Edge has published its question and answers for 2013: “What *should* we be worried about?” If you are not acquainted with Edge, it is a continuing conversation started by John Brockman to get scientists and artists to compare notes, as it were, about the state of things. Often the results are presented as a collection of brief essays, each with their own register, some short and some extended.
The responses for the 2013 question make for an interesting read. One theme that arises across a number of responses has to do with being “too connected” as Gino Segre puts it. The internet and mobile communications connects us all, but also appears to homogenize us. Segre’s concern, though, is not that everyone is just a cell call or email away from the rest of the world, but rather that research is getting pulled toward what will count for professional advancement:
I believe the desire to make an unforeseen offbeat discovery is an integral part of what draws anyone to become a scientist and to persist in the quest. As is true in other walks of life, demands to conform intervene. It would be naïve to discount the struggle to obtain funds and the increasingly weighty burden that they impose as research grows more expensive. But that is yet another facet of the scientific life.
The push for fancy publications limits what faculty are willing to study, especially early in their careers. I worked with an assistant professor in environmental toxicology who had spent his first five years on one project–how cells realize that they need more copper and iron–and had just hit on a connection that could matter for how anemia is treated in some cancer therapies. Of course, this was an area apparently outside his departmental mandate, and though his colleagues in the department thought his work was outstanding, the dean refused to grant him tenure–he didn’t have the right publications in the right journals, and therefore wasn’t “productive”. Apparently, it’s all about surviving in the system. Well now.
Steven Strogatz offers related thoughts–that there may be “too much coupling”–systems influencing each other and fall into sync, and in the process changing their behaviors:
In all sorts of complex systems, this is the general trend: increasing the coupling between the parts seems harmless enough at first. But then, abruptly, when the coupling crosses a critical value, everything changes. The exact nature of the altered state isn’t easy to foretell. It depends on the system’s details. But it’s always something qualitatively different from what came before. Sometimes desirable, sometimes deadly.
But the math suggests that increasing coupling is a siren’s song. Too much makes a complex system brittle. In economics and business, the wisdom of the crowd works only if the individuals within it are independent, or nearly so. Loosely coupled crowds are the only wise ones.
When we turn to “innovation ecosystems” it might be that decoupling and diversifying may be an important component. There is a strong, visible demand to “survive in the system.” At some point, it is difficult for anyone to speak out, to propose an alternative to the established “best practice”. Look at what has happened to independent scholarship at American universities: institutional controls have been imposed, routing a wide range of inventive and creative work through a single office for “management”. The technology licensing offices, too, are now strongly coupled, using roughly the same policies, stating the same objectives, operating with the same general practices. “Too much coupling makes a complex system brittle,” to paraphrase Steven Strogatz. If systems become coupled, their behavior may change dramatically.
So here is something we should be worried about in 2013–that our approaches to innovation have become so conventionalized that they really aren’t approaches to innovation but rather a collective imitation of a few re-told narratives about approaches, trying to recreate past glories. What once may have been approaches, now are not–the complex system has changed its behavior as it has become coupled.
Restoring a diversity of approaches means decoupling systems, and allowing for a degree of independence, so that folks can pursue ideas without institutional regulations or expectations. The virtues of “commercialization” are always there, but “commercialization” is hardly the be-all and end-all of university-based inquiry. It may well be that universities should be working much more diligently to create commons than products–that is, technologies available with weak coupling rather than withheld unless they can be made into a monster product. Instead: feeding the public domain, encouraging independent initiative, working in areas with small markets or no markets, on problems that don’t appear to offer to change the world or mitigate the most egregious failings of socialism and/or capitalism, challenging with observation and data and insight the status quo, the consensus, the conventional wisdom of companies, of venture capitalists, and governments.
The wisdom of crowds works if the individuals are independent. That would be a good starting point for university approaches to intellectual property. Freedom to innovate. If a worry about coupled, brittle systems leads to a more open, decoupled environment for university research and discovery, that seems like a good thing to worry.