“We should consider ourselves as a product of these two interacting and often competing levels of evolutionary selection.”
~ E.O. Wilson [2]

Richard Dawkins introduced in his book “The selfish gene” [1] the ORGANISM AS VEHICLE metaphor: he argued eloquently that biological organisms can be considered as survival machines of genes, used by them to lever themselves into the next generation.

If this vehicle would be a train, i.e. if we consider evolution as a railway, then biological organisms can be compared to trains, which carry their genes from one generation to the next. The genes would be the passengers, the organisms the trains, and the different generations of organisms would be like stations – stations where the passengers of the next generation are shuffled, arranged and selected by natural selection. This means the station would correspond to the common place or time where the organisms meet and where natural selection takes place. The place would be the nest, territory or city, the time would be the common generation.

Human generations in particular are not like a normal station, they are more like a union station. They contain a population of replicators from different places and different systems (genes, memes, or abstract replicators like ideas in general) waiting to be processed. They are not only subject to natural selection, they are also affected by group selection.

In North America, a union station is usually owned by a separate corporation whose shares are owned by the different railways which use it, so that the costs and benefits of its operations are shared proportionately among them. Stations are places where different people and passengers meet. Union stations are moreover stations which are owned and used by different systems.

The human mind is in fact like a joint venture whose shares are owned by the different evolutionary systems that use it, whether genes or memes, a product of interacting and often competing evolutionary systems. A product of a Star Wars civilization with Stone Age emotions, or, as E.O. Wilson puts it [2]: “Right now we’re living in what Carl Sagan correctly termed a demon-haunted world. We have created a Star Wars civilisation but we have Palaeolithic emotions, medieval institutions and godlike technology. That’s dangerous.”  Humans are a bit like union stations where all kinds of different characters meet, from Star Wars to Stone Age. And all these people struggle with each other to get the next train. Wilson writes [3] “the human condition is an endemic turmoil rooted in the evolution processes that created us. The worst in our nature coexists with the best, and so it will ever be”.

It is this duality of Star Wars and Stone Age that is so specific and characteristic for us. One reason is that multilevel selection was our origin in the first place. In the words of E.O. Wilson [2]: “Humans originated by multilevel selection – individual selection interacting with group selection [..] We should consider ourselves as a product of these two interacting and often competing levels of evolutionary selection. Individual versus group selection results in a mix of altruism and selfishness, of virtue and sin, among the members of a society.”

References

[1] Richard Dawkins,  The selfish gene, Oxford University Press, 1976

[2] E.O. Wilson, The full-blown American Optimist, New Scientist 21 April 2012 (34-35)

[3] Natalie Angier, Edward O. Wilson’s New Take on Human Nature, Smithsonian magazine, April 2012

(The picture of a union station in L.A. is from Wikipedia)

Adaptation is one of the main topics of this blog, since it is the major characteristics of complex adaptive systems. It can be found in multiple fields and many different systems. In anthropology, adaptation is usually defined as the gradual process organisms undergo to achieve a beneficial adjustment to a particular environment [1]. Organisms adjust themselves to the conditions of the environment. Indeed there are as many types and forms of adaptations as there are organisms and systems: biological, psychological, social, and economic systems. Adaptations can range from short term changes in form of temporary adjustments (often reversible) to long term, irreversible changes in form of written, inheritable code changes.

Humans are the ultimate masters of adaptation. They use sunglasses, scarfs and hats to protect themselves from strong sunshine, they wear light clothes in the summer and warm ones in the winter to protect themselves from heat and cold, respectively. Like all mammals they sweat when it is hot and shiver when it is cold. They have adapted themselves to every inhabitable area on earth, from the Arctic to the Sahara Desert. They use fire to adapt to inedible food, and they construct houses to protect themselves from the weather. They adapt their behavior perfectly to the group they live in by learning their language, customs and conventions.

In the past we have considered a lot of different forms of adaptations. What do they have in common? To which system do they belong? Barbara D. Miller distinguishes in her book Anthropology [2] three categories of adaptation: genetic, phenotypic or physical, and cultural. She defines genetic adaptations as “a change that, over a long period of time, has been selected for and thus becomes part of the genetic heritage of a population”. Cultural adaptation is “a learned and shared response to environmental stresses” (for example the use of fire or the construction of houses). Phenotypic and physical adaptations can be found in between in the phenotype: for example in form of a temporary acclimatization to a different climate.

Harrison and Morphy mention in their book Human Adaptation [3] four different basic forms: genetic, physiological, behavioral and cultural adaptation. They affect different organisms and systems, all the way from genetic to cultural systems. Here we consider physiological adaptation as the link between genetic and behavioral adaptation, since physiology is situated between biology and psychology (at least physically). Anthropology comprises all of these different forms of adaptation, because all of them concern humans. It can be considered as a link as well, only from an evolutionary perspective.

Genetic Adaptation

Affects physical properties of biological organisms (plants, animals, ..) in general, esp. humans as biological organisms. Biological evolution and natural selection determine how animals look like. They result in the particular shape, specific form and individual appearance which is encoded in the genes. Long term changes involve permanent, inheritable changes of the genetic code.

