It's been about two years now since I retired from my last paying IT position. At the time of my retirement, I was just finishing up about 13 years of being a member of the Middleware Operations group of Discover Financial Services, an excellent corporation best known to most by its fine line of credit cards. I really enjoyed my time at Discover. It was my first assignment in IT operations, and I greatly benefited from experiencing the daily mayhem of supporting large-scale commercial software. For a good description of what I was doing at Discover, take a look at my posting on Software Embryogenesis. Prior to that, I had spent about 24 years in IT development groups at United Airlines and Amoco.
In IT operations, you quickly learn the value of finally rebooting a system that has totally run amuck after all other measures have failed. Of course, such a drastic step is not the first course of action to be taken. When first paged out in the middle of the night for an outage conference call, all of the usual suspects join the teleconference in order to troubleshoot, and hopefully, quickly remedy the situation. This would entail the IT Command Center, representatives from the Call Centers, the IT Manager on call, Applications Development, Middleware Operations, Database Operations, Unix Operations, Network Operations and IT Security. The purpose of the outage teleconference is to rapidly assess the impact of the problem at hand and then to come up with plausible explanations for its root cause. Then, based upon plausible explanations that result from evidence-based rational thought, we would then as a group come to a consensus on what remedial steps to take to resolve the problem. For example, we might all decide to restart an Oracle instance to see if that fixed the problem, or we might restart some Websphere JVMs. However, after a few hours of an outage, things would begin to get a bit desperate as we began to run out of plausible explanations for the outage. At that point, all of the participants on the outage call would begin to grasp at straws to get us out of the mess at hand. As a last resort, if we had just done a major install, requiring a whole night of work, we would spend an equal amount of time during prime shift to back out the major install. However, if the outage had not arisen after a major install, we were then left with no alternative but to start rebooting entire Unix servers. This was always a very dangerous operation because Unix is such a stable operating system. Many of our Unix servers would run for four years without a reboot! In IT, a lot can happen during four years. Many hundreds of operating system patches and application installs occur over a four-year period, so nobody knew for sure what would happen after rebooting a Unix server that had been happily running without a problem for four years or more without a reboot.
All of this should be quite familiar for anybody using a machine that runs the Windows operating system. Now don't get me wrong. I have always been a lifetime fan of Microsoft, going all the way back to DOS 1.0, mainly because I could never afford Apple products, and none of the corporations that I worked for could afford Apple products either. Microsoft operating systems may have always had a problem with hanging and freezing up, but in my view, Microsoft did manage to bring cheap computing to the masses, like Henry Ford's Model T. So before beginning my workday as an IT professional, I routinely rebooted my Windows machine each morning, so that I would have a fresh machine that likely would not freeze up during the day while I might be on a conference call fighting an outage. Also, if we were planning for an all-night major install, I would reboot my Windows work machine just prior to the install window and crank up all of the software that I needed for the install. But now that I am retired, I just run my personal Windows machine until it needs a reboot for a Windows update or the machine starts to behave badly for no apparent reason. I also always keep the Windows Task Manager running at all times to troubleshoot machine problems. Task Manager lets me keep an eye on how Windows is using the machine's CPU, Memory and Disk resources. When Windows starts to hang, I can then see which processes are sucking up the CPU, Memory and Disk. I can then use the Windows Task Manager to kill the culprit process by right-clicking on the process and doing an "End task" on it, just like I used to do at work. However, sometimes that just does not work, and I have to reboot my machine. My personal world-record for running a Windows instance without a reboot is about 10 days. That is far short of four years for a Unix machine!
The important take-back from all of this is that sometimes when a complex system runs amuck, the best thing to do is to simply reboot the system and start afresh. For example, I routinely reboot my cable box when problems occur, and I have found that I have to reboot my furnace and air conditioning system every time we have a power outage. For some reason, the motherboard on my furnace and air conditioning system does not like the initial ragged voltage sine wave that comes from my power company when power is first restored.
Does Civilization Need a Reboot?
