Category: Uncategorized (Page 5 of 5)

This week we had a lecture from Professor Loreto on the adjacent possible. He discussed how the new can enter our lives. I found the games that Professor Loreto had us play very interesting. We played the Shannon Game from 1951 where you guess letters based on your knowledge of language. Loreto said that it is possible to use an equation to know how much you are going to guess. Even if you know the language that you are guessing letters from there are so many possibilities that come after every word. One must rely on the knowledge of the previous character. Apparently, one can use similar equations for gambling. I was surprised when Professor Loreto said that the longer you play roulette the more likely you will loose all your money and the same applies to guessing letters.

We talked a lot about new innovation, new innovations in biology, technology, and social systems. Innovation comes from serendipity, exaptation, trial and error, and mutation/fixation. Innovations may be ahead of their time, but they may be a success.

We discussed the difference between what is Actual – what you know all already know and what is Possible- what is possible. We did an exercise where we imagined what could happen in 24 hours. We came to the conclusion that you can’t even imagine what could happen.

In many cases we look at the future with the eyes of the past. However, this doesn’t always work. For example when we look at the history of weather prediction, they used to look at the weather from the past years and predicted the weather based on patterns. For example one may infer that tomorrow will be identical to tomorrow 100 years ago. Now we predict weather using satellites. In addition, we discussed the difference between Modeling vs. Inference. Inference is when one is looking at the past.

Professor Loreto talked about the new Volvo self-driving cars. He discussed how they can’t recognize kangaroos. He used this example to bring up the questions: Can we grasp how the new enter our lives? Can we provide a mathematical framework for innovation dynamics?

Loreto brought his lecture back to talking about language. We discussed the frequency of words in natural texts and Zipf’s law frequency rank plot. He asked us, how can you find innovation in natural texts? One can measure how many new words.

According to Heaps’ law in text the rate of innovation decreases over time, therefore it is tougher and tougher to introduce new words in the text. One can conclude that innovation becomes more difficult overtime. If innovation becomes more difficult over time how can we explain that over the past 100 years innovation has been exploding? This may be because the number of species has also been exploding. However, If you look at twitter and Wikipedia the innovation rate is going down over time, therefore innovation is getting tougher.

Loreto asked us, Can we use math to guess innovation rates? We looked at the species sampling problems. How many species are there in the population including unseen species? Do you know how much time it would take to find new species? This is very complicated. Can we conceive experiments to observe human innovations? We can conceive experiments to observe human creativity at works.People used to invent to functions that were useful. We can look at the way in which people can come up with new ideas. Overall the lecture was very intriguing, I found my self lost in certain moments but remained fascinated by the idea of the New.

Going into Felix Frey’s talk on “Industrial Centers in the Arctic: Why Soviet Planners Located Cities and Industry in Hostile Environments,” I was expecting to struggle with understanding the material since I have no background knowledge on the subject matter.  However, Mr. Frey successfully drew me into a surprisingly fascinating topic.  These industrial cities located in the far north of the Soviet Arctic are homes to extremely unique communities and their reasons for coming to and staying in these hostile environments are very interesting.

These cities originally drew people to the far north with the promise of a job, a home, and company-paid utilities.  The Soviet Union had a goal to utilize all of its natural resources, and since these hostile environments held profitable resources, they needed a way to attract workers.  The promise of a paying job and provided utilities was enough to draw people up north, and often enough to make people stay.  Once a community had been established, families for generations stayed in these northern industrial cities.  They had built a life there and grown accustomed to an extreme climate lifestyle.

These industrial centers in the Soviet Arctic thus drew people away from home into extreme climates with a vastly different lifestyle, and all for the operation of factories.  This ability of the demand for manual labor to completely change people’s lives reminded me of Lewis Mumford’s considerations in Technics and Civilization.  Had there been the technology to automatize the extraction of natural resources, so many people would not have been displaced.  However, on the flip side, the automatization of the industry would have taken away the opportunity for all of these people to earn a living.  By introducing machines and automatizing labor, we make life easier and more convenient, but we also take away jobs from people who need them.  As we keep automatizing, more and more people lose their jobs and less and less jobs become available.

What will happen to these people who have built their lives working in industrial cities in the Soviet Arctic when the factories shut down or come to rely completely on machines?  What will happen to everyday people across the world as they are replaced by machines?  Especially in regard to the communities in the Soviet Arctic, these people do not know another life than the one they have built in these extreme climates.  They are accustomed to a very specific lifestyle and to suddenly have to move away from home and into a completely different city with no job and no familiarity would be extremely difficult.

Although these communities of people living in the harsh conditions of the Soviet Arctic must have struggled to adapt and continue to struggle with the climate, they have built a life in these places where they earn a good living and have a set routine.  To replace these people with machines or to close the factories all together and leave them without jobs would be to destroy the life they have worked so hard to maintain and the communities they have become a part of.