Y2K & Evolutionary Systems

[Roberto Verzola <rverzola@phil.gn.apc.org>]

The article below was forwarded to the moderator by Bob Olsen
(bobolsen@tao.ca):

"The Y2K problem is bringing to our awareness a 'design flaw' of major
proportions."

This essay by Ted Lumley will  be of interest to anyone who is trying to
understand the Y2K phenomenon. It takes some reading, but the wider
perspective it delivers is well worth it. Besides it resonates rather
beautifully with what Dave Walton (one of the UK's leading technical
experts on Y2K) has said to me on numerous occasions about Y2K and the
"error recursion" problem. I wonder whether we are beginning to see the
outlines of new principles for software and knowledge design? As Dave said,
we should be preparing post-Y2K institutions now. And they will need new
principles, since it will be clearly demonstrated that the current set have
failed.

I have known for some time about the probability of the time consuming
(infinite?) recursion trouble that arises from having to fix and test the
possibilities of new problems created by the fixes. I have noted that more
and more mainstream companies are now admitting that they will have no time
to test fixes. We certainly need a policy other than pretending to be
accomp-lishing the impossible. The direction I have been looking in is
towards radical simplification.

~ Jan Wyllie (December 6 1998)

***********************************************

Y2K and a Design for Evolution

by Ted Lumley, December 6, 1998
<http://rampages.onramp.net/~emlumley/update.htm>


"The process of fixing a software bug can generate new faults."

My on-going research is very much about space-time at the basic
philosophical level, my primary focus being on what I would call 'holonic
geometry'.

In a curved-space-time view of things, as Einstein pointed out, with every
causal action, there is an associated alteration of the 'reciprocal
disposition' (his words) of space-time. The example I use to convey this is
a pool game. If I make a difficult shot in pool, everyone will applaud it
(figuratively speaking). This is a cultural thing, we would say that it was
a 'good' shot. Now the same is true in business and in our culture in
general because our culture encourages us to see things in terms of a
'single issue at a time', and to look at our alternatives...to order them
from worse to best, and to go with the best alternative. This is all a
linear process of course, based on 'exclusionary logic'. We started out
using exclusionary logic by extracting the 'issue' from out of the whole
flow.

Now let's go back to our pool analogy. When we make our difficult shot, and
our egos tend to draw us towards making the real difficult, challenging
shots, we change the 'reciprocal disposition' of the whole 'game'...the
whole ball configuration. It's possible that we should never have attempted
to make that shot, because we disturb the 'order' in the ball configuration
in a manner which greatly reduces our future opportunity relative to our
overall purpose. The true expert in pool sees this and the spectator often
wonders why the expert is not going for the 'obvious shots'. It is because
the expert is taking into account the 'reciprocal disposition impact' as
well  as his causal action opportunity. This can only be done via
'intuition' since  like most systems, pool is subject to 'deterministic
chaos' (sensitive dependence on initial conditions).

What the pool expert is doing is described by Erich Jantsch (quantum
physicist and author of 'Design for Evolution') in terms of operating at
the highest of three levels or modes of 'perception and inquiry'. Jantsch
refers to this as the 'evolutionary level', where one tunes in to the
'evolutionary consequences' of one's causal actions. One reason I am up
here in Montreal is to engage with the aboriginals (Mohawk, Iroquois,
Abenaki) on these aspects of their learning traditions, e.g. thinking of
the 'reciprocal disposition impact' of EVERY causal action five generations
into the future, intuiting what the impact will be for one's great, great,
great grandchildren.

As in the pool shot, while the causal transaction we focus on is usually
very localized in space and time, the 'reciprocal disposition impact' is
usually more dispersed in space-time (note that causal thinking is in
euclidian space and linear time, and that to think about reciprocal
disposition impact takes one into the curved space-time continuum).

To get a good understanding of this mode of 'systems perception and
inquiry' which one needs to 'design for evolution', one has to go back to
the very basics of 'space-time'; i.e. to the recognition that we split
'space' and 'time' apart in the era when we began (in the West) to put
'rationalism' into an unnatural primacy over 'intuition' around 500 B.C. As
Einstein noted in his essay on 'geometry and experience' and elsewhere,
'intuition' (bringing a multitude of real and imaginary experiences into
connection in our minds and extracting the ordering principles which
simplify and unify them) is essential for coming up with the basic
principles of complex systems, such as the principle of relativity in
nature.

