Morality is not a vision of ends, however desirable, but a system of restraints in the pursuit of any ends. To understand the meaning of a “school,” there has to already have been an experience of the search and struggle for the change of being. These lectures are obviously not intended for everybody, but as an invitation, to those who may agree on the futility of man’s present situation, to inquire into and experience the question of what he is and what he might become. Most people want to hear new things; that is, things that they have never heard before. I know that it is not an easy thing to realize that one is hearing new things. We are so accustomed to the old tunes, and the old motives, that long go we ceased to hope and ceased to believe that there might be anything new. And when we hear new things, we take them for old, or think that they can be explained and interpreted by the old. It is true that it is a difficult task to realize the possibility and necessity of quite new ideas, and it needs with time a revaluation of all usual values. I cannot guarantee that you will hear new ideas, that is, ideas you never heard before, from the start; but if you are patient you will very soon begin to notice them. And then I wish you not to miss them, and to try not to interpret the in the old way. During the time when psychology was connected with philosophy and religion it also existed in the form of art. Poetry, drama, sculpture, dancing, even architecture, were means for transmitting psychological knowledge. For instance, the Gothic cathedrals were in their chief meaning works on psychology. #RandolphHarris 1 of 18

In the ancient times before philosophy, religion, and art had taken their separate forms as we now know them, psychology had existed in the form of Mysteries, such as those of Egypt and of ancient Greece. Later, after the disappearance of the Mysteries, psychology existed in the form of Symbolical Teachings which were sometimes connected with the religion of the period and sometimes not connected, such as astrology, alchemy, magic, and the more modern Masonry, occultism, and Theosophy. When we understand the importance of the study of man from the point of view of his possible evolution, we shall understand that the first answer to the question, what is psychology, should be that psychology is the study of the principles, laws, and facts of man’s possible evolution. If we take historical mankind, that is, humanity for ten or fifteen thousand years, we may find unmistakable signs of a higher type of man, whose presence can be established on the evidence of ancient monuments and memorials which cannot be repeated or imitated by the present humanity. As regards prehistoric man or creatures similar in appearance to man and yet at the same time very different from him, whose bones are sometimes found in deposits of glacial or pre-glacial periods, we may accept the quite possible view that these bones belong to some being quite different from man, which died out long ago. Denying previous evolution of man, we must deny any possibility of future mechanical evolution of man; that is, evolution happening by itself according to laws of heredity and selection, and without man’s conscious efforts and understanding of his possible evolution. #RandolphHarris 2 of 18

Our fundamental idea shall be that man as we know him is not a completed being; that nature develops him only up to a certain point and then leaves him, to develop further, by his own efforts and devices, or to live and die such as he was born, or to degenerate and lose capacity for development. Evolution of man in this case will mean the development of certain inner qualities and features which usually remain undeveloped, and cannot develop by themselves. Experience and observation show that this development is possible only in certain definite conditions, with efforts of a certain kind on the part of man himself, and with sufficient help from those who began similar work before and have already attained a certain degree of development, or at least a certain knowledge of methods. We must start with the idea that without efforts evolution is impossible; without help, it is also impossible. After this we must understand that in the way of development, man must become a different being, and we must learn and understand in what sense and in which direction man must become a different being; that is, what a different being means. Then we must understand that all men cannot develop and become different beings. Evolution is the question of personal efforts, and in relation to the mass of humanity evolution is the rare exception. It may sound strange, but we must realize that it is not only rare, but is becoming more and more rare. #RandolphHarris 3 of 18

Many questions naturally arise from the preceding statements: What does it mean that in the way of evolution man must become a different being? What does “different being” mean? Which inner qualities or features can be developed in man, and how can this be done? Why cannot all men develop and become different beings? Why such an injustice? Why cannot all men develop and become different beings? Because they do not want it. Because they do not know about it and will not understand without a long preparation what it means, even if they are told. The chief idea is that in order to become a different being man must want it very much and for a very long time. A passing desire or a vague desire based on dissatisfaction with external conditions will not create a sufficient impulse. The evolution of man depends on his understanding of what he may get and what he must give for it. If man does not want it, or if he does not want it strongly enough, and does not make necessary efforts, he will develop. So there is no injustice in this. Why should man have what he does not want? If man were forced to become a different being when he is satisfied with what he is, then this would be injustice. Now we must ask ourselves what a different being means. If we consider all the material we can find that refers to this question, we find an assertion that in becoming a different being man acquires many new qualities and powers which he does not possess now. This is a common assertion which we find in all kinds of systems admitting the idea of psychological or inner growth of man. #RandolphHarris 4 of 18

However, this is not sufficient. Even the most detailed descriptions of these new powers will not help us in any way to understand how they appear and where they come from. There is a missing link in ordinary known theories, even in those I already mentioned which are based on the idea of the possibility of evolution of man. The truth lies in the fact that before acquiring any new faculties or powers which man does not know and does not possess now, he must acquire faculties and powers he also does not possess, but which he ascribes to himself; that is, he thinks that he knows them and can use and control them. This is the missing link, and this is the most important point. By way of evolution, as described before, that is, a way based on effort and help, man must acquire qualities which he thinks already possessed, but about which he deceives himself. In order to understand this better, and to know what are these facilities and powers which man can acquire, both quite new and unexpected and also those which he imagines that he already possessed, we must begin with man’s general knowledge about himself. And where comes at once to a very important fact. Man does not know himself. Man has invented many machines, and he knows that a complicated machine needs sometimes years of careful study before one can use it or control it. #RandolphHarris 5 of 18

However, he does not apply this knowledge to himself, although he himself is a much more complicated machines than any machine he has invented. He has al sorts of wrong ideas about himself. First of all, he does not realize that he actually is a machine. What does it man that man is a machine? It means that he had no independent movements, inside or outside of himself. He is a machine which is brought into motion by eternal influences and external impacts. All his movements, actions, words, ideas, emotions, moods, and thoughts are produced by external influences. By himself, he is just an automaton with a certain store of memories of previous experiences, and a certain amount of reserve energy. The conductor of an orchestra in the Soviet Union (during the Stalin era) was traveling by train to his next engagement and was looking over the score of the music he was to conduct that night. Two KGB officers saw what he was reading and, thinking that the musical notation was some secret code, arrested him as a spy. He protested that it was only Tchaikovsky’s Violin Concerto, but to no avail. On the second day of his imprisonment, the interrogator walked in smugly and said, “You had better tell us all. We have caught your friend Tchaikovsky, and he is already talking.” So beings one telling of the prisoners’ dilemma, perhaps the best-known strategic game. Let us develop the story to its logical conclusion. Suppose the KGB has actually arrested someone whose only offense is that he is called Tchaikovsky, and are separately subjecting him to the same kind of interrogation. #RandolphHarris 6 of 18

If the two innocents withstand the treatment, each will be sentenced to 3 years’ imprisonment. If the conductor makes a false confession that implicates the unknown “collaborator,” while Tchaikovsky holds out, then the conductor will get away with 1 year (and the KGB’s gratitude), while Tchaikovsky gets the harsh sentence of 25 years for his recalcitrance. Of course, the tables will be turned if the conductor stand firm while Tchaikovsky gives in and implicates him. If both confess, then both will receive the standard sentence of 10 years. Now consider the conductor’s thinking. He knows that Tchaikovsky is either confessing or holding out. If Tchaikovsky confesses, the conductor gets 25 years by holding out and 10 years by confessing, so it is better for him to confess. If Tchaikovsky holds out, the conductor gets 3 years if he holds out, and only 1 if he confesses; again it is better for him to confess. Thus confession is clearly the conductor’s best action. In a separate cell in Dzerzhinsky Square, Tchaikovsky is doing a similar mental calculation and reaching the same conclusion. The result, of course, is that both of them confess. Later, when they meet in the Gulag Archipelago, they compare stories and realize that they have been had. If they both had stood firm, they both would have gotten away with much shorter sentences. If they had had an opportunity to meet and talk things over before they were interrogated, they could have agreed that neither would give in. However, they are quick to realize that in all probability such an agreement would not have done much good. #RandolphHarris 7 of 18

Once they were separated and the interrogations began, each person’s private incentive to get a better deal by double-crossing the other would have been quite powerful. Once again they would have met in the Gulag, there perhaps to settle the score of the betrayals (not of the concerto). Can the two achieve enough mutual credibility to reach their jointly preferred solution? Many people, firms, and even nations have been gored on the horns of the prisoners’ dilemma. Look at the life-or-death issue of nuclear arms control. Each superpower liked it best the outcome in which the other disarmed, while it kept its own arsenal “just in case.” Disarming yourself while the other remains armed was the worst prospect. Therefore no matter what the other side did, each preferred to stay armed. However, they could join in agreeing that the outcome in which both disarm is better than the one in which both are armed. The problem is the interdependence of decisions: the jointly preferred outcome arises when each chooses its individually worse strategy. Could the jointly preferred outcome be achieved given each side’s clear incentive to break the agreement and to arm itself secretly? In this case it needed a fundamental change in Soviet thinking to get the World started on the road to nuclear disarmament. For one’s comfort, safety, or even life itself, one needs to know the way to get out of the prisoner’s dilemma. The story of the prisoners’ dilemma also carries a useful general point: most economic, political, or social games are different from games such as football or poker. #RandolphHarris 8 of 18