Physiological Adaptation

Affects physiological properties based on genetic changes which control the behavior: Emotions, Feelings, Depression, Stress, Intelligence. Physiological refers to organic or bodily processes of an organism. Physiological adjustments are short-term changes in response to environmental conditions: presence of predators or prey, climatic conditions (very low or very high temperature), etc.

Behavioral Adaptation

Affects properties of cognitive and psychological systems (adaptive lifeforms), esp. humans as intelligent beings: Arrogance, Kindness,  Brevity, Intelligence . Our personalities are complex products of multiple factors. In general, as in all evolutionary systems, favorable variations tend to be preserved. Some of our behaviors are more successful than others. We tend to keep those which are successful and drop those which are not. The result after a long path-dependent development is our “character” or “personality”.

Cultural Adaptation

Affects properties of cultural systems (cultures, companies, corporations)  with “cultural DNA” esp. humans as social groups: Anonymity, Tolerance, Corruption. Long term changes involve permanent, inheritable changes of the corporate identity or  “cultural DNA” code.

References:

[1] Cultural Anthropology: The Human Challenge, William A. Haviland, Harald E. L. Prins, Bunny McBride, Dana Walrat, Wadsworth Publishing, 2007

[2] Anthropology, Barbara D. Miller, Pearson, 2006

[3] Human Adaptation, G.A. Harrison and Howard Morphy (Editors), Oxford University Press, 1993

( The sunglasses picture is from Flickr user Hamed Saber )

Someone contacted me via email recently and drew my attention to the history of Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC). She said her name is Megan Davenport but I am not sure if this is her real name. Well, anyway, the DEC story sounds interesting. DEC was a major American company in the computer industry and a leading vendor of computer systems, software and peripherals from the 1960s to the 1990s. It suffered the same fate as Sun Microsystems recently: like Sun which was acquired by Oracle, DEC was acquired by Compaq and disappeared subsequently.

Yet DEC was not an arbitrary computer company among many. Once DEC was the second-largest computer company in the world. According to a boston globe article, DEC was the Google of the ’70s and ’80s: it was dominated by an innovative engineering culture (only focused on hardware instead of software). Now it no longer exists. Some legacy parts of it still live on in other companies like HP and Intel, others became part of public domain and open source. DEC invented interactive computing and developed the first computers for personal use. DEC was one of the first businesses connected to the Internet with dec.com, registered in 1985. It developed the command-line interface, console or terminal. The first versions of C and UNIX were invented on PDP mini computers from DEC.

Like Microsoft, Amazon, Google and Apple today, DEC was once a pioneering force in the fields of computer systems and software. Now it has vanished nearly without a trace. The last VAX workstations and PDP-11 systems have been used to control and monitor factories, transportation systems and nuclear plants. The big PDP mini computers in the museums look increasingly like fossil remains of an ancient, now extinct computer culture.

Computers and Markets

How can a major American company in the computer industry with so many crucial innovations and over 100,000 employees simply dissolve, collapse and cease to exist? It was larger than Microsoft, Apple or Google today: Microsoft has now 92,000 employees, Apple 60,000 employees, Amazon 56,000, and Google 33,000. Will one of the powerful IT corporations today – Microsoft, Apple, Google, Amazon – share the same fate? Well, Microsoft is at risk, since Google will win the race for the smartphone operating system. And Apple certainly would have suffered the same fate already if Steve Jobs would not have turned the company around and positioned the company in the new smartphone market.

DEC and the early Apple had a lot in common, they sold the full stack, a bundle of hardware and proprietary software, i.e. a complete set of hardware equipped with an own operating system. DEC built not only one OS, they built quite a lot of interactive operating systems, including OS-8, TOPS-10, TOPS-20, RSTS/E, RSX-11, RT-11, and OpenVMS. Each of their PDP computer series had an own operating system. Yet it was Microsoft, originally a programming language company in Albuquerque, New Mexico, which displaced DEC with the success of MS-DOS and Microsoft Windows. The founders Paul Allen and Bill Gates used PDP computers from DEC for their early work. It is probably a path-dependent frozen accident that lead to the lock-in effect of Microsoft’s operating system. DEC was destroyed by the tremendous success of the IBM PC coupled with Microsoft’s MS-DOS and Windows. It was killed by the disruptive innovation of the PC which created a new market (the PC market) and destroyed an old one (the minicomputer market). DEC vanished together with the minicomputers it built.

Failure to adapt

Similar to the fall of maya civilization, which failed to adapt to their environment, DEC failed to adapt to their changing environment and to their changing markets. The reason for the downfall was the failure to adapt successfully to the PC market, to the mass-market of home computers, and to the needs of people in the personal computer era. Although DEC invented interactive computing and developed the first computers for personal use, they failed to produce successful products for the personal users of the PC era. And although the PDP-1 was the first commercial computer that focused on the development of interaction with a human user, they failed to recognize the needs of the typical business user. People in the PC era needed compatibility and standard hardware, and the IBM PC was the winner here. And they needed standard software: a standard operating system, which was MS-DOS, and a standard office software for word processing (MS-Word) and spreadsheet calculation (MS-Excel).

