Speech before the Los Angeles World Affairs Council on December 5, 2000:
Thomas
Homer-Dixon
Author, The Ingenuity Gap
Director, Peace and Conflict Studies Program,
University of Toronto
Well, it’s delightful to be with you this evening and to
be here in your beautiful city. This
is actually the first time I’ve really had a chance to visit Los Angeles
properly. I’ve been here a couple
of times before, but I was on a tour today and it really is a marvelous place.
I’d like to talk this evening about my new book, The
Ingenuity Gap. This is a book
that, as Curtis mentioned, asks a number of key questions: Are we creating a world that is too complex to manage?
Do the experts really know what’s going on?
I imagine some of you have an answer in the back of your mind to that
question. Are we really as smart as we think we are?
And, most fundamentally, can we solve the problems of the future?
Now the keystone concept in the argument that I’m going to make this
evening is this concept of the ingenuity gap, and that’s the gap between our
rising requirements for solutions to the problems we face in an evermore complex
and an evermore fast-paced world and our sometimes inadequate ability to supply
those solutions. I’m arguing
basically that in many areas of our lives, in our individual lives, in the lives
and affairs of our national societies and in our global affairs, our problems
are sometimes getting harder, far faster than we can hope to solve them.
What are some of the problems I’m talking about?
Well, I’m discussing things like global climate change, which will
affect potentially billions of people on this planet in the next decades and
which will require us to create the most complex institutions, the most
sophisticated institutions, known in the history of humanity if we’re going to
resolve this problem effectively. I’m
talking about things like the unstable international financial system, a
financial system that has trillions of dollars of hot capital sloshing around
inside of it and that’s so tightly coupled, in that it’s operating so
quickly, that it’s prone to flip between stable and unstable modes, as we saw
with the Asian financial crisis. I’m
talking about the development of zones of anarchy in much of the developing
world, in poor countries around the world, that are suffering from a convergence
of a variety of problems from the diffusion of light weaponry in those societies
to the problems of epidemics of tuberculosis and AIDS.
We’re finding that many of these societies are simply unraveling inside
because of these converging pressures on them.
These are problems on the global level.
I also talk about problems at the national level in our society, such as
rising antibiotic resistance that we’re all familiar with.
This is actually, in some ways, a classic example of a race between our
developing pathogens, the diseases that affect us, and our technical ability,
our medical ability and our epidemiological ability to keep up with these new
pathogens. [We see]
chronic health care crisis in many Western countries.
In this country we have forty million people who are uninsured. Similarly in the United States and Canada, we see problems of
chronic homelessness in just about all of our major cities.
These are problems; the problem of the homeless is something that our
municipal, state, provincial, and federal governments seem incapable of solving.
Another issue that I think is important within our national
society are the widening gaps between the super-rich and everyone else, gaps
that undermine our sense of community and that risk in time the stability, the
very stability, of our societies if they continue to widen. Now
the most tangible manifestation of the ingenuity gap in our everyday lives is
information overload, I believe. I
think that all of us feel that we are inundated by information.
We have too much information, too many inputs, too many things happening
in our lives, too many stimuli in general, and often we feel just overwhelmed by
the things that are confronting us, and we feel that there is a gap between our
ability to manage information and the actual information that we are getting in
our lives.
Now, I’m going to try to put all of this in a bit of
perspective by telling a story of an airplane crash that I introduce at the
beginning of the book, and it’s quite a dramatic story.
Some of you probably remember this.
It’s the story of the United Flight 232, flying between Denver and
Chicago on July 19, 1989. This plane was at altitude when one of its engines blew out.
It was a DC10, and a DC10 has three engines, one on each wing and then
one on the tail. The tail engine
blew out, and when that happened, the shards of the exploding engine destroyed
all of the hydraulic systems within the plane.
There are three independent hydraulic systems that would normally allow
the pilots in the front of the plane to steer the plane, control the rotor and
the ailerons and the other flight surfaces that direct the plane though the
atmosphere. When this happened, the
pilots in the front of the plane suddenly found that their controls went dead
and the plane twisted into a right-hand turn and started to dive.