Football and poker are zero-sum games: one person’s gain is another person’s loss. However, in the prisoners’ dilemma, there are possibilities for mutual advantage as well as conflict of interest; both prisoners prefer the no-confession result to its opposite. Similarly, in employer-union bargaining, there is an opposition of interests in that one side prefers low wages and the other high ones, but there is agreement that a breakdown of negotiations leading to a strike would be more damaging for both sides. In fact such situations are the rue rather than the exception. Any useful analysis of games should be able to handle a mixture of conflict and concurrences of interests. We usually refer to the players in the game as “opponents,” but you should remember that on occasion, strategy makes strange bedfellows. Although we do our best to foresee important consequences, there is widespread acknowledgment that this is extraordinarily hard in times of dramatic change. The Information Revolution provides excellent examples, for deep reason we will examine. Some of the most famous stories of mistaken foresight center on managers and board members at companies like IBM and Intel who were unable to grasp the World-changing potential of their own products. IBM leaders once thought a handful of computers would suffice for the entire World. The Intel board of directors discouraged the first proposals to develop a microprocessor. The National Science Foundation has remarked that its panel of distinguished information technology scientists and engineers is consistent in its unwillingness to predict the future. #RandolphHarris 9 of 18

Efforts of the Justice Department to redress the consequences of Microsoft Corporation’s monopoly are hampered by the inability of experts to say what operating systems might become. The gears of the digital revolution [are] turning faster then the wheels of justice. Some industry leaders were frank enough to say—two years after the deluge—that they saw the first effective Web browser, Mosaic, as an inconsequential toy. As we write, that experience of the unanticipated World Wide Web explosion is fresh in our memories. In the Information Revolution, there are clearly strong limits on our ability to foresee what is to come. A wary attitude toward prediction is probably healthy, but it presents a severe roadblock to the normal processes of designing new artifacts or strategies, or refining and implementing policies. The standard procedure of design and policy making is to develop expectations (predictions) of how the future will unfold, and to define actions we could take that would lead to more desirable predicted futures. This stance can be stretched to accommodate some uncertainty by brining in specialized techniques like Bayesian inference to deal with probability distributions on possible futures. However, the usual approaches to designing an intervention grind to a half if we acknowledge that we do not know what might happen as a consequence of our actions. What we need is a far more innovative approach to the problem of the silver wave—solutions that may have to cross the boundaries of multiple existing bureaucracies. #RandolphHarris 10 of 18

A key slander of retirees holds that they are unproductive. However, older people do not have to be unproductive, and most are not, once we recognize, in addition to their paid production, the economic value they create by prosuming. We need not replay the discussion of prosuming we have previously discussed. However, Japan could lead the World toward solutions of the aging problem by increasing the productivity and productivity of elderly prosumers. We know that prosumers create social capital by volunteering. Japan might envision large-scale ways to facilitate that. Or it might consider modest loans to some retirees for tools or materials with which to test their long-held idea for new kinds of products or services that might sell in the money economy. Or for woodworking tools a retiree might use to make furniture one could bater to a friend for diving one to the doctor on Wednesday afternoons. As we have seen, there are many ways in which prosumer output can be increased, and alternative forms of money that can be used in lieu of a regular paycheck. The choice for retirees requiring care does not have to be between a woman and a robot. Admittedly, some of the specific ideas sketched here may be impractical. However, to solve many twenty-first-century problems it will be necessary to explore ideas outside of the many boxes stuffed with obsolete industrial-age assumptions. Japan has repeatedly shown that it is a highly creative country, capable of finding tiny, fascinating, novel solutions to problems. To solve the problems now piling up, it will have to apply the same creativity and willingness to explore and experiment on a large scale as well. #RandolphHarris 11 of 18

When Sears, Roebuck & Company, the largest U.S. retailer, announced a major reorganization of its merchandise group not long ago, the group chairman and CEO, Michael Bozie, said it was needed because “We are competing in many diverse businesses…and have essentially been using one organizational format to compete in all of these businesses.” This, critics implied, had made the firm sluggish and noncompetitive. However, even top managers who sense they need to “let go” or loosen the reins, in order to free up the energies of their people, drastically underestimate how far they will need to break the grip of bureaucracy. Scores, if not hundreds of companies have broken themselves into numerous “profit centers,” each of which, it is hoped, will act like a small, market—driven enterprise. Even some staff operations have now been designated as profit centers and must finance themselves (and thus justify their existence) by selling their inhouse services. However, what good is it to break a firm into profit centers if each of these is merely a cookie-cut miniature of the parent firm—a mini-bureaucracy nestling inside the mega-bureaucracy? What is beginning now is a much more profound and revolutionary shift, which will alter the entire nature of power in business. Most American managers still think of the organization as a “machine” whose parts can be tightened or loosened, “tuned up, or lubricated. This is the bureaucratic metaphor. By contrast, many Japanese are already using a post-bureaucratic metaphor—the corporation, they say, “is a living creature.” #RandolphHarris 12 of 18

This implies, among other things, that it undergoes birth, maturation, again, and death or rebirth in a new form. The Japanese term for company birth is sogyo and many companies today speak of experiencing a second or third or “new” sogyo. It is precisely at this moment of rebirth that long-term success or failure is determined. For if the new reborn firm is still organized along bureaucratic lines, like the old one it replaces, it may have a short and unhappy second life. By contrast, if at this moment firms are permitted to reach out in new direction and to assume whatever organizational forms are most appropriate, chances for adaptation to the new, innovation-rich environment are much better. The flex-firm concept does not imply structurelessness; it does suggest that a company, in being reborn, may cease being a mule and turn into a team consisting of a tiger, a school or piranhas, a mini-mule or two, and who knows, maybe even a swarm of information-sucking bees. The image underlines the point. The business of tomorrow may embody many different formats within a single frame. It may function as a kind of Noah’s Ark. To grasp the “flex-firm” concept, it helps to remind ourselves that bureaucracy is only one of an almost infinite variety of ways to organizing human beings and information. We actually have an immense repertoire of organizational forms to draw on—from jazz combos to espionage networks, from tribes and clans and councils of elders to monasteries and soccer teams. Each is good at some things and bad at others. Each has its own unique ways of collecting and distributing information, and ways of allocating power. #RandolphHarris 13 of 18

A company could conceivably have within it’s a monastery-style unit that write software…a research team organized like an improvisational jazz combo…a compartmentalized spy network, with need-to-know rules, operating within the law, to scout for merger or acquisition possibilities…and a sales force organized as a highly motivated “tribe” complete with its own war songs and emotional membership rituals. (The author has attended the sales meeting of a major corporation where the tribal form was incipient and the members so psyched up about their jobs they quite literally danced on tabletops.) This new way of a company as a collection of very different organizations, many of them counterbureaucratic, reflects what already exists in some firms in a semi-smothered or embryonic form. Many businesses will find themselves moving toward this free-form model simply to stay alive in the de-massified economy of tomorrow. The term flex-firm is needed because there is no handy word in the English language to describe such an entity. The French economist. Hubert Landier uses the mouth-cracking term polycellular to describe the business of the future. Others describe it as “neural” or nervous-system-like rather than machinelike. Still others refer to the emerging business organization as a “network.” Through all these words capture some facet of the new reality, none are adequate, because the drawing business form of the future embraces them all, and more. They may include elements that are polycellular or neural. They may (or may not) be networked. However, organization may also include within it units that remain thoroughly bureaucratic because, for some functions, bureaucracy remains essential. #RandolphHarris 14 of 18

A key feature of post-bureaucratic firms is that the relationships of their parts are not closely pre-specified, like information force-fitted into an old-fashioned data base. Instead, the units of a flex-firm may draw information, people, and money from one another and from outside organizations as needed. They may be next door to one another or continents apart. Their functions may partly overlap, like information in a hyper-media data base; for other purposes, the functions may be logically, geographically, or financially divided. Some may use many central services provided by headquarters; others may choose to use only a few. In turn this requires freer, faster flows of information. This will mean crisscrossing, up, down, and sideways conduits—neural pathways that bust through the boxes in the table of organization so that people can trade the idea, data, formulae, hints, insights, facts, strategies, whispers, gestures, and smiles that turn out to be essential to efficiency. Once you connect the right people with the right information you get the extra value added. Information is the catalyst for effecting change at every level. That is what makes its power so awesome. Social science, social research, and the kind of work we call imaginative literature are three quite different kinds of enterprises. In the end, all of them are forms of story-telling—human attempts to account for our experience in coherent ways. However, they have different aims, ask different meanings to “truth.” In most of these respects, social research has little in common with science, and much in common with other forms of imaginative literature. #RandolphHarris 15 of 18

