Freedombox, A Suggestion

The Freedombox is an idea who's time has come. Unfortunately, it's still just an idea.

Why is it still "just" an idea? Joshua Spodek has some thoughts. To paraphrase: it's probably because the idea isn't perfect yet (engineers are notorious for never being ready to release their work). He figures someone (or someones) needs to step up and organize an effort, no matter how poor the initial outcome might be. Once SOMETHING is out there it can be improved by feedback from actual users.

Pictured: users.

I agree that open-source projects either publish or cease to exist. OS projects just don't work until a person or a small group takes responsibility for getting results. Ideas are a great contribution, but someone has to contribute time and money too. Arguably an idea that can't attract even one person to take responsibility for it must not be a very good idea.

Freedombox is a great idea. We need to shift the momentum of the internet back to individual control.

That being the case, why hasn't the idea gotten more attention?

At the moment it catches the attention of people who 1) understand technology and 2) are not invested in using it to control people (for one reason or another). Unfortunately that means the vast majority of the world is not, and possibly WILL not, be captivated by the idea.

Getting a lot of people to use one is kind of the whole point of the freedombox concept, so failing to capture the collective imagination is pretty much total failure period. Therefore, it seems to me that a big part of getting some momentum behind the idea is getting people interested in it.

Or, failing that, latching onto something people are already interested in.

Time to get sneaky.

On average, people don't care about security. They will instantly compromise every single security precaution established if it saves them a moment's frustration. They will not "opt in." So, to get them to do secure things, you have to restructure their environment such that they must "opt out."

Rather than focusing on all the security advantages of the freedombox, emphasize its NON-security features. For example don't advertise the idea as a personal security initiative (freedom from oppression), instead advertise it as a personal cloud initiative (freedom from

cost/frustration). THEN build in all the security stuff you would have anyway. Tell people that's all there to guarantee the security of their cloud data. People love the idea of the cloud right now, and arguably a bunch of freedomboxes working together would fit under that umbrella.

The project could still be called "freedombox" and the product could still be pretty much the same as before, just change the marketing.

The strength of the idea is that it is the most "inherently" secure of all the options. When your data is on a company's servers it's under THEIR control. When your data is in your closet it's under YOUR control. In every society a person's home is considered more sacred than anywhere else. If an entity (cops or criminals) has to break into some faceless corporation to compromise you, that's one thing. When they have to go into your personal residence, that's an entirely different thing. No only is it simply physically easier to protect your dat

a when it's at home, but the government (even if it's corrupt) is far more likely to extend extra protections under the law to anything in your home.

Play up all the ways the freedombox will "free" people to go anywhere and still have access to their data. It will absolutely accomplish that goal. When people embrace that they'll also be getting all the security built into the gadget by its creators. If they want to turn that stuff off, they can. It's theirs and they can do what they want. Since it's open-source someone will probably even create a security-lite release that runs on the same hardware. Whatever. All the people grabbing up the "personal cloud" will create momentum that will help out the people who live under repressive governments.

Trickle down freedom.

Basically, attach the idea to something that's already popular and it will get a lot more support. Play up one or two features that appeal to the largest audience. That way the few people who can REALLY benefit from it will get it even though they would never have been able to create enough momentum on their own.

Awareness of System Boundaries is Necessary for Success

A system is where you define it. Sometimes it's easier for people to agree on the boundaries of the system, sometimes it's harder, but either way it's always arbitrary. In keeping with the fractal nature of systems, the subsystem boundaries are also arbitrary.

The definition of a system's performance depends on its boundary. A car's performance is measured in miles per hour because the boundary of the "car system" is between the tire and the road. We could say that the car actually stops at the axle and that the wheels are a separate system. Then the performance of the "car system" would be measured in revolutions per minute. However, car and the wheels are generally considered the system. On the other hand, when we talk about a highway at rush hour the cars are considered subsystems of the traffic jam. Alternatively, an company's organizational chart is an illustration of subsystems within systems.

