Tag Archives: complexity

Narratives of innovation: techno tarot@Drumbeat

According to David Lane, sometimes we need to make decisions in a condition that he calls of ontological uncertainty. That means we have no means of painting an exhaustive picture of the situation and of the full range of moves we can possibly make; and certainly we are unable to foresee the consequences of the few moves we can imagine. In a famous article, David asks us to consider the situaton of a Bosnian diplomat trying to bring an end to the bloodshed in his country in early September 1995:

It is very difficult to decide who are his friends and who his foes. First he fights against the Croats, then with them. His army struggles against an army composed of Bosnian Serbs, but his cousin and other Muslim dissidents fight alongside them. What can he expect from the UN securiy forces, from the NATO bombers, from Western politicians, from Belgrade and Zagreb, from Moscow? Who matters and what do they want? On whom can he rely, for what? He doesn’t know – and when he thinks he does, the next day it changes.

How to make decisions in such a situation? Answer: by telling yourself stories. Humans are good at storytelling: if you recognize yourself as the hero of a story, he will inspire your course of action, just like Don Quixote changed his life to model it in on medieval chivalry epics.

Innovation often happens in ontological uncertainty conditions. It is certainly possible to have a well defined goal in terms of producing an artefact, but the market system that depends on what people will use that artifact for – is always emergent. Movable type printing was a well-defined R&D project, but Gutenberg could not have forseen Aldus Manutius’s portable book and and the Umanesimo movement in Italy in the Renaissance; Henry Ford rationalized car production, but he could not have foreseen bedroom communities and mass commuting. To build and bring to market an innovation means acting in a changing context, like that of our Bosnian diplomat. And that requires storytelling.

Nadia El-Imam has come up with the idea to help people to tell stories about themselves and what they are doing with technology. She uses a special deck of tarot cards she designed herself (in lieu of the Hermit and the Magician she has arcana like the Server, the Developer and the Interface). Dressed up as a gypsy fortune teller, she offered to divine the future of the various geeks gathered at Mozilla Drumbeat in Barcelona. It was a roaring success, with a permanent queue of people waiting to interrogate her tarot. Among them, entrepreneur and venture capitalist Joi Ito (in the video). Engaging with Nadia and the cards, innovators make sense of what they are doing, and look for a way to complete their quests.

In their own unusual way, Nadia’s techno tarot are a platform, that lends itself to be used for collecting ethnographic data on innovation, for technology counseling and who knows for what else. I am quite curious to see how it all evolves.

Il domatore di reti sociali: il mio Ph.D. all’università di Alicante

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Ho iniziato il 2010 con il proposito di studiare l’economia della complessità. Nel mio lavoro di consulente sulle politiche pubbliche mi trovo a dovere risolvere problemi che l’economia che ho studiato all’università non riesce neppure a descrivere, non parliamo poi di risolverli. L’approccio delle scienze della complessità – un curioso miscuglio molto interdisciplinare di biologia, informatica, un po’ di neuroscienze e vari altri ingredienti minori, dalla statistica all’archeologia, con la matematica a tenere insieme il tutto – potrebbe avere qualche risposta.

Beh, pare proprio che avrò parecchie occasioni di studiare queste cose. A partire dall’anno accademico 2010-2011 sono infatti uno studente di dottorato in economia quantitativa all’università spagnola di Alicante. Il mio supervisore sarà David Lane, che fa parte dello Science Board del leggendario Istituto di Santa Fe, e se tutto va bene discuterò la tesi nell’autunno 2012. L’argomento della tesi è piuttosto pratico: voglio capire come usare le reti sociali per eseguire dei compiti. Le reti, non le persone che le compongono.

Il problema è molto più aggrovigliato di quanto sembra. Abbiamo sempre detto che le dinamiche sociali sono emergenti. La maggior parte degli oggetti interessanti nella società, dal sistema di Common Law alle culture e perfino alla criminalità organizzata, sono sistemi adattivi complessi, e il loro comportamento è imprevedibile a lungo termine. Non è questione di raffinare i modelli previsionali: secondo questo tipo di scienza, è imprevedibile in linea di principio.

D’altra parte io ho teorizzato (in Wikicrazia) e provato a mettere in pratica (in Kublai e altrove) l’idea di imbrigliare l’intelligenza collettiva per migliorare le politiche pubbliche e, in definitiva, il mondo in cui viviamo. Come conciliare l’imprevedibilità delle reti sociali con la direzionalità che le politiche pubbliche richiedono? Vorrei esplorare l’idea che sia possibile, attraverso scelte di progettazione e la somministrazione di stimoli adeguati, addestrare le reti sociali, come se fossero dei grandi animali; e sfruttare la loro capacità di elaborare l’informazione, che è molto più che umana, per fare vivere meglio gli umani. Questo vuol dire innanzitutto comprenderne la struttura matematica, e cercare di influenzarla; è quello che abbiamo cominciato a fare insieme a Ruggero Rossi, anche lui studente ad Alicante. Comunque sia, ritorno a scuola: a 44 anni, è davvero un lusso e un avventura meravigliosa. Grazie davvero a Giovanni Ponti, il direttore del programma di dottorato, per avermi conferito di nuovo il titolo accademico più importante e prestigioso: quello di studente.

Taming social networks: my Ph.D. at University of Alicante

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One of my New Year resolutions for 2010 was “study complexity economics”. In my job as consultant on public policy I find myself facing problems that standard economics cannot even describe, let alone solve them. The complexity approach – a weird interdisciplinary mix of biology, computer science, neuroscience and various add-ons, from statistics to archaeology, with math holding everything together – could hold some of the answers.

It’s looking like I’ll get plenty of chances to study this stuff: I have become a Ph.D. candidate in Quantitative Economics at University of Alicante, in Spain, effective academic year 2010-2011. David Lane, member of the Science Board of the legendary Santa Fe Institute, and – less problems – I shall defend my thesis in the fall of 2012. My line of research is going to be quite practical: I want to figure out how to train social networks to execute some tasks. It’s networks, as opposed to people participating in them, I want to train.

This is more entangled than it seems. We more or less agree that social dynamics are emergent. Most interesting societal strucures, from Common Law to cultures and even the Mob are complex adaptive systems, and their behavior is impossible to predict in the long run. Not because we have bad models: in a complexity framework it is unpredictable even in principle

On the other hand, I have theorized (in Wikicrazia) and tried to practice (in Kublai and elsewhere) that we can and should harness collective intelligence to improve public policies and, ultimately, the world we live in. How to reconcile the unpredictability of social networks with the agency that public policy requires? I would like to explore the possibility of training social networks, through appropriate design choices and stimuli, as you would train some huge animal: using their superhuman information processing capacity to the advantage of humans. This means first and foremost understanding their mathematical structure and trying to influence it: it’s what Ruggero Rossi (another newly enrolled Alicante Ph.D. candidate) and I have started to do. Anyway, I’m going back to school: at 44 it is really a luxury, and a wonderful adventure. My thanks to Giovanni Ponti, the director of Alicante’s doctoral programme, for awarding me the most important and prestigious academic title: that of student.