Airbrushing Airwaves & The Adjacent Possible

Happy New Year, Welcome Back.

First off: the “adjacent possible”. Then: “airbrushing airwaves”.

For many years in this column I’ve applauded and espoused Nassim Taleb’s philosophy (as put forth in “Fooled by Randomness” and “The Black Swan”) of not only not knowing what we don’t know, but not knowing (or accepting) that it isn’t possible in many instances to know the future. We mistake luck for skill and often mistakenly attribute success to genius when it’s mere luck.

Being pattern-seeking mammals (remember: the non-pattern seekers got eaten by tigers, having sat still when the bushes rustled), we’re uncomfortable processing randomness. We look at puffs of clouds and see faces and animals. We’re hardwired for it. We can’t help ourselves.

Now I bring to you another idea that I consider as important. It’s from complexity theorist and physicist Stuart Kauffman and it’s called “the adjacent possible.” In my words it’s this: Stuff happens. That stuff might be useless. Until it isn’t.

In longer form: Some stuff (whether in nature or business or science) might randomly get invented (either by accident or byproduct of an original intent) and that stuff might have an attribute that has absolutely no apparent use, you can’t even predict a use way into the future for it. But then lo and behold, sometime in the future, something happens and suddenly a use for that attribute, by itself or in combination with another thing, gets discovered.

Some of you immediately are thinking: Ah, it’s evolution! Random mutation and natural selection. And that’s true. But it’s more than that. The idea of the “adjacent possible” is about the possibility space of all the things that might happen as some new biological trait, technology feature, molecule have pathways that might one day be taken.

Here’s Stuart Kauffman in his own words:

“You might look at a heart and ask, what is its function? Darwin would answer that the function of the heart is to pump blood, and that's true—it's the cause for which the heart was selected. However, your heart also makes sounds, which is not the function of your heart. This leads us to the easy but puzzling conclusion that the function of a part of an organism is a subset of its causal consequences, meaning that to analyze the function of a part of an organism you need to know the whole organism and its environment. That's the easy part; there's an inalienable holism about organisms.

“But here's the strange part: Darwin talked about pre-adaptations, by which he meant a causal consequence of a part of an organism that might turn out to be useful in some funny environment and therefore be selected. The story of Gertrude the flying squirrel illustrates this: About 63 million years ago there was an incredibly ugly squirrel that had flaps of skin connecting her wrists to her ankles. She was so ugly that none of her squirrel colleagues would play or mate with her, so one day she was eating lunch all alone in a magnolia tree. There was an owl named Bertha in the neighboring pine tree, and Bertha took a look at Gertrude and thought, "Lunch!" and came flashing down out of the sunlight with her claws extended. Gertrude was very scared and she jumped out of the magnolia tree and, surprised, she flew! She escaped from the befuddled Bertha, landed, and became a heroine to her clan. She was married in a civil ceremony a month later to a very handsome squirrel, and because the gene for the flaps of skin was Mendelian dominant, all of their kids had the same flaps. That's roughly why we now have flying squirrels.

“The question is, could one have said ahead of time that Gertrude's flaps could function as wings? Well, maybe. Could we say that some molecular mutation in a bacterium that allows it to pick up calcium currents, thereby allowing it to detect a paramecium in its vicinity and to escape the paramecium, could function as a paramecium-detector? No. Knowing what a Darwinian pre adaptation is, do you think that we could say ahead of time, what all possible Darwinian pre adaptations are? No, we can't. That means that we don't know what the configuration space of the biosphere is.”

The more tinkering society does, the better the chance that someone else will pick up that tinkered thing and run with it in a way never imagined. Kevin Kelly founder of WIRED has made a persuasive argument that there’s a moral imperative to invent. Consider if the piano hadn’t been invented by the time of Mozart. Consider if organized basketball leagues hadn’t been invented before Michael Jordan. Or what if the PC hadn’t been invented before Bill Gates? The more “instruments” we invent, the better the odds that a genius picks one up, tweaks it or masters it and carries it further, advancing society.

Sometimes the uses of an instrument end up being even more useful in a completely different field. Someone recently shared with me how a geophysicist used sound waves to map oil wells in the 1990s. A singer friend new this geophysicist was an expert with sounds waves and asked him to tune her singing. Not only did it work, it worked so well, the music industry has now been secretly using it for a decade, it’s called “AutoTune”. Cher's hit song "Believe", Madonna's "Music", current rap star T-Pain. The pitch for the technology: correct your pitch, or tweak it. What about hip-hop’s mantra of "Keep it real"--yeah, right. It’s now airbrushing the airwaves.

Viewed through the lens of history, you shouldn’t be surprised by this. The history of technology has been one of displaced labor. New jobs are birthed as old ones die. Talent is embedded in technology. And technology gets further embedded in advanced materials. Where the molecules are the device I’ve long called this “Simplexity”.

Consider Hollywood and videogame developers who use CGI. They are eliminating the need for actors (or at least managing egos of live ones). Olympic athletes are stripped of medals for doping and enhancing. Milli Vanilli were fully mocked (one of them attempted suicide) for lip-synching. Will discovery of digital doping lead to stripping Grammy medals? Unfortunately, it’s probably no more likely than false economic ideas will lead to stripping Nobel medals.

As Tom Clancy said, “The difference between fiction and reality? Fiction has to make sense.” Art imitates life. The science fiction of Blade Runner with Replicants now seems a future possibility.

In the music business I can envision lyrical Luddites leading a cultural revolution against the inauthentic and engineered while demanding the analog, true and slightly out of tune. Where will true talent come from? Statistically speaking: Asia. As a case in point: see Charisse, 15 year old Phillipine phenom discovered by Oprah, promoted by David Foster, already doing duets with her own hero, Celine Dion.

A once obscure girl in Asia, with a once randomly invented technology (webcam) on a once obscure website (YouTube), that gets randomly watched by another once obscure woman, Oprah Winfrey. As I always say, we cannot predict the future, we can only invent it.