Don't Worry, It Runs Itself

And a Black Swan to finish things off

In today’s world, the complexity of the systems that underpin our daily lives is increasing at an unprecedented rate - at least for those who have no understanding of the implications of Moore’s Law, or of the nature of the Technological Singularity many think is in the process of occurring. From the infrastructure that delivers our utilities to the global networks that power our communications, these systems are becoming more intricate and interconnected.

However, as these systems grow in complexity, there is a growing concern about the ability of individuals to comprehend and manage them effectively. Especially concerning are the complexities of Strong Artificial Intelligence (SAI), which may be literally beyond human apprehension, that is, we would be unable to perceive them at all.

Complex systems are intricate networks of interconnected elements that exhibit unpredictable behavior and emergent properties. They can be found in nature, society, and technology, ranging from ecosystems to economies, from the human brain to artificial intelligence. Modeling and simulating such systems is a challenging yet vital task for understanding and managing them effectively.

Unfortunately, even at our relatively primitive technological state (barely dipping our toe into the vast realm of SAI, for instance), we have already managed to create complex systems we have no way accurately to model or simulate. And if and when we can, we are likely to run into the Simming Problem, and all the moral and ethical considerations it involves.

The concept of complex systems is not new, but its application to the vast networks that make up our national and global infrastructure is a relatively recent development. These systems are characterized by numerous components that interact in non-linear ways, leading to emergent behaviors that are often difficult, (or impossible, given current abilities and understandings) to predict or control. The challenge is compounded by the fact that these systems, (and the components of which they are made) are not static; they evolve over time, adapting to new inputs and changing conditions.

In other words, it’s chaos all the way down. Humans seem to innately apprehend this, which accounts in part for the enduring popularity of religions which promise to relieve us of the burden of all this uncertainty, generally via an omnipotent, omniscient, omnibenevolent entity called god, or God, if you prefer.

One of the critical issues facing complex systems is the competence crisis. As highlighted in a recent article from Palladium Magazine, there is a concern that the systematic promotion of individuals based on factors other than competency could lead to a weakening of society's ability to manage modern systems, [an ability already quite weak to begin with]. This is not just a theoretical concern; history has shown that when key systems fail, the consequences can be catastrophic, affecting not just the system in question but also those that are interconnected with it.

As complex systems continue to evolve, the need for competent individuals who can understand and manage these systems becomes increasingly critical. The interconnectivity of these systems means that a failure in one area can have far-reaching implications. Therefore, it is essential to foster a culture of competency and effective decision-making to ensure the resilience and stability of the national meta-system of systems. The nature of our future will depend on our ability to adapt to and manage the complexity that surrounds us.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb, a Lebanese-American essayist, scholar, statistician, and former trader and risk analyst, is renowned for his work on probability, uncertainty, and complex systems. His insights into the nature of complex systems and the competencies required to navigate them are particularly relevant in our increasingly interconnected world.

Taleb's perspective on complex systems is that they cannot be understood in isolation by examining their individual components. Instead, they must be viewed as wholes, where the interactions between components are more critical than the components themselves. This view is vividly illustrated in his analogy of an ant colony, where understanding an individual ant does not provide insights into the colony's behavior. The emergent properties of complex systems mean that they behave in ways not predicted by their individual parts.

In terms of competency, Taleb argues that traditional academic and scientific intuitions fail when applied to complex systems. Instead, he suggests that wisdom, often passed down through generations, may offer better guidance in dealing with such systems. He emphasizes the importance of having "skin in the game," meaning that those who make decisions should also bear the risks and consequences of those decisions. This principle tries to ensure that decision-makers are competent and accountable, leading to more robust and resilient systems.

The effectiveness of this strategy is scattershot at best. See the recent plethora of individual and systemic failures within the US Secret Service that led to the recent nearly-successful attempt to assassinate President Donald Trump.

Taleb's concept of "antifragility" is central to his views on complex systems and competencies. Antifragility goes beyond resilience or robustness; it describes systems that actually benefit from shocks, volatility, and disorder. Competency, in this context, involves the ability to not only withstand chaos but to use it as a catalyst for improvement and growth. This idea challenges the conventional wisdom of trying to control and predict complex systems and instead advocates for building systems that can adapt and thrive in uncertainty.

One might encapsulate this in the phrase, “Whatever doesn’t kill us makes us stronger.”