Yet social “scientists” have consistently sought to identify themselves, and in more than name, with physicists, chemists, biologists, and others who inquire into the lawful regularities of the natural World. Why students of the human condition should do this is not hard to explain. The great success of modern times—indeed, perhaps the only successes—have come in medicine, pharmacology, biochemistry, astrophysics, and all the feats of mechanical, biological, and electronic engineering made possible by the consistent application of the aims, assumptions, and procedures of natural science. These successes have attached to the name of science an awesome measure of authority, and to those who claim the title “scientist” a similar measure of respect and prestige. Beyond that lies the nineteenth-century hope that the assumptions and procedures of natural science might be applied without modification to the social World, to the same end of increased predictability and control, and with the same kind of engineering success. This hope has proved both misguided and illusory. However, the illusion is a powerful one, and, given the psychological, social, and material benefits that attach to the label “scientist,” it is hard to see why social researchers should find it hard to give it up. It is less easy to see why the rest of us have so willingly, even eagerly, cooperated in perpetuating the same illusion. In part, the explanation lies in a profound misunderstanding of the aims of natural and of social Worlds. However, there is more to it than that. #RandolphHarris 16 of 18

When the new technologies and techniques and spirit of men like Galileo, Newton, and Bacon laid the foundations of natural science, they also discredited the authority of earlier accounts of the physical World, as found, for example, in the great tale of Genesis. By calling into question the truth of such accounts in one realm, science undermined the whole edifice of belief in sacred stories and ultimately swept away with it the source to which most humans had looked for moral authority. It is not too much to say, I think that the desacralized World has been searching for an alternative source of moral authority ever since. So as far as I know, no responsible natural scientist, either of the Renaissance or of recent times, has claimed that the procedures of natural science or its discoveries can tell us what we ought to do—whether some way of dealing with our fellow humans is good or evil, right or wrong. Indeed, the very principles of natural science, with its requirement of an objective stance toward what is studied, compel the natural scientist to abjure in his or her role as a scientist such as moral judgments or claims. When natural scientists speak out on moral questions, on what is good or evil to do, they speak as the rest of us—as concerned citizens on a threatened planet, as rational women and men, as people of conscience who must struggle no less than you must, or I, to answer for themselves where the ultimate authority for their moral judgments lies. It is the World of desperate listeners, longing for a more powerful moral authority, that begs the natural scientist to say it is the science that speaks, not the woman or man. However, the scientist cannot honor consent. #RandolphHarris 17 of 18

Looking further at the human environment, we find a lot of cloth and related materials, such as carpeting and shoes. The textile industry was at the cutting edge of the first industrial revolution, and the next industrial revolution will have its effects on textiles. With nanotechnology, even the finest textile fibers could have sensors, computers, and motors in their core at little extra cost. Fabrics could include sensors able to detect light, heat, pressure, moisture, stress and wear, networks of simple computers to integrate this data, and motors and other nanomechanisms to respond to it. Ordinary, everyday things like fabric and padding could be made responsive to a person’s needs—changing shape, color, texture, fit, and so forth—with the weather and a person’s posture or situation. This process could be slow, or it could be fast enough to respond to a gesture. One result would be genuine one-size-fits-all clothing (give or take child sizes), perfectly tailored off the rack, warm in winter, cool and dry in summer; in short, nanotechnology could provide what advertisers have only promised. Even bogus advertising gives a clue to human desires. Throughout history, the human race has pursued the quest for comfortable shoes. With fully adjustable materials, the seemingly impossible goal of having shoes that both look good and feel good should finally be achieved. Shoes could keep your feet dry, and warm except in the Arctic, cool except in the tropics, and as comfortable as they can be with a person stepping on them. #RandolphHarris 18 of 18

Cresleigh Homes

Residence 1 at #PlumasRanch Meadows may be a single story, but it’s not small on space! From the lavish outdoor space to the two car garage (plus workshop!), it offers all the room you’ll need to spread out and do your thing. 👌

As the evening temps drop, our firepit becomes the go-to destination for us AND our guests. Enjoy all that #CresleighHomes has to offer both indoors and out!

Americans are always hung over from some blow dealt them by their technological environment and are always looking for a fix—for some pleasurable escape from what technology has itself created. Complex systems in which interventions could induce large changes can be approached in a common way, no matter what the problem is. The first concept is that of an agent. An agent has the ability to interact with its environment, including other agents. An agent can respond to what happens around it and can do things more or less purposefully. Most commonly, we think of an agent as a person, such as the team member in a company or the person seeking a loan. Considering this broad definition, we can see that a person is not the only kind of agent. A family, a business, or an entire country can also be an agent. Even a computer program interacting with other programs can be regarded as an agent. When we talk about agents we will usually expect them to have a number of properties. These include location—where the agent operates; capabilities—how the agent can affect the World; and memory—what impressions the agent can carry forward from its past. The second key concept is strategy, the way an agent responds to its surroundings and pursues its goals. An employee might help a co-worker in the hope that the co-worker will reciprocate. Someone needing a small loan might ask friends to help out. A nation seeking to promote favorable norms might try to lead by example. #RandolphHarris 1 of 23

A computer program seeking useful resources might buy information from other programs and keep track of which ones provided resources that were actually worth what was paid. These are all strategies. Our usage includes deliberate choice, in the sense of the term “business strategy,” but it also includes patterns of response that pursue goals with little or no deliberation. A central interest of ours is how strategies change over time. One source of change is the agent’s experience of how well the strategy is doing. An employee, finding that co-workers are not contributing to a joint project, might decide not to contribute either. Typically, human agents have some awareness of their own strategies, and they may be able to observe something about how well they are doing according to some measure of success. Often they can observe the actions or successes of the agent to try a new strategy based on trial and error, or to imitate the strategy of another agent. Changes in strategies can also come about through changes in the population of agents. For example, experienced workers may train new workers, or practices at one company may be imitated at another. Such processes of reproducing, or copying, play an important role by changing the mix of strategies or agents in the population. The idea of a population of agents is our third major concept. Indeed, the idea is so central that we sometimes refer to our framework as the “population approach to Complex Adaptive Systems.” #RandolphHarris 2 of 23

If you are seeking to harness complexity, populations are important in three ways: as a source of possibilities to learn from, as recipients for a newfound improvement, and as part of your environment. For example, if one is a business manager, one can learn from the population of managers who face similar problems, one can spread what is learned to a population of businesses and consumers that one adapts to even while they are adapting to you. One can think about populations of strategies as well as populations of agents. For example if you try different ways of raising funds for your nonprofit organization and observe others doing fund-raising for theirs, one can learn from the resulting population of fund-raising strategies. One of the key questions generated by our framework center on the way strategies or agents of a particular type become more (or less) common in population. For example, “aggressive” and “lowkey” might be types of sales strategies that a particular firm distinguishes. Another firm might distinguish “recurring” from “onetime.” Teachers might define the population of children at their school (agents, in our terms) as falling into types by grade levels. For other purposes, genders might be the relevant types. #RandolphHarris 3 of 23

Our rough criterion for the boundaries of a population will be that two agents are in the same population if one agent could employ a strategy used by another. So, for example, a villager might try an approach to borrowing money that had been effective for a family member or friend. This simple example of villagers reveals two important features of populations. First, strategies spread (and sometimes change) by moving among members of a population. A borrowing strategy might spread by word of mouth through family or friendship networks. It might also change in some significant way as it is repeatedly retold. Change processes such as this create variation among strategies. Second, populations have structure—interaction patterns that determine which pairs of agents are likely to interact and which pairs unlikely. The borrowing strategy moves among friends or relatives. Real situations often include more than just a single population of agents, of course. For one thing, there may be several different kinds of agents. There are not only sellers in the village, but also buyers. There are not only nations in the international system, but nongovernmental organizations. Moreover, many settings include important entities that are not agents. Books, vehicles, weapons, and medicines play significant roles even if they lack some qualities of agents. We will be especially interested in artifacts, objects that are used by agents. #RandolphHarris 4 of 23

Like agents, artifacts can have important properties, such as location or capabilities. A toy may respond to a child who winds its springs. Artifacts may have “affordances,” features that evoke certain behavior from agents, like the beautiful handle of a pitcher that invites the grasping hand. However, artifacts usually do not have purposes of their own, or powers of reproduction. When we want to talk about a real situation, we will generally pack all of these elements up into the term system. We will use the word to indicate one or more populations of agents (for example, employees and customers of the company), all the strategies of all the agents (working together to produce and sell products, and buying and using products), along with the relevant artifacts and environmental factors (manufactured products, production tools, sales brochures, and store opening hours). Here then we glimpse one of the most fundamental yet neglected relationships between knowledge and power in society: the link between how a people organize their concepts and how they organize their institutions. Put most briefly, the way we organize knowledge frequently determines the way we organize people—and vice versa. When knowledge was conceived of as specialized and hierarchical, businesses were designed to be specialized and hierarchical. Once a bureaucratic organization of knowledge finds concrete expression in real-life institutions—corporations, schools, or governments—political pressures, budgets, and other forces freeze the organization of knowledge into place, obstructing the reconceptualization that leads to radical discovery. #RandolphHarris 5 of 23