People who are in charge of a subsystem will generally consider themselves in charge of a system. When they strive to do the best job possible they will usually try to optimize the performance of their system. Just like the performance of the axles in a car is measured differently than the performance of the tires, the performance of one group is measured differently from the performance of the larger group it is a part of. The person in charge of the subsystem can't measure the performance of the system, because that's not where they are; all they have to work with is the performance of their subsystem.

This is a problem because to optimize the performance of a system you must de-optimize the performance of all the subsystems.

For example, a "tuned" car doesn't have the most powerful engine because it would rip the transmission apart. If the transmission were beefed up it would spin the tires instead of moving forward. If the tires were stickier it would warp the frame. If the frame were reinforced it wouldn't leave enough space for the big engine, or it would weigh too much and it would need a bigger engine, starting the cycle over again.

The Tsar tank. More like the reTSARded tank! Am I right?

A system must have subsystems that are in balance with each other based on the performance goals of the system, not on the performance goals of the individual subsystems. This is relatively easy to understand when the systems are not people. But as soon as people get involved they start to get all pissy about being a subsystem rather than a system.



This is why the executives of companies are constantly being reminded, often by highly overpaid consultants, that they have to explain to employees how their actions affect the company's overall goals. Otherwise, all they have to go on is the performance of the system they are aware of, which is the one they happen to be in charge of. When they do their best they will actually be destabilizing the company.

BTW, this is why companies alternately claim it is better to keep their employees powerless and scared, or empowered and brave, depending on which extreme they are already closer to. A company that judges its employees on how well they aid the overall goals will strengthen the company by empowering everyone. A company that judges its employees on how well they perform on their section's individual metrics will strengthen the company by squashing everyone.

National Healthcare Reform Leadership

A new national healthcare system is in the works, or at least a modified one. Which is good, because no matter how you slice it the country needs to do something about steadily increasing healthcare costs, says the CBO.

If rising healthcare costs were a steamroller. . .

In BusinessWeek, Nikos Mourkogiannis proposes that the new system should focus on cutting costs. He also says that, while that is a fairly obvious consensus view, actually implementing it will require prodigious acts of leadership. The general idea is to create a system that ensures the average person will have a minimum level of benefits.

As Mourkogiannis points out, the new healthcare system will not be able to do everything for everyone, it will have to make triage decisions which first reduce costs (and do everything else second). From the White House:

President Obama is committed to working with Congress to pass comprehensive health reform in his first year in order to control rising health care costs, guarantee choice of doctor, and assure high-quality, affordable health care for all Americans.

The fun thing about mission statements is that they often utilize a lot of commas. Giving commas to a bureaucrat is the linguistic equivalent of giving a credit card to a teenager. All sorts of commitments are made with little consideration given to whether or not they can all be delivered. The term "high-quality" has a lot more wiggle-room than "affordable," and the situation demands the focus be on "affordable" anyway, so "high-quality" is really only in there to attempt to placate fears that the healthcare storm troopers are going to drag you off to the crematorium when you reach 65.

Your grandpa ran off to join the circus. Here's his replacement.

High-quality will have to be secondary to low cost. The only reason we need healthcare reform is that our current approach will bankrupt us. So, at a minimum, we have to do the same thing only cheaper. Improving quality would be nice, but it is not the primary driver; cost is.

Now, try explaining that to the people who will cost too much to take care of.

This healthcare reform situation is a good example of a situation that demands attention be paid to systems, innovation and leadership. The system is monstrously complex, implementing it won't work without some innovations that no one's thought of yet, and even then the leadership challenge is pretty much guaranteed to be beyond anyone's capabilities. We (Americans) are okay with the idea that the system can't take care of everyone. We are not okay with the idea that the system will officially not be taking care of everyone because they are officially on the wrong side of the cost/benefit analysis.