Here are some examples of antifragility in action:

1. **Biological Systems**: The human body exemplifies antifragility through the process of hormesis. By exposing the body to small doses of stress, like exercise or fasting, it adapts and becomes stronger. For instance, weight lifting imposes stress on muscles, leading to increased strength and muscle mass over time. (It is not by accident that Taleb happens to be an enthusiastic weightlifter, and practices some variant of the same system I use, the Rippetoe method.)

2. **Economic Systems**: Some businesses thrive on unpredictability and change. For example, companies that specialize in crisis management or disaster recovery services grow and improve their capabilities with each challenge they face.

3. **Technological Systems**: In the realm of computer science, certain algorithms are designed to improve their performance under stress. For instance, machine learning models can become more accurate when exposed to more varied and extensive data sets. Think about how this applies to the most important, and most complex, technological development of the past hundred years, Artificial Intelligence.

4. **Social Phenomena**: The Streisand Effect is a social example of antifragility. Attempts to suppress information, like censoring a book or a piece of news, often lead to increased public interest and dissemination of that information. At least that is the formal definition. I submit that is probably incorrect, and should properly be defined as failed attempts to suppress information…”

5. **Personal Development**: Setting personal short-term deadlines can create a healthy level of stress that pushes individuals to achieve their goals more efficiently. Similarly, engaging in competitive activities can stimulate growth and improvement. That’s why you will often find highly productive individuals habitually organize their lives around to-do lists. I have been diagnosed with ADHD, and to-do lists are not just an organizing tool for me, they are a critical factor in allowing me to be more or less functional at all.

6. **Nature and Evolution**: Ecosystems and species often develop antifragile traits through evolution. For example, some plants grow back stronger after being damaged by herbivores or weather events.

7. **Cultural Practices**: Certain cultural practices, such as the tradition of storytelling, have survived and evolved through centuries of human civilization, often becoming richer and more complex through the challenges they have faced.

These examples illustrate how antifragility manifests in different contexts, turning potential negatives into positives and fostering growth and improvement through adversity. Competence in understanding and applying the principles of antifragility can lead to more resilient and adaptive systems, whether in personal life, business, or society at large.

Which brings us full circle back to the issue of complexity and competence, and how that affects the ever-increasing brittleness and unpredictability of the complex systems that increasingly order almost every aspect of our daily lives.

In our ever-more-impenetrable world, the complexity of systems is an undeniable reality. From the intricate networks that power our cities to the sophisticated algorithms that drive our online virtualities, complexity is all around us. However the human ability to comprehend and manage them is diminishing, and that is no accident. During the period from the early 1960s until the post-Nixon 1970s, the Boomers turned into the human and cultural tidal wave they were always destined to become, tore down the old meritocracy, and in its place constructed the foundations of the new DIEversitopia.

The landmark case of Griggs vs. Duke Power - decided in March of 1971 - marked far more indelibly than any of the great legislative Civil Rights packages the moment when what we today know as DEI, (for non-cultists, DIE) became inevitable.

The decision rested on what must have seemed very strange logic to the men of the Greatest Generation, founded as it was on a basic misinterpretation of American scripture - that all men are created equal. While the actual intent and meaning of those who crafted that phrase was obvious to the people of that time, it later became (deliberately?) twisted to mean all men are equal. And upon that promising foundation the Griggs decision was constructed to make it the law of the land, or so it was interpreted by those who wished to do so, that in any endeavor involving a group, (since all were equal in capacity, talent, intelligence, upbringing, and potential) any disparity in outcomes among individuals of that group could only be caused by racism.

And while the Founders and Framers knew that a war on racism, or, as it was more politely called in those days, discrimination, (as if the human mind wasn’t itself a superb engine for seeing the difference between one thing and another, or discriminating between them), was likely futile, they never conceived that their words would be warped and bent into the notion that discrimination was evil. The notion that there was no morally justifiable reason to make distinctions between and among people, because people, always and forever, were indistinguishable, identical, equal would have been laughable to them.

Today, of course, anybody who makes such distinctions is flying in the very face of reality itself. Their version of it, at least. It isn’t just evil, it is madness.

Needless to say, the Duke Power Company went down in such a judicial auto da fe that ever since, organizations have been trying unsuccessfully to perform an impossible act: To pretend on the one hand that employees are all equal, would all be treated in an exactingly equal manner, and that this would result in all of them achieving a perfect equality in their progress through the organization and all the outcomes inherent to that progress.

It was all hogwash, of course, and everybody knew it. Nonetheless, the raw power of it remained and grew, buttressed by courts of law and courts of public opinion, not to mention schools of very hard legislative and administrative knocks.