Today, high-speed change requires equally high-speed decisions—but power struggles make bureaucracies notoriously slow. Competition requires continual innovation—but bureaucratic power crushes creativity. The new business environment requires intuition as well as careful analysis—but bureaucracies try to eliminate intuition and replace it with mechanical, idiot-proof rules. Bureaucracy will not vanish, any more than the state will wither away. However, the environmental conditions that permitted bureaucracies to flourish—and even made them highly efficient engines—are changing so rapidly and radically, they can no longer perform the functions for which they were designed. Because of today’s business environment is convulsing with surprise, upsets, reversals, and generalized turbulence, it is impossible to know precisely and in advance who in an organization will need what information. In consequence, the information needed by both executives and workers to do their jobs well, let alone to innovate and improve the work, cannot reach the front-line managers and employees through the old official channels. This explains why millions of intelligent, hardworking employees find they cannot carry out their tasks—they cannot open new markets, create new products, design better technology, treat customers better, or increase profits—except by going around the rules, breaking with formal procedures How many employees today need to close their eyes to violations of formal procedure to get things done? To be a doer, a fixer, a red-tape cutter, a go-getter, they must trash the bureaucracy. #RandolphHarris 6 of 23

Thus, information begins to spill out of the formal channels into all those informal networks, gossip systems, and grapevines that bureaucracies seek to suppress. Simultaneously, corporations spend billions to construct electronic alternatives to the old communication structures. However, all these require enormous changes in the actual organization, the way people are ranked and grouped. For all these reasons the years ahead will see a tsunami of business restructuring that will make the recent wave of corporate shake-ups look like a placid ripple. Specialists and managers alike will see their entrenched power threatened as they lose control of their cubbyholes and channels. Power shifts will reverberate throughout companies and whole industries. For when we change the relations between knowledge and production, we shake the very foundations of economic and political life. That is why we are on the edge of the greatest shift of power in business history. And the first signs of it are already evident in the new-style organizations fast springing up around us. We can call them the “flex-firms” of the future. Sergio Rossi was a business hero. He was not some strutting bureaucrat or tycoon ensconced in a glass-sheathed skyscraper. He worked, instead, from his home in the Val Vibrata, in eastern Italy, with three employees who use high-tech machines to turn out fine-quality purses and pocketbooks for sale in New York City department stores. He founded his own brand. #RandolphHarris 7 of 23

Not so far away one finds Mario D’Eustachio, who heads up Euroflex, a 200-employee firm that makes luggage for Macy’s. Euroflex is a collaborative effort. Pia D’Eustachio, Mr. E’s wife, is in charge of sales; Tito, a son, guards the finances; Tiziana, a daughter, designs the luggage; and a nephew, Paolo, runs the production side of things. These are only 2 of the 1,650 small firms in the valley, each averaging only 15 workers, but collectively turning out over $1 billion a year in clothing, leatherware, and furniture. And Val Vibrata is only one small region—part of what is now known as the Third Italy. Italy Numero Uno was the agricultural South. Italy Numero Due was the industrial North. Italy Numero Tre is composed of rural and semirual regions, like Val Vibrata, using high-tech and small, usually family-based enterprise to contribute to what has been called the “Italian miracle.” A similar pattern is seen in smaller cities. Modena, for example, boasts 16,000 jobs in the knitwear industry. Whereas the number f workers in firms employing more than 50 has plummeted since 1971, employment in firms with 5 or fewer workers rose. Most of these are family-run. The virtues of family business are being discovered elsewhere too. In the United States of America, after years of being considered small-time, family businesses are hot. Francois M. de Visscher, of the financial firm Smith Barney, says he wants his company to become “the premier investment banker to family businesses,” and everyone from management consultants to marriage counselors are gearing up to sell services to what might be called “the fam-firm sector.” #RandolphHarris 8 of 23

The smallest of these family firms are short on titles and formality; larger ones combine informality among family members at the top with formality and bureaucratic organization below. It is glib to suggest that small is always beautiful or that an advanced economy can function without very large enterprises, especially as the global economy grows more integrated. Italian economists, for example, worry that Italy’s dynamic small firms may not cut the mustard in an integrated European market, and the European Community, long an advocate of bigness, favors large-scale mergers and urges small firms to form alliances and consortia. However, while consortia may make sense, the EC’s infatuation with superscale may prove shortsighted—a failure to recognize the imperatives of the super-symbolic economy. Thus, there is mounting evidence that giant firms, backbone of the smokestack economy, are too slow and maladaptive for today’s high-speed business World. Not only has small business provided most of the 20 million jobs added to the U.S.A economy since 1977, it has provided most of the innovation. Worse yet, the giants are increasingly lackluster as far as profits go. The biggest companies are the most profitable—on the basis of return on equity—in only 4 out of 67 industries. Well over half the time the biggest corporate player fails to attain even the industry average return on invested capital. #RandolphHarris 9 of 23

In many fields the savings that sheer size once made possible are fading as new technologies make customization cheap, inventories small, and capital requirements low. Most of the classical justifications of large size have proved to be of minimal value, or counterproductive, or fallacious. Small firms now can gain access to huge amounts of capital from Wall Street. They have ready access to information. And it is easier for them to use it, since they tend to be less bureaucratic. Conversely, the “diseconomies of scale” are catching up with many of the bloated giants. It is clear, moreover, that in the economy of tomorrow huge firms will become more dependent than in the past on a vast substructure of tiny but high-powered and flexible suppliers. And many of these will be family-run. Today’s resurrection of small business and the family firm brings with it an ideology, an ethic, and an information system that is profoundly antibureaucratic. In a family, everything is understood. By contrast, bureaucracy is based on the premise that nothing is understood. (Hence the need for everything to be spelled out in an operational manual and for employees to work “by the book.”) The more things are understood, the less has to be verbalized or communicated by memo. The more shared knowledge or information, the fewer the cubbyholes and channels needed in an organization. #RandolphHarris 10 of 23

In a bureaucratic company, position and pay are ostensibly determined by “what you know,” as though “who you know” did not matter. Yet the reality is that “who you know” is important, and grows in importance as one moves up in the World. Who you know determines access to crucial knowledge—namely, information about who owes whom a favor, and who is to be trusted (which, in turn, means whose information is reliable.) In a family firm nobody kids anymore. Too much is known by all about all, and helping a son or daughter succeed by using “pull” is natural. In the bureaucratic firm, pull is called nepotism and is seen as violation of the merit system that purportedly prevails. In a family, subjectivity, intuition, and passion govern both love and conflict. In a bureaucracy, decisions are supposed to be impersonal and objective, although, as we have seen, it is internecine power struggles that determine important decisions, rather than the cool clear rationality described in textbooks. Finally, in a bureaucracy it is often difficult to know who has power, despite for formal hierarchy and titles. In the family enterprise, everyone knows that titles and formality do not count. Power is held by the patriarch or, occasionally, the matriarch. And when he or she passes from the scene, it is usually conferred on a hand-picked relative. In short, wherever family relationships play a part in business, bureaucratic values and rules are subverted, and with them the power structure of the bureaucracy as well. #RandolphHarris 11 of 23

This is important, because today’s resurgence of family business is not just a passing phenomenon. We are entering a “post-bureaucratic” era, in which the family firm is only one of many alternatives to bureaucracy and the power it embodies. Now, when focusing on Japan, for its economy to advance in a period of rapid, often confusing and complex change, it will also have to loosen its rigid role structure—not merely in the professions and the workplace generally but at the deeper level of family life and gender. Old assumptions about marriage and family—and their relationship to the economy—are falling away. In 1972, according to a white paper issued by Japan’s Cabinet Office, 80 percent of Japanese men and women agreed that only men should hold jobs. Wives should be full-time homemarkers. By 2022, 45 percent of men, and 55 percent of women no longer agreed with that division of labor. Young women are marrying later and attach less stigma to staying single. A postwar low of 514,000 marriages were registered in Japan in 2021, while around 50 percent of women and 70 percent of men in their 20s have never married. Today’s more assertive unmarried women refuse to be classified as “Christmas Cakes,” a disparaging term that compares them to leftovers tossed in the garbage bin the day after the holiday. Those who do marry are having fewer babies. The national birthrate for Japan in 2022 is 7.109 births per 1,000 people, a 1.33 percent decline from 2021. #RandolphHarris 12 of 23

Thus, while promotional opportunities for women are better in I.T. and Internet-related companies. In 2018, women account for 14.9 percent of management staff in Japan, which is up from 9.9 percent in 2003. That is compared to nearly 40 percent of all managers being women in the United States of America. And women’s earned income in Japan was still only 46 percent of males. Meanwhile, the government, hoping to stem the decline in the birthrate, has called on business to offer paternity leave to fathers, hoping they would help their wives and bond with their newborns. So few men, however, have taken advantage of this that the city of Ota decided sterner, more creative (and procreative) measures were needed. In 2004, it ruled that all males working for the city would henceforth be compelled to take forty days off in the year after a birth, to keep notes and to report back on what they had learned from the experience. The idea, said one city official, was to “get men involved in raising children” and to counteract the notion that doing so was effeminate. Ota proves that even a city hall can, on occasion, think outside the proverbial box. Or that, faced with these birth numbers, Japan’s leaders are desperate. However, are they desperate enough? #RandolphHarris 13 of 23

