The Argument

As I have examined in earlier blogs, information overload, exceeding the brain's plasticity, induces individual insanity and collective chaos. Plasticity stress is a function of the speed and degree of innovation and individual contexts; paradigms, databases, and narratives. The only brake on the locomotive of 'progress' is cultural inhibition to the adoption of new technology.
Early adopters, who fall in the autistic stage of the brain plasticity range, have little cultural inhibition. The slowest to adopt, the schizophrenic stage of the brain plasticity range, are singularly culture bound. Our present method of working out the speed of adoption operationally, progress to social breakdown, is social suicide. It is dystopian.
We absolutely must manage innovation. As discussed earlier, the nature of the universe and the limits of human intelligence preclude any pretense of being 'real'. We all live in distorted realities of filter bubbles. Reality can no longer be an argument for progress. We are generally exceeding the plasticity of the human brain and must manage change. We must increase cultural inhibition to the deployment of new technology while increasing the range and complexity of our personal contexts in order to adequately integrate new technology in humane social schema, a process of some 20 to 40 years.
That is my postmodern mantra and my prescription for dealing with our present chaos.

Do well and be well.

Modern Innovation

Modern innovation begins arbitrarily with Einstein's 1905 paper on relativity. This, following on the heels of the Long Depression and a general increase in the capability and employment of machine tools, and preceding the Great War and a general collapse of civilization and its narratives, fueled a truly incomprehensible flood of innovation that became intense and socially pernicious after 1945.
The list of innovations introduced into society in the period, 1905 to 1945, is significant but the list of the period, post 1945, is mind boggling, atomic power, television, the integrated circuit and its transistors, the internet, robots, and, now, gadgets that are organized as the IoT, all of them pushing the limits of the human brain and culture and increasingly going beyond those limits into functional insanity and social chaos.
When an innovation is subject to inclusion into a culture that innovation is accomplished individual by individual. Yes, there are protocols for dealing with technology that are circulated among populations. These do not imply comprehension and they are temporary to task completion. They are a part of machine culture, not human culture. Social acculturation means integrating new ideas into neural networks so that behavior becomes meaningful. If one's behavior is a repertoire of such protocols, a machine culture, then one is a minion of the machines and the only meaning is the machine. That is intolerably inhumane. Thus, the eternal drive to comprehend, to integrate new ideas into a coherent brain mass.
With relativity and quantum mechanics and their esoteric and difficult concepts we find this drive, the drive to meaning, frustrated by the individual limits of the ability to understand, a function of talent and plasticity. Culture moves ahead, semper ad Lucem, incorporating new technology and ideas into humane behavioral systems but it moves slowly in filter bubbles and approximate realities. Compounding this are absolute theoretical limits of comprehension, the universe consists of scalar fields decaying into particles and scalar fields are unknowable, and the absolute limit of general comprehension, as Feynmann once said, nobody understands entropy.
Only with artificial intelligence and IoT gadgets do we see the possibility of a meaningful existence obtained within the comfort zone of the average human being, without performance enhancing drugs, without elitist exclusion. There is, at the logical terminus of technological development, more day to dawn, as Thoreau put it. We may be in sight of that dawn, the dawn of machines adjusting to human beings, the dawn of the truly humane society, but we still have to reach that point of technological development and acculturate it. We are not there yet.

Brain Plasticity and Innovation: A Model

Prerequisite to any examination of the consequences of innovation on human behavior is a working model of brain plasticity. I define this arbitrarily as the ratio of dendrite connectivity over pruning which, at one end of the spectrum, defines aspects of autism, hyperconnectivity, and at the other defines aspects of schizophrenia, excessive pruning according to recent genetic studies. This model excludes the formation of new neurons in adults, which does occur, for purposes of simplification and concentrates on the formation and destruction of dendrite connections in a phenomena of the constant rewiring of the brain, plasticity.
Armed with this model, a larger model of response to innovation becomes possible. Positing an aggregate learning curve to adopting a specific technology, there are five characteristic states to that adjustment in behavior. There is the prophet state, well ahead of the curve. There is the autistic state, ahead of the curve. There is the normal state, even with the aggregate curve. There is the laggard state, behind the curve, and there is the schizophrenic state, off the back of the curve. Please keep in mind that these are characterizations of brain plasticity, not value statements nor epithets.
This model implies aggregate states of efficient task performance in the deployment of new technology, the productivity curve, in which the five states occur as a specific population in relation to that curve as a function of brain plasticity.

To be continued.....

The Acculturation of Technology and Ideas

I am writing this, not in the role of scientist or scholar, but rather as that of a thinker exploring new concepts. My usage of 'acculturate' is nonstandard as the word is usually applied to interactions between different cultures but it is the perfect word for the inclusion of new technology and ideas into behavior and narrative and I could find no other suitable term. It is not a neologism, which I deplore, but it is a significantly different usage although describing similar dynamics.
Acculturation, in the sense that I am using it, has been studied. There are theories. The Theory of Diffusion being foremost. There are celebrated and brilliant books such as 'The Structure of Scientific Revolutions' by Thomas S. Kuhn. There are historical and anthropological studies. What interests me however are the limits of acculturation such as the plasticity of the human brain.
Acculturation is a spectrum of behavioral accommodation to new technology and ideas distributed through a given population anchored by childhood exposure and living memory which is governed by brain plasticity, cultural inhibition, and context: database, paradigm, and narrative. There are, as Kuhn found, significant limits to significant change and these limits are in the range of generational transfer. Standards for one generation are fairly set for that generation's flourishing, some twenty to thirty years.
Increasing the rate of innovation pushes that dynamic and the human brain to and beyond their limits. The results are fairly chaotic.

