What Technology Wants (40 page)

But our notions of complexity are still ill defined, elusive, and mostly unscientific. What's more complex, a Boeing 747 or a cucumber? The answer right now is we don't know. We intuitively sense that the organization of a parrot is much more complicated than that of a bacterium, but is it 10 times more complicated or a million times? We have no testable way to measure the difference in organization between the two creatures, and we don't even have a good working definition of complexity to help us frame the question.

A favorite mathematical theory of the moment relates complexity to the ease of “compressing” the subject's information content. The more it can be abbreviated without losing its essence, the less complex it is; the less it can be compressed, the more complex. This definition has its own difficulty: Both an acorn and an immense 100-year-old oak tree contain the same DNA, which means both can be compressed, or abbreviated, to the same minimal string of informational symbols. Therefore, both the nut and the tree have the same depth of complexity. But we sense the spreading tree—all those unique crenulated leaves and crooked branches—to be more complex than the acorn. We'd like a better definition. Physicist Seth Lloyd counts 42 other theoretical definitions of complexity, all of them equally inadequate in real life.

While we await a practical mathematical definition of complexity, there is plenty of factual evidence that intuitive “complexity”—loosely defined—exists and is increasing. Some of the most prominent evolutionary biologists don't believe there is an innate long-term trend toward complexity in evolution—or in fact any direction to evolution whatsoever. But a relatively new group of renegade biologists and evolutionists has amassed a convincing case for the broad rise of complexity across all epochs of evolutionary time.

Seth Lloyd, among others, suggests that effective complexity did not begin with biology but began at the big bang. I made the same argument in previous chapters. In Lloyd's informational perspective, fluctuations of quantum energy within the first femtoseconds of the cosmos caused matter and energy to clump. Amplified over time by gravity, these clumps are responsible for the large-scale structure of galaxies—which in their organization display effective complexity.

In other words, complexity preceded biology. Complexity theorist James Gardner calls this “the cosmological origins of biology.” The slow ratchet of biological complexity was imported from antecedent structures such as galaxies and stars. Like life, these exotropic self-organized systems teeter on the edge of persistent disequilibrium. They don't burn out like a chaotic flame or explosion (they are persistent) but rather sustain their flux (disequilibrium) over long periods of time without settling into predictable patterns or equilibrium. Their order is neither chaotic nor periodic but semiregular, like a DNA molecule. This type of long-lasting, nonrandom, nonrepeating complexity found in, say, the stable atmosphere of a planet served as the platform for the long-lasting, nonrandom, nonrepeating order in life. In exotropic forms of organization, whether in a star or in genes, effective complexity accrues over time. The complexity of a system rises in a series of steps, where each higher level congeals into a new wholeness. Think of a mass of stars swirling as one galaxy or a mass of cells becoming a multicellular organism. Like with a ratchet, exotropic systems rarely reverse, devolve, or become simpler.

The irreversible ladder of ratcheting complexity and autonomy can be seen in Smith and Szathmary's eight major transitions in organic evolution (discussed in chapter three). Evolution began with “self-replicating molecules” transitioning to the more complex self-sustaining structure of “chromosomes.” Then evolution passed through the further complexifying change of cells “from prokaryotes to eukaryotes.” After a few more phase changes, the last ratcheting self-organization moved life from languageless societies to those with language.

Each transition shifted the unit that replicated (and upon which natural selection worked). At first, molecules of nucleic acid duplicated themselves, but once they self-organized into a set of linked molecules, they replicated together as a chromosome. Then evolution worked on the whole of both nucleic acid and chromosomes. Later, these chromosomes, housed in primitive prokaryote cells like bacteria, joined together to form a larger autonomous cell (the component cells became organelles of the new one), and now their information was structured and replicated via the complex eukaryote host cell (like an amoeba). Evolution began to work on three levels of organization: genes, chromosomes, cells. These first eukaryote cells reproduced by division on their own, but eventually some (like the protozoan
Giardia
) began to replicate sexually, so now life required a diverse sexual population of similar cells to evolve.

A new level of effective complexity was added: Natural selection began to operate on populations as well. Populations of early single-cell organisms could survive on their own, but many lines self-assembled into multicellular organisms and so replicated as a whole, like a mushroom or seaweed. Now natural selection operated on multicelled creatures, in addition to all the lower levels. Some of these multicellular organisms (such as ants, bees, and termites) gathered into superorganisms and could only reproduce within a colony or society; here evolution emerged at the society level as well. Later, language in human societies gathered individual ideas and culture into a global technium, so humans and their technology could only prosper and replicate together, presenting another autonomous level—society—for evolution and effective complexity.

At each escalating step, the logical, informational, and thermodynamic depth of the resulting organization increased. It became more difficult to compress the structure, and at the same time it contained less randomness and less predictable order. Each step was also irreversible. In general, multicellular lineages do not re-evolve into single-cell organisms; sexual reproducers rarely evolve into parthenogens; social insects rarely unsocialize; and to the best of our knowledge, no replica-tor with DNA has ever given up genes. Nature will sometimes simplify, but it rarely devolves down a level.

Just to clarify: Within one level of organization trends are uneven. A movement over time toward larger body size or longer life span or higher metabolism may be found only in a minority of species within a family. And directions of change can be inconsistent across taxa. For instance, in mammals, horses may tend to get larger over time, while rodents may get smaller. The trend toward greater effective complexity is primarily visible only in the accumulation of new levels of organization over macrotime. So complexification may not be visible within ferns, say, but it appears between ferns and flowering plants (going from spores to sexual fertilization).