Apparently, a computer maker is doomed if it no longer produces computers people need. People wanted PCs, and DEC was only able to produce PDPs. The larger DEC became, the more it was focused on the own proprietary and idiosyncratic products, the VAX/VMS OS and the PDP-x minicomputers, and the less it saw the environment in which it was embedded. The bigger it became, the less it was able to react quickly to competitors. As Harlan Anderson writes in his autobiography, the strength of DEC was hardware, and hardware became increasingly a cheap commodity within the industry. The x86 architecture of the IBM PC was by no means superior or excellent, in fact it was gruesome. Since the company culture valued excellent hardware and elegant design, the corporation was unable and unwilling to produce cheap commodity hardware. But IBM PC comatible computers were cheap and became standard. The same engineering culture that made DEC successful also contributed to the decline.

Are there any lessons from DEC’s rise and fall? We can learn that even a major American company in the computer industry and a leading vendor of computer systems and software can disappear in a short time. If the company and its products may disappear, then the only thing which is left is are the stories of the employees. The legacy may shine bright if the culture was original and the people were treated right. As a MIT management review says in an age when companies come and go one should “watch out for disruptive innovations, keep in mind that even a culture of innovation can become dysfunctional as markets change, and remember that one of an executive’s most lasting legacies may be how he treats people.”

References:

* The autobiography of Harlan E. Anderson, co-founder of Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC): Learn, Earn & Return, My Life as a Computer Pioneeer, Harlan E. Anderson, Locust Press, 2009

* Digital effects – Computer maker’s rise, fall still echo in Mass., Boston Globe, February 15, 2011,

* DEC Is Dead, Long Live DEC: The Lasting Legacy of Digital Equipment Corporation, Edgar H. Schein, Berrett-Koehler Publishers, 2003
 

Why are shows like American Idol where people can dance and sing so popular? Perhaps because everybody wants to be famous (except those who already are), and dancing and singing are so fascinating to people because everybody can do it. At least in principle.. These are such archaic and basic activities that they can be found in nearly every culture from Africa to Alaska. They require nothing else but the pure body and a little bit of concentration, coordination and training. As babies we are only able to cry and move randomly. When we grow up, our movements become increasingly sophisticated, skillful and artful. If we bump into things, then at least with style.

For the kids, walking, talking and writing is an art. If we are grown up, we learned (or should have learned) how to walk, talk and write, and these basic activities of daily life are no longer an art. The boundary of art has shifted to more elaborate activities such as dancing, singing, and painting, activities usually reserved for artists. Dancing is artful and cultivated movement without a purpose except entertainment. Singing is a similar artful and cultivated activity.

Thought of You from Ryan J Woodward on Vimeo.

Art exists in the space between imitation and innovation. We learn a new art by imitating existing types and forms. We extend and invent it by creating our own forms. With art we can imitate, illustrate, represent and portray something or someone. The object of art can be an existing entity – a person, a scene, a landscape, etc. –  or a fictional one.  In the former case we create an image of an existing item. In the latter, we create something new which did not exist before. We have made an innovation, a new combination of ideas, colors, styles, perspectives, etc.

The combinations one can make are endless, the history of art from realism to minimalism is rich, one can use languages to describe pictures and draw pictures of languages, a dancer lets the music regulate the gestures while a conductor regulates music by gestures, etc.

Imagination can take you everywhere (in principle). In practice imagination takes you only to place you have been, again and again, because these places matter the most to you, and you know them best. Creativity and experience go often hand in hand.

In a recent Google+ discussion, Russ Abbott drew my attention to Stanley Milgram’s insights how society works. In large cities people are much less helpful, friendly and polite than in small towns. Why is that so? Stanley Milgram tried to explain it by the concept of “overload”.

Stanley Milgram (1933-1984) was an American social psychologist who was born in New York, went to high school with Philip Zimbardo, made his PhD at Harvard, and became later a full professor of psychology at the City University of New York. In one of his studies he wondered how city dwellers manage to live in such proximity to each other. As this PsyBlog article says, he found that the way we behave in busy urban areas is a natural response to information overload: “In the city our senses are continually assaulted. There are too many sights, sounds and other people for us to process properly. This is both the attraction of the city and its downside”. City dwellers, therefore, try to conserve their “processing power” and “psychic energy”.

Milgram argued that living in large cities has a price. People in large cities have only superficial social interactions with each other, which is encouraged by frowning or looking angry all the time. They keep moving and transact any business as quickly as possible. Social niceties like apologizing for bumping into each other are skipped because city dwellers have less spare processing power available.

Any inhabitant of a larger city like London, L.A. or New York can confirm this unsocial and sometimes rude behavior. There is an unwillingness of city dwellers to be helpful and supportive. Since Milgram was born in New York, Milgram should know what he was talking about. In his classic science paper “The experience of living in cities” from 1970, Milgram says the reason why people show an unsocial behavior which discourages others from initiating contact is to reduce cognitive and social overload:

“The ultimate adaptation to an overloaded social environment is to totally disregard the needs, interests, and demands of those whom one does not define as relevant to the satisfaction of personal needs […] contrasts between city and rural behavior probably reflect the responses of similar people to very different situations, rather than intrinsic differences in the personalities of rural and city dwellers. The city is a situation to which individuals respond adaptively.”