This does not mean that all women should enter the workforce. Caring for children and managing a home are critical prosumer functions that, as we have seen, create economic value and keep the money economy alive. However, the old division of labor based on gender is another structural rigidity standing in the way of Japan’s economic advance toward revolutionary wealth. In today’s Worldwide race to create knowledge-based money economies, Japan, once a leader, is using only half of its available brainpower. And that is not smart. Speaking of smart, do athletes ever have a “hot hand”? Sometimes it seems that Steph Curry cannot miss a basket, or Alex Ovechkin or Sidney Crosby a shot or a goal. Sports announcers see these long streaks of consecutive successes and proclaim that the athlete has a “hot hand.” Yet according to psychology professors Thomas Gilovich, Robert Vallone, and Amos Tversky, this is a misperception of reality. They point out that if you flip a coin long enough, you will find some very long series of consecutive heads. The psychologists suspect that sports commentators, short on insightful things to say, are just finding patterns in what amounts to a long series of coin tosses over a long playing season. They propose a more rigorous test. In basketball, they look at all the instances of a player’s baskets, and observe the percentage of times that player’s next shot is also a basket. A similar calculation is made for the shots immediately following misses. If a basket is more likely to follow a basket than to follow a miss, then there really is something to the theory of the hot hand. #RandolphHarris 14 of 23

They conducted this test on the Philadelphia 76ers basketball team. The results contradicted the “hot hand” view. When a player made his last shot, he was less likely to make his next; when he missed his previous attempt, he was more likely to make his next. This was true even for Andrew Toney, a player with the reputation for being a streak shooter. Does this mean we should be talking about the “stroboscopic hand,” like the strobe light that alternates between on and off? Game theory suggests a different interpretation. While the statistical evidence denies the presence of streak shooting, it does not refute the possibility that a “hot” player might warm up the game in some other way. The difference between streak shooting and a hot hand arises because of the interaction between the offensive and the defensive strategies. Supposed Andrew Toney does have a truly hot hand. Surely the other side would start to crowd him. This could easily lower his shooting percentage. That is not all. When the defense focuses on Toney, one of his teammates is left unguarded and is more likely to shoot successfully. In other words, Toney’s hot hand leads to an improvement in the 76ers’ team performance, although there may be a deterioration in Toney’s individual performance. Thus we might test for hot hands by looking for streaks in team success. #RandolphHarris 15 of 23

Similar phenomena are observed in many other team sports. A brilliant running-back on a football team improves its passing game and a great pass-receiver helps the running game, as the opposition is forced to allocate more of its defensive resources to guard the starts. In the 1986 soccer World Cup final, the Argentine star Diego Maradona did not score a goal, but his passes through a ring of West German defenders led to two Argentine goals. The value of a star cannot be assessed by looking only at one’s scoring performance; one’s contribution to one’s teammates’ performance is crucial, and assist statistics help measure this contribution. In ice hockey, assists and goals are given equal weight for ranking individual performance. A player may even assist oneself when one hot hand warms up the other. The Oakland Warriors star Steph Curry, is great a shooting 3 pointers, even though he is under pressure all the time. 2-point shots tend to be easier, but Curry can put the ball on the floor and create his own shot from anywhere on the floor and he does not need much space to get his own shot off. We know even when a 2-point shot is stronger, it may even be used less often because a player may be in for maximum points. Many of you will have experienced this unusual phenomenon when playing tennis. #RandolphHarris 16 of 23

If your backhand is much weaker than your forehand, your opponents will learn to play to your backhand. Eventually, as a result of all this backhand practice, your backhand will improve. As your two stokes become more equal, opponents can no longer exploit your weak backhand. They will play more evenly between forehands and backhands. You get to use your better forehand more often; this could be the real advantage of improving your backhand. Both the novelist and the social researcher construct their stories by the use of archetypes and metaphors. Cervantes, for example, gave us the enduring archetype of the incurable dreamer and idealist in Don Quixote. The social historian Marx gave us the archetype of the ruthless and conspiring, though nameless, capitalist. Flaubert gave us the repressed bourgeois romantic in Emma Bovary. And Margaret Mead gave us the carefree, guiltless Samoan adolescent. Kafka gave us the alienated urbanite driven to self-loathing. And Max Weber gave us hardworking men driven by a mythology he called the Protestant Ethic. Dostoevsky gave us the egomanic redeemed by love and religious fervor. And B.F. Skinner gave us the automaton redeemed by a benign technology. I think it justifiable to say that, in the nineteenth century, novelists provided us with most of the powerful metaphors and images of our culture. In the twenty first century, such metaphors and images have come largely from the pens of social historians and researchers, but can come from sports and players. #RandolphHarris 17 of 23

Nevertheless, think of John Dewey, William James, Erik Erickson, Alfred Kinsey, Thorstein Veblen, Margaret Mead, Lewis Mumford, B.F. Skinner, Carl Rogers, Marshall McLuhan, Barbara Tuchman, Noam Chomsky, Robert Coles, even Stanley Milgram, and you must acknowledge that our ideas of what we are like and what kind of country we live in come from their stories to a far greater extent than from the stories of our most renowned novelists. I do not mean, incidentally, that the metaphors of social research are created in the same way as those of novels and plays. The writer of fiction creates metaphors by an elaborate and concrete detailing of the actions and feelings of particular human beings. Sociology is background; individual psychology is the focus. The researcher tends to do it the other way around. The focus is on a wider field, and the individual life is seen in silhouette, by inference and suggestion. Also, the novelist proceeds by showing. The researcher, using abstract social facts, proceeds by reason, by logic, by argument. That is why fiction is apt to be more entertaining. Whereas Oscar Wilde or Evelyn Waugh shows us the idle and conspicuously consuming rich, Thorsten Veblen argues them into existence. In the character of Sammy Glick, Budd Schulbreg shows us the narcissist whose origins Christopher Lasch has tried to explain through sociological analysis. #RandolphHarris 18 of 23

So there are differences among storytellers, and most of the time our novelists are more pleasurable to read. However, the stories told by our social researchers are at least as compelling and, in our times, apparently more credible. In the new there is always an admixture of the antiquated, especially where technology is considered. Surfaces surround us, and human-made surfaces—walls, roofs, and pavement—cover huge areas that matter to people. How can smart materials make a difference here? The revolution in technology has come and gone, and you want to repaint your walls. Breathing toxic solvents and polluting water by washing brushes have passed into history, because paint has been replaced with smarter stuff. The mid-twentieth century had seen considerable progress in paints, especially the development f liquids that were not quite liquid—they would spread with a brush, but did not (stupidly) run and drip under their own weight. This was an improvement, but the new material, “paperpaint,” is even more cooperative. Paperpaint comes in a box with a special trowel and pen. The paperpaint itself is a dry block that feels a lot like a block of wood. Following the instructions, you use the pen to draw a line around the edge of the area you want to paint, putting an X in the middle to show where you want the paint to go on; the line is made of nontoxic disappearing ink, so you can slop it around without staining anything. Using the towel, you slice off a hunk of paperpaint—which is easy, because it parts like soft butter to the trowel even though it behaves like a solid to everything else. Very high IQ stuff, that. #RandolphHarris 19 of 23

Next, you press the hunk against the X and start smoothing it out with the towel. Each stroke spreads a wide swath of paperpaint, much wider than the trowel, but always staying within the inked line. A few swipes spreads it precisely to the edges, whereupon it smooths out into a uniform layer. Why does it not just spread itself? Experience showed that customers did not min the effort of making a few swipes and preferred the added control. The paperpaint consists of a huge number of nanomachines with little wheels for rolling over one another and little sticky pads for clinging to surfaces. Each has a simple, stupid computer on board. Each can signal its neighbors. The whole mass of them clings together like an ordinary solid, but they can slip and slide in a controlled way when signaled. When you smooth the trowel over them, this contact tells them to get moving and spread out. When they hit the line, this tells them to stop. If they do not hit a line, they go a few handbreadths, then stop anyway until your trowel them again. When they encounter a line on all sides, word gets around, and they jostle around to form a smooth, uniform layer. Any that get scraped off are just so much loose dusts, but they stick together quite well. This paint-stuff does not get anything wet, does not stain, and clings to surfaces just tightly enough to keep it from peeling off accidentally. If some experimentally minded child starts digging with a stick, makes a tear, and peels some off, it can be smoothed back again and will rejoin as good as new. The child may eat a piece, but careful regulation and testing has ensured that this is no worse than eating plain paper, and safer than eating a colorful Sunday newspaper page. #RandolphHarris 20 of 23

Many refinements are possible. Swipes and pats of the trowel could make areas thicken or thin, or bridge small holes (no more Spackling!). With sufficiently smart paperpaint, and some way to indicate what it should do, you can have your choice of textures. Any good design will be washable, and a better design would shed dirt automatically using microscopic brushes. Removal, of course, is easy; either you rip and peel (no scrapping needed), or find that trowel, set the dial on to handle to “Strip,” and poke the surface a few times. Either way, you end up with a lump ready to pitch into the recycling bin the same old wall you started with, bared to sight again. Perhaps no product will ever be made exactly like the smart paint just described. It would be disappointing if something better could not be made by the time smart paint is technologically possible. Still, paperpaint gives a feel for some of the features to expect in the new smart products, features such as increased flexibility and better control. Without loading yet more capability into our paint (though there is no reason why one could not), soon you may even be able to use your very walls to, say, turn on the stove or dim the lights. Researchers at Carnegie Mellon and Disney Research have collaborated to design a conductive paint that, when applied to any wall, makes the surface interactive. #RandolphHarris 21 of 23

