The Structure of Technology Revolutions

Since last summer, I've been working on a book project tentatively (and modestly!) titled "The Structure of Technology Revolutions." The purpose of the book is to show how technology enables completely new possibilities, by breaking trade-offs that are considered unbreakable.

To demonstrate the underlying structure of the innovation process, I'm using Category Theory tools (OLOGs) originally created by D.I. Spivak from MIT.

Here's a series of draft figures with an example of how the logic of innovation had worked in the technology revolution initiated by the automobile with the internal combustion engine (see below).

 Note, that the same logic can be applied to the modern autonomous vehicle. The technology is going to be successful because it creates incredible maneuverability at the "traffic" level of abstraction.

Now, back to the horses example:

Fig. 1 introduces the trade-off between Power and Maneuverability. An eight-horse carriage has a lot of power, but it's difficult to maneuver. Adding more horses will create a huge maneuverability problem. On the other hand, a horse rider is highly maneuverable but he lacks the carrying capacity of the horse carriage.

Fig. 2 introduces a logical representation of a horse carriage and maps it onto a "Conflicting Desires Diagram." That is, we show that any "designer" of a horse carriage faces a trade-off between Power and Maneuverability.

Fig. 3 sheds horse pictures and shows a logical generalization: a horse carriage is a kind of power-driven vehicle. 

Fig. 4 indicates the desired situation (the green dot on the right): We want a vehicle that has the best of both worlds, it's highly powerful and highly maneuverable.

Fig. 5 shows that the Automobile breaks the trade-off and creates a vehicle with the potential to hit the green dot. That is, we create a technology that disentangles human ability to control horses from the power. Thus, we achieve a new state that was considered impossible before.

To model the Autonomous Vehicle technology revolution we need to abstract from "a vehicle" to "traffic" and show how the new technology breaks the traffic congestion trade-off. In general, congestion trade-offs are ubiquitous in economic systems and technology revolutions break through them quite often.

Fig. 6 is a generalized diagram of how technological innovations make the impossible possible.

tags: innovation, trade-off, logic, technology, revolution

Logical Reasoning: Twitter popularity numbers

According to @Mediabistro, the current popularity ratings for individuals look like this:

Find a name that DOES NOT belong with the others.

tags: media, aboutness, logic, social, networking

Quote of the Day: the Value of Books

George Boole, a self-taught logician, the inventor of Boolean logic, an essential element of today's math and computing:

In later years, reminiscing about this period in his life, he explained that having a very limited budget for buying books, he found that mathematics books provided the best value because it took longer to work through them than books on other subjects.

                             - Source: The Universal Computer, by Martin Davis. 2000.

In today's world where books are very inexpensive, the most valuable books are those that are easy to read, i.e., accessible to lots and lots of people.

tags: creativity, invention, science, logic, control

Ah, the wonderful things you can learn at Oxford.

 

Is this argument valid?

If two plus two equals five, then grass is green.

Watch the whole lecture here.

The problem with problem definitions.

I regard as no less pertinent a warning against apparent proper names having no reference. ... This lends itself to demagogic abuse as easily as ambiguity -- perhaps more easily. 'The will of the people' can serve as an example; for it is easy to establish that there is at any rate no generally accepted reference for this expression.

Gottlob Frege. On Sense and Reference. (Über Sinn und Bedeutung, 1892.)

Problem definitions frame our approach to problem solving. Bad problem definitions can make search for a good solution very difficult or even impossible. I often find that people don't understand that putting a label on a bad situation is not enough for problem definition. The confusion between label and definition is rampant in everyday thinking.  For example, when Gallup formulates questions they go for simplicity rather than clarity.

We might argue whether or not Unemployment/Jobs is a problem (it is not because unemployment is an abstraction that aggregates millions of individual cases that most likely require different solutions), but "Economy in general" is definitely not a problem that can be solved. How do you solve Economy? Would it be the same way we solved the "Osama bin Laden" problem - by killing it?

A fundamental failure of imagination.

Philosopher Bertrand Russell remarks on a priori knowledge, essential for deductive [mathematical] reasoning:

When Swift invites us to consider the race of Struldbugs who never die, we are able to acquiesce in imagination. But a world where two and two make five seems quite on a different level. We feel that such a world, if there were one, would upset the whole fabric of our knowledge and reduce us to utter doubt.

Children before age 3 or 4 live in this wonderful world where 2+2=5. Actually, it's quite obvious for them that you can take two pieces of playdough, add another two pieces of playdough, and out of them make any natural number of playdough pieces: 5 or 1 or whatever. Then they grow up, become adults and a simple statement like 2+2=5 throws their world into utter doubt. Amazing, how fragile the world of adults is.

tags: psychology, philosophy, logic

Problem-solving in action.

Some time ago I mentioned that to produce a high quality solution, inventor has to break laws of conventional thinking. For example, despite the fact that the so-called first principle of economics states that "everything is a trade-off," breakthrough inventions destroy rather than enforce trade-offs.

Today, I've found another instance of "inventing by breaking the law." This time it relates to formal logic. Here's what Bertrand Russell writes about one of Kant's laws of thinking:

Let us take as an illustration the law of contradiction. This is commonly stated in the form 'Nothing can both be and not be', which is intended to express the fact that nothing can at once have and not have a given quality. Thus, for example, if a tree is a beech it cannot also be not a beech; if my table is rectangular it cannot also be not rectangular, and so on.

In contrast, classical TRIZ requires the problem-solver to break this law by formulating the problem as a dilemma: element X has property A, and element X has property anti-A. At the same time we  focus on useful and harmful functions provided by the element, which allows us to escape from the constraints imposed by the existing implementations.

Just the other day, when I was working with a client on a problem considered to be almost insolvable, we did find a solution by systematically applying the dilemma-busting rule. Psychologically, it was very difficult. But once we managed to overcome the inertia of taking the existing implementations for granted, the solution became almost obvious.

Though I can't disclosure the client's solution, I can show a case study from my Principles of Invention class. Here's an example of a real-life technology dilemma I solved to get US Patent 7,529,806.

tags: trade-off, dilemma, problem, solution, philosophy, logic, invention