While automatic translators on internet make it easy nowadays to understand at least the sense of a text in any other language, live audio translation between languages was only something of the future.
Is that really so? In that stunning demonstration, a Microsoft executive demonstrates both live text and audio translation between English and Chinese (if you don’t have time to watch the 9 min video, watch after 6:40 for the live audio – here is the link to YouTube for that part of the video):
There is a definite trend in the literature to link complexity with fragility. Examples of books that revolve around this issue include “Antifragile: Things that Gain from Disorder” the new book by Nicholas Taleb, or more technical books on risk management in complexity such as “A new Theory of Risk and Rating” by Jacek Marczyk (that one is only recommended to risk geeks).
Fragile items just break suddenly and fully
The concept is that in a complex world, in particular when systems reach very high complexity, at the limit of what is bearable by the system, things can change abruptly. Instead of being ductile, the world then shows very fragile, brittle characteristics. The previous state is suddenly broken and is replaced by a very different condition.
Fragility is thus linked with complexity.
We would prefer to live in a world where change happens progressively, which would give us some chances to intervene. This is what engineers are always seeking when they specify that engineered materials should remain as ductile as possible across a wide range of conditions – this is to avoid the sudden, unpredictable rupture without prior deformation.
As complexity increases in a given system, it becomes more and more fragile – until it breaks suddenly, unpredictably, and is replaced by a new system that is more tolerant to complexity.
This theoretical observation has wide-ranging consequences. Our world today becomes more and more complex, interconnected. Our societies need to change before they reach the limit of complexity they can bear. Or, changes will inevitably be sudden, with lots of damages. Because, if our societies and institutions don’t change, their fragility will increase. Until they reach the breaking point.
According to Tony Robbins, “The quality of your life is in direct proportion to the amount of uncertainty you can comfortably live with“.
How comfortable are you with uncertainty and illusions?
This quote can be taken in two ways. A first, protective way is to suppose that the more you can bear uncertainty, the least disturbed you will be by what is happening around you and the happier you will be. This is quite a limited view which will not lead to transforming your life.
I certainly prefer to think of uncertainty rather as a source of opportunity – a second way to understand this quote. Uncertainty is the key for unexpected success in today’s increasingly complex world. The unexpected encounters, unforeseeable events or the unexpected viral effect of an artistic production actually shape much of today’s world. Just before these uncertain things happen, uncertainty was at its maximum. Just after, our world and existence took a turn. The world branched out. If you can’t bear the high level of uncertainty linked with releasing something to the world, then you can’t shape it. You can’t shape your life.
Living with uncertainty is at the same time uncomfortable and exciting. It is not a character trait, it is a choice. So, are you ready to choose to live with a high level of uncertainty in your life? Are you ready to grab those opportunities that will come close to you?
“After you plant a seed in the ground you don’t dig it up every week to see how it is doing” – William Coyne, former 3M executive, quoted in “Weird Ideas that Work” by Robert Sutton.
This sentence was used in the context of creativity: when you’re planting a seed for a new product or a new idea, leave it undisturbed for a while to grow! It is the seedling that is the most fragile phase and needs to be protected.
For example, make sure creative teams operate outside the rush of the corporate world; or on a personal note, make sure that you give time for an idea to grow a bit before exposing it to the harshness of the world.
Because any new idea is just a fragile air draft that can disappear instantly. Because new ideas are precious and need time to grow and develop.
How well are you protecting your new ideas to let them grow enough to face the world?
“Fundamentally, the world is uncertain. Decisions are about the future and your place in the future when that future is uncertain. So what is the key thing you can do to prepare for that uncertainty? You can have the right people with you“.
The next time, instead of spending too much time developing spreadsheet projections over the next decades (which mean absolutely nothing), focus your energy on getting the right people in. Not just people like you, but a diverse and complementary team. Then through conflict and discussions, you’ll make your way through this complex world.
Where is your team right now? When do you start building it to thrive in this complex world?
Collaboration is the key here. Because through collaboration and creating tribes that can vet our creation, we have a group that can give us feedback before we expose ourselves too much to the world, with which we can discuss any weird idea that come to our mind. We have a group that can funnel to us the information we need to understand the present situation. We can then increase the level of uncertainty we expose ourselves while minimizing risk.
Actually, collaboration is really a fundamental key to success in the real, complex world. It allows to draw ideas from multiple brains that have been expose to multiple situations and dramatically increase our own capabilities.
Maintaining our social network as a ‘secure base’ with which we can test our latest weird idea is a fundamental capability to explore new possibilities.
Certainty in our world and our lives was an illusion. We now know it can’t work. We now have the tools and the capability to routinely collaborate across continents with hundreds, thousands of people (yes, you also: how many people are you linked with on all your social network tools like Facebook, LinkedIn, etc?). We still don’t take enough advantage of this new capability because we don’t really understand it.
Take advantage of your social network more. Harness this collaborative energy to increase the amount of uncertainty you can cope with – and enjoy a better life while increasing your contribution.
In the Industrial Age, for the first time in our long human history, we were conditioned into believing that our life, our environment could be made certain: regular salary increment and a sure retirement; regular working times; lower and lower variance of manufactured items and processes, etc.