Within fifteen or twenty seconds they would have lost control, but at the
last moment the pilot increased power to the right engine.
Remember, there are two engines-- there’s one on the right wing and one
on the left wing--and he increased power to the right engine and that brought
the right wing up. So, the plane
was stabilized for a time and they realized that one of the ways that they could
steer the plane from then on was to use differential engine thrust, to increase
power to the right engine and then the left engine alternatively and have it
essentially skid through the air. That’s
the way they continued to fly the craft at that point.
Now, it turned out that there was an additional pilot in
first class, somebody who was off duty and who realized that something was wrong
and he offered his services to the pilots in the front of the plane.
When he went up, the captain of the plane suggested that he take over
control of the engine throttles. They
were so busy trying to deal with other things going on in the plane that he
asked this new person, who is called a check airman because he was, in general,
responsible for overseeing crews as they were flying around the United States.
He was off duty at the time. The
pilot asked this check airman to stand between the pilot and co-pilot with a
throttle in each hand and change the engine thrust, and basically steer the
plane like that. Now, when I do
this presentation I have a photograph of the flight path of United 232 that
describes a series of clockwise circles across the Iowa countryside.
They were still essentially out of control, but they had developed, on
the spot, a way to maintain some semblance of control over the plane.
Eventually, they were able to land the plane at Sioux City,
Iowa, and they brought the plane right down at the end of one runway.
Some of you may have seen the videotapes of this.
It hit the ground five times, broke into pieces, the cockpit broke off
and tumbled across the tarmac to one side and the fuselage broke into two
pieces, cart-wheeled away, and spilled into flames.
Of the 300 people on board 200 did survive and, in fact, the entire
cockpit crew managed to survive; [the cockpit] was compressed to a piece of
metal about six feet high.
Now you might ask, why do I start my argument with this
story, which seems like a dramatic, rather sensational story, to begin an
argument about the state of the world? Why
would I possibly use this as a metaphor to describe the state of our world?
Well, there are a number of things that stuck me about this event that I
thought resonated with what is happening in our world right now.
And I’ll just talk a bit about four of those things.
The first thing that stuck me, and the reason that I was
interested in this crash from the beginning, was that I came across a study of
the communication within the cockpit at the time, during the forty minutes after
the explosion, and I found that this study showed that these pilots within the
cockpit--the pilot and the co-pilot and the check airman plus the
navigator--were basically communicating at their maximum possible rate.
They were up against their peak cognitive loads.
They were facing a converging series of pressures and they had to process
information at an extraordinary rate to land that plane.
They had to make countless decisions at a very high rate.
In fact, their rate of decision making and their rate of information
processing was about 5 times greater than the maximum rate that a pilot would
experience even in landing a plane under stressful conditions in a normal
flight. And it stuck me that this
situation was a good example of the kind of situation that any of our decision
makers face in the world today, especially during times of crisis when they have
multiple things happening, multiple streams of information, and they constantly
have to make decisions at high speed without adequate information available to
them. And they are constantly
operating against their maximum cognitive capability.
The next thing that I thought was interesting is that when
a plane loses control over all its flight surfaces, like the ailerons and the
rotor and everything else, but it still has power, it tends to do what
aeronautical engineers called a fugoid, which means that it goes through the
atmosphere almost like a porpoise jumping through the waves of the water, wave
of the ocean. It goes up and down
through the atmosphere. Now the key
thing about fugoid is that when you change the thrust to the engines, the plane
does not respond to actually change its orientation for twenty to thirty seconds
afterwards. There is a time lag
between the time you actually change the engine thrust and the actual change in
the direction of the plane, the response of the plane.
Similarly, we find in our world today that there are countless time lags
in the complex systems that we are dealing with, between the time we intervene
in the system and the time it actually responds, perhaps in the way we want it
to. The example that we see in the
world all the time, and it’s one we are confronting right now, is the time lag
in the changes in central bank interest rates and subsequent changes in the
output of goods and services from economies.
