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A Short HIstory of a Complex Civilization

Birth of A Complex Global Civilization | My grandfather, Ben Garside, died in 1970 when I was 15 years old. Born in 1880, he had lived nearly his entire life in one house or another with no insulation, no furnace, no phone, no electricity or running water. He was a farmer-turned-market-gardener. He didn’t see an automobile until he was over 35 years of age, yet he lived long enough to see astronauts land on the moon. He taught me one important thing – that it is possible to live with very little, as our ancestors did for hundreds of thousands of years, and find genuine happiness. How did things change so quickly in one lifetime?

Direction choices and career decisions with a businessman standing in the center of a group of radial roads going in different paths as a business metaphor for government bureaucracy guidance and deciding on the best way towards success.

Choice Fatigue

New Energy | Around the time my grandfather was born, there was a flurry of inventions based on the cheap new energies of fossil fuels and electricity. My grandfather’s uncle worked with Nicola Telsa on the first power generating station at Niagara. My wife’s great-great uncle Melville Bissell came up with the Bissell electric vacuum cleaner. The telephone was quickly invented and you could then talk to relatives in a distant city rather than travel by horse. Oil was discovered, pumped out of the ground and put to use in diesel engines in trains and ships. Cheap shipping made the world a much smaller place.

Literacy | Aside from the abundant cheap energy there was something else even more catalytic to the perfect storm of 20th century progress. Just a couple of decades before Ben’s birth there was a popular movement to provide a general education for all children. In the back woods of St. Joseph Island in Lake Huron, Ben was going to get to read and write. I have a copy of the same primer from which he learned to read. He would be able to read newspapers and magazines and keep informed of events and trends across the country and around the world. But more than learning information, schools taught us how to make meanings by deliberately connecting events and processes into a myriad of repeating recognizable patterns.

Modernity | In 1921, American sociologist named William Ogburn coined the term ‘cultural lag’. Cultural lag captured the idea that hard technologies, like ploughs, guns and automobiles, can be adopted at a much faster rate than the values, beliefs and behaviours associated with the use of those technologies. Today, for example, we have billions of smart phones in use and thousands of people will die (or kill) in traffic accidents when using them while driving. These lags don’t close before new ones are added. The lags are often cumulative.

New Foundations | My graduate thesis advisor, Richard Jung, worked with Ludwig von Bertalanffy, the founder of general systems theory. Von Bertalanffy was one of a handful of scientific geniuses giving birth to the esoteric sciences of information theory, operations research, systems theory and cybernetics beginning a decade before I was born. These sciences would not only give rise to the computer, but to the artificial intelligence that promises to one day soon make humans irrelevant. They also form the foundation for the management science that makes global corporations possible. These same sciences help explain life itself so we can manipulate it in genetic engineering and even make new synthetic life forms. They may yet help us simplify our world and save ourselves, but for now, few people know anything at all about the long term cultural lags associated with the science and technology boom.

Back to the Future | The year my grandfather died, American journalist Alvin Toffler published his book called ‘Future Shock’. In it he chronicled the rapid expansion of complexity in the modern world. Toffler stated that there was as much diversity and change in the current lifetime as there was in the previous 800 lifetimes put together. And he was right! Not only are there more things but there are more people, more ideas, travel, publications, and relationships. Knowledge was and is expanding exponentially in every direction! In 1920, just one long lifetime ago, atoms were just a theory and there was only a handful of known galaxies. We now know about sub-atomic particles smaller than quarks, that there are thousands of identifiable planets, and billions of galaxies filled with billions of solar systems. We may already be suffering from future shock and not even know it!

Small Planet | Cheap transportation, electrical appliances, public education and mass communication brought us globalisation. Globalisation quickly brought us closer together than ever. There is a global brain drain going on as people with credentials move to specialized industrial ‘gravitational poles’ around the planet. People gather in giant metropolises — innovation hubs. Moreover, there is growing exposure to variety, diversity and complexity in everything from sciences and occupations, to races, religions, cultures, education, entertainment and political views. We really don’t know how long it takes for people to effectively acclimatize to these changes. We shouldn’t be surprised by popular upheavals.