That being assumed, what sort of leadership approaches have the best chance of getting people to at least let the necessary changes happen, if not get people excited about the changes?

• "We are working hard for you, but someone/thing else is working against us." Whoever gets saddled with the job of representing healthcare reform can try casting themselves as the plucky, unquestionably-good-hearted hero valiantly struggling against an evil menace. The menace could be immigrants flooding our emergency rooms, greedy HMOs, or just the vast scale of the problem.
  
• "We all know more than you and we say this is a good idea/working." Several large stakeholders in the healthcare marketplace, like the pharm-companies and AARP, have already expressed support for healthcare reform. It could be possible to present a unified front that overwhelms any attempt to claim it's a bad idea.
• "Every alternative is worse, especially doing nothing." Proponents of healthcare reform, like me, have pretty much started here anway. This approach assumes that this will remain the primary tool moving forwards. It could be expanded upon by occasionally adding a new description of just how bad the future will/could get if things aren't done in a particular way.
• "I was worried, but now I see there's nothing to worry about." Instead of the leaders speaking, they could get average Joes and Janes to speak for them. That way the people who need to be convinced could see people just like them being convinced, rather than Ivy-league, smooth-talking socialist puppets trying to be convincing.
  

The Consciousness Consensus

There is no consensus regarding what consciousness is, let alone whether or not it can be created artificially. The introduction to Cognition Distributed does an excellent job of walking the reader all the way around the abyss that is our lack of understanding of consciousness.

It takes a $100 book to explain that something can't be explained.

When you say to yourself, "What is seven times nine?" and then "sixty three" pops up, you are certainly conscious of thinking "sixty three." So that's definitely mental; and so is the brain state that corresponds to your thinking "sixty three." But what about the brain state that actually found and delivered "sixty three"? You are certainly not conscious of that, although you were just as conscious while your brain was finding and delivering "sixty three" as while you were breathing, though you don't feel either of those states.

We can agree that consciousness emerges from a sufficiently complex system, but not from insufficiently complex systems. While the metaphysical doubt that a rock could be somehow conscious, or a tree, or Gaia, always remains. . .it is merely a qualification made to preserve intellectual honesty. The doubt is really reserved for things like biomes and planets, not for dust and bushes. It's subjective, sure, but it's the best we've got.

This question has been addressed so often that the language for discussing it is well established. It is possible there are just things that cannot be something, kind of like how "0" and "zero" are things that represent nothing. It's a paradox, not an inconsistency.

Anywho, the really interesting development is that as we offload cognition into artificial actors we are accumulating context for the discussion that was impossible before the microchip. New innovations are being created every day that do things we previously associated only with conscious actors. Since we do not consider these new mechanisms conscious, we can no longer say those functions are conscious. If a function can be provided by purely vegetative processes then consciousness must be something else.

Consciousness is one of those leading-edge concepts because everything we've nailed down as mere complexity, so far, has failed to explain it. Like how the round Earth was just a theory until someone actually managed to sail all the way around it, because the surface that had been explored up to that point didn't fully explain the Earth's roundness. I think we'll figure it out eventually. . .probably a few seconds after SkyNet becomes conscious and tries to kill us all. . .but life's a journey, not a destination.

Robots Don't Kill People, People do

Rod Furlan twittered a day in the life of a Singularity University student. At 12:08:21 PM he asked, "When a robot kills, who pulled the trigger?"

This question cycles through the public consciousness every year or so and is well illustrated by the South African National Defence Force's 'little' accident with an automated Oerlikon GDF-005 (it sprayed 500 35mm anti-aircraft shells around its firing position, killing 9 and wounding 11).

Oerlikon GDF-005, A.K.A. the T-001

At the moment no one seriously considers (except maybe the Koreans) holding the auto-turret responsible for the killings, because the system that controls the mechanical stuff isn't complicated enough to be plausibly sentient.