On the issue of space and time Plato, in 'Timaeus', pointed out;

"Had we never seen the stars, and the sun, and the heaven, none of the
words which we have spoken about the universe would ever have been uttered.
But now the sight of day and night, and the months and the revolutions of
the years, have created number and have given us a conception of time; and
the power of enquiring about the nature of the universe; and from this
source we have derived philosophy, than which no greater good ever was or
will be given by the gods to mortal man."

The point is that all of what followed emerged in a co-dependent manner
from a jigsaw-puzzle like view of reality;  'exclusionary logic' (night and
day in the sense of no overlap - an abstracting approximation - i.e. night
OR day), numbers (integral numbers based on completed revolutions and
exclusionary logic), space independent from time (euclidian space and
linear time), analytical science and western philosophy (quantitative and
qualitive systems of inquiry).

The Y2K computing problem flags the fact that we do not 'design for
evolution', and as a result our designs tend to be rigid and we have to
periodically dismantle our systems and rebuild them. This is alleviated by
accounting for and planning for such reconstruction, but can become very
bothersome (to say the least) if the systems become defunct 'before their
time' (i.e. the lifecycle time we've ascribed to them) in an unplanned
manner. This whole 'bottom-up' design paradigm of planned obsolescence is
very different from a top-down 'design for evolution' paradigm.

What we do when we create a dependency on a computer program (if there is no
dependency, it is a null issue), is to change the 'reciprocal disposition'
of the overall system. In other words, the program becomes like an organ in
a system which is in an overall sense 'organic' but which has mechanical
subsystems embedded in it, if you like. So the overall problem of nature
and machinery (computers) has the same geometry as the 'embedded chip
problem'. This is a kind of 'robocop' model for the industrialized social
system, as opposed to a fully robotic model.  At any rate, each time we add
a machine or computer program depen-dency, we change the 'reciprocal
disposition' of the overall system, just as we did in making the pool shot,
and we therefore disturb the evolutionary consequences for the overall
system.

Now clearly what we'd like to be able to do is to account for that
'reciprocal disposition change impact' even as we execute the causal act of
implementing the program so that we can account for it in our program
design. However, this can only be done intuitively because of deterministic
chaos, and it requires a general knowledge of how the overall system
performs. For example, if I am a specialist implementing a program within a
specialized area, and don't have a clue how what I am doing interplays with
other interdependent mechanical and organic systems components, then I
really don't have the 'reciprocal disposition' information needed to bring
things 'into connection in my mind' and adjust my design as I do it. Since
I am unable to tune my design so as to foster harmonious evolutionary
consequences, the chance for my actions infusing dissonance into the
overall system ontogeny is very high.

Making sure that a new 'part' will work harmoniously with the whole
space-time system is of course common (intuitive) sense, yet the failure to
do so is a major source of dysfunction in our society and within particular
organizations as well. The dysfunction derives from the failure to account
for 'reciprocal disposition impact', such as when the accounting department
which is under pressure to reduce costs, converts the time sheet accounting
system from a clerical to a computer process. The costs of the old clerical
process are eliminated, but the 'reciprocal disposition impact' is to have
high paid professionals diddling about with a screen entry timesheet system
when the secretary had previously filled in their timesheets for the whole
department in about five minutes time. In this case, there is no 'measuring
system' in place which will detect the net setback (there's no job code for
'diddling with time sheet screen entry system')  and since organizations
are run by quantitative analysis for the most part, this dysfunction may well
persist unless someone at a level of sufficient influence 'intuits' that there
is a design flaw which is eroding overall organizational purpose.