Unsocial behavior is a response to “too much” society and social interactions. This is similar to arrogant behavior, which is often a response to “too much” demands from the intrusive environment. Among city dwellers, anonymity, brevity and unsocial behavior are an adaptation to information overload. Inhabitants avoid speaking with each other and do not know each other. One aspect of urban anonymity is the familiar stranger: an individual who is recognized from regular activities, but with whom one does not interact, for example somebody who is seen daily on the train, but with whom one does not otherwise communicate. On the contrary in small villages there are no strangers. In very small towns and villages there is too little information, and the inhabitants speak with each other all the time, until everyone knows everything about everybody.

It looks like brevity (“keep it short” or “short is good”) is a general strategy to deal with information overload, too. CEOs like to hear short “executive summaries” because they do not want to drown in information. Internet users have a similar problem: there is too much stuff and too much information available. There is no time to consume it all. Seth Godin argued that we will that something is too long more often in the future. There is an increasingly popular internet slang phrase TL;DR which means “too long; didn’t read”. Like the city dwellers who try to conserve their “mental” energy by reducing their actions, interactions and transactions, internet dwellers try to conserve their energy by limiting their consumption of information.

Therefore anonymity, brevity and limited attention span are an adaptation to information overload in general. If we are overwhelmed with information, we try to adapt our behavior by keeping it short, brief and swift to save our limited processing power. We neglect any unnecessary niceties. Thus the next time the CEO appears to be unsocial and rude, he may just try to conserve his limited processing power 😉

References:

(The picture of the crowd in New York is from Flickr user Gary McCabe)

A classic secret service, intelligence service or news service like the MI6, the British Secret Intelligence Service, employs secret agents like “James Bond” who spy for the agency. Where does it come from? Why is it needed at all?

An intelligence agency is used to obtain and evaluate information about potentially hostile countries, nations, or forces. The purpose is the supply the government with information about potential dangers to national security and impending crises.

We have seen earlier that the ability to obtain, process and evaluate information, called intelligence, can be seen as an adaptation to change. As H.G. Wells said in “The Time Machine”: “there is no intelligence where there is no change and no need of change”. Manipulation of information and distortion of reality – including flattering, lying, deceiving and pretending – can be considered as an adaptation, too. It is as adaptation to the expectations of the observer.

Now, obtaining and manipulating information is a central task of an intelligence service. Is it a kind of adaptation to a certain condition or need as well? In combats and wars, information about the enemy is of crucial importance. It is essential to be informed about any hidden change in the forces and actions of the enemy. Lack of information means decreasing the ability to react to attacks.  If you do not know what is going on, you are not prepared to defend yourself appropriately by reacting fast enough. Adaptation is the best defense.

Secret agents are intended to obtain information about hidden operations which may affect national security. The classic secret agent of your majesty, James Bond aka 007, is a product of the cold war. Countries were divided by an iron curtain, and the purpose of the secret agent was to look for answers to the question “What is going on?” in the hostile foreign countries behind the curtain. A secret agent or intelligence service is necessary if there is a struggle between two parties, countries or ideologies, and one side tries to hide information from the other. For example some country tries to fight your country or behaves increasingly hostile, while keeping back essential information about secret weapons, military operations, etc.

Thus a classic secret service, intelligence service or news service is used to obtain important secret information. The CIA or the MI6 in the cold war had the purpose to obtain information about changes and hidden activities in the Soviet Union. In a conflict of national states and opposing countries, such a service is necessary to get information about processes and operations in countries with restricted freedom, esp. if they are “closed” countries locked behind a wall, firewall or iron curtain.

In this sense, an intelligence service can be considered as an adaptation to restrictions of freedom (freedom of the press, political freedom, freedom of religion, ..) in opposing countries or international organizations. It should guarantee the ability to adapt and react to hidden changes and activities. This means the secrecy of the secret service is nothing but an adaptation to the secrecy and the lack of freedom  in closed countries and evil dictatorships: “if you operate in secrecy, we can do it, too”.

Are secret services still needed if there are no longer big wars between national states
and if the number of closed countries and evil dictatorships declines? This is at least a
question which should be debated in modern democracies. Today in the digital age of social networks, everybody is registered at big social networks like Google+, Twitter or Facebook. It is probably more important to have an internal source at Facebook or Google than to have a top secret agent in Burma, or is it?

 (The picture showing Pierce Brosnan in Cannes is from Wikipedia. Like Sean Connery  he played the classic secret agent James Bond in a number of Hollywood films)

In Disney and Pixar films non-humans are sentient beings. In Disney films these non-humans are typically animals, in Pixar films robots, toys, cars, or monsters.  These non-human beings like the toys in Toy Story possess human levels of intelligence, although they are not human. And although they are non-human beings, they behave sometimes more human that we do. How is that possible?

They are social beings: toys care for other toys, robots for other robots, and monsters for other monsters. They are guided by emotions and conscious decisions. They are conscious of themselves, i.e. they are not only toys, robots or monsters, they are aware that they are (just) toys, robots or monsters. And they are willing to sacrifice themselves for their peers and their “purpose”. The toys in Toy Story have a main purpose or primary objective for which they were made. The purpose of the toys is to be played with by kids. Walter Isaacson writes in the biography of Steve Jobs:

The idea that John Lasseter pitched was called ‘Toy Story’. It sprang from a belief, which he and Jobs shared, that products have an essence to them, a purpose for which they were made. If the object were to have feelings, these would be based on its desire to fulfill its essence. The purpose of glass, for example, is to hold water; if it had feelings, it would be happy when full and sad when empty. The essence of a computer screen is to interface with a human. The essence of a unicycle is to be ridden in a circus. As for toys, their purpose is to be played with by kids, and thus their existential fear is of being discarded or upstaged by newer toys. So a buddy movie pairing an old favorite toy with a shiny new one would have an essential drama to it, especially when the action revolved around the toys’ being separated from their kid. The original treatment began, ‘Everyone has had the traumatic childhood experience of losing a toy. Our story takes the toy’s point of view as he loses and tries to regain the single thing most important to him: to be played with by children. This is the reason for the existence of all toys. It is the emotional foundation of their existence.