Zeitgeist | There is now a pervasive general background uncertainty and anxiety. Long term investment planning is evermore challenging. Alleged facts and logical arguments do not validate hopes. We don’t know which scientists to believe. Political pundits argue with different sets of facts. Meanings are apparently so complex and interdependent that anyone can spin them to get whatever results they want. Lies are easily disguised as someone’s truth. People search the workplace, lifestyles and other religions for a sense of meaning and purpose. We don’t get better at multitasking, we get better at being distracted. We feel busy, but in a moment of reflection we realise we’re spinning our wheels and going nowhere. There is little time to analyse and deliberate so people more frequently depend on quick intuitive assessments. Less time spent in deliberation means deliberation skills get weaker.

Media | What people really know is how they feel day in and day out. TV showcases the lives of the rich and famous. “Why not me?” The psychological reactions to cumulative stresses are feelings of powerlessness, frustration, envy, anger, fear, suspicion, anxiety and depression. People talk of information overload, change fatigue, choice fatigue, apathy and disengagement. There is nostalgia for the past when times were simpler and you knew who you could trust. Conspiracy theories and post-apocalyptic dystopias are popular entertainment. Now “get off the grid, prep and hunker down.”

Planetary Paradoxes | Though apparently history repeats itself, we also live in unprecedented times. The familiar rhythms of life are becoming chaotic and unrecognizable. Aside from climate change, the death of the oceans, extinction of many species, and over-population, what else is happening that we have not yet even identified? Scientists are calling our times the Anthropocene Period because of the dramatic impact our population is having on the planet. Never in 3.6 billion years of life on the planet has there been anything like what we humans are doing in this lifetime.

Change Fatigue

Change Fatigue

21st Century Design | Underlying all that is happening in our global mono-culture and its proliferating sub-cultures is the compounded exponential growth of complexity, accelerating change, and convergence of multiple cumulative cultural lags. Cultural ideas and their expression in technology, not genes, are the medium of civil evolution. They’re not slowed by the need for hundreds of generations. What systems science tells us is that this growth pattern, with mathematical certainty, will come to an end one way or another. This is not my grandfather’s world!

Going Forward | With the web we have an unprecedented opportunity to engage in collective discussion. We had better put our little heads together now and figure out what we want to be when we grow up, and how we’re going to get there. How shall we define humanity in the 21st Century?

– Randal B Adcock © 2016

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Community as Natural Intelligence

When we individuals have difficulty managing the complex challenges around us, we have always turned to collective and organizational intelligence for assistance. It’s as ancient as we are. We call it community. And when life seems so busy that we want to retreat from community, we need to reinvent community so it continues to work for us. No one finds his own way without help from others. The collective does not find its way without individual leadership and initiative. We are all wayfinders together.

Authentic Community

Scott Peck, the famous author of The Road Less Travelled and A Different Drum, said if you have ever experienced ‘authentic community’, you will continue to seek it out and recreate it wherever you go — for the rest of your life!

Sadly, many people today feel something is missing. Something bigger than themselves. They don’t know that the human heart has a vacuum in it the size and shape of community. It needs to be filled. Community is something that nature has given to us social animals as a birthright.

The authentic community fills that inner void. It provides a sense of belonging, identity, loyalty, security and shared purpose – things maybe you didn’t know were missing until you find them. It is an experience that transcends personal differences, and not only tolerates, but embraces and puts our differences to good use for the good of the whole. We are all different for good biological reasons. Our personal strengths were meant to be shared. That’s a higher order natural intelligence at work!