The general geometry of the embedded chip problem is that at the space-time
coordinates of implementation of the chip, the implementers must have a
reasonable view of the overall system so that they can be 'tuning -in' to
the 'evolutionary consequences' of not only their causal action of
chip-embedding (which is often the only thing we look at in the West), but
also of the 'reciprocal disposition impact' of the causal action. If they
are specialists paid to consider systems on a purely mechanical, local (in
space and in time) single issue basis, then there is no way for them to
account for evolutionary consquences in the whole 'robocop' interdependency
web.

The high performance teams I've studied all invested in each member of the
team having an overall view of the entire system and all its human and
mechanical components, in the context of its overall 'purpose'. It's
surprising how little time and effort that actually takes and how energized
people are to learn about the whole thing, from finances to the most
esoteric technical functionality. They don't need to learn the detailed
specifics, only the resonant geometrical structure (the phase space
trajectory and attractor geometry). Once they have this, they can see
themselves and their contributory actions in this systemic context (a
'shared space view'), and be in a position either as individuals or with
others to intuit ways to improve the system performance in an evolutionary
or morphogenetic context.

The Y2K problem can be seen in terms of this geometry if one rises up high
enough above it and gets a 'morphogenetic' view of computers vis-a-vis
social systems (including commercial systems). The design issue in our
society is to what degree our systems should look like robocop or like a
robot (intuition over rationality or rationality over intuition). Social
systems co-ordination webs have been largely organic and intuitive.
However, the coming of global communications and computing networks
gives us the option for either bio-rational co-ordination networks or
rationo-biological co-ordination networks. My suggestion is that we have
unthinkingly (because of our similar cultural proclivities) opted for the
robotic co-ordinative web, instead of the bio-rational robocop design.

That is to say, in the modern world, we have both organic and mechanical
systems and there is a question as to how we shall 'hook them up'...do we
put the organic (intuitive) aspect in the primacy, or the
'mechano-rational'?  What we have been doing is more oriented to the latter
than the former. So the scenario is that society just added the 'computer'
as a new subsystem or 'tool' within its web of organic and mechanical
components. The new tool is built to be short-circuit free until the year
2000, at which time, all warranties cease.  The problem here of course, is
that this tool has been implemented, not simply in support of
discrete functions, such as a finger-chainsaw controller or whatever, but
as an automated  means of providing co-ordinating information to many
functions within the system (a robotic scenario).  In the case where the
co-ordinating web 'breaks', this is a chaos-amplifier, in that it opens the
door to applying pure deterministic chaos at functional inputs which
orchestrate the limbs of the overall system. That is, the computer-based
co-ordinating web will not only 'fritz' in an unpredictable way within
itself, the fritzed information it sends out to modulate the organic and
mechanical limbs of the robotic social system will amplify this chaotic
signal by translating it into chaotic behaviors within and across the
overall system.

So we come out of this scenario with a set of design principles, or 'design
for evolution' principles, as follows;

1. In the design process, one must account for the fact that for every
causal action, there will be a 'reciprocal disposition impact'
(environmental impact) which will generally be more dispersed in space-time
than the causal action.

2. Accounting for 'reciprocal disposition impact' cannot be done
analytically, but must be done 'intuitively', by 'bringing into connection
in the mind a multitude of real and imaginary experiences' (Einstein...he
calls this 'geometric-physical theorizing', but it's essentially
'intuition' in a formalized sense).

3. The designers and executors of a causal action must be in possession of
an overall understanding of the affected system; i.e. that portion of the
overall system which will be (primarily) impacted by the action, in order
to intuit the 'reciprocal disposition impact' and shape their design
accordingly.

A primary implication of these three principles is that global systems must
be designed with intuitive 'controllers' in the primacy, which of course,
is not what has historically transpired to this point. Instead, the
rational elements of the system (the mechanical sum of the parts) is in the
primacy and human intuition is on the 'receiving end'.

High performance teams, where they live long enough (a few years is the
maximum lifecycle I have seen), naturally design their computer support
systems in this way, where the web of co-ordination is 'intuitive' and the
computer tools are supportive, rather than the web of co-ordination being
'computer-based' ('bottom-up', rational and exposed to a single point of
failure).To give an example of how this computer design differs in reality
I will use a Bakersfield heavy oil group that I studied, a high performance
team which  lasted about two to three years before it was savaged by
mechanical transformation edicts of the containing corporation.