The idea is if an object were to have feelings, these would be based on its desire to fulfill its main purpose or primary objective. The purpose of the robots in WALL-E is to clean up and evaluate the environment: WALL-E was built to collect garbage, while the task of EVE is to evaluate vegetation. The purpose of the cars in Cars is drive on roads and to win a race. The purpose of the toys in Toy Story is simply to be played with. The purpose of the monsters in Monsters, Inc is to arise emotions in kids (i.e. to frighten them or make them laugh).

This idea can be applied to agent-oriented software engineering as well: if an agent were to have feeelings, then the feelings should be based on its desire to fulfill its main purpose or primary objective. If we equip the agent with the right emotions, we can be sure it does everything to fulfill its main purpose, and leave at the same time enough room for decisions which can not be specified in advance. This trade-off is a way to reconcile emergence and engineering: on the one hand, the agent can do whatever it likes to do as long as it does not violate the primary objective, which means that unpredictable things can occur and emerge during the interaction of agent and environment. On the other hand, the agent has to followed the primary objective, which guarantees its purpose and function. It is a trade-off between purpose and autonomy or force and freedom. And it is a solution to the major problem in agent-oriented software engineering:  “I have a Multi-Agent System, but what is its purpose and function ?” If an agent decides itself what it needs to do, how can we make sure that it does something useful or something we want it to do? Genes have solved the problem of agent-oriented engineering long ago. Their natural blueprint specifies a built-control system for every sentient being.

The key is to equip the agent with the right emotions, the same control mechanism the DNA uses to control their bodies. If the agent does things that feel good and avoid things that feel bad, like we do, then the agent should of course feel bad if the primary objective or prime directive is missed. It should feel good if it is fulfilled. That’s all in principle. The concrete implementation depends on the directive and the architecture.  Animals have the directive to (a) survive long enough to (b) reproduce themselves. Point (a) means to get enough food and water. All animals crave for the building blocks of life: sugar, fat and water. In this sense, a robot which depends on energy to survive would long for energy. A robot with the directive to explore the world would be very curious, it would crave for new information, insights, or ideas, or it would try to explore new regions, new worlds, and new horizons.

How the agent or robot implements the directive depends on the cognitive architecture. Using the subsumption architecture from Rodney Brooks, the primary objective of a robot or agent may be to explore the world, i.e. to look for unknown places. Below this layer there would be the directive to “wander around”. At the bottom there would be the directive “avoid collision with objects”. While the agent moves around, it constantly checks the lowest directive (“Don’t collide with objects”). If it is fulfilled, it checks the directive on top of it and seeks to fulfill it (“Wander around”). If this is also fulfilled, it tries to fulfill the top directive (“Explore the world”, i.e. “Look for unknown places”).

If we consider the mind as a society of agents, then emotions are not primarily distinct agents, but rather the same agents activated and organized in different ways. As Minsky argues in his book “The Emotion Machine”, emotions, intuitions, and feelings are not distinct things, but different ways of thinking. Emotions act like a jury or an advisory system, which says which is good or bad. For example for threats it is important “to be ready” for action to react fast enough. This can be realized by a threat-level dependent advisory system, i.e. a system which exhibits certain levels of alertness or readiness for action, for instance in a sports team or a military system. In a sports team the trainer may play the role of regulating emotions if he wakes the team up in case of a threat and calms it down it is too disturbed. A military system has usually many kinds of alerts (from an slightly increased level of attention to the famous “red alert”) which prepares the system for action.

• A single agent can follow an objective if it is guided by feelings and emotions which are based on its desire to fulfill its objective.
• A group of agents can follow an objective if all are guided by a central principle, for example by being part of an organization, group or team. In this organization every agent plays a certain role, which is in turn shaped by the overall objective of the organization. The group as a whole can be subject to “emotions” if it has a “built-in” jury or advisory system which encourages certain actions while suppressing others.

Thus if the feelings of agents are directed towards the fulfillment of their primary directives, we can reconcile naturally engineering and emergence, force and freedom, or purpose and autonomy, just as living beings have done this for millions of years. Emotions are the built-in drive to fulfill the underlying primary directive  which specifies the purpose of the agents. Their presence ensures the fulfullment, compliance and completion of the directives specified in the blueprint of the agent. They guide the agent in the direction specified by the genes of the blueprint. They are good at it, because they have done it in natural, biological systems for millions of years successfully.

This is the real, overall purpose of emotions: to guarantee the fulfillment of the primary directive (for biological organisms this means survive and reproduce). The specific purpose  of this ancient control system is manifold. If we consider the belief-desire-intention model or the perceive-reason-action cycle in detail, the purpose of emotions is..