Thus did the Greatest Generation sow the seeds of the destruction of the quasi-utopia they had hoped for and worked so long and hard to create. As did that Revolutionary Generation with those few words, “All men are created equal.” They never imagined that other men with reptile eyes and carnivore teeth would later come along to argue, “If God created all men equal, how can all men ever not be equal?”

Thus did Original Sin enter into the gardens of the Greatest Generation, the mightiest gardens ever seen in the world of men, and there it flourished.

Equality is the deadly enemy of merit, and it was merit that plowed and planted and nurtured those gardens, and now Equality set about destroying them, root and branch.

Rather than reinvent the wheel, allow me to acquaint you with the thoughts of someone who has examined this matter at length and in depth. You may find what he has to say of interest:

Complex Systems Won’t Survive the Competence Crisis

As a consequence of escalating rates of failure, America’s complex systems are slowly collapsing.

The core issue is that changing political mores have established the systematic promotion of the unqualified and sidelining of the competent. This has continually weakened our society’s ability to manage modern systems. At its inception, it represented a break from the trend of the 1920s to the 1960s, when the direct meritocratic evaluation of competence became the norm across vast swaths of American society.

And it was the crowning achievement of the Greatest Generation.

Administrative law judges have accepted statistically observable disparities in outcomes between groups as prima facie evidence of illegal discrimination. The result has been clear: any time meritocracy and diversity come into direct conflict, diversity must take priority.

As I said. Mortal enemies.

In the language of a systems theorist, by decreasing the competency of the actors within the system, formerly stable systems have begun to experience normal accidents at a rate that is faster than the system can adapt. The prognosis is harsh but clear: either selection for competence will return or America will experience devolution to more primitive forms of civilization and loss of geopolitical power.

In other words, start learning how to become a Doomsday Prepper.

However diversity itself is defined, most policy on the matter is based on a simple premise: since all groups are identical in talent, any unbiased process must produce the same group proportions as the general population, and therefore, processes that produce disproportionate outcomes must be biased.

Aha, and there it is: Bias, which means discrimination, which means the Original Sin of Racism…which can never be washed away, no matter how much you bend the knee to its Holy Inquisitors and its murderous mobs.

A complex system is characterized by numerous components that interact in ways that are entirely opaque until they reveal themselves in completely unexpected ways. These are the Black Swans that Nick Taleb talks about. And please do keep in mind Taleb’s definition of a Black Swan:

Taleb asserts:^[10]

What we call here a Black Swan (and capitalize it) is an event with the following three attributes.

First, it is an outlier, as it lies outside the realm of regular expectations, because nothing in the past can convincingly point to its possibility. Second, it carries an extreme 'impact'. Third, in spite of its outlier status, human nature makes us concoct explanations for its occurrence after the fact, making it explainable and predictable.

I stop and summarize the triplet: rarity, extreme 'impact', and retrospective (though not prospective) predictability. A small number of Black Swans explains almost everything in our world, from the success of ideas and religions, to the dynamics of historical events, to elements of our own personal lives.

Let me lean much harder into that triad, and emphasize as strongly as I can that all three must be extreme, in order to identify, in retrospect only, that a true Black Swan has flown into our world.

First, it must be a rara avis, indeed. I suspect that one occurs perhaps once a generation. Some generations may see none at all. Since I have already identified a second Black Swan to my own satisfaction, my Boomer generation will have, (assuming most of us survive to the actuarial norm) two of the damned beasts. Lucky, lucky us.

Taleb says 9/11 was one of his dark flock. Well, it’s his theory, so, okay, but I’d be willing to argue that 9/11 was not really a Black Swan, given that I think it fell short on at least two of the three aspects of the triad. Although it was the single biggest successful Muslim terrorist attack on our homeland we have ever experienced, something like it, if not identical to it, could certainly have been expected, or at least predicted. After all, it happened only ten years after Muslim terrorists set off bombs in the basement of the WTC’s North Tower:

Tragically, the 1993 bombing foreshadowed the much larger attack on the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001, in which a different group of Muslim extremists would achieve at least part of Yousef’s horrific goal.

If this attack foreshadowed 9/11, then one can only with difficulty argue convincingly that 9/11 was an outlier, “…because nothing in the past can convincingly point to its possibility.” The 1993 bombing of the WTQ was carried out by Muslim terrorists. Their goal was to bring down both towers and slaughter hundreds of thousands of the infidel. And apparently ten years before 9/11, they came closer than most realize.