Not every evolutionary species line will proceed up the escalator of complexity (and why should they?), but those that do advance will unintentionally gain new powers of influence that can alter the environment far beyond them. And as with a ratchet, once a branch of life moves up a level, it does not move back. In this way there is an irreversible drift toward greater effective complexity.

This arc of complexity flows from the dawn of the cosmos into life. But the arc continues through biology and now extends itself forward through technology. The very same dynamics that shape complexity in the natural world shape complexity in the technium.

Just as in nature, the number of simple manufactured objects continues to increase. Brick, stone, and concrete are some of the earliest and simplest technologies, yet by mass they are the most common technologies on Earth. And they compose some of the largest artifacts we make: cities and skyscrapers. Simple technologies fill the technium in the way bacteria fill the biosphere. There are more hammers made today than at any time in the past. Most of the visible technium is, at its core, non-complex technology.

But as in natural evolution, a long tail of ever-complexifying arrangements of information and materials fills our attention, even if those complex inventions are small in mass. (Indeed, demassification is one avenue of complexification.) Complex inventions stack up information rather than atoms. The most complex technologies we make are also the lightest and least material. For instance, software, in principle, is weightless and disembodied. It has been complexifying at a rapid rate. The number of lines of code in a basic tool such as Microsoft's Windows operating system has increased tenfold in thirteen years. In 1993, Windows entailed 4 to 5 million lines of code. In 2003, Windows Vista contained 50 million lines of code. Each of those lines of code is the equivalent of a gear in a clock. The Windows OS is a machine with 50 million moving pieces.

Complexity of Software.
The number of lines of codes used by each release of Microsoft Windows between 1993 and 2003.

Throughout the technium, lineages of technology are restructured with additional layers of information to yield more complex artifacts. For the past 200 years (at least), the number of parts in the most complex machines has been increasing. The diagram below is a logarithmic chart of the trends in complexity of mechanical apparatuses. The first prototype turbo jet had several hundred parts, while a modern turbo jet has over 22,000 parts. The space shuttle has tens of millions of physical parts, yet it contains most of its complexity in its software, which is not included in this assessment.

Complexity of Manufactured Machines.
The number of parts (shown as powers of 10) used in the most complicated machines of each era over two centuries.

Our refrigerators, cars, and even doors and windows are more complex than two decades ago. The strong trend for complexification in the technium provokes the question, how complex can it get? Where does the long arc of complexity take us? The thrust of 14 billion years of increasing complexity cannot stop today. But when we try to imagine a technium with another million years of complexity accruing at the current rate, we shudder.

There are several different ways technology's complexity can go.

As in nature, the bulk of technology remains simple, basic, and primeval because it works. And the primitive works well as a foundation for the thin layer of complex technology built upon it. Because the technium is an ecosystem of technologies, most of it will remain in its equivalent microbial stage: brick, wood, hammers, copper wires, electric motors, and so on. We could design nanoscale keyboards that reproduced themselves, but they wouldn't fit our fingers. For the most part, humans will deal with simple things (as we do now) and only interact with the dizzily more complex occasionally, just as we now do. (For most of our day our hands touch relatively coarse artifacts.) Cities and houses remain similar, populated with a veneer of fast-evolving gadgets and screens on every surface.

Complexity, like all other factors in growing systems, plateaus at some point, and some other quality we had not noticed earlier (perhaps quantum entanglement) takes its place as the prime observable trend. In other words, complexity may simply be the lens we see the world through at this moment, the metaphor of the era, when in reality it is a reflection of us rather than an actual property of evolution.

There is no limit to how complex all things can get. Everything is complexifying over time, headed toward that omega point of ultimate complexity. The bricks in our building will become smart; the spoon in our hand will adapt to our grip; cars will be as complicated as jets are today. The most complex things we use in a day will be beyond any single person's comprehension.

 

If I had to, I would bet on scenario #1 and dismiss #2 as unlikely. The bulk of technology will remain simple or semisimple, while a smaller portion will continue to complexify greatly. I expect our cities and homes a thousand years hence to be recognizable, rather than unrecognizable. As long as we inhabit bodies approximately our size—a few meters and 50 kilograms—the bulk of the technology that will surround us need not be crazily more complex. And there is good reason to expect we'll remain the same size, despite intense genetic engineering. Our body size is, weirdly, almost exactly in the middle of the size of the universe. The smallest things we know about are approximately 30 orders of magnitude smaller than we are, and the largest structures in the universe are about 30 orders of magnitude bigger. We inhabit a middle scale that is sympathetic to sustainable flexibility in the universe's current physics. Bigger bodies encourage rigidity; smaller ones encourage empheralization. As long as we own bodies—and what happy being does not want to be embodied?—the infrastructure technology we already have will continue (in general) to work: roads of stone, buildings of modified plant material and Earth, elements not that different from our cities and homes 2,000 years ago. Some visionaries might imagine complex living buildings in the future, for instance, and some of these may happen, but most average structures are unlikely to be composed of materials more complex than the formerly living plants we already use. They don't need to be. I think there is a “complex enough” restraint. Technologies need not complexify to be useful in the future. Danny Hillis, computer inventor, once confided that he believed that there's a good chance that 1,000 years from now computers might still be running programming code from today, say a UNIX kernel. They almost certainly will be binary digital. Like bacteria or cockroaches, these simpler technologies remain simple, and remain viable, because they work. They don't have to get more complex.