...as backed up by empirical research by Friedman and Millett (1997), and by Moon and Nass (1998), humans do attribute responsibility to computers. Of course, that we may be inclined to blame computers does not entail that we are justified in so doing. Although computer systems may clearly be causally responsible for the injuries and deaths that resulted from their flawed operation, it is not so clear that they can be held morally responsible for these injuries or deaths.

However, some people are really excited about the possibility that computers will eventually (sooner rather than later, yay!) be complicated enough for us to blame things on them. Without going into the background on this topic, the basic requirement for something to be responsible for its actions is that it be consciously aware of the difference between right and wrong. Since computers just do what they are programmed to do, and have no ability to understand the concept of "should," they are not responsible for anything. Computers just follow orders.

Computers totally would have let the Nuremberg Defendents off the hook.

The human brain is a system, and a computer is a system, so it is plausible that computer systems can increase in complexity and reach a par with the human brain. So, at some point we will probably have to deal with computers that actually do understand morality. Since we'll still be human, we'll probably give them a gun and tell them to go kill our enemies. However, before we can pull the "the robot did it on its own" card, we will be forced to use old-fashioned computers to kill people.

Dr. Ronald Arkin wrote a book about this, and did a few interviews, and worked on a prototype computer-based morality system. His thesis is that robots can be more moral on the battlefield than humans because they are capable of making fewer mistakes. They won't make decisions based on fear, anger or recklessness and they will evaluate every situation on its own merits instead of suffering from 'scenario fulfillment' and jumping to conclusions.

From a systems standpoint it seems fairly obvious that computers will eventually be more complicated than humans, and at that point they will probably have to start taking responsibility for their own actions (and for cleaning up that pig-stie they call a room). Until then, however, we humans will have to continue taking responsibility for robots that are put in increasingly complicated situations. Dealing with this transition period will require innovations that have not appeared yet. At some point it becomes difficult to hold a person responsible for the actions of a system they own, but that they can't possibly understand fully enough to predict its actions in all situations. Isaac Asimov built part of his career exploring the ways a robot could do totally unexpected things while blindly obeying the 3 Laws of Robotics.

We need an innovative way to interpret who is responsible for the actions autonomous (but unconscious) systems take. Even when some computers truly are unequivocally responsible for their own actions, the vast majority of computers systems will continue to be unconscious. Inevitably, some of the moral computers that we declare responsible for their own actions will assume control of non-moral computers that still aren't responsible for their own actions.

The question is, 'in the future, when a moral computer tells a non-moral computer to kill, who can I sue?'

President Obama's Healthcare Newsconference

The President addressed the nation. . .or at least as much of the nation as felt like watching the whole thing. The ones who relied on soundbites will miss out on the chance to draw their own conclusions, because anyone who uses soundbites or quotes is trying to back up a predetermined point :-)

He said, "I'm the president, and I think this has to get done." This sort of statement is interpreted as arrogance by people who don't like the speaker, and as authority by people who do. I think the truth is actually somewhere in the middle because the laws of physics actually require a phenomenal concentration of arrogance to stabilize the phenomenal concentration of authority that comes with the Presidency.

What's he got to be smug about anyway?

On the subject of healthcare reform, I think he did a good job of summarizing the reason we should at least talk about it. He said the cost of doing nothing is more than enough reason to do something (cuz the current system is on track to bankrupt the federal government); since we should do something, we should do it right. Doing it right means it doesn't add to the deficit, it protects the middle class and it satisfies healthcare experts. He also said there is so much waste in the current system that we can provide healthcare to everyone; if we can get people insurance that pays for preventative care they won't end up in the emergency room making the rest of us pay for their amputated foot instead of for cheaper counseling on diabetes prevention.

An apple a day keeps our economy afloat for another fiscal year.

The healthcare system is incredibly complicated. That's something that seems to be forgotten when discussing healthcare reform. Additionally, it is a service that cannot be suspended while being overhauled. The average person doesn't even have the language skills necessary to frame the issue, let alone discuss anything approaching a solution. By way of an example, out of the dozens of times pundits mentioned the "cost" of the healthcare reform plan, only a couple times did anyone bother to mention that it was the projected cumulative cost over 10 years, expressed in current dollars.