To be continued....

A New Glass-Steagall?

In an emerging era of regulation reform, talk of new Glass-Steagall Act is going to be muted. I suggest that this is the perfect time to process the regulatory failure that produced the Great Recession of 2007-2008 into reasonable restraints upon our most important financial institution, banks. I further suggest that a blanket separation of investment and commercial banking is, as former President Clinton said, not appropriate. The problem is too complex for simple solutions.
Banks exist to supply liquidity for fluctuating capitalist economies. In order to do that they must make money doing it. That is a hard fact of capitalist life. There is nothing in this scenario to deny them the right to take reasonable risks in equity markets in order to increase their return on investment. The problem lies in the phrase, 'reasonable risk', and how that can be regulated.
I am here arguing that there is a solution to that problem and it lies in regulating mathematical risk models which guide institutional investment. Risk models must be demonstrably and categorically shown to be reliable in a hostile critical environment before they can be employed in actual investment strategies. That is not a simple solution but it is not a simple problem.
The legislation can be written. I suggest it be considered.

Towards Sanity: A Living Minimum Wage

A market, an exchange of goods and services usually for money, is definitely an expression of human social existence. For all the exposure of the greed and excess of market players, markets have to serve society. They cannot otherwise exist. At the point that they exacerbate social ills and create unmanageable inequalities of station, social, economic, and legal, the greed and excess that make markets function effectively have broken the operational constraints of proper market dynamics and are loose, rather like a maniac escapee from a high security mental facility. The general case is, and the legitimate prejudice is, that something in the economy has lost equilibrium and is generating unsustainable numbers which are fueling aberrant economic behavior.
While draconian measures are the usual kneejerk reaction to this social collapse, and it is a social collapse, a measured response calculated to find the cause of the disequilibrium is far more desirable. Transfers of wealth are draconian and polarize society. The argument resolves around the question of the best employment of disposable income. According to the wealthy investment is more valuable to society and according to the poor, the general welfare is paramount to a functioning constitutional democracy. That argument is well beyond the scope of this blog and its resolution requires a fine balance in a society.
It is my contention that an adequate measured response to this social collapse would be an increase in the minimum wage to a level of true economic and social participation which has been found to be the foundation of the wealth and health of a society. The problem with letting the market set the price of labor is that that means that society considers labor a commodity to be traded and that indicates that philosophically society considers human beings a commodity. What kind of society would that be? A society of robots? That position is counter to the values of Western Civilization and well beyond the limits of reason. It is alienated, read insane, and cannot be tolerated in a constitutional democracy. That is the absolute argument for a minimum wage. As for the living minimum wage, it is a commonplace observation that a business paying less than living wages is not really in a value added economy. It is in the business of generating funny numbers that drive market psychology beyond its proper bounds.
While I believe that the mass industrial society that has turned us all into minions of the automated machine process and the consequent loss of self-esteem and the compensatory defensive reaction of grandiose self-concepts to be the root cause of this antisocial phenomenon, the redress to that mindless society currently in process is an entrepreneur/infrastructure model which, while far more conducive to psychological health, does leave far too many people out.
Central to this model is the notion that the bar to social and economic participation is being raised but is still attainable. That is nonsense. The bar is over everybody's head. IBM's Watson and a robot could have the average entrepreneur's lunch. The sooner we close the lid on the Pandora's box of the notion that technology is intrinsically superior to human beings, the better. Technology serves humankind and the boldest, measured, statement we can make to that effect is a living minimum wage.

The Justice Instinct

Although I have seen many attempts at a rigorous definition of 'justice', I have seen no clear triumphs including the Ancient Greeks. The results tend to be circular in their reasoning, culture bound sophistries. For a concept central to civilization itself, this is an unusual situation. From a naive perspective, what is justice.
Sugar cane was, from time immemorial into the Nineteenth Century, a slave industry. Sugar, it is generally agreed, is not healthy ingested in large quantities without a proper regimen. Yet the use of slave labor depressed the price of sugar to the point that this was fairly common. Therefore the deployment of an immoral economic system had an effect detrimental to the health of the people who allowed it to happen. That is justice. It is very close to irony and I know it when I see it.
From this observation it is obvious that any attempt a definition of justice would begin with the idea that for justice to exist it would have to be inherent in the nature of the universe. What, in simplistic terms, is the nature of the universe? Scalar fields decaying into particles. What is there of justice in that? Just from this superficial inquiry, the difficulty of defining justice is apparent. As in Wittgenstein's examination of 'game', a definition may not be possible.
If this is true, and so far it appears to be true, then justice, like game, like language, is an innate concept, a concept with which we are born. It could be a Kantian 'thing in itself' which interacting with perceived reality, generates specific bodies of law and cultural norms, categories of understanding.
So we are left with the justice instinct, bred into us and present at birth, which is unknowable and apparent only in the manifestations of its influence on law and culture. This may be the actual phenomenon and it cannot be conserved, only recognized. We know it when we see it.