That time lag is usually between six and nine months, and that makes
directing economies very difficult because you have to constantly think in the
future and you are not sure exactly what the situation is going to be in the
future, but you have to make judgments about changing the system now.
We see exactly that issue right now with Alan Greenspan and the direction of the American economy. A lot of people are concerned that he’s raised interest rates too much, but it was impossible to know that six or eight months ago or a year ago when he first began raising interest rates. These time lags are characteristic of all the complex systems we are embedded in, whether we are talking about our national economies or whether we are talking about things like the global climate. The carbon dioxide that we’re putting into the atmosphere around the planet right now won’t have an impact on the temperature of the atmosphere for up to 100 years from now. The warming that we’re seeing now is a consequence of carbon dioxide that was put into the atmosphere many decades ago. So, again that was something that resonated for me between this flight and the state of our world.
Another thing that I thought was quite striking is that
when these pilots were sitting in their cockpit, they didn’t know exactly
which of the tools available to them were actually controlling the direction of
the plane and which weren’t. It
turns out that the only thing that was controlling the direction of the plane
was the differential engine thrust that the check airman was exercising with the
two throttles. However, because
they didn’t know that was the only thing, they continued to work the wheels
and the columns in the cockpit. The
pilot and the co-pilot still continued to work all of the instruments and
controls available to them because they thought that they might have some
residual control over the plane that way. And
similarly in our world today, because we don’t understand the systems we
operate in very well, we often have to do everything to try to control them.
We feel we don’t know exactly what works and what doesn’t work and so
ultimately the load that our decision makers face is much greater because they
have to try to do everything rather than just doing the things that really do
work because we don’t know exactly what works.
Now the final thing that I felt was particularly important
about this case was the role of experts, and I referred to that a little bit
before. As soon as the explosion
occurred the pilots in the plane radioed to the ground and said, “Get us
systems aircraft maintenance-- get us SAM.”
These are the people within United Airlines that provide advice to pilots
in a time of crisis like this. And
so a number of SAM engineers gathered around a speakerphone in Chicago and
started talking to the pilots up in the plane, to the navigator in particular.
The first thing that happened was that they got a run-down of the state
of the plane. But the people on the
ground, the engineers on the ground, these SAM engineers, couldn’t believe
that they’d lost all three hydraulic systems.
In fact, they’d never heard of such an accident before.
The point of having three hydraulic systems, independent systems, was
that if you lost one you still have two more and in the unlikely event that you
lost two, you’d still have one left. But
here they’d lost all three and they talked about this for a while and then
there was radio silence, and twenty minutes into the flight after the explosion
they radioed, “Can you just confirm that you have all three hydraulic systems
down?” The navigator said,
“Affirmative, affirmative, affirmative,” and then he just basically told
them to go away because they were useless.
Well, I think that we can see the parallel. In times of crisis, the people that we anoint as experts are
frequently inadequate to the situations they are confronting.
They don’t really seem to know what’s going on and they don’t
really seem to be able to answer the key questions that we have and tell us what
to do.
I felt that this incident was revealing--that it was a
metaphor. But you might still
wonder whether it is legitimate to say that we are spiraling across, in a sense,
the Iowa countryside as we progress into the future. Are we really that much out of control? Well, I would argue, going back to some of those problems I
discussed before, that there are a whole variety of challenges that we aren’t
confronting effectively in this world. That
there are time lags that we can’t deal with effectively and that in many cases
our experts are inadequate to the challenges that they face.
I want to say a little bit though about where this idea comes from, where
I thought this up originally, why I decided to focus on the flow of ingenuity
and then I am going to talk more specifically about what I mean by ingenuity.
As Curtis mentioned, I have been working with a number of
colleagues for many years on the relationship between environmental and stress
violence in developing countries. These
are things like water scarcity and land scarcity contributing to revolution,
rebellion, and civil war in developing countries. We’ve been looking at cases like the Philippines, like
Rwanda, at South Africa, at Pakistan, and Chiapas in Mexico. We have accumulated a lot of information about relationships,
linkages between environmental stress and violence in these places.