Even trying to talk about how much it might cost requires several qualifications and each qualification can be further qualified. Thinking about it is tough, let alone expressing it in a sentence. So, instead of admitting how complicated it is, we just gloss over the parts (99.99%) we don't understand and assume there is nothing significant hiding in the fog. It's like when people assumed the ocean floor was flat until they actually got a look at it.

Pictured: Advanced sentence structure.

Anywho, the commentary which followed was even more fun.

CNN

• he didn't add anything new
• apparently Henry Louis Gates Jr.'s arrest is way more important than national healthcare

I suppose we should forgive CNN. Their Black In America 2: The Revenge of Black In America program was airing next and they really wanted to plug it. Apparently the best way to keep the attention of people who tuned in for a 45 minute lecture on healthcare reform is to claim it was a waste of time and that we should be paying attention to some dude who got arrested and then wasn't charged with anything. CNN is classy that way.

FOX

• he's a great liar
• nothing is worth doing unless a list of bullet points can fully explain it

Luckily, FOX was busy furiously ignoring the discussion of what happened to that dude who got arrested (oh, was he BLACK, we totally didn't notice) so they had plenty of time to talk about the news conference. Of course, by "talk about" I mean link everything to Republican talking points and, when that was too hard, tell the audience they should be too confused to remember to blink their eyes or wipe the drool off their bib.

O'Reilly

• I don't understand what his plan is (despite the fact that he opened the press conference by saying the plan is still being debated)
• I don't want the government aggregating rates of medical conditions (despite the fact there is no reason names need to be attached to conditions)

Maybe it's me...but O'Reilly always claims to adore Obama...while always coming up with a reason to hate everything Obama does. In this case he was very clear on two points: that he couldn't understand what Obama was saying and that he went to college so he totally should have been able to. Then he brought in some dude to talk about how healthcare reform is actually really simple, and all the possible changes (all 2 of them) must inevitably lead to a zombie apocalypse.

He'll be standing between you and your healthcare.

AC360

• Tough to make a hard sell for a proposal that's still evolving
• Republicans don't have an alternative, just objections

I think it's the hair. Anderson Cooper, like Superman, realies on his super-powered hair to save mankind once a week. Just imagine the desperate straits we'd be in if his hair was more like this:

Definition of System (1 of 3)

The biggest problem encountered when discussing the three concepts systems, innovation, and leadership is that people rarely agree on what the words mean when they are used. To help narrow down the list I will state explicitly that I am using these terms in their general sense and avoiding using them as specific jargon like you would find in a technical medical or computer discussion.

This post is the first in a three-part series. Each instalment will investigate the definition of a word by summarizing the process I went through to generate a useful definition.

The history of the word, as related by the Online Etymology Dictionary, can be traced back to the word 'systema' which is made up of 'syn' (together) + root of 'histanai' (cause to stand); meaning "set of correlated principles, facts, ideas, etc."

The Random House Dictionary has a half dozen (relevant) overlapping definitions of the word. They can be condensed like this: an [ordered/comprehensive/coordinated/formulated/regular] [assemblage/combination/set/body] of [things/parts/members/facts/principles/doctrine/methods/schema] forming a [complex/unitary] [whole/scheme].

The American Heritage Dictionary has fewer overlapping definitions: A [group/organized set] of [interacting/interrelated/interdependent/functionally related/coordinated] [elements/ideas/principles/objects/phenomena] forming a complex [whole/order].

The Merriam-Webster Dictionary has even fewer: A [interacting/interdependent/related] [group/arrangement] of [items/bodies/objects/forces/devices] forming a [unified/harmonious] [whole/network].

If all that could be further condensed down to a single sentence it might look something like this: a system is an integrated group of things which form a whole. However, I think there is an important concept being left out of these definitions.