Healthy Community

Healthy communities do not segregate themselves but are open and engaging, adaptive and even innovative. They seek to grow and develop appropriately to serve the needs of their members. Healthy communities get good at helping their members find their best strengths and place in the bigger picture. They draw out that natural talent, nurture it and support it for the common good.

Collective Intelligence

Community intelligence is related to what is now called collective intelligence and crowd-sourced wisdom. In the early days of the scientific revolution kings offered prizes for the best scientific proposals.  Collective intelligence is not new but it’s being rediscovered and modified for the 21st century. One person in a million may have a solution to a problem. Now, if that inventor wants to share it, we can all benefit from that solution. If the inventor can protect the intellectual property then he or she can charge for it and make a profit. The inventor may alternatively choose to make a free contribution to the sharing economy.

business peopleOrganizational Intelligence

But while collective intelligence draws on the talents of many individuals, this by itself does not produce new ideas or solutions. Another important aspect of community intelligence is what organizational behaviour theorists are now calling organizational learning, andorganizational or collaborative intelligence.  This is not your grandad’s staff training. It’s about optimizing patterns of communication and control in the organization to maximize organizational performance. In any well-managed dialogue, committee or work group, for example, new ideas emerge that no individual member could have come up with on their own. In poorly managed or dysfunctional teams, the output group IQ could actually be lower than that of any member.

Community intelligence has what chaos theorists call emergent properties. The parts, together in particular relationships, produce new properties that do not exist in the parts themselves and usually would not be predicted. Others call it synergy, in which the intelligence of the whole community is greater than the sum of the members’ intelligence. Whatever you call it, the phenomenon is ubiquitous throughout nature but is only recently being recognized, studied and understood. The patterns of relationships among the members of a community add significant value that serves each member.

Businessman Pointing to Our Services SignCommunity intelligence building is a key purpose behind the new social enterprise, Wayfinders Business Co-operative. It’s not just about business, but about how we all work together organically in an ecosystem of trusted intellectual and economic transactions. Wayfinders incorporates both collective and collaborative intelligence, guided, of course, by human values.

Balancing the Self-Other Orientation

Nature has given us the genes to work both as individuals and as groups or communities. Each of us has some natural disposition for one end or the other of the spectrum — self or other. People are asked to ‘carry their own weight‘ but also to ‘serve others‘. Most people find a balance somewhere between the extremes. Using statistics you can see that there is a ‘bell-curve’ normal distribution of people along the continuum, with extreme loners at one end and extremely gregarious at the other end. Most find a balance somewhere in the middle.

bell curve

Normal distribution of self-other orientation and locus of control

Neither end of the spectrum is solely correct, but both poles will surround themselves with people who feel the way they do. Like attracts like. People at both ends will develop worldviews shared among those with similar sentiments. Over time, we see ideologies emerge which solidify the polarities and bring out our sense of competitive tribal allegiances and territorialism.

When a natural neighbourhood has no sense of community, communities of interest come in to fill the void and play a bigger role in your life. That may mean membership is no longer as open, diverse or inclusive. They can become closed to outsiders. Religious orders, political ideologies, scientific disciplines, and intellectual camps can progressively become disengaged from the general population, displacing the organic community and thereby restricting community intelligence.

Some will say the adversarial polarity of politics is good for shaking out the issues. However, under competitive pressure to win the popular vote, people find more reassurance in their tribal alliances than they do in seeking facts, logic, truth or the ultimate welfare of the community as a whole.

You can see the evolution of party politics since the beginning of the British parliamentary democracy. But on a bigger scale you can contrast western liberalism that favours the individual and eastern collectivism that favours the whole. Within boundaries, both civilizations can survive and thrive. But there are limits and tipping points at which civil stability is threatened.

Personally, I favour an overall balance as I believe nature intended. I think it is not only possible to reconcile left and right, but it is imperative. The strengths of the individual and the strengths of community intelligence need each other. The work of sociobiology supports this position. There are mathematical algorithms that describe social interdependence in many other species as well as our own. I believe we should use management science to optimize the balancing of competing priorities in our civil systems.

