Chapter Content
Okay, so, like, let's talk about something kinda big. It's about, like, a fundamental shift that needs to happen in how we think. Basically, society needs to realize that the way we've been building stuff in the economy, it's, like, coming to an end, you know? And that way is design.
I mean, humans have been designing things forever, right? It's about choosing the parts and how they interact to, you know, solve problems. We put these choices into plans or drawings so others can build stuff. Think about the stone axe, right? That was thanks to our ability to, like, mix our understanding of the world with, you know, carving wood and shaping stone. But just discovering things wasn't enough. We had to use design to put it all together, to make it actually useful.
And design is great when things are deterministic. Deterministic means the same inputs always give the same outputs, you know? Like, with the axe, the force of your hand goes to the handle, then to the binding, and finally to the sharp edge. You swing, it cuts. Sure, things can go wrong, like you might slip or something, but the axe itself is deterministic. It's a chain of actions, one thing leading to the next. And it's not just the axe; it's like, the office building, the bridge, the engine, the rocket, all that stuff. Problems solved, mostly by design.
But here’s the thing, design, like, actively messes things up when you're trying to create things that are complex. Complex things aren't like the axe or the building or any of that stuff. They're more like nature. An engine has parts, but nature's solutions are, like, wet and smooth and organic. Nature doesn't just push pieces together. It’s adaptive, resilient, and, above all, emergent.
Complex things are nondeterministic. The same input doesn't always mean the same output, you know? That lack of exactness is what makes it complex. And it's not just harder, it's completely different. They don't produce outputs from, like, step-by-step things. They materialize what's needed somehow else. And that’s, like, the whole point of this whole thing. Nature's way of creating can't be explained by simple science. Emergence, well, it kinda flies in the face of how scientists and engineers explain things and build systems.
And here's the big deal, emergence can't be reverse-engineered and put into a plan. Nondeterministic objects just don't have the precision and control that traditional engineering relies on. That's why we avoid complexity when we build things at scale. We want to prevent errors. Like, if the axe can't be gripped or gets pushed by the wind, it's useless.
Without control over outputs, design just doesn't work. Choosing parts and their connections, the plans, they don't really explain how a thing works. Design demands strict determinism. You have to see how pieces interact, how one thing leads to another. But emergence can’t be designed. It's not about things bumping into each other, you know? Emergence produces outputs that solve problems, sure, but the mechanisms don’t look like mechanisms at all. It’s the collective action of pieces, but it doesn't look like those pieces. Design and emergence are, like, opposites.
And we *have* to create complex things to solve today's problems. We're entering a time where what we build *has* to be complex. Only complex things can solve the hard problems. And hard doesn't mean difficult in the way we think of simple systems. Complexity isn’t just a harder version of simple; it’s a different thing. A hard problem is only hard if you try to solve it with simple approaches. These problems are different from the problems the axe or the engine could solve. They need a totally different solution.
So, to build in this age of complexity, we need to engineer emergence into our systems. Which sounds, like, crazy, right? How can you create something whose inner workings you can't understand? How do you imagine something that manifests on its own? How do you make sense of a system whose outputs look nothing like the pieces it's made of? But that's exactly what we have to do.
It changes *everything*. It’s not just a new way of science and engineering; we have to rethink what skill and excellence even mean. It's huge. It all comes down to building things, not just technology, but also institutions, social norms, values, networks, education, economics, politics, support systems, ethics, laws, all of it! This need to engineer emergence changes the foundation of everything in science, engineering, and our economy.
And in the end, this age of complexity is going to bring us full circle. It's going to force us to embrace the skills we evolved for, the ones that have been looked down on because of the, you know, Enlightenment and the Industrial Revolution. The world has, like, demonized human bias and our reliance on gut feelings. But that's because of the simple systems we built, where simple thinking worked. But that doesn't work with complexity. Our biases and feelings evolved to solve hard problems.
Humans evolved the way they did because knowing details doesn't mean you can solve hard problems. We’ve been told to ignore our emotions, like they are a weaker form of reasoning, but the best reasoning comes from following our, like, evolutionary emotional cues. It's not about being soft or hating rationality. It’s a stand against thinking nature got it wrong.
The current scientific and engineering way of thinking is all about design. It's about reverse-engineering nature, looking at the parts, explaining how things work, and then using those explanations to make a plan. We use designs to get millions of people working together, by dividing up the work. That's what our ideas of knowledge and skill are based on. Without designs, we wouldn't know what to do, how to fix things, or how to think of systems as dependable. To know something, we’re told, is to know how it works on the inside.
Almost everything we've built has been mechanical and deterministic because the machines we've made have been simple. Simple doesn't mean easy to find; it means the solution produces outputs in a deterministic way. Simple objects use a basic set of steps to produce outputs. But they can’t solve hard problems. Simple things solve simple problems. Complex things solve hard problems.
Nature's solutions solve the *hardest* problems. And these problems exist in natural environments and are solved, not by changing inputs into outputs in a simplistic way, but by emergence. These problems aren't like the "complexity classes" in computer science. They can't be solved by breaking them into pieces. Nature doesn't follow our simple ways of engineering. Only a truly complex object can solve a naturally hard problem.
Solutions that solve these problems are fundamentally different from what we've built. The number of parts and interactions is way beyond what we make. But there's a connection between human engineering and nature. Using more and more pieces to solve bigger problems has been part of our progress since the beginning.
So, let's start there, with our continual stringing-together of pieces, as we try to reach higher, farther, and faster.