The second failure of 9/11 to measure up to Taleb’s strict definition of a Black Swan is in the area of its impact. Yes, it shuffled a few deck chairs on the already-listing American Titanic, but frankly, Iraq was a turkey shoot, and the fiasco in Afghanistan was largely the fault of our own crippled “best and brightest,” a tawdry affair that was characterized as much by western corruption as it was by the warriors of fundamentalist Islam becoming unique change agents for Allah.

I assert is a second Black Swan, though, and it is among us today. However, acknowledging the reality of it is so cognitively terrifying that when I tell you what this Black Swan is, you’ll probably laugh out loud.

Elon Musk, the first Black Swan of the new millennium.

Okay, take sixty seconds to guffaw, and then get back in your seats and we’ll continue.

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Okay. Feel better? Take a deep breath. Exhale. Again. All righty, then.

Elon Musk is a Black Swan of such an overwhelming nature that he simply defies peoples’ ability to think rationally about what he really is. It is almost as if he has his own personal cloak of invisibility. He’s the 8000 ton gorilla in the middle of the global living room, and most of you have no…freaking…idea.

Let’s take it in order.

1. Rarity. Not much more than ten years ago, hardly anybody outside some esoteric technical, industrial, and financial circles had even heard of him. Something to do with electric cars, wasn’t it? Maybe those science fiction space rocket things? Well, everybody knew those were guaranteed failures, and Musk was probably only pursuing them as scams to squeeze the government teat while the milking was good.

Tesla is today the most valuable car maker in the world, even if its valuation has slipped a bit from previously hitting the one trillion dollar mark and now rides comfortably at $800 billion, more than three times the value of number two Toyota. If Tesla was Musk’s only accomplishment, that would still make him damned near unique, but it’s merely his opening bid.

2. Impact.

Musk is a human dynamo who, as far as I can tell, never stops, and maybe even never sleeps. Even as he built Tesla’s gigantic auto company valuation, he was also beginning to create what is today by far the largest network of charging facilities for his Teslas, but also for the EVs of his competitors. And they will pay him to let them use his chargers, because they are better than anybody else’s. He has built, and continues to build, a metric crap ton of them, along with revolutionizing the scaling of energy storage technology in the process. Compare that to Kamala’s efforts to use a mandated budget of $7.5 billion to build “tens of thousands” of EV charging stations, but has so far managed to construct only 15.

Musk’s Tesla has put up 6500 of the high-powered Supercharger installations, and will be building thousands more all over the planet. In other words, in his spare time from building the most valuable car company in history, he also established the largest charging network on the planet. That’s a lot of power. What do you suppose he’s going to do with it?

I’ve got a notion. You see, back in the early 2010s, Elon got interested in Artificial Intelligence. So he dumped a bunch of money into a Brit company called Deep Mind, which was sold to Google in 2014, (odd when you think about it, since Google’s star science guy is Ray Kurzweil, the godfather of the tech (and AI) Singularities.

Anyway, he needed the spare change from the Deep Mind sale to sink $100 million into a new AI venture. He called it OpenAI. His idea was that it would be just that - Artificial Intelligence developed as Open Source-ware, completely transparent. In this way he hoped to get around his worries about the potential of AI being mishandled to the great, perhaps even terminal detriment of mankind.

Yet somehow he took his eye off the ball long enough for his partners - well, one partner in particular - to hijack the entire company, enter into a compact with Satan…er…Microsoft… and take the whole thing private. No more transparency. He should have paid more attention.

Although…maybe it was that he was using his copious spare time from building that gargantuan EV car company, and that global-sized network of super-size-me charging stations, and…oh, yeah, creating SpaceX, the biggest and most successful spaceship company in the history of the world, (all based on doing yet another thing everybody who knew better said he couldn’t do - reuseable space ships).

Load them up, blast them into orbit, unload them, bring them back to earth and land them on the equivalent of a hole-in-one on a golf course ten thousand miles long, load them up again, blast them into space, wash, rinse, repeat. And why would he be doing that, for God’s sake? Doesn’t he have enough to keep him busy, what with his harem of somewhat odd women and his 742 kids (or whatever it is now) of every imaginable flavor, stripe, and inclination?

Well, anyway, now he’s standing up his third Artificial Intelligence venture, this one based on something called Grok, which is currently taking baby steps around the used-to-be-twitter, now X-itter network, and planned for a wide and revolutionary rollout next year some time.