An important concept to capture is that at any given moment a system is an arbitrary boundary drawn somewhere in a hierarchy of subsystems. A system is simultaneously a system and a subsystem, so defining it in relation to its subsystems makes it a sort of self-referential meta-definition. It's not as simple as nesting dolls. . .


. . .it's more like a fractal.



Therefore, I propose the following definition of 'system': a purposeful choice of scale in an infinitely complex hierarchy of nesting subsystems, the discussion of which involves integrated collections of related things.

For some other discussions of the definition of systems The Univ. of Missouri-St. Louis, the Division on Systemic Change, and the International Society for System Sciences are valuable resources.

The Improbable Makes Perfect Sense

The thing about systems that make them difficult to understand is that they obey rules which make sense, but the outcome can often make no sense whatsoever. By way of an example, I present this article.

Basically, a woman handed a man her baby to use as a Taser shield. Yeah.

Babies: It's about time they were useful for something.

I was going to try to build some sort of lesson around this example, but I think it pretty much stands on its own. If you think something would never happen because it wouldn't make any sense, then it will happen. . .and when it does it won't make any sense.

Systems Discussions Required Specificity.

Rachel Lehmann-Haupt wrote in Newsweek 11-18 May 2009: "Egg freezing, I believe, could be as revolutionary as the birth-control pill. And the timing for its takeoff couldn't be better. The age of first-time motherhood is rising. In the United States, the number of women becoming pregnant between the ages of 35 and 44 has nearly doubled since 1980. As education, advanced degrees and higher salaries become priorities, we are trading in our years of procreative power to gain economic power."

I tracked down the statistic the author references (thank you eppc.org for actually referencing the stat) in a press release from the National Center for Health Statistics. The press release states, "The birth rate for women aged 40-44 years has more than doubled since 1981." It also states that the birth rate for that age group in 2003 was 8.7 births per 1000 women. I had to dig through their archives to find the exact birth rate for 1981 (it was 4.0 for all women 40 and over).


The data does indicate a steady increase in the birth rate for women over 40. However, when the birth rate for all the other age categories are included in the plot, the tend is. . .underwhelming.


As you can see, the statistic is entirely accurate, but it is also completely out of context. Until the birth rate of the 40+ age category doubles from 8 to 16, and then again to 32, it will still be a relatively insignificant event. Mentioning that it doubled is like mentioning that America is using more wind power. Yeah, we are, but even "twice as much" still doesn't matter. In fact, the most significant increase seems to be in the 30-40 age range, not in the 40+ age range.

After looking at the data (in what is admittedly a quick and dirty fashion) it appears the author's main point seems to stand. Overall the birth rate seems to be decreasing and, at the same time, the birth rates for older women have been increasing. From a systems perspective, this is an interesting trend. What factors could be driving this change? Is it "education, advanced degrees and higher salaries" as the author states?

One of the things to keep in mind when looking at a system is the difference between correlation and causation. Just because two metrics change the same way at the same time does not mean one is affecting the other. For example, an increase in average global temperature coincided with a decrease in average global pirate attacks. That does not mean that pirates are allergic to heat, and it does not even mean they are both responding to a change in some third factor, it just means that they both changed.

I didn't write this to get into the debate. I only intended it as a small case study to illustrate a point. Statistics should be very carefully applied to systems. Statistical analysis is a great tool for reductionism, but it is less useful for analysis of holistic systems. This is due to the fact that statistics, by necessity, can only be used when things are reduced to specific metrics. It is tempting to analyze every subsystem and think that you understand the system, but to understand the system you have to analyze the system itself, not the subsystems. Doing this properly requires a lot of careful definitions of exactly what the system you are studying consists of, which are pretty boring, so that step usually gets skipped (or at least not mentioned).

