systems Make Terrible Decisions - and How the World Lost its Mind by Dan Davies
Abundance by Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson
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Complexity is not the same as change.
The new dis-improved user interface that was just downloaded to my phone probably isn't more complex than the last one. It's just different. Users have to deal with increasing complexity, because of remembering dozens of different user interfaces to accomplish the same damn thing. But if they climbed into some vendor's walled garden, they could sharply reduce that number, particularly if they purchased new tools - that did nothing new or better that they needed - long before the older ones had become useless. It still wouldn't be as stable as a hand axe, or even a typewriter, but it'd be a bit easier to cope.
We do get complexity on the inside. I worked as a performance engineer for cell phones. Layers and layers of software that no one fully understands, all of it changing routinely in ways never clearly documented. My job was to understand the complexity better than most, with the aid of tools that let me look inside often proprietary boxes, and reduce the incidence of unwanted consequences - if I could.
This complexity supposedly provides benefits - but the main one seems to be faster time to market. We'll just reuse some pre-existing software that doesn't quite fit our use case, adding a layer of shims to make it fit. Except that software is reusing some other software, adding its own shim. Pretty soon it's shim-city, and both performance and reliability are terrible. But we got that new UI on user devices faster than ever, and the person in charge got a promotion, sparing him from the need to address his bugs. (It's usually a "him", in my experience.)
LLMs add additional complexity, with even less documentation. No one knows what they are doing, and that's by design. I'm kind of glad I retired before they became prevalent. But it's basically the same old ever-growing complexity.
It's important to note that the price of all this complexity is that things don't work very well. The nth-order interactions lead to lots of breakage. But that's also a cost of the constant churn - newly modified software will have fewer of its bugs revealed and repaired. No wonder it's easy to conflate them.
Overall, I'm less sanguine than you about the benefits of all complexity-inducing creativity, at its current scale, while recognizing that some of it has been useful to me.
I see it a little differently:
Humans are mostly fixers of problems rather that innovators from scratch. So a problem comes along, and we solve it by adding a layer of complexity to fix the original problem. But then this results in more, but smaller problems, so we fix each of those too, but of course that creates even more problems that need fixing, and yet another layer of complexity. So we aren't so much innovators as developers, not so much radical designers as iterative fixers.
The problem is that such an approach leads to layer upon layer of complexity, often getting further and further away from the original simple concept of the genuine innovator. The Austin Mini by Issigonis becomes the BMW so-called 'Mini' a 4x4 truck. The VW Campervan becomes the 20 ton motorhome with jacuzzi bath with a toy hauler on the back.
And an education to do useful work becomes a $250,000+ debt to join an intellectual arms race for esoteric theoretical qualifications and sheer numbers of academic research papers published, that are all-too-often useless to everyone still living in the real world!
And the mobile phone that makes phone calls and sends texts, becomes a supercomputer Smartphone, that knows exactly where you are every minute of every day, watches your every move and everyone around you, can measure your heartbeat and how much sleep you get, and sends all that information back to........ who exactly? Palantir? CIA?
And the funniest thing? YOU PAY PEOPLE FOR THAT!!!
George Orwell would never have dreamed that a government could get people to pay every month to get spied on!
😅😂🤣😂🤣