Some Thoughts on Nassim Taleb's "The Black Swan"
I have been reading the book, "The Black Swan", and finding it quite interesting. So far (I haven't finished it yet), Taleb has described the "black swan", as an event which no one saw coming, yet which radically changed the world we live in. He goes on to explore how the hardwiring of our brains tends to prevent us from seeing black swans coming. He says that we humans are geared to record past histories, "track records" if you will, and extrapolate them forward into the future. However, a black swan does not follow from a preexisting set of events, but by definition appears 'de novo'; it is something completely new.
Some examples of black swans which have radically changed the way humans live our lives:
- The bow and arrow
- Agriculture
- The wheel
- The internal combustion engine
- Powered flight
- Penicillin
- Computers
- The Internet (ongoing)
Since black swans are by definition extreme-low-probability, virtually-non-extrapolatable phenomena, they are virtually impossible to predict. However, I've gotten far enough into Taleb's book to reach the part where he advises us not to try to predict the black swan, but rather to prepare for the changes it may wreak. My personal take on this part is, to examine those things which we so take for granted in our world, that it does not occur to us to imagine what the world would be like when they are superseded.
I will start with an example from around 160 years ago, the world of 1850.
In 1850:
- All land travel, shipping, and commerce were powered by animals, or human feet. (This includes canals)
- All sea travel was powered by wind in sails.
- News and information was transmitted by means of printing on paper, or orally.
- The Ottoman Empire held sway over the Middle East and northern Africa.
- The main sources of energy were burning wood and coal
- ... and so on.
No one in 1850 could envision a carriage which was self-propelled without the presence of a horse. In fact, even as late as 1890, a drawing was made by an engineer who proposed to harness the power of steam by-- wait for it-- building a steam-powered horse (!) Steamships were just a mad-scientist gleam in the eyes of a handful of cutting-edge engineers in 1850. And if you had proposed to any audience of the day that passengers and mail would be transported through the air in large numbers via heavier-than-air vehicles, you would have seen the room fall to the floor in gales of helpless laughter. The Ottoman Empire had been around for literally centuries, and as far as anyone could tell, it would be there for centuries more. Petroleum was known mostly as a source of tar, asphalt, and occasionally as a minor source of lighting fuel.
As we know, of course, the ensuing hundred years saw squadrons of black swans descend upon the world, hatched by an explosion of technological invention which continues to this day. The world we take for granted now would be unimaginable to our ancestors of a century and a half past.
So what does our future bring?
I do not believe I can imagine it. However, I do believe that I can list those things we take for granted today, and we can begin to imagine (and perhaps prepare) for a world in which they are no longer true:
- Petroleum and its derivatives are the major source of energy used by society(ies)
- Humans of the Caucasian race in the Northern Hemisphere own or control most of the planet's resources, and have the highest standard of living.
- Males are dominant over females over most of the globe, owning or controlling many more resources/"wealth"/property than women, given better education, and having command/veto power over women's life choices (and not the reverse).
- A capitalistic/free-market, work-and-money-based system is the main economic system (or at least the dominant one).
- Humans exchange information by talking to each other, reading each other's writings, or by means of audio-video depictions of various activities and events.
- Humans' diet is composed of substances derived from plants which are grown in the ground, animals which are fed on those plants or on other animals, or from sea creatures of various species.
- The surface of the earth (and a few miles of atmosphere above it) is the only location in which humans live and our activites are conducted.
- Humans and goods are transported by means of vehicles which take a definite period of time to travel from Point A to Point B.
- Our planet has ice caps, which cover regions of generally a thousand miles' radius or so from the poles.
- Our planet's rotational poles are near its magnetic poles.
- Our planet is 75% covered by oceans which average a half mile to a mile deep.
- ... and so on.
I'm not even imagining alternatives here, just making a list of "foundation stones" of our lives today which we take for granted. And you can already see, by even imagining that there can be alternatives to these things, we get a vision of the future spinning rapidly off into what we would call science fiction. Even a system based on alternatives to the first two or three items would be virtually unrecognizable to us today-- and I consider those to be the least "disruptive" of the list. Proceeding further down the list:
Capitalism is one of several economic systems which have existed throughout history. The others are: hunter-gathering, village-agricultural, feudal, communism (and probably some I've missed). History makes clear that economic systems are changed and replaced quite ruthlessly to meet changing needs, and I see no indication that capitalism is any more immune to the winds of change than any other. What shape the new system would take, I cannot imagine-- save to suspect that it will allocate resources, skills, and work more efficiently to where they are needed and wanted than capitalism does. This is the reason why the previous systems replaced their older ancestors.
Imagine a world in which the bandwidth of human communication is no longer restricted by what we can say, read, watch or hear... a kind of "UberInternet", where ideas and information are transmitted almost instantly, and as quickly as human brains can absorb and process it. Someone already has imagined one such alternative, and called it, "The Borg". Should such an alternative to current human communication limits be actually created, it may make us into "the Borg"-- or it may cause the creation of an entirely different system, which we cannot imagine (I expect the latter).
For the items further down on the list, even imagining that there can be alternatives to them takes us deeper into the reaches of so-called "science fiction". But before we scoff, we must remember the world of 1850, and how they would have reacted to a description of our world today. I mean... men on the moon???
'Not only is the future stranger than we imagine, it is stranger than we can imagine.' (paraphrase)