Right, that Xitter thing. I forgot to mention that while all this other crap was going on, he got annoyed at the Ruling Class-Deep State-Tech Oligarchy-Media Coven monopoly on the dissemination of information, or, more accurately, disinformation, and scrounged $55 billion from under the sofa pillows in his twenty or thirty mansions, many of which he’s never slept in, (I know, I exaggerate. But not by much) to buy Twitter, an acquisition he marked in his own inimitable way by marching into the Twitter HQ on Mission Street in San Francisco carrying a heavy porcelain sink in his arms as he Tweeted, “Let that sink in!”

Elon Musk shows up at Twitter HQ: 'Let that sink in' (youtube.com)

Funny man - really - but he was only getting started. Within a week he’d fired nearly eighty percent of Twitter’s employees, most of whom were deranged leftist “non-binary” loons (according to Musk) charged with censoring or banning any Twitter users to the right of Joseph Stalin, that or simply loafing around on the company dime while chronicling their workplace cavortations on Instagram - a social media platform owned by one of Twitter’s chief competitors.

The weeping, wailing, and outrageously outraged rage over that spawned a temper tantrum on the left from coast to American coast and all the ships at sea. Elon didn’t give a flying rat’s patoot. Nor did he, as so many of his former employees, laboring under delusions of indispensability, predicted, collapse the company and go out of business.

Today, X is not entirely out of the financial woods, but the platform, reformatted around the principles of freedom of speech and transparency of operation, is the single most influential media operation on earth. But that isn’t the real accomplishment. Because what Musk really did was break the the leviathan hammerlock the Powers That Used To Be had on the American, indeed the global, public square.

Nowadays , when the likes of MSNBC’s washed up comic LARPing as a “news person,” Rachel Maddow, or one of the deranged, semi-soused suburban cat ladies on The View, erupts with some especially vile, hate-filled, corrupt, and dishonest eructation, everybody just heads over to X to find out what the real story is, generally in a lot less time than using any other source.

It turns out that it only takes just one to keep the rest of them, if not exactly honest, at least not nearly as exuberantly dishonest as they used to assume was their Satan-given prerogative. Now, when they lie, cheat, and steal, somebody knows about it and is likely posting about it in real time…on X. Formerly Twitter, dontcha know?

So, in the space of not much more than ten years, Elon Musk, African-American (ho, ho) built the most valuable car company in history, with a product line of nothing but electric vehicles. Then he built and continues to build a vast network of Supercharging stations so the EV’s can get juiced as easily as Nancy Pelosi does on a cold Friday night. And with any leftover power, he is standing up what will probably be the most powerful Artificial Intelligence in history, possibly even the first emergent General Artificial Intelligence, thus ringing in the Tech Singularity.

Did I mention he’s taking us to Mars, thus eliminating the single point of failure that took down the dinosaurs, freeing our species from having to contemplate the sad end of the king lizards that had ruled our planet for 180 million years or so?

In the next few years he will put a fully autonomous self-driving car on the road, managed by a mobile computer so powerful it might just go emergent on us as well. All several million of them. Currently, Tesla is rolling out a supervised self-driving system that predicts just one “driver intervention,” (for some reason or other you have to take personal control of the vehicle yourself) every 2000 miles. While this isn’t full autonomy, it’s getting into the ballpark - most drivers would have to take control less than once a month. Think that will have any impact?

And he’s boring a bunch of tunnels underneath Las Vegas. I’m not entirely certain I understand why he’s doing that, but based on past history I’d guess it will be wildly successful, make him another Everest of wealth, and be folded into some other project we haven’t even heard about yet. My guess is he’s building the preliminaries for his Hyperloop system of very high speed capsules traveling in low air pressure tunnels.

Since Musk is so invested in an ever-growing variety of very powerful computer technologies, perhaps it would be useful if humans could hook up to some of them? Maybe something like this - you could call it the Neuralink.

What? Oh, sure. I almost forgot, it’s so trivial. Somewhere in there, four or five years ago, he became the richest man who has ever lived. It must have been a slow day, and he probably thought, “Why the hell not?”

I mean, really, Why the hell not?

And that is pretty much the tale of Elon Musk’s life. Which is why I name him either America’s first, or second Black Swan of the new millennium.

P.S. That competency crisis and all those complex systems blowing up all over the place?

Don’t worry about it. One of Elon’s AIs will be handling all of that for us in the not-too-distant future.

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Hmm. Um. Do you think there is any possibility that Elon himself is humanity’s first emergent AI?