Many people like to knock down walls, but why not make them make more sense? The smart walls function like giant touchscreens and have the potential to respond to gesture commands. They can track users’ positions in the room and know which electrical appliances are close by and whether they are being used. The researchers used special conductive paint containing nickel, applied in grid, to create electrodes on the wall. This paint turns the wall into a touchscreen and an electromagnetic sensor. They then painted over the electrodes with regular paint. The walls look and feel totally ordinary. That is one of the major benefits. We imagine a future where every Cresleigh Homes comes equipped with similar smart walls, which home owners can feel free to use or simply ignore. This could mean that people may prefer to go back to traditional homes, with formal rooms, not just one big casual space. Another benefit of using paint to create the smart surface is cost. The team currently estimates the application costs at about $20 per square meter, but hope to bring the price down with further fine tuning. The walls could potentially serve as an interface for controlling home appliances that would be less expensive, more efficient and less obtrusive than current smart home setups. People purchase smart appliances that can easily cost thousands of dollars, or one could buy after market sensors that people can tag to everyday objects. However, one does not want one’s beautiful kitchen to be tagged with all these sensors. And batteries have to be recharged. #RandolphHarris 22 of 23

The walls target the needs and preferences of different residents, identified perhaps by their smart watches. It could turn on the lights just the way you like, play your roommates favorite tunes when one walks into the room, notify family members if baby appears to have fallen. Besides reducing the cost of the paint, walls will be capable of detecting appliances at further distances. Right now the walls have a range of 3 meters, which is fine for wall-mounted TVs or a lamp that sits by the couch. However, they hope to expand the range to 10 or even 20 meters, making the walls capable of sensing electronics in the middle of very large rooms. This product may be commercially available in less than five years. One could walk into Home Dept or Ace Hardware and buy this paint. This is what we want in our future technology in terms of being really invisible and embedded and camouflaged and subtle. Victorian homes were haunted by spirits, our homes will be haunted by technology. The future of smart home technology will blend seamlessly into our homes. We might, for example, have systems that subtly nudge us towards sleep by diming the lights or spraying calming whiffs of lavender. Smart mattresses could monitory our sleep phases and adjust the environment to keep us comfortable. We want simple control features, which will allow people to control smart walls by gestures, so users do not spend weeks trying to figure out how to interact with the technology. This will make people feel like they have superpowers. #RandolphHarris 23 of 23

Cresleigh Homes

Trick or Treat! 👻 Coming up to our #PlumasRanch ranch home this afternoon? We can’t wait to offer you some sumptuous sweets!

Of course, our home is always the best treat we can think of. Can’t wait to see you in our neighborhood! 🦇

#CresleighHomes

In some small degree, we feel bored and uneasy with the orderly chrome and porcelain vacuum of our lives. In this contemporary life the book of experience is filled with blank and mysterious pages. We die from our machines, our own poisons, our own weapons, our own despair. We call such Worlds Complex Adaptive Systems. In Complex Adaptive Systems there are often many participants, perhaps even many kinds of participants. They interact in intricate ways that continually reshape their collective future. New ways of doing things—even new kinds of participants—may arise, and old ways—or old participants—many vanish. Such systems challenge understanding as well as prediction. These difficulties are familiar to anyone who has seen small changes unleash major consequences. Conversely, they are familiar to anyone who has been surprised when large changes in policies or tools produce no long-run change in people’s behaviour. When managers and policy makers hear about complexity research, they often ask, “How can I control complexity?” What they usually mean is, “How can I eliminate it?” However, complexity, as we shall see, stems from fundamental causes that cannot always be eliminated. Although complexity is often perceived as a liability, it can actually be an asset. However, there is no doubt that complexity can be harnessed. So, rather than seeking to eliminate complexity, we shall explore how the dynamism of a Complex Adaptive System can be used for productive ends. #RandolphHarris 1 of 22

In a World of mutually adaptive players, even though prediction may be difficult, there is quite a bit that you can do. Complexity itself allows for techniques that promote effective adaptation. When there are many participants, numerous interactions, much trial-and-error learning, and abundant attempts to imitate each other’s success, there will also be rich opportunities to harness the resulting complexity. And there will be thing to avoid. To take a simple example: Even though one action seems best, it usually pays to maintain variety among the actions you take so that you can continue to learn and adapt. Managers and policy makers must learn to harness complexity. There are three main foundations that we will deal with. These include biology, computer science, and social design. From evolutionary biology come the insights of Darwinian evolution, particularly that extraordinary adaptations can come about through the selection and reproduction of successful individuals in populations. Even though moths in England could not understand or predict that the Industrial Revolution would turn white-barked trees into soot-covered trees, it did not take very long for selection by predatory birds to transform the population of moths near a factory from white to black. From computer science come insights about how systems with many artificial agents can be designed to work together and even adapt over time to each other and to their ever-changing environment. #RandolphHarris 2 of 22

Two area of computer science have been especially important to us. First, there is the field of evolutionary computation, which has fostered an engineering approach to adaptation. With an engineering approach, one asks how system can be designed to become more effective over time. By making evolution and adaptation an engineering problem, evolution computation has shed light on how complex systems can be adaptive. Second, there is the rapid growth of distributed and network-mediated computing (including the Internet), which has led computer science into deeper analyses of just what it takes to make systems of many agents work together and grow. From social design come insights into people and their activities in political, economic, and social systems. Entire disciplines—such as political science, economies, sociology, psychology, and history—have been devoted to understanding human beings and the settings they build and live in. Among the approaches that have concentrated on social design are organization theory and game theory. Organization theory provides insight into how institutional structure matters. Game theory provides insight into how people can choose strategies to maximize their payoffs in the presence of other people who are doing the same. #RandolphHarris 3 of 22

While the foundations of this work come from evolutionary biology, computer science, and social design, our analysis differs from all three of these in important ways. Unlike evolutionary biology, we are primarily interested in the shaping of evolutionary processes rather than just observation and explanation, in intelligent individuals with language and culture, rather than plants and animals that rely primarily on their genetic heritage, and in different measures of success rather than taking the ability to have offspring as the sole measures of success. Unlike computer science, we are primarily interested in systems composed of people or organizations rather than pieces of software, in systems with long and rich histories rather than systems that have little or no history, and in systems in which the costs of trials needed for adaptation are measure in terms of efforts and even lives of people rather than in cycles of computer time. Unlike some approaches to social design, we are primarily interested in problems in which the preferences and even the identities of the participants can evolve over time, rather than situations in which the players and their preferences are fixed, as they are in game theory, and in problems in which decentralization is both promising and problematic, rather than situations in which decentralization is seen as practically a panacea, as in some forms of neoclassical economics. #RandolphHarris 4 of 22

Strategic thinking is the art of outdoing an adversary, knowing that the adversary is trying to do the same to you. All of us must practice strategic thinking at work as well as at home. Businessmen and women and corporations must use good competitive strategies to survive. Politicians have to devise campaign strategies to get elevated, and legislative strategies for the players to execute on the field. Parents trying to elicit good behaviour from children must become amateur strategists (the children are the pros). For forty years, superpowers’ nuclear strategies have governed the survival of the human race. Good strategic thinking in such numerous diverse contexts remains an art. However, its foundations consist of some simple basic principles—an emerging science of strategy. A variety of backgrounds and occupations can become better strategists if they know these principles. The science of thinking is called game theory, as mentioned before. However, like all sciences, it has become shrouded in jargon and mathematics. How should people behave in society? All of us are strategists, whether we like it or not. It is better to be a good strategist than a bad one. Work, even social life, is a constant stream of decisions. What career to follow, how to manage a business, whom to marry, how to bring up children, whether to run for president, are just some examples of such fateful choices. The common element in these situations is that you do not act in a vacuum. #RandolphHarris 5 of 22

Instead, you are surrounded by active decision-makers whose choices interact with yours. This interaction has an important effect on your thinking and actions. To illustrate the point, think of the difference between the decisions of a lumberjack and those of a general. When the lumberjack decides how to chop wood, he does not expect the wood to fight back; his environment is neutral. However, when the general tries to cut down the enemy’s army, one must anticipate and overcome resistance to one’s plans. Like the general, one must recognize that one’s business rivals, prospective spouse, and even your children are intelligent and purposive people. Their aims often conflict with yours, but they include some potential allies. Your own choices allow for the conflict, and utilize the cooperation. Such interactive decisions are called strategic, and the plan of action appropriate to them is called strategy. It is important to think strategically, and then translate these thoughts into action. The branch of social science that studies strategic decision-making is called game theory. The games in this theory range from chess to child-rearing, from tennis to takeovers, and from advertising to arms control. Many continentals think life is a game, the English think cricket is a game. We think both are right. Playing these games requires many different kinds of skills. Basic skills, such as shooting ability in basketball, knowledge of precedents in law, or a blank face in poker, are one kind; strategic thinking is another. #RandolphhHarris 6 of 22

