The Ingenuity Gap, Thomas Homer Dixon, Nottawasaga Inn, October 19, 2002

Durham College and the University of Ontario Institute of Technology, Board of Governors' Fall 2002 Retreat, Saturday, October 19, 2002, 10:20 a.m.

These participant's notes were created in real-time during the meeting, based on the speaker's presentation(s) and comments from the audience. These should not be viewed as official transcripts of the meeting, but only as an interpretation by a single individual. Lapses, grammatical errors, and typing mistakes may not have been corrected. Questions about content should be directed to the originator. These notes have been contributed by David Ing (daviding@systemicbusiness.org) at the IBM Advanced Business Institute ( http://www.ibm.com/abi ).

Special note: This is not the complete digest for the session. Comments and questions particularly related to the Durham College / UOIT context have been omitted. Please contact David Ing (daviding@systemicbusiness.org) if you have a reason to see the full digest.

Introduction by Denise

• Thomas (Tad) Homer-Dixon

Research focuses on social adaptation to complex stress

• Evolved out of social breakdown
• Precursor to violence in societies is an adaptation failure - inability to adapt to a rapidly changing environment.
• Why do some societies adjust, and not others?

Aim today to put the Durham College challenge into the context

• Will discuss some broad economic and social aspects that will impact.
• Will have some recommendations, some that won't have heard from elsewhere.

Talk in two parts

• Review of the argument in the book
  • Not all of ingenuity theory
• Second focus on challenges for UOIT and Durham College

Basic questions:

• Are we creating a world that people can't manage?
• Experts?
• Are we smart as we think we are?
• Can we solve the problems of the future?
• Complexity
• Need more ingenuity.
• Problem, can't supply enough ingenuity at the time and place we want.

Challenges at:  national, societal, and daily life.

• There are common challenges that we face on a day-to-day basis.
• Similarly to global level.
• Contentious: people like to keep the day-to-day and global separate

Global

• Climate change
• International finance
• "Zones of anarchy" in developing worlds - disease, poor governments
  • Collapse of institutions

At societal level

• Rising antibiotic resistance
• Chronic health-care crises
• Persistent homelessness
  • Problems that people would like to solve, but can't

In our daily lives

• Information overload - cognitive thresholds

Broad range of challenges, what are the links?

• Brief introduction to ingenuity theory, social adaptation to complex stress

Contrast two paradigms

Dominant:  the economic paradigm

• Rational consumers
• Consumption / production and investment / saving
• People as walking appetites
• Factors of production: Capital and labour
• • Sometimes land and ideas
• Contrast with the Ingenuity Paradigm

People seen as pragmatic problem-solving

• Ingenuity requirements and supply
• Factors of problem-solving or system inputs are matter, energy (work) and ideas
• People as problem solvers
• Turn the ideas / recipes of instructions to reconfigure the world.
• The Thinkpad today has as much computer power as defense department in the 1960s - configured from the natural world.
  • We're adding these recipes
• Different from economic perspective

Ingenuity == sets of instructions that tell us how to arrange the constituent parts of physical and social worlds in ways that help us achieve our goals.

• Close to endogenous growth theory, Paul Romer, Stanford U.
• Economically useful ideas - reconfigure resources into useful ways.
• However, most economics are focused on technology - call them blueprints, e.g. for a new machine.
• If you read Paul Romer carefully, he's talking about something other than technical blueprints, e.g. how you arrange your marketing programs, how you arrange your organizational structure

Distinguish between social and technical ingenuity.

• Social ingenuity == how we arrange ourselves
• Don't get technical ingenuity unless you have social arrangement right first
  • e.g. markets, need to set up right property rights, limited liability, stable monetary system
  • If markets aren't working right, then won't get technologies you want.
• Decided can't say much on governance structure - it's too complicated
  • Will say that there's a great deal of path dependency, decisions will depend on earlier decisions, lock-in decision.
  • This institutional design challenge is a good example of an ingenuity problem.

Requirement for ingenuity:

• Distinction between the supply and demand
• Supply as generation, then a pipeline of implementation and delivery.
• Don't consider ingenuity to be supplied unless it's delivered.
• We usually do well on ingenuity generation
  • Problem is that they don't move well along the pipeline
  • Often blocked by existing powers and institutions
• Political systems are changing, challenge the creation of new institutions

Sometimes the supply of ingenuity won't keep up with the requirement for ingenuity

• Not about a ceiling to innovation
• Sometimes we create problems for ourselves, so that we can't keep up.

Basic questions:

• Is the requirement for ingenuity rising?
• Can we supply the ingenuity we need

Factor boosting our ingenuity requirement

• Larger and denser human populations
• Higher consumption of resources per person
• Faster and better technologies

Together, the above 3 sharply raise the density, intensity and pace of our interactions with each other an our environment.

• From Emile Durkheim, 1900, the rising density of human societies.
  • Networks, and nodes within networks.
  • Increase in nodes and connections
  • More information and resource flows across the links.
  • Connections are denser.
• These connections have become complex

We need a new way to look at the world - not complex.