Management Science

The challenge is to assume conscious, deliberate and rational control of our civil guidance system. No one wants to have someone else do ‘social engineering’ on us. We need to develop a new platform with good ‘organizational DNA‘ and values aligned with basic human needs. The platform would promote active member engagement, hence, a cooperative governance model is proposed. Each member gets one voting share. Each member is educated in the co-operative and management science principles.

Whether anyone is aware of it or not I cannot say, but there has been progress over the past few decades that holds the key to our personal and common futures. The key lies in the domain of those sciences variously called information theory, systems theory, cybernetics, operations research, chaos theory, decision theory, complex adaptive systems, AI, and so on. I prefer the term ‘management science‘ for convenience. To me every living thing is managing its life. That’s what we all do with our intelligence.

Words-business-intelligence-written-on-a-book.-Business-concept-000075279587_MediumEssentially this cluster of related sciences is evolving a unified explanation to encompass all life and intelligence. Management science finds ways to optimize performance or production lines, business processes and organizations of all kinds. It results in giant economies of scale in mass production, for example, so you can buy goods for cheaper. It can also be used to assist less formal organizations such as communities. If we prefer to think of communities as natural and organic, then we can refer to optimized communities as intentional communities.

Cultural Lag

Again, call them what you may, but we have a cumulative cultural deficit or growing cultural lag across our global monoculture. This is manifest differently in many quarters. The advances of technology leave advances in politics, family and community in the dust. As biological organisms, we pay more attention to tangible things than abstract or invisible things. We can adopt electronics faster than we can change religions. We quickly introduce cars and cell phones, then we take years to effectively regulate them.

In other words, our civil systems are not carefully optimized. The soft culture of values and beliefs is becoming the important critical path on the journey we call progress. Soft culture is the aspect of community and civilization that slows everything down or even disrupts technology. This soft culture needs a paradigm shift to catch up. In order to do this, the social sciences and psychology need to be firmly placed on the management science platform.

Civil and Psych Science

Our 200-year-old legacy social science has been largely marginalized. There is little money to incentivize serious civil research and development beyond academic exercises. Political animals, entrenched in legacy ideologies, often pay little attention to independent research on sociocultural matters. They generally believe they have the truth in their ideologies and party platforms. Much of the useful progress has come from organizational theory that emerges from management practice.

Businessmen And Businesswomen Meeting To Discuss IdeasPsychology is refining us. Advances in psychology are among the most profound of all advances in the last 150 years. But this kind of progress plays too close to the human heart, and at heart, we are creatures of habit, not inclined to change behaviours until we have to. So while we have a better appreciation of mental health, there is a growing concern over mental illness. Meanwhile, there are probably a lot more psychologists in the marketing and sales industry than there are in clinical research and practice.

Part of the problem of the various social sciences and psychology lies in the fact that each has evolved into their own separate disciplines. But reality is not disciplinary. Management science, on the contrary, views the real world as made up of tightly integrated and embedded systems. This is a far more realistic worldview.

Governments are known to be reactionary, rarely getting ahead of public opinion. Public opinion is also lagging well behind the futurists and thought leaders. The best thought leaders have been quite surprised by many recent events on the global stage. We need to understand that with the very unpredictable nature of our current human condition, we must get back to some basics while we are capable of being rational and thoughtful.

Wayfinding

Can we afford to allow a generation of our human family to wander off course amidst the dizzying accelerating rates of change, exponential growth of civil complexity and compounding chaos? As people cope with the mounting pressures and distractions they will inevitably disengage and lean on more primitive tribal instincts for protection.

People in a Meeting and Leadership Concept

Wayfinders at Work = Community Intelligence

We need to reconsider many of our legacy worldviews, sort through the best ideas, methods and tools available to us today, and incorporate them into a new paradigm platform.  So that is what we ate doing at Wayfinders Business Co-operative© and it’s in an early startup stage.