Strategic thinking starts with your basic skills, and considers how best to use them. Knowing the law, you must decide the strategy for defending your client. Knowing how well your football team can pass or run, and how well the other team can defend against each choice, your decision as the coach is whether to pass or to run. Sometimes, as in the case of superpowers contemplating an adventure that risks nuclear war, strategic thinking also means knowing when not to play. We develop the ideas and principles of strategic thinking; to apply them to a specific situation you face and to find the right choice there, you will have to so some work. This is because the specifics of each situation are likely to differ in some significant aspects, and any general prescriptions for action we might give could be misleading. In each situation, you will have to pull together principles of good strategy we have discussed, and also other principles from other considerations. You must combine them and, where they conflict with each other, evaluate the relative strengths of the different arguments. We do not promise to solve every question you might have. The science of the game theory is far from being complete, and in some ways strategic thinking remains an art. We often have to translate ideas into action. Strategic issues arise in a variety of decisions. Some broad classes of strategic situations—brinkmanship, voting, incentives, and bargaining—where one can see the principles in action. #RandolphHarris 7 of 22

The examples range from the familiar, trivial, or amusing—usually drawn from literature, sports, or movies—to the frightening—nuclear confrontation. The former are merely a nice and palatable vehicle for the game-theoretic ideas. As to the subject of nuclear war too horrible to permit rational analysis. However, as the cold war winds down and the World is generally perceived to be a safer place, we hope that the game-theoretic aspects of the arms race and the Cuban missile crisis can be examined for their strategic logic in some detachment from their emotional content. Some cases we examine are open-ended; but that is also a future of life. At times there is no clearly correct solution, only imperfect ways to cope with the problem. We are often asked how “complexity” differs from “chaos.” The simple answer is that chaos deals with situations such as turbulence that rapidly become highly disordered and unmanageable. On the other hand, complexity deals with systems composed of many interacting agents. While complex systems may be hard to predict, they may also have a good deal of structure and permit improvement by thoughtful intervention. We view the process of biological change as wonderful example in the larger set of Complex Adaptive Systems. However, they have special kinds of agents, particular sorts of strategies, distinctive patterns of interaction, and their own special process of selection. #RandolphHarris 8 of 22

The patterns one sees in biology are not always found in other Complex Adaptive Systems. Copying a strategy for stock trading (such as a computer algorithm) involves only digital information and so nearly costless compared with producing a new organism that contained a copied gene. Evaluating a business strategy (say, the introduction of a new product) can be enormously expensive compared with making a random variation of a fruit fly. Variation, interaction, and selection are at work in the population of business strategies, but detailed mechanisms are often distinctly unbiological. To harness complexity effectively, many kinds of Complex Adaptive Systems must be considered. We choose to harness because it conveys a perspective that is not explanatory but active—seeking to improve but without being fully able to control. The Complex Adaptive System approach is a way of looking at the World. It provides a set of concepts, a set of questions, and a set of design issues. By itself, it is not a falsifiable theory. Such a theory would have to specify the operational meaning of the key concepts and mechanisms in a particular domain. For example, to apply the Complex Adaptive Systems approach to economic markets, one would have to specify who the economic actors are, what they can see and do, how they generate variety in their behaviour, how they interact with each other, and how the actors and their strategies are selected for retention, amplification, or extinction. #RandolphHarris 9 of 22

Complexity research can be made relevant to problems social design. It offers a way to those who want to improve the World as well as marvel at it. The hard reality is that the World in which we must act is often beyond our understanding. Each action we take is partly an instrumental step and partly a learning experience. Adaptation can be regarded as an engineering problem. The complexity of the World is real. We do not know how to make it disappear. To create a positive host culture for a flexible knowledge-intensive economy, Japan, for example, will also have to reexamine the social rules that contribute to inflexibility—including the way decisions are made. Much has been written about Japan’s emphasis on group decision-making, especially about the fact that once a consensus decision has been reached, its implementation is rapid because all relevant parties have by then bought into the goal and understand what needs to be done. The reverse side of this, however, is the length of time needed to reach a decision, and the difficulty of changing quickly in response to new information or conditions. We saw this at work once during a television shoot with a crew of Japanese, Canadians and Americans. The Japanese team was extremely professional and, during the many months of working together, formed warm relations with the westerners. Each side had an opportunity to observe and learn from the other. #RandolphHarris 10 of 22

Typically, the night before shooting at a new location, the Japanese team would stay up late debating every aspect of the task—who would do what, exactly when and where. By morning the team was fully prepared. By contrast, the Americans and Canadians were more likely to spend the evening hours chatting, downing a beverage or two and going to be. However, Wally Longul, the Canadian director, would get up very early and go, by himself, to look the location over again. One morning her discovered a nearby location that he believed would provide a better background for the shoot. When he suggested to the Japanese that they switch to the alternate location, he faced a wall of stubborn refusal—even though none of them had seen the place he proposed. The reason for this seemingly blind resistance was clear. The Japanese had invested a great deal of time and energy in arriving at their decision in the first place. Switching to a better location—which, under the circumstances, might have been a better decision—was ruled out. Yet in today’s increasingly accelerated and complex economy and society, the ability to change plans rapidly, to arrive at decision quickly, is a vital survival mechanism. We can expect to see a decline in collective decision-making in Japan under the pressure of high-speed change and the rise of a new generation that is increasingly individuated. #RandolphHarris 11 of 22

Some companies attempt to impose order on information by designing computerized management information systems (MIS). Some of these, it turns out, are intended to buttress the old system by employing computer and communication links merely to expand the cubbyholes and the capacity of the communication channels. Others are truly revolutionary in intent. They seek to crush the cubby-hole-and-channels system and replace it with free-flow information. To appreciate the full significance of this development, and the power shift it implies, it helps to note the quite remarkable (though largely unremarked) parallels between bureaucracies and our early computers. The first big mainframes ministered to by the data priests supported the existing bureaucracies in business and government. This accounts for the initial fear and loathing they aroused in the public. Ordinary people sensed that these monster machines were yet another tool of power that might be used against them. The very data bases they held resembled the bureaucracies they served. Early business computers were used chiefly for routine purposes like keeping thousands of payroll records. John Doe’s record was made up of what the computer experts called “field.” Thus his name might be the first field, his address the second, his job title the third, his base salary the fourth, and so on. Everyone’s address went into his or her second “field.” Everyone’s base salary figure went into one’s fourth field. In this way, all information entered into the payroll files went to pre-specified locations in the data base—just as information in a bureaucracy was addressed to pre-specified departments or cubbyholes. #RandolphHarris 12 of 22

Moreover, the first computerized data systems were largely hierarchical, again like the bureaucracies they were designed for. Information was stored hierarchically in memory, and the actual hardware itself concentrated computer power at the top of the company pyramid. Brains resided in the mainframe, while at the bottom the machines were unintelligent. The jargon referred to them appropriately as “dumb terminals.” The microcomputer revolutionized all this. For the first time, it placed intelligence on thousands of desk tops, distributing data bases and processing power. However, while it shook things up, it did not seriously threaten bureaucratic organization. The reason for this was that even though there were now many computerized data banks instead of one giant central bank, the knowledge stored in them was still crammed into rigid predesigned cubbyholes. Today, however, we are at the edge of a further revolution in how information is organized in computerized data bases. So-called “relational” data bases now permit users to add and subtract fields and to interrelate them in new ways. Taking all dimensions of change into account, we realized upfront that hierarchical relationships between the data would be a disaster. The new data bases had to allow new relationships to emerge. #RandolphHarris 13 of 22

However, such systems today are still so cumbersome they cannot be easily run on microcomputers. The next step has come with the introduction recently of “hyper-media” data bases capable of storing not merely text but also graphics, music, speech, and other sounds. More important, hyper-media combine data bases and programs to give the user far greater flexibility than earlier data base systems. Even in the relational systems, data could be combined in only a few pre-specified ways. Hyper-media vastly multiplies the way in which information from different fields and records can be combined, recombined, and manipulated. Information in the original data bases was structured like a tree, meaning that to go from a leaf on one branch to a leaf on another, you had to go back to the trunk. “Hyper” systems are like a web, making it possible to move easily from once piece of information to another contextually. The ultimate goal of the hyper-media pioneers—admittedly still a distant grail—is systems in which information can be assembled, configured, and presented in an almost infinite number of ways. The goal is “free-form” and “free-flow” information. A striking example of the genre (called “HyperCard” and popularized by Apple) was first demonstrated at a Boston computer show by its author, Bill Atkinson. What he showed stunned the audience at the time. #RandolphHarris 14 of 22

First to appear on his screen was a picture of a cowboy. When Atkinson indicated the cowboy’s hat, other hats began to appear on the screen, one of which was the hat on a baseball player. When Atkinson indicted the player’s hat, other images associated with baseball began to appear, one after another, on the screen. He was able to extract information from the data base and detect patterns in it, in highly varied ways. This was so different from earlier data base systems that it gave the illusion that the computer was free-associating—much like a person. By crossing conventional categories, reaching across different collections of data, hyper-media makes it possible for, say, a designer creating a new product to let one’s mind weave through the stored knowledge naturally and imaginatively. One might instantly shift, for instance, from technical data to pictures of earlier products that preceded in the market…to chemical abstracts…to biographies of famous scientist…to video clips of the marketing team discussing the product…to transportation tariff tables…to slips of relevant focus groups…to spot prices for oil…or lists of the components or ingredients the new product will need…plus the latest study of political risk in countries from which its raw materials will have to come. In addition to vastly increasing the sheer quantity of accessible knowledge, hyper-media also permits a “layering” of information, so that a user can first access the most or least abstract form of it, and move by stages up or down the abstraction ladder. Or, alternatively, generate innovative ideas by creating novel juxtapositions of data. #RandolphHarris 15 of 22

