Todd Suomela's Library tagged efficiency →  View Popular, Search in Google

"One hundred years from now, the role of science and technology will be about becoming part of nature rather than trying to control it."

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"Products of intelligent design typically have capabilities that exceed usefulness precisely because these can be “intelligently” engineered, not in order to make the product more useful but in order to make it more impressive. In biological evolution, by contrast, “barely good enough” is the highest level that can be reached, because expense that does not improve overall fitness cannot be tolerated. The “barely good enough” standard is also maintained in biological evolution because species characteristics cannot be redesigned from scratch. Human bipedalism is far less than perfect—consider all those endemic back problems! It is clearly the result of a quadruped design being turned into a biped design rather than having been intelligently designed from scratch. This is exactly the mark of the “blind watchmaker” of natural evolution. But the nonblind watchmakers who intelligently design watches can, and do, redesign from scratch."

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"The thread that unites the two books is an idea Marx called "the theory of compensation as regards the workpeople displaced by machinery" and Keynes criticized as the doctrine of self-adjustment. William Stanley Jevons described the