• ..to influence our desires and decisions. We don’t have to think about something in order to make the right decision. Emotions care that we do the right thing. They determine our motivations, desires and reasons.
• ..to influence our beliefs and color our life. They influence how we perceive things. We feel good if we experience positive emotions, we feel bad for negative ones. We tend to remember things that triggered strong emotions much better than those which did not.
• ..to influence our intentions and control our life. They influence how we act. We tend to do things that feel good and avoid things that don’t. The purpose of good feelings is to tell us what is good for us, what we should pursue, and what we should do. The purpose of bad feelings is to tell us what is bad for us, what we should avoid, and what we should not do.

From an evolutionary perspective, emotions are an adaptation of goal-oriented sentient animals which try to survive in a fast changing and challenging complex environment. Especially bad feelings and negative emotions are an adaptation to harsh environments with frequent bad conditions. One can consider consciousness as an adaptation for these conditions, too. One that is even better. And one that is not restricted to humans, as we begin to realize. Whatever form non- or super-human intelligence takes, it is clear that humans are no longer the only sentient conscious beings in the universe in the near future.

Summary

To sum it up: all living beings are sentient beings. This means they have feelings and emotions. These feelings are directed towards the fullfillment of the primary directive, i.e. to survive and reproduce themselves, which is the purpose specified by their genes. The purpose of emotions is to guarantee the fulfillment of the primary directive.  Although living beings are just survival vehicles engineered by their genes in order to replicate themselves, human are more than that. They strive and long for more. If we create non-human sentient beings, and we want to solve the fundamental problem of agent-oriented engineering, i.e. to bridge the gap between autonomy and purpose, then we should endow them with control systems which act like emotions, too. If we equip them with feelings and emotions, then these feelings should be directed towards the fullfillment of their primary directive. This solves the problem of agent-oriented enginerring, but creates another problem: we have created a sentient being which has its own rights and feelings.

References

* Marvin Minsky, The Society of Mind, Simon & Schuster, 1988
* Marvin Minsky, The Emotion Machine, Simon & Schuster, 2006
* Rodney Brooks, A robust layered control system for a mobile robot, IEEE Journal of Robotics and Automation, 1986
* Walter Isaacson, “Steve Jobs”, Simon & Schuster, 2011

(The picture from EVE, the Extraterrestrial Vegetation Evaluator robot, is a low resolution screenshot from the highly recommendable Pixar film WALL-E)

The Maya civilization is always good for a headline in the National Geographic magazine. It is commonly associated with mysterious hieroglyphs, monumental buildings and magic sunken cities, lost in the rain forest.  Their ancient archaeological sites are spectacular, their pyramids in the rain forest are monumental, and the fall of their civilization is mysterious. How can an ancient civilization like this simply dissolve and collapse?

Jared Diamond mentions five factors for the collapse of the Maya civilization in chapter 5 of his book “Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed” (2005). He identifies the following points: population growth outstripping available resources, deforestation and erosion, increased fighting and endemic warfare, drought and mismanagement by shortsighted leaders. Considering multiple societies, he made a general 5 point framework check list of factors which determine if a society will fail in general:

• environmental problems
• climate change
• hostile neighbors
• friendly trade partners
• the society’s responses to its environmental problems

The last factor is perhaps the most important: the society’s responses to its environmental problems determines if it is able to adapt to environmental issues or not. A good response can turn around and save the situation. A wrong or missing response, i.e. the failure to adapt to environmental issues, can be the crucial factor which leads to collapse. If the attention of the leaders, as Jared argues, is only focused “on their short-term concerns of enriching themselves, waging wars, erecting monuments, competing with each other, and extracting enough food from the peasants to support all those activities” then a collapse is not surprising.

Modern researchers and scholars have confirmed this point of view. They proposed a number of factors which contributed to the fall and collapse of the ancient Maya civilization including mismanagement, poor leadership, militarism, overpopulation, exploitation of the working population, social turmoil, environmental damage, deforestation, soil erosion, famines, epidemies, and extended drought. Michael D. Coe (2011) emphasizes 3 major factors: endemic warfare, overpopulation and accompanying environmental collapse and severe drought. Sharer and Traxler (2006) argues that these factors were responsible for the decline of the divine kingship model and the breakdown of centralized authority. The most important factor was perhaps that people got tired of their society and their leaders. After an extended drought up to 9 years, no divine king was able to convince people he will be able to influence the rain god Chaac and let it rain, even if his sacrifices become larger, and his rituals wilder.