High performance teams must somehow make available to local 'in-the-know'
intuition how the system is performing on an overall 'harmonic' or
'co-resonant' basis. In Bakersfield, this was achieved through a system of
real-time indicators presented to ALL team members (hourly and
professional) on a PC network (there were 19 realtime indicator displays
which displayed the historical curve as well as present value). These
indicators captured the human operational 'cost and revenue' drivers. In
the robocop model, you might think of it in terms of the information from
robocop's limb movement which was being captured by the embedded chip. The
curves would also show the complex influence of the intuitive instructions
issued in response to the patterns on these indicators. The 'cost drivers'
are the 'causal actions' which the team (robocop system) decides to fund,
and the 'revenue drivers' are the way in which money or resources are
brought back into the system.

But this is not an 'engineering model'. Thus there is no direct linkage
between 'cause' and 'effect' built into the monitoring system. This is left
to the intuition of the team members, and experience is built up by playing
with different causal actions and seeing how the indicators
respond. In this way, it is possible to look at the system in 'complex
systems' terms, where the overall behaviors of the system cannot be deduced
from the properties of the parts (they can be 'intuited' however). These
vital signs displays provided the basis for both local and global (overall
team) interaction with the operations, and supported a kind of autonomous
co-evolutionary mode of operation.

That is, what these 19 indicators constituted when you looked at them all
displaced on one screen, was similar to how the vital signs of a human look
when he is being operated on, and the video monitor is displaying his
pulse, respiration, heartbeat, blood pressure, temperature, oxygenation
level, brain activity etc. There is an overall system harmony here which is
recognizable to the experienced eye. And it is on this basis that the
intuitive surgeon requests more anaesthetic, more oxygen or whatever, or
that a responsible member of the team may adjust the adrenaline drip rate
etc.

The Bakersfield team was truly exceptional (that's why I studied it) in
operating as one overall co-ordinated whole. They had naturally evolved
these 'immersed space' (as I call them) computer-based perceptual tools
which helped one-and-all to garner insight into the 'reciprocal disposition
impact' of particular causal actions. Because of the historical trajectory
type of display, one could actually tune in to the morphogenesis of the
operation, seeing the evolution of actions and how the outputs such as NOX
emissions gradually fell to far lower levels than the legally prescribed
maximum, even as production climbed and costs fell.

The above was just to give a practical example of the available option of a
fundamental inversion in design, which puts 'intuition' in a primacy over
'rationalism' and gives the overall operating character an organic flavor
supported by rational constructs (mechanical and computer tools). This is
not the notion of a 'robot' which puts the rational program in the primacy
and makes intuition subordinate to it.

So my point is that the Y2K problem is bringing to our awareness a 'design
flaw' of major proportions. It is the same design flaw which is being
spoken about  in the context of currency and local economies, or in terms
of environmental issues. A 'bioregional' design approach to economies would
follow the same geometry as just discussed above, wherein the system is
monitored and evolved on the basis of intuition and local 'vital signs'.
The global web of co-ordination, in this case, is not blinking on and off
like a binary clock controlled neon display, with the same Macdonald
burgers popping off the grill at the same time all around the world.
Because of its 'design for evolution' nature it appears instead as a
throbbing and pulsating biological culture. And the system is not exposed
to the chaos amplification phenomena wherein one glitsch can propagate
unimpeded (without being intercepted by intuitive nodes) across the entire
web as happens in a pure computer, because a computer web per se has no
internal intutiive checks, whereas the type of co-ordinative web as in
Bakersfield is locally controlled by intuition.

I would therefore argue that what you are working on  from a design
perspective [innovative local currency systems] is the same thing that
others are struggling with in terms of globalization versus bioregionalism
in economic systems; i.e. that we are evolving 'robotic' or
rationo-biological type systems designs rather than 'robocop' or
bio-rational type systems designs.

Anyhow, that's my 'angle' on the relationship between Y2K computer problems
and social issues.

Ted Lumley, December 6, 1998
<http://rampages.onramp.net/~emlumley/update.htm>