In recent years, I feel like once again, that I am on one of those middle-of-the-night outage calls for all of civilization. This is because it now seems that many of the end-users of civilization are now calling into our global Call Centers with complaints about the way civilization is currently running. Now civilization has been running continuously for about 4,000 years, ever since it first appeared in the Middle East about 7,000 years after the last Ice Age on the Earth. And like all complex systems, civilization has had its transient ups and downs during that 4,000-year run. But I contend that all of those bumps in the road can easily be attributed to the transients that all nonlinear systems are subject to. But thankfully, we found that most of those problems were largely self-correcting in nature over the long run, without the need for a complete reboot of civilization. But now I am not so sure that civilization can come through the current set of challenges it now faces without a complete reboot. After all, sometimes you just need to turn the power off to a complex system and let all of the transistors go to zero. Then you can bring the complex system back up in stages to finally restore service.
For me, the major challenges that civilization is facing and not dealing with properly are:
1. We are currently not dealing very well with the rise of software as the dominant form of self-replicating information on the planet. Now we Homo sapiens also had difficulties with the parasitic/symbiotic relationship that we struck with the memes about 200,000 years ago, as the memes rose to become the dominant form of self-replicating information on the planet too. Yes, the rise of the memes within the minds of Homo sapiens did allow our species to flourish as we passed down the wisdom gained by our predecessors by means of cultural evolution, but we also managed to pass down some really disgusting, brutal and destructive memes as well, like the memes for war, genocide, slavery, torture, imperialism, fascism and another form of fascism we called communism back in the 20th century. Indeed, the history of Homo sapiens on this planet has been strewn with many shocking events that we all would have a hard time explaining to a delegation of intelligent aliens. See A Brief History of Self-Replicating Information for more on that.
But the rise of the memes was certainly a necessary precursor to the rise of civilization. The problem that civilization is currently having with the rise of software is that software is now rapidly eroding the very foundations upon which civilization was built. As we saw in Oligarchiology and the Rise of Software to Predominance in the 21st Century and The Danger of Tyranny in the Age of Software all civilizations have always been based upon a hierarchical/oligarchical structure that empowered a 2% High to run the civilization. This oligarchical fact of life has been true under numerous social and economic systems - autocracies, aristocracies, feudalism, capitalism, socialism and communism. It just seems that there have always been about 2% of the population that liked to run things, no matter how things were set up, and there is nothing wrong with that. We certainly always do need somebody around to run things because, honestly, 98% of us simply do not have the ambition or desire to do so. Of course, the problem throughout history has always been that the top 2% naturally tended to abuse the privilege a bit and overdid things a little, resulting in 98% of the population having a substantially lower economic standard of living than the top 2%, and that has led to several revolutions in the past that did not always end so well. However, historically, so long as the bulk of the population had a relatively decent life, things went well in general for the entire oligarchical society. The key to this economic stability has always been that the top 2% has always needed the remaining 98% of us around to do things for them, and that maintained the hierarchical peace within societies. But that has been rapidly changing in the 21st century as software has continued to displace more and more workers. As Alfred Henry Lewis noted in 1906, “There are only nine meals between mankind and anarchy.”, and when things get economically tough, mankind tends to descend into the simple solutions provided by fascism, as it did in the 20th century, and now in the 21st century with the rise of the fascist Alt-Right movements seen around the world. This has only become even more of a threat than it was in the past thanks to the power of social media software and the coming Internet of Things (IoT) - see Fascism and the Internet of Things.
2. Civilization has decided not to bother with stopping the climate change that we have foolishly brought upon ourselves by dumping huge amounts of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. For more on that please see This Message on Climate Change Was Brought to You by SOFTWARE, How to Use Your IT Skills to Save the World, 400 PPM - The Dawn of the SophomorEocene and Last Call for Carbon-Based Intelligence on Planet Earth. The resulting economic impacts from climate change are also going to put huge strains on the traditional hierarchical/oligarchical structures of civilization too. Of course, we could have prevented the effects of climate change for a relatively low cost, but instead, we all wisely decided to go with the much higher cost of constantly paying for the never-ending costs of trying to live with a state of perpetual climate change. As I always caution - saving money sure gets expensive!
