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The Technium: The Arc of Complexity

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What's more complex, a cucumber or a Boeing 747? The answer is unknown. We have no way to measure the difference in order and organization between the two and don't have good working definition of complexity to even frame the question. Seth Lloyd, a quantum physicist at MIT, has counted 42 different mathematical definitions of complexity.

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The smallest description of a random number is the random number itself; there is no compression without loss, no way to unpack a particular randomness from a smaller package than itself.

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"Logical depth" is a good measure for strings of code, but most structures we care about, such as living organisms or technological systems, are embodied in materials.

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Since randomness is so distracting, producing "shallow" complexity, they decided to simply ignore it.  Their measurement, called effective complexity, formally separates the random component of a structure's minimal code and then measures the amount of regularities that remain.

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"the outstanding feature of life's history has been the stability of its bacterial mode over billions of years!"

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To be fair to the orthodoxy, I don't think Gould and others would deny the power of very small changes to have profound effects. The contention is whether these small changes (like occasional lines of increasing complexity) are the main event or simply a side effect of the main event. To rephrase Gould, are we really just witnessing random evolution away from simplicity, rather than random evolution directed towards complexity?

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In 1995, two biologists, John Maynard Smith and Eors Szathmary, envisioned the major transitions in organic evolution as a set of ratcheting organizations of information flow. Their series of eight revolutionary steps in evolution began with "self-replicating molecules" transitioning to the more complex self-sustaining structure of "chromosomes." Then evolution passed through the further complexifying change "from prokaryotes to eukaryotes" cell type and after a few more phase changes, the last transition moved it from language-less societies to those with language.

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Nature will simplify, but it rarely devolves down a level.

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If a movie is a program (as in a computer program), then over time these narratives accumulate the equivalent of subroutines, parallel processing, and recursive loops, elevating the story into a more adaptive, living thing.

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Scenario #2A. Complexity plateaus because we can't handle it.

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Scenario #3. There is no limit to how complex things can get.

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Technologies need not complexify to be useful in the future. Danny Hillis, computer inventor, once confided to me that he believed that there's a good chance that 1,000 years from now computers might still be running programming code from today, say a unix kernel and TCP/IP. They almost certainly will be binary digital. Like bacteria, or cockroaches, these simpler technologies remain simple, and remain viable, because they work. They don't have to get more complex.

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the concept of "complexity" will probably be as dead as the old notion of "metaphysics" because it will have turned out to be too blunt for the dozens if not hundreds of concepts it probably contains.

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What I really want to drive home is that complexity is a measure of explanation, and explanations are relative to a specific conceptual framework. Attempting to measure increases or decreases in complexity over time only works if the conceptual framework itself does not change — a circumstance that does not apply to the real world.

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Each of those lines of code is the equivalent of a gear in a clock. The Windows OS is a machine with 50 million moving pieces.

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This is why I think it’s a mistake to talk about the generalized “complexity” of the universe, evolution or anything else. Yes, you can attempt to measure the information it takes to descibe the universe in bits and characterize those bits as more or less complex. But really what you are measuring is the efficiency of how you use those bits to represent meaning, not the things themselves.

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