Despite all amazing accomplishments of the Maya they were not advanced enough to master the challenges of an urban society and environment. In the years of the decline, system and government were no longer adapted to the mounting challenges of society and environment. The Maya civilization collapsed because it was no longer well adapted to the environment. Originally, as Arthur Demarest notices (2004), the true secret of the Maya civilization was the successful adaptation to the complex rain forest environment, for example by  raised fields, terracing and “swidden” farming. The decentralized, locally controlled adaptation to local conditions was the most successful strategy. The experiments with large conquest states ruled by divine kings apparently failed. What we see at the ruins of Tikal, Calakmul and Caracol are failures on a grand scale. The leaders or the ruling class failed to protect their people from drought and war, they failed to nourish and feed their people. They failed because their states were no longer adapted to the environment:

• drought, deforestation, exploitation: not well adapted to the natural environment
• hostility, warfare: not well adapted to cultural environment (i.e. neighbors and other city states)

These two points correspond to 4 of 5 points from Jared Diamnond’s list. The relationship to the environment was broken, the society was not well adapted to (1) environmental problems and (2) climate change.  A society which causes constant environmental damage like soil erosion and deforestation by exploitation of non-renewable resources  and overpopulation is certainly not well adapted to the complex and fragile environment of the rain forest, especially in times of longer drought. It is like a species which destroys the own habitat. The relationship to neighbors was also broken or badly damaged, the society was not well adapted to (3) hostile and (4) friendly neighbors. A city state based on endemic, destructive warfare is not well adapted to an environment which mostly consists of other city states. A defensive instead of an offensive strategy would have been better for hostile neighbors, and peaceful trade better for  friendly neighbors. If a society fails to adapt to all these important environmental issues, then a collapse is inevitable if the pressure increases, even if the writing system is the most advanced one of the whole continent. A writing system which is only used to glorify the leaders on monumental buildings may cause awe, but it will not save the society from collapse.

A society, organization or civilization can collapse, dissolve or vanish if the people simply no longer want to be a part of it. Collapse starts if the negative emotions of the people like fear and disgust towards the group and the divine leader are stronger than the positive ones like awe and joy. Emergence starts if positive emotions are stronger than the negative ones. Spectacular monuments can contribute to both. First their greatness led to rapture and fame (the emergence of the civilization), later to ruin and shame (the collapse of the civilization), and centuries later to awe and money (the emergence of tourism). Thus monuments can lead to ruin or rapture. It depends on their use.

Every society and social group is based on sacrifices, the members must sacrifice their time, their money, their ideas, their work, or other resources they own. It makes of course a difference if the leader sacrifies himself, if the leader makes sacrifices, or if the leader sacrifices members of society. In open-minded and voluntary cultures, everyone makes a little sacrifice, in autocratic empires or dictatorships the dictator tends to sacrifice the own people (during wars or by killing heretic members). If open-minded cultures turn into brutal autocratic empires that torture and sacrifice their members, people don’t want to be member of this system anymore and the system starts to dissolve. This can be the end of civilization. If people abandon their city in a city-state they leave their civilization behind, and the civilization collapses.

In the IT industry, it is common that the question “how is it possible the system does not work” often turns during debugging into the question “how could it ever worked in the first place”. Maybe it is similar with the civilization of the ancient Maya: the question “How is it possible it broke down” may turn into the question “how could it lasted so long in the first place”.

There are some striking similarities to the rise and fall of civilizations in ancient Europe at the same time. Both worlds started with hieroglyphic writing systems, built temples and pyramids, and started to develop a higher civilization, but also produced imperialistic conquest states and empires. In a sense, the Greek city states are to the ancient Romans what the ancient Maya have been to the Aztecs: a set of independent city states which inherited their culture from earlier precursors and which were involved in constant wars against each other. The Greek temples look like Egyptian ones, and they inherited the writing system from the Phoenicians. The stepped  temple pyramids of the Maya look like the ones in Teotihuacan, and they inherited their writing system from the Olmecs and Zapotecs. Both Maya and Greeks developed in turn a culture which later civilizations adopted and changed.

It looks like the monumental buildings are remains of an imperialistic “phase”. Imperialism seems to spread like a wave or disease from one area to another. Once an area has been infected with “imperialism”, it seems to be immune against it:

• Ancient Egypt » Greek » Macedonia » Roman empire
• Teotihuacan » Maya » Chichen Itza » Aztecs

We tend to admire the size and the strength of historic empires, the empire of Teotihuacan,  the Roman empire, the Aztec empire, etc., but are inclined to forget how extremely brutal these empires have been. We tend to admire their monumental buildings, but forgot that they were also monumental failures: buildings of cultures who drowned in warfare, imperialism and violence.

References

Books
* Robert J. Sharer with Loa P. Traxler, “The Ancient Maya”, Stanford Univ. Press, 2006
* Arthur Demarest, “Ancient Maya”, Cambridge Univ. Press, 2004
* Michael D. Coe, “The Maya” (8th edition), Thames & Hudson, 2011
* Jared Diamond, “Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed”, Viking Press, 2005

Links
Wikipedia links for Maya Civilization, Maya Script and Classic Maya Collapse , for Jared Diamond’s book Collapse: How Societies choose to fail or survive, and for the ancient Maya cities Palenque, Tikal and Chichen Itza

(The picture of the Palenque ruins which shows the Temple of Inscriptions containing the tomb of Pacal is from Flickr user Carlos Adampol. Palenque, Tikal and Chichen Itza are the most famous Maya cities. The picture of the Maya Glyphs is from Wikipedia.)

There is an old saying  “necessity is the mother of invention” (in German “Not macht erfinderisch”) which means difficult situations inspire innovative solutions. It goes back to Plato who speaks in The Republic of necessity, who is the mother of invention: “let us begin and create in idea a State; and yet the true creator is necessity, who is the mother of our invention.” When people really need and want to do something, they will figure out a way to do it.  Are people on the edge of survival more innovative than others? We argued earlier that innovation is an adaptation to the permanent threat of extinction. Individuals which are critically endangered or threatened by extinction have a stronger incentive to be innovative than others.