Maybe Civilization Really Needs a New Version Upgrade and a Reboot
Given the above, it seems that Civilization 1.0 may be doomed to degenerate into a very undesirable state of world fascism, like that of George Orwell's 1949 dystopian view of the future in his infamous book Nineteen Eighty-Four in which Orwell outlined a very grim possible future in his book-within-a-book The Theory and Practice of Oligarchical Collectivism. So obviously, it seems that civilization is indeed in need of at least a reboot because its current path seems to be untenable. But would a simple reboot solve our problems? Perhaps we all really do need to stop for a moment and let all of our transistors go to zero. Then we should calmly sit down together and take a good look at the current version of civilization that we have been running for the past 4,000 years. Before restarting civilization, we probably need to come up with a new version release that can effectively deal with the following problems:
1. How do we run civilization when machines are doing most of the work required to keep civilization going?
2. How do we distribute the output of civilization if hardly anybody is working?
3. How do we run a civilization without the use of carbon-based fuels?
The solution to the last problem is very easy. As an 18th-century liberal and a 20th-century conservative, I always like to use the power of the free market to solve complex problems, but the Darwinian mechanisms of inheritance, innovation and natural selection upon which capitalism is founded require incentives to work, and carbon-based fuels now appear to be very cheap to the market because they do not bear the full weight of the long-range economic costs of climate change. To provide the necessary incentives for the market to work we need to impose a stiff carbon tax on the carbon content of fuels at the point of extraction right at the well-head or the coal mine. Then refund the carbon tax income on income taxes to make the carbon tax revenue neutral and then just let the free market fix the problem all by itself. With a carbon tax in place, people will automatically seek out a low-carbon footprint to further their own economic interests without the need of governmental regulations.
The solution to the first two problems is much more difficult. Some, like free-market economist Milton Friedman, have suggested that we provide all the inhabitants of the Earth with a subsidized minimum standard of living by means of something like a negative income tax for those who have been displaced by automation. Then let the free market provide those who are still working with additional income as we do today. But one always needs to worry about unintended consequences when designing a Civilization 2.0. Remember, Civilization 1.0 is a meme that evolved on its own through the Darwinian mechanisms of inheritance, innovation and natural selection. Civilization 1.0 does seem to have some serious problems, but a poorly designed Civilization 2.0 might have even more. For a cautionary tale on the subject, please see THE MACHINE STOPS by E.M. Forster (1909) at:
https://www.ele.uri.edu/faculty/vetter/Other-stuff/The-Machine-Stops.pdf
This short story from 1909 describes an engineered world civilization of the distant future that has poisoned the surface of the Earth to the point that the entire population must live underground on artificially purified air and water. Even so, the entire population of the Earth has a very high standard of living and nobody needs to work because all the needs of the entire population are provided by a self-sustaining Machine that takes care of everything, including itself. However, this idyllic civilization does not end well as the Machine begins to fail and nobody knows how to fix it.
Figure 1 – In 1909, E.M. Foster wrote the short story THE MACHINE STOPS in which he described an engineered world civilization that lived underground because the surface of the Earth had been poisoned by the inhabitants of the Earth. The citizens of this new release of Civilization 2.0 led idyllic lives with a very high standard of living provided by the self-sustaining Machine that took care of all of their needs. However, things began to fall apart when the Machine began to fail because nobody knew how to fix the Machine.
So we may be in a bit of a bind because all of the complex systems known to us all evolved over time by means of the Darwinian mechanisms of inheritance, innovation and natural selection. However, the evolution of Darwinian systems does have its limitations as I outlined in The Limitations of Darwinian Systems. Indeed, Civilization 1.0 seems to be stuck upon a localized peak within the survivability terrain of civilizations with no place to go but down, and jumping to an even higher peak in the survivability terrain of civilizations by means of an engineered design seems to be highly unlikely based upon the failures of socialism in the 20th century to do so. Any suggestions?
Comments are welcome at scj333@sbcglobal.net
To see all posts on softwarephysics in reverse order go to:
https://softwarephysics.blogspot.com/
Regards,
Steve Johnston