But one thing that we realized early on is that some societies adjust
reasonably well to scarcities of water and crops, land and fuel, wood and forest
supplies, where as other societies don’t adjust very well at all.
And those societies that don’t adjust, that don’t adapt, often suffer
from social break-down and sometimes violence.
So the critical question right at the beginning of our research was, why
do some societies adjust well and some don’t?
That was the starting point for the development of the rudimentary theory
of ingenuity that I’m going to talk about today.
I wanted to understand why societies, or how societies, adapt to the
complex stresses they face.
Now, after working on this for a number of years and I’m
sure all of you have had this experience at one point or another, when you’re
monomaniacal about something for long enough you start to see it everywhere--and
I started to see ingenuity gaps everywhere in my life.
I had this hubris, I guess you might say, that I could take this idea and
I could apply it to the world more generally, beyond poor countries and beyond
environmental problems, and that’s what I tried to do in this book.
I had this intuition that there were relationships and common forces
operating between the things that we see in our daily lives all the way to
things and events we see at the global level.
So again, those are problems I talked about and challenges I talked about
before, such as information overload in our daily lives.
I’m suggesting that the rising apparent complexity and pace of our
daily lives, the causes of that rising complexity and pace, are the same causes
that are driving things like the instability of the international financial
system, that there are linkages among these various phenomena once you start to
look at them in the right way. Now
that’s a fairly bold claim. I’m
going to talk for a few minutes about what I think those common forces are back
behind the scenes, so to speak, leading to all of these different challenges
that I’m suggesting in our daily lives, in the lives and affairs of our
societies and in the affairs of our global society as a whole.
What do I mean by ingenuity? I’m talking about the rising requirement for ingenuity and
our sometimes limited ability to supply ingenuity.
But what do I really mean by ingenuity?
I define it as ideas that we apply to our practical, social and technical
problems, or the sets of instructions that we use to tell us how to arrange the
physical and social constituents of our world in ways that help us meet our
goals. So they are basically like
recipes. Ingenuity consists of
recipes for how we can arrange our physical world and our social world.
Now, I’d critically distinguish between two types of ingenuity –
technical ingenuity and social ingenuity. Technical
ingenuity is ideas for technologies, ideas that help us meet our physical needs
for health, for transport, for shelter, for entertainment and the like, but just
as important, in fact I believe probably more important ultimately, is what I
call social ingenuity. These are
ideas for how we arrange our societies, how we arrange the institutions that
allow us to prosper together as a community.
These are ideas for effective markets, good governments, for judicial
systems that work well, and the like. Now, social ingenuity, I think, is more
important than technical ingenuity because you don’t get the flow of the right
kinds of technologies unless you get your institutions working right.
And particularly you’ve got to get your markets working right; you have
to give people the right price signals, your technological entrepreneurs the
right price signals, if they’re going to take the risks in developing
technologies. So you need to get
your markets and your social institutions before you actually get the
technologies that you want. Social
ingenuity is a precursor, in other words, for technological ingenuity.
The next thing I do is distinguish between the requirement for ingenuity and the supply of ingenuity. I’m suggesting that as our world becomes more complex, the requirement for ingenuity rises – the requirement for the sets of instructions rises. We need more, in a sense, sets of instructions, more sophisticated sets of instructions to deal with the problems that we face. On the supply side we need to distinguish between two things: the generation of ideas, whether it be in a laboratory or corporation, or in government bureaucracy, research think tank, or at the community level when people are dealing with their local problems, and the implementation and delivery of those ideas. And that’s where the problem usually arises. It turns out we usually have lots of fairly good ideas to solve our problems around but we don’t implement and deliver a lot of the good ones, especially because there are narrowly vested interests, special interests, that can block the delivery of solutions to our problems. That’s something I focus on at some length in the book.