One example are the people of two small valleys in the Italian dolomites, Val di Zoldo and the neighboring valley “il Cadore” (or “Val di Cadore”), with the towns Zoldo Alto, Forno di Zoldo and Zoppe di Cadore. In the second half of the 19th century an economic crisis hit the Val di Zoldo, a narrow, picturesque valley in the Dolomites. Today, the region is a wonderful skiing area, but at that time the economic crisis forced residents to reinvent their professions. Many emigrated to Austria and Germany, trying to succeed in different professions. The official site of the valley says:

The people of the Zoldo Valley, always forced to emigrate in search of work, did their best in every field: shipwrights in Venice, carpenters in the building of roads and dykes, woodsmen, mechanics, pastry makers, peddlers of cooked pears and candied fruit. From the mid-19th century the Zoldo Valley inhabitants started to produce and sell their own ice-cream.

Selling homemade ice cream (“gelato”) was apparently one of the more successful activities, and finally the famous Italian ice cream carts and parlors were born. Due to the excellent quality of the ice cream produced by the Italian ice ceam makers according to local Zoldo tradition, the Italian ice-cream immediately gained success establishing itself by far the best on the European market. Zoldo Alto became the valley of the ice cream makers: Val di Zoldo is now known as the “valle dei gelatieri”.

Today, allegedly 75% of the ice cream parlors in Germany come from two small valleys in the Italian dolomites, val di Zoldo and Val di Cadore. What can we learn from this? On the edge of survival, ice cream can save your life..

(The Flickr photo of the strawberry ice cream is from Flickr user Jessica Merz)

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Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) are the latest and most advanced weapon technology in warefare, like rockets in WWII. Both can be used as deadly weapons. The V2 rocket developed by Wernher von Braun in Nazi Germany at the time of WWII was a weapon used to attack London, and it enabled intercontinental ballistic missiles, but it was also the prototype and foundation for the Saturn V moon rocket 20 years later. Rockets had a scientific and a civil purpose in the form of space exploration.

What is the value of UAVs, can they be used for civil and scientific purporses, too? Well, they can be used for exploration, for example for search and rescue missions. And they can be used as autonomous vehicles to explore foreign worlds. NASA’s Mars exploration rovers Pathfinder, Spirit, and Opportunity were very successful. They are controlled remotely like UAVs. The latest and largest NASA rover “Curiosity” is scheduled to land on the surface of Mars in August 2012.

Space exploration is exciting. But as new technology develops, old becomes obsolete, and astronauts seem to be among the obsolete stuff. The more distant the destinations, the easier it is to use robots instead of humans, and the more important autonomous behavior becomes. Astronauts are threatened by extinction. The heros of space exploration were once indispensable because the computers of the PC stone age were not developed enough. Today, astronauts are no longer necessary for many exploration missions, machines and robots can do a much better job: they don’t have to return to Earth.

Thus pilots and astronauts are more and more replaced by remote operators and in some advanced cases and in really remote sites, by intelligent autonomous agents. The ultimate UAV would be an AI-empowered machine, an UAV controlled by an AI, by an artificial agent who understands the world. Operating without a remote controller would be like leaving the earth orbit, and would require a very strong engine. In this sense, building the ultimate UAV or creating an AI is like reaching the moon in the 21st century: agents are the astronauts, UAVs are the new rockets, artificial curiosity is their fuel, adaptation their propulsion, and data centers their engine. Instead of space and cosmos, these agents would explore unknown foreign or virtual worlds.

I guess the secret of true artificial intelligence lies here, at the path to AI-empowered machines:

• create a device capable of travelling to the moon: an extremely adaptive system (with vast cognitive capacity and the right kind of internal architecture, let us say an UAV controlled by an own set of datacenters)
• place the system on the launch pad, i.e. in an artificial environment which is complex enough. Either you build robots (bring the computer in the world), or you create agents for virtual worlds (bring the world in the computer). In both cases you need a strong engine, a large number of really powerful data centers to let the device take off
• launch the device, let the system learn and grow

Some cosmologists and astrobiologists even claim that this is the ultimate path any intelligent civilization must follow if it wants to explore the universe. They argue if we ever encounter aliens, it will be in the form of intelligent machines, because biological intelligence would only be a transitory (!) phenomenon. Paul Davies for instance says in his new book “The Eerie Silence” that any aliens exploring the universe will be AI-empowered machines:

“I think it very likely – in fact inevitable – that biological intelligence is only a transitory phenomenon, a fleeting phase in the evolution of the universe. If we ever encounter extraterrestrial intelligence, I believe it is overwhelmingly likely to be post-biological in nature.”

Davies writes further

“Human intelligence is no more than a few hundred thousand years old, depending somewhat on definition. In a million years, if humanity isn’t wiped out before that, biological intelligence will be viewed as merely the midwife of ‘real’ intelligence – the powerful, scalable, adaptable, immortable sort that is characteristic of the machine realm. Thereafter, machin intelligence will accelerate in power and capability until it hits fundamental bounds imposed by the physical environment, whatever they might be.”

(The pictures of an unmanned aerial vehicle and the NASA rover curiosity are from Wikipedia)