• Large human resources and higher resource consumption impact natural resources
• More powerful technologies shift power from national and international institutions to individuals and subgroups.
  • Not benign, e.g. weapons technologies, megaterrorism

These changes mean that we must deal with more complex interactions

Then complexity is further increased when we try to boost the performance of our social and technological systems, within tight resource, political and value constraints.

• The Algonquin problem.
• Maps have becoming more indecipherable over time.
  • Shading, hatch marks
• Steadily increasing and demanding set of user groups.
• Wilderness canoers, loggers, hunters,
• Resource managers are creating more and more complicated solutions.
• Consequences:
  • When you squeeze out slack, get complex management systems with complicated results.
• e.g. used to just phone in to make a reservation for a place in a park, and could just wander around the park.
  • Now, you need to phone a private agency, and have to tell them where you're going to be, everyday in the park.
  • Challenge:  when canoeing, sometimes there are whitecaps, and you can't go where you want to go, causing a ripple effect back into people wanting to move to a space that's already full.

Complex systems exhibit feedbacks, synergies, nonlinearities, unknown unknowns

• Unknown-unknowns represent ignorance
  • Worked on cars, didn't own on one for 17 years, then dealer shows engine "you can look at it, but you can't touch it".
  • As long as technologies work, I'm more powerful than I was, before.
  • Can travel further, talk to more people
  • Also disempowered, because no way to know how to fix them.
• Nonlinearities
  • Can flip from stable to unstable modes quite rapidly
  • Cod fisheries
  • Asian currencies

Two types of complexity

• A lot of complex systems are robust complexity - homeostatis, self-balancing
  • Starting to push beyond boundaries, e.g. climate system
• Unstable

e.g. Atmosphere temperature rising over time

• Record of rates of snowfall, gives a surrogate of temperature
• Around 11,500 years ago, end of ice age, about 7 degrees Celsius warming over 30 years
  • Not just over North Atlantic, seen around the planet
• There is now concern that we may be doing something similar to the environment, by putting a lot of carbon dioxide into the environment
• Consequences for agriculture, particularly in north (farther from equator).

Lake Vostok, Anarctica

• Drilled down to lake
• Notice correlation between carbon dioxide and temperatures
• In last 150 years, have introduced a 30% increase in carbon dioxide
• By 2050, given current growth rates, will get a doubling of carbon dioxide
• Scientists know that we're likely to getting a tripling or quadrupling
• Princeton Fluid Dynamics suggested 20 to 25 degrees Fahrenheit increase by 2040.
• Creates challenges for inventiveness.

Challenge:  Can we supply the ingenuity we need?

There's a chapter on each in the book

• Brains
  • Are our brains well-adapted for the types of problems we want/need to solve?
  • In some cases, would say we're not well-adapted
• Science
  • Important, but not panaceas>
  • e.g. cancer, $30 billion to $40 billion investment, disappoing.
• Markets
  • Afflicted by market failures, not working right
  • e.g. gasoline prices should be a lot higher, if we're concerned with the environment.
  • This is related to UOIT, in the relationship with business
  • Are the skills that the private sector demands really the ones that UOIT should supply?
• Politics
  • Changes, particularly with new information technologies that create new power for subgroups
  • Electronic cacophony

What does the ingenuity gap do for our future?

• It widens gulf between rich and poor, and the powerful and weak.
  • Increasingly, will see who sections of society fall behind, and will fall off the radar screen
  • e.g. 500 million people in Africa
  • Don't see that sub-Sahara Africa would ever attain the success in the first world.
  • e.g. severe drought that isn't even making it to the newspaper
• This fragments common identity
  • These different worlds won't stay isolated from each other.
  • e.g 9/11:  breakdowns in distance parts of the world can spill over into our society.

How is ingenuity theory relevant to Durham College and UOIT?

It helps us recognize the importance of what's being done

Building human capital

• Community colleges are the unsung heroes of society
  • Learning the set of instructions, recipes, that keep our society running
  • Firefighting, .
• Making good ideas work in practical ways, moving down the ingenuity pipeline.

Adjusting the content of the educational experience

• Canadians, and particularly those from universities, need to understand complexity better.
• • Need to understand synergy, feedback, non-linearies.
• Need to move from a mechanistic conception, clockwork view
• That's not the way the world works anymore.
• Too many educational exercises have the mechanistic approach.
• • The idea that cause and effect are proportionate to each other.
  • Maximization and optimization, e.g. fisheries failing
• Problem that people think the climate system is a machine
• What happens when you push these systems too far?

Need to encourage in young Canadians certain habits of mind.

• Nimbleness to deal with complexity
• Comfort with ambiguity.
  • Professor at Carleton:  if you're in political science, need great comfort with ambuity.
  • Need cross-disciplinary problem-solvers

Special note: Recommendations and question/answer period pruned off