Emergent Behavior

Emergent Behavior is some weird stuff.

For instance, if you learn everything there is to know about the structure and behavior of atoms and their particles, you can derive all of Molecular Chemistry.

But it's -way- easier to treat Chemistry as a separate discipline, with it's own rules and language.

So chemistry is an emergent behavior of particle physics. Something outrageously complex on a quantum level can be simplified into something comprehensible if taken as it's own behavior.

This is fairly well known and accepted by the scientific community.

But I am thinking we just don't go far enough in applying this concept.

Sure, we can take psychology as an emergent behavior of biochemistry, and from there go bigger to sociology and economics and politics. But the bigger we get, the less well understood it is. Much like Asimov's "Psychohistory", in theory we just need a big enough sample for the rules to make any sense, but these things are evolving at a much faster rate the bigger we get.

For instance, imagine dropping a top tier economist/financier from our current age into the middle of the industrial era. Even if he were to have some odd form of specific amnesia about what technologies and ventures would prove to be winners, the -techniques- he would use would blow everyone else out of the water.

So too our social interactions and political structures evolve with frightening speed. Some changes are in response to technology. I'll forgo the usual Information Age examples and point out that The Pill has made gender equality something we can dream of achieving one day.

Politics changes even faster as people learn from the mistakes and triumphs of other societies. Some repeat the mistakes of the past, others are fine with the status quo, but still more societies struggle for positive change. Rome was not built in a day, and it lasted centuries. Japan went from obscurity to world power in a figurative blink of an eye, and after the war took them down a peg or two, re-emerged as an economic power in a generation. Since China's embrace of the market economy, they are rising at a rate that truly boggles the mind, dragging a billion people with them.

CRACKPOT THEORY TIME

Considering the speed and of change of these emergent behaviors, it begs more questions than I have theories for. But here's a few:

Global Economy and Politics

Regions with relative stability will expand economically until they are at parity with the western world and the fully developed Asian nations, such as Japan, where the per-capita income resembles that in the US. At that time, the US as an economic superpower will be more like Brittan as a strong military power, but no longer an Empire. Likewise our military might and station in world politics will be as one of many, rather than the biggest bully on the block.

To do: invest in plurality and coalition building while we can, or the new big kids (China and India) will kick sand in our faces.

Note: This only applies to regions with relative stability. Places where someone getting killed is a tragedy and investigated by an efficient police force are stable. Places where someone getting killed is a statistic are not.

Maturation of information/communications technology

We're still figuring out what we can do with this crazy internet thing, and building new and more powerful computers and new and crazier things to do with that power. Many of these uses involve porn and gaming, but as soon as someone figures out how to make money doing something, the rest of the world follows.

I am not so sure this trend is infinite. Moore's Law breaks down as the physical implementation of computing reaches the realm where it's impossible to make things smaller or faster as you reach the limits of the size of molecules and the speed of light.

Software maturation will take longer, but eventually we'll be inventing software that can write and optimize software, and teach that machine to understand plain English. The day will come when you can ask your computer, in plain speech, any question and it will figure out what it needs to do to answer that question.

Don't doubt some of the first uses of this will include "What does (some celebrity) look like naked?"

To do: Implement Asimov's Three Laws of Robotics ASAP. (refine them just a bit to make sure they'll work)

Even More Emergent Behavior

This is all good and well, but it's only scratching the surface. Just like if you only consider biology, the Human Being looks like the pinnacle of Emergence, we too are limited in what we can understand. What behaviors will occur that will emerge from thought, memes, sociology, politics, economics, etc? Will we even be able to comprehend what happens as these evolve at absurd rates? Will Human Thought be as cells to some larger, incomprehensible phenomenon that will think it's so neat that these cute humans keep doing what they do? Would we even understand if such a thing existed even if it were capable of desiring that we know?

That's right! Throw your preconceived notions and antrhopomorphisms to the wind, because we will have less frame of reference to understand these than we do the quantum physics that many have tried and failed to really wrap their heads around.