When you want to talk about a system, but you skip the definition step, what you say probably doesn't matter. At the very least, it is open to a lot of misinterpretation. For example, in the case I cite here the author could have been more specific about what the stat(s) were actually describing, how they were obtained, etc.

Opportunity Recognition

I think that the key to recognizing opportunities is to do a lot of thinking beforehand.

When we observe a system we have a chance to learn what the underlying principles of that system are. The principles, of course, are much more important to understand than any particular manifestation of them. An actual event, or series of events, is just a manifestation of the underlying principles. If we imagine that the event is important, rather than the principles which dictated it, we will never be better than one step behind. The principles allow us to predict what will happen based on what is happening and what has happened; to project into the future.

We don't know where it will go, but we do know where it won't go.

Once we can predict what will happen with better than 50% accuracy it becomes a useful tool. What we do with that tool is stick it into our imagination, along with everything we know about the past and present, and churn the whole thing up for a while.

I can't take credit for this particular idea. But Blenderhead can.

If done properly, what will pop out are plausible predictions of future events. We can then test the plausibility of these predictions by waiting to see if they actually happen. When they happen as we predicted, we win a Nobel Prize. When things do not go the way we predicted, we reevaluate the ingredients in the mind-blender and then set it to frappe. Eventually we will get an accurate enough understanding of the principles, and the salient aspects of the past and present, that our predictions will be relatively reliable.

AFTER that, we are ready for opportunity recognition. The potential to recognize opportunities only emerges when we start to think about the way things could work out if a change was made at the correct time or place. It is the next step beyond simply predicting the way things will work out if everything continues as it has. First we have to predict what would be useful in a situation that doesn't exist yet, and then we have to file that prediction away.


Opportunity recognition finally occurs when we run across a situation that closely conforms to those predictions we made. If we thought previously that a certain thing would be possible if this, that and the-other-thing were present, and then we see something that offers this, that and the-other-thing, we can recognize it as a chance to make something better happen. However, it requires a lot of forethought. That is the key. Effort has to be put into figuring out what would be useful, but that first requires that we figure out what will happen, and to do that we first have to figure out the principles that control the situation.

Music emerges from complexity

This is a good example of what emerges from sufficiently complex systems.



As a system becomes more complicated, new properties begin to emerge.
"The ability to reduce everything to simple fundamental laws does not imply the ability to start from those laws and reconstruct the universe..The constructionist hypothesis breaks down when confronted with the twin difficulties of scale and complexity. At each level of complexity entirely new properties appear. Psychology is not applied biology, nor is biology applied chemistry. We can now see that the whole becomes not merely more, but very different from the sum of its parts."

It's not so much that no one, if they'd sat down and thought about it, could have predicted that people would make music with old computer parts. People make music with everything they can get their hands on. It is that computer parts would not have existed without a certain level of system complexity; they simply require too much infrastructure to be available at a lower level of complexity.

There is no inherent difference between a person turning an old trash can into an instrument and a person turning an old computer into an instrument. However, one of them only requires that trash cans exist, while the other requires that computers exist.

Cavemen lost in a modern world, or international percussion sensation?

We will always be able to hit something, or pluck something, and get a noise out of it. With a certain amount of experimentation and elbow grease we could figure out how to get a musical scale out of just about anything. However, new tools require us to learn new techniques. Notice that no one was banging on the old computer parts. The concept of "hit it until it makes a sound you like" is not new, and might even be buried somewhere in our genetic code. Taking over an old computer system's drive unit and figuring out how much juice to give it, and for how long, and in what combination, to get a particular sound requires an entirely new thought process.

Not everyone likes every instrument. If you happen to want to play an instrument that does not exist you have two options: invent it or wait for someone else to invent it. To invent an instrument requires knowledge, which means that someone might learn something new just so that they can invent (or play) an instrument.

Once these new skills and ways of thinking are out there they can be applied to areas where they might not have been generated spontaneously and they can even inspire brand new ideas. Thus increasing the complexity of the system even more and allowing for even more emergence.