How enjoyable is the “normal” of the Industrial Age?
The entire system was geared to make us believe that certain was normal. We tried hard to fit every event into normality; to diminish as much as possible the impact of unavoidable variation (like weather, for instance) on our lives. Any hindrance to our existence was to be considered a problem that needed to be addressed to bring it back to normality.
We need to recognize now how much of an illusion that was. In addition, that turned out to be quite boring. Freak events will continue to happen forever. We need to live with a large amount of uncertainty in our lives to be successful and invent the world we want.
Many people still live in the dream of the Industrial Age certainty (although, luckily, much less since the 2008 economic ‘crisis’ which shook many ‘certain’ existences). This myth continues to be propagated by large sections of our current institutions like social security, public schools… It is important to recognize it is a myth, and resolutely move into the Collaborative Age mindset of thriving on uncertainty.
During the all the previous Ages, exploitation of nature was a central economic activity. This often meant killing ‘pests’ – when it was not to exploit wildlife directly (whales, fur animals…). Today, forests and wildlife come back with a vengeance!
What will we do with wildlife as it comes back?
This excellent paper of the Wall Street Journal “America Gone Wild” describes the situation in the US: wildlife booms and starts to impact severely the modern american way of life. In Europe, a generation of countryside hobby game hunters who were traditionally managing wildlife is also disappearing, opening the way to a more professional management of game and wildlife.
It is great to see that nature comes back and that the environment does improve in developed countries. Forests grow. Wildlife develops. Still as we are moving into the Collaborative Age we need to reinvent wildlife management to satisfy our wish of a dynamic wildlife and still manage it so that it stays within reasonable bounds that we can accommodate. This will need more professional, subsidized game management, probably involving professional hunters. A new institution, probably.
There will be some soul searching on that subject in the next years and decades; and there will certainly be some instances of excessive wildlife presence that will need to be curbed.
More importantly we need to invent a new relationship with nature. Let not the fear of the wolf so ingrained in our European minds will come back to haunt us! Not any more a confrontational or exploiting relationship, but a synergistic relationship that will make us thrive on Earth. Are you ready to contribute?
We are making a break for two weeks , taking time to discover New Zealand in a campervan with the family – probably very much disconnected from the internet! I hope you’ll enjoy the festive season and you’ll take time to recover energy for an exciting year 2013.
The Fourth Revolution Book cover
The most commented or visited blog posts of the year have been:
Economists notoriously fail to explain the world in which we live. And their forecasting capabilities are highly unreliable. Why is that? Our take is that there is a fundamental impossibility for economists to apprehend the real world’s complexity. And so, it is going to get even worse as the world complexity increases!
A complex system: an early representation of Internet
Economists try to fit the economy in simple rules. They do that at different scales: macro-economy; micro-economy; case studies. One of the major hypothesis is that of the rational individual, i.e. that individual’s decision making is driven by rational decisions based on improving one’s economical condition.
We know for a long time that it is a simplified view of people’s actual motivation. It has become clearer in the last few decades with the emergence of the concept of “leadership” (why would you want “leadership” in the economists’ world when compensation should be enough?). Repeated crisis have shown the limits of all rational econometric models – and that “Black Swan” events happen frequently – events that upend conventional thinking based on careful analysis of past statistical data.
What are economists good for then? Simply giving some comfort to politicians? Driving the economy in times of normality?
Economics is still a recent discipline. If it is to become really useful it needs to apprehend complexity – how complex systems work, how they can become unstable and unpredictable. And then only will economics be truly be able to take the central role in governance that it seeks for a long time.
Economists are known not to agree on explanation of past events, and to be a disaster when it comes to predicting what will happen in the economy.
Among their feats, economists still can’t explain how Wikipedia, for example, works. As quoted by Alex Tabarrok in his post “Shared Creation”, they still can’t figure out what is the effect of such low transaction costs in the spontaneous assembly of people performing for free a seemingly so valuable service to Humankind.
Because non monetary motivation is more important than any kind of economic exchange in this case, the usual tools of the economists based on the “economically rational individual” fail completely. And indeed – Wikipedia lives only through the voluntarily contributions of millions of people. Still, it is now an institution that is supported by many and has become so indispensable in our lives.
As Alex Tabarrok mentions, “Economists thought that Wikipedia couldn’t work because of problems of motivation but what turned out to matter most was not motivation but transaction costs. With 7 billion people and low transaction costs what other forms of shared creation become possible?”
That transaction costs are now zero changes completely the logic of the exchange of value. A lot of what we are doing during the day is not any more just motivated by economic rationality. It makes the reason why so many organizations and institutions exist completely obsolete. Will economists become also an extinct profession in the Fourth Revolution?
“In today’s world, if you do what you have always done, you’ll get less than you’ve always gotten“. – Morris Shechtman
Upgrade Yourself!
I find that quote particularly inspiring when it comes to pushing us to change. Today with the Fourth Revolution, change is not an option, it is mandatory. Change your focus, stop expecting the Corporation to decide for you, change your mindset. You need to find out what you need to do, but for sure you need to change the way you view the world and what you’ve always done – or what your parents have always done.
