Page 30 - Deep Learning

The Need to Override Experience 13

Almost all natural systems are of the complex, unpredictable sort. to adapt
to this reversal in perspective, natural scientists might want to choose some
artifact other than the clock as their model of a prototypical material system. A
loaf of bread would serve: The many ingredients interact to form an emergent,
hard-to-predict structure that exists for some time, undergoes thoroughgoing
changes and eventually ceases to exist.
If scientists surprised us, and themselves as well, by moving beyond clock-
work science, historians were no doubt more surprised than everyone else.
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History was the first science, and it will be the last. Long after we have learned
everything there is to know about nature, human beings will continue to love
and work, squabble and scheme, form and break alliances and somebody will
feel the itch to chronicle and interpret. History is also the quintessential sci-
ence of change. In the past, history and clockwork science have had little to
say to one another. However, the conceptual vocabulary that scientists have
developed for complex systems is eminently suitable for talking about aspects
of society that are of intense interest to historians, economists and social
scientists.
organizations, governments, nations and entire civilizations have a life
cycle; they emerge, unfold and collapse. Although the ancient Greeks hypoth-
esized a repeating cycle of ages, modern historians assign time a direction.
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The past and future are not mirror images. The Vikings shall never again row
their boats across the Atlantic to conquer Britain for lack of entertainment at
home, and samurai swords shall forever gather dust in art exhibits. Historical
changes are not only irreversible but thoroughgoing. There have been attempts
to discern laws underlying historical change – progressions through stages of
perfection, movements toward ever more efficient modes of production and so
on – but the majority of historians write as if the turbulence of human affairs
is irreducible. 32
Historical analyses necessarily move back and forth between the level of
the individual and the social systems – armies, civilizations, firms, govern-
ments, markets, nations, organizations – within which he functions. Emergent
phenomena are commonplace. Political economy began with the question of
how the economic system that we now refer to as the Industrial revolution
appeared in Britain in the period of 1780–1830. It was not the product of a
plan but emerged as a consequence of the interactions among the individual
economic agents. 33
Instances of other complex system features are equally obvious in history.
There is no better example of a butterfly effect than the determination of British
Prime Minister Winston churchill in the spring of 1940, when France fell to