Conventional data bases are good for getting information when you know exactly what you want. Hyper systems are good for searching when you are not certain. Ford Motor Company is developing a “Service Bay Diagnostic System” for mechanics, so that they can search and browse for answers when they are not sure what is wrong with your car. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency makes available a “hyper-text” data base to help companies sort through and interrelate complex regulations governing 2 million underground storage tanks. Cornell University uses a hyper system for its second-year medical curriculum, permitting students to browse and search for patterns interactively. The University of Toledo has developed a hyper-text-based course in Spanish literature. We are still a little away from being able to throw different kinds of data or information into a single pot and then search it entirely free of a programmer’s preconceptions about what pieces are or are not related. Even in hyper systems the cross-connections a user can make are still dependent on previous programming. However, the direction of research is clear. We are inching toward free (or at least freer) forms of information storage and manipulation. Bureaucracies, with all their cubbyholes and channels prespecified, suppress spontaneous discovery and innovation. In contrast, the new systems, by permitting intuitive as well as systematic searching, open the door to precisely the serendipity needed for innovation. #RandolphHarris 16 of 22

The effect is a dazzling new freedom. The significant fact is that we are now moving toward powerful forms of knowledge processing that are profoundly antibureaucratic. Instead of a little bureaucracy inside a machine, as it were, where everything is sequential, hierarchical, and pre-designated, we move toward free-style, open information. And instead of a single mainframe or a few giant processors having this enormous capacity, companies now have thousands of personal computers (PCs), which before long will all have this capacity. This for of information storage and processing points toward a deep revolution in the way we think, analyze, synthesize, and express information, and a forward leap in organizational creativity. However, it also eventually means the breakup of the rigid little information monopolies that overspecialization created in the bureaucratic firm. And that means a painful shift of power away from the guardians of those specialized monopolies. Even this tells only a fraction of the tale. For to these truly revolutionary ways of storing and using knowledge, we must now add the nonhierarchical communication networks that crisscross companies, crash through departmental perimeters, and link users, not merely between the specialized departments but also up and down the hierarchy. A young employee at the very bottom the ladder can now communicate directly with top-level executives working on the same problem; and, significantly, the CEO at the touch of a button can access any employee down below and jointly call up images, edit a proposal together, study a blueprint, or analyze a spreadsheet—all without going through the middle managers. #RandolphHarris 17 of 22

It is surprising therefore that recent years have seen such savage reductions in the number of middle managers in industry? Just as the new forms of information storage strike a blow against specialization, the new forms of communication end-run the hierarchy. The two key sources of bureaucratic power—cubbyholes and channels—are both under attack. Making familiar products from improved materials will increase their safety, performance, and usefulness. It will also present the simplest engineering task. A greater challenge, though, will result from unfamiliar products made possible by new manufacturing methods. In talking about unfamiliar products, a hard-to-answer question arises: What will people want? Products are typically made because their recipients want them. In our discussion here, if we describe something that people will not want, then it probably will not get built, and if it does get built, it will soon disappear. (The exceptions—fraud, coercion, persistent mistakes—are important, but in other contexts.) To anchor our discussion, it makes sense to look not at totally new products, but instead at new features for old products, or new ways to provide old services. This approach will not cover more than a fraction of what is possible, but will start from something sensible and provide a springboard for the imagination. #RandolphHarris 18 of 22

As usual, we are describing possibilities, not making predictions. The possibilities focused on here arise from more complex applications of molecular manufacturing—nanotechnological products that contain nanomachines when they are finished. Earlier, we discussed strong materials. Now, we discuss some smart materials. The goal of making material and objects smart is not new: researchers are already struggling to build structures that can sense internal and environmental conditions and adapt themselves appropriately. There is even a Journal of Intelligent Material Systems and Structures. By using materials that can adapt their shapes, sometimes hooked up to sensors and computers, engineers are starting to make objects they call “smart.” These are the early ancestors of the smart materials that molecular manufacturing will make possible. Today, we are used to having machines with a few visible moving parts. In cars, the wheels go around, the windshield wipers go back and forth, the antenna may go up and down, the seat belts, mirrors, and steering wheel may be motor-driver. Electric motors are fairly small, fairly inexpensive, and fairly reliable, so they are fairly common. The result is machines that are fairly smart and flexible, in a clumsy, expensive way. In the Desert Rose scenario, we saw “tents” being assembled from trillions of submicroscopically small parts, including motors, computers, fibers, and struts. To the naked eye, materials made from these parts could seem as smooth and uniform as a piece of plastic, or as richly textured as wood or cloth—it is all a matter of the arrangement of the submicroscopic parts. #RandolphHarris 19 of 22

These motors and other parts cost less than a trillionth of a dollar apiece. They can be quite reliable, and good design can make systems work smoothly even if 10 percent of a trillion motors burn out. Likewise for motor controlling computers and the rest. The resulting machines can be very smart and flexible, compared to those of today, and inexpensive, too. When materials can be full of motors and controllers, whole chunks of materials can be made flexible and controllable. The applications should be broad. Now, when considering America, the development of this country is not a Machiavellian invention of capitalists, but rather a mechanism which all viable social systems must evolve spontaneously in order to protect themselves from instability. Many people believe that Marx was doing science, or Max Weber or Lewis Mumford or Bruno Bettelheim or Carl Jung or Margaret Mead or Arnold Toynbee. What these people were doing—and Stanley Milgram was doing—is documenting the behaviour and feelings of people as they confront problems posed by their culture. Their work is a form of storytelling. Science itself is, of course, a form of storytelling too, but its assumptions and procedures are so different from those of social research that it is extremely misleading to give the same name to each. In fact, the stories of social researcher are much closer in structure and purpose to what is called imaginative literature; that is to say, both a social researcher and a novelist give unique interpretations to a set of human events and support their interpretations with examples in various forms. Their interpretations cannot be proved or disproved but will draw their apparel from the power of their language, the depth of their explanations, the relevance of their examples, and the credibility of their themes. And all of this has, in both cases, an identifiable moral purpose. #RandolphHarris 20 of 22

The words “true” and “false” do not apply here in the sense that they are used in mathematics or science. For there is nothing universally and irrevocably true or false about these interpretations. There are no critical tests to confirm or falsify them. There are no natural laws from which they are derived. They are bound by time, by situation, and above all by the cultural prejudices of the researcher or writer. A novelist—for example, D.H. Lawrence—tells a story about the particulars of a woman’s life which involved pleasures of the flesh—Lady Chatterley—and from it we may learn things about the secrets of some people, and wonder if Lady Chatterley’s secrets are not more common than we had thought. Lawrence did not claim to be a scientist, but he looked carefully and deeply at the people he knew and concluded that there is more hypocrisy in Heaven and Earth than is dreamt of in some of our philosophies. Alfred Kinsey was also interested in the lives of women. His particular interest was also involving pleasures of the flesh, and so he and his assistants interviewed thousands of them in an effort to find out what they believed their pleasures of the flesh was like. Each woman told her story, although it was a story carefully structured by Kinsey’s questions. Some of them told everything they were permitted to tell, some only a little, and some probably lied. However, when all their tales were put together, a collective story emerged about a certain time and place. #RandolphHarris 21 of 22

It was a story more abstract than D. H. Lawrence’s, largely told in the language of statistics and, of course, without much psychological insight. However, it was a story nonetheless. One might call it a tribal tale of one thousand and one nights, told by a thousand and one women, and its theme was not much different from Lawrence’s namely, that the life involving pleasures of the flesh of some women is a lot stranger and more active than some other stories, particulary Dr. Freud’s, had led us to believe. I do not say that there is no difference between Lawrence and Kinsey. Lawrence unfolds his story in a language structure called a narrative. Kinsey’s language structure is called exposition. These forms are certainly different, although not so much as we might suppose. It has been remarked about the brothers Henry and William James that Henry was the novelist who wrote like a psychologist, and William the psychologist who wrote like a novelist. Certainly, in my meaning of the word “story,” exposition is as capable of unfolding one as is narrative. Of course, Lawrence’s story is controlled entirely by the limits of his own imagination, and he is not obliged to consult any social facts other than those he believed he knew. His story is pure personal perception, and that is why we call it fiction. Kinsey’s story comes from the mouths of others, and he is limited by what they answered when he asked his questions. Kinsey’s story, therefore, we may call a documentary. However, like all stories, it is infused with moral prejudice and sociological theory. It is Kinsey who made up the questions, and chose who would be interviewed, the circumstances of the interview, and how the answers would be interpreted. All of this gives shape and point to his story. Indeed, we may assume that Kinsey, like Lawrence, knew from the outset what the theme of hist story would be. Otherwise, he probably would not have care to tell it. #RandolphHarris 22 of 22

CRESLEIGH HOMES

Fall in love with a Cresleigh Homes where you will discover a community of charming single-family homes and apartment homes.

A new Cresleigh Community is coming soon, but in the meantime, take a look around and see what is avaliable.

#CresleighHomes