Category: October 24 (Page 2 of 3)

Whenever someone uses the phrase “adjacent possibility” to refer to something that may not be possible now but will be given the realization of one intermediate possibility, I’m inclined to try and picture something like a big bike wheel with lots and lots of spokes continuing outward from the center for a long, long time. Where we are right now can be construed as an “origin” of sorts, so the metaphor makes some degree of sense in that particular manner. The infinite distinct things that could happen right now or that could happen because of what we do right now  are, logically, extensions of the present in the way that spokes are extensions of the center. So far so good with this metaphor. But let’s keep going. Each spoke would have to have another center attached to the end of it, right? For every action or inaction (meaning for every spoke) there is a result, meaning that this metaphor would have to include additional centers at the end of each and every one of the infinite spokes. And then each of those centers would need more spokes with more centers and so on and so on. My question is at this conundrum. At face value, it doesn’t seem difficult to arrive at the assumption that there are infinite possibilities. The notion of infinity spokes, each leading to infinity more spokes forever and forever until the end of time certainly doesn’t  lend itself to any sense of finiteness. But if there are infinite possibilities, shouldn’t that mean that everything is possible? And I do mean everything. Not just outlandish stuff like “ghouls and goblins rise from the graves and launch their own Super PAC,” but stuff that fundamentally challenges our most basic understandings. For example “the fabric of spacetime turns orange.” Maybe that’s a bad example because there isn’t actually any “fabric” (as far as we know), but couldn’t there be? It’s a possibility, meaning that it’s gotta be on one of the spokes I talked about.

I hope I’ve made my point clear so far. With my bike spoke model (which, by no coincidence, has a very close resemblance to the model that was used in the presentation), it seems that there’d be nothing that’s impossible. Even if we limit the number of spokes that a given center can have, then, eventually, you’d still arrive at any possibility you wanted. You’d just have to pass through more centers. So that’s the issue that I take. Everything is possible in this model. Paradoxes, mutual exclusivities, and even logic itself could be (respectively) resolved, coincident, and altered.

So that’s my problem with this whole “everything is possible” thing. Even if that’s not what he meant, it’s still the logical conclusion of the model that was used in the presentation. Everything.  This may be the proverbial hill on which I have to die, but I will not concede that this is true. Some things are just impossible. Some are impossible because of logistical concerns (flying to the sun in half a second? Can’t happen because it’s faster than the speed of light) while others are impossible by definition. And the model that seems to be used most commonly to describe the “adjacent possible” seems to imply otherwise.

That’s my two cents.

-Jon

Being a child born just a few years before the new millennium, my lifetime has coincided with what seems to be the fastest period of growth in technology our world has witnessed so far. (I claim no responsibility for this, yet.) Since 1996, we have grown the capacity of a single hard-drive nearly 4000-fold from 16 gigabytes to 60 terabytes. Electric cars have become a legitimate and viable transport option. Stage 1 rockets can now land on their own and be reused. The race to become an interplanetary species is in full swing. It seems innovation is on an exponentially growing curve. However, Vittorio Loreto disagrees.

On the evening of October 24th, Loreto presented on the topic of “Novelties, Innovation, and the Adjacent Possible”. In his presentation, he referenced studies which his team had performed which suggested that innovation and the production of novelties are, in fact, on a downwards slope. The studies surveyed a handful of internet-based communities such as Last.FM, GitHub, Wikipedia, and Project Gutenberg. What Loreto’s team saw was that over time, the rate of innovation (contribution of novelties) steadily declines. Loreto argues that innovation, much like any resource, can be depleted. As we mine innovation, it becomes harder to create novelties organically.

One might argue that Loreto’s observations of novelty rates on sites like GitHub or Wikipedia may be somewhat biased or flawed. The rate of innovation in a medium, whether it be a traditional written language or a programming language/paradigm, must be subject to the capacity of the medium. While such a number would still be astronomical, only so many sensical phrases can be written in the English language. Similarly, only so many valid lines of code can be written within a language or paradigm. Once we begin approaching the bounds of a medium, standalone novelties do become more difficult to produce. However, novelty should not be mistaken for the only form of innovation. Context adds a whole new dimension to the bounds of the medium, one I suspect would be too complex to observe and model on a chart (e.g. frequency of A occurring immediately between B and C, followed by X VS. just the frequency of A).

Moore’s law presents an excellent example of continual innovation without much novelty as of recent. “Moore’s law is the observation that the number of transistors in a dense integrated circuit doubles approximately every two years” (Wikipedia) The rapid evolution of computer processors was to due to novel technological innovations in its early stages. However, recent growth has been dominated by innovative reconfigurations of existing concepts. Moore’s law applies to a number of similar observations including hard disk drive areal density, fiber-optic capacity, pixels-per-dollar, and the quality adjusted price of IT equipment.

Innovation comes in many forms. Some innovation is found true discovery and happenstance. Other innovation is laboriously constructed by drawing on and building up from previous achievements, no less impressive. Vertical innovation should not be discredited in favor of its horizontal cousin.