As Wayfinders Business Cooperative sets out to bring forward the best in humanity, the best of our intellectual and technological heritage, we need to be smart about the new synthesis of these traditions, and be conscientious about where we are heading. We need to draw on management science and practice to develop the best science and practice in community intelligence.

Moreover, we must be cognizant of the fact that with each decision we make we add to the definition of humanity. We must find a way to remain true to our most positive nature while navigating an evermore complex global civilization.

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A Methodical Approach to Designing Our World for Life With AI

One of the biggest questions facing the 21st Century civilization is “how are we going to manage the escalating automation of our world so we continue to live safe, prosperous, and fulfilling lives?”

In general, naturally, we are going to manage intelligence with intelligence. The intelligence we are going to use will be some combination of personal (cognitive and emotional), social or collective, and artificial intelligence. Of course it all derives from natural intelligence, something we see every day in such things as fractals in plant leaves and blood vessels, or in the balance of species in an ecosystem. Think of AI as a new species arriving in our civil ecosystem we call civilization. How do we accommodate and use it for our highest purposes rather than compete with it?Artificial intelligence making possible new computer technologie

We struggle with other seemingly insurmountable issues such as climate change, the growing gap between the super-rich and everyone else, the concentration of corporate control, and the polarization of political, ethnic and religious populations. In this context the continued penetration of AI into our lives becomes more challenging. AI can be a spoiler in the hands of those who acquire it first.

We need not examine in detail all the various approaches and applications to artificial intelligence, such as robotics, neural networks, deep (machine) learning, forged labour or synthetic intelligence. Many AI professionals like to make sharp distinctions, but for those of us who are going to have our job descriptions radically altered, have our security seriously challenged, and maybe get attacked by smart weapons, maybe its all the same stuff. There are opportunities and threats for all of us on many fronts. We each and all need to be strategic, individually and collectively.

One thing is for sure, as far as I am concerned. We need to think big, long and hard about how our world is systematically migrating to a different platform as we live and breathe. The AI professionals have told us for years, “don’t worry, AI won’t be around to bother you in your lifetime“. Others have been hitting the hype buttons. Meanwhile, most AI professionals have been sprinting a marathon in hopes of getting in on the one breakthrough that is the real game-changer.

Now many of them are telling us that significant breakthroughs could happen in the next five to ten years. And the common public response is, “we’ve heard that nonsense before“. Someone cried ‘wolf’ one too many times. Meanwhile, robots continue to infiltrate the manufacturing lines and now the service lines. Algorithms chase down meaningful patterns in millions of data points. Watson out-smarts our greatest knowledge keepers, and a robot actually passes a college entrance exam. And, yes, one AI system can read the expressions in human faces better than many people can.

Public policy is notoriously reactionary and delayed. While our governments are a nerve centre for our nations, they are not well prepared to anticipate emerging needs and lead discussion and action. They react to lobbyists, disasters and voters at election time. There is nothing stopping ordinary concerned citizens from becoming informed , holding their own discussions and coming up with their own plans and policy positions.

Papers-are-passed-webWe will need to structure the public dialogue to deal with complex issues such as the impacts of AI on modern civil systems (society, economy, culture, and politics). We have had many brainstorming tools in practice for longer than my lifetime.

More recently we have seen growing popularity of approaches such as systems and design thinking, strategic foresight, behavioural insights and predictive analytics. We can start with a simple SWOT analysis, and look at the emerging Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats. Let’s put these smart methods to good use. As we begin a local conversation we can exchange our best ideas and methods and learn how to make progress against this impending behemoth of change. Then scale up.

With wise use of artificial, cultural, collective and personal intelligence we may soon be able to co-ordinate efforts around the world to develop a shared vision of what we want to be when we grow up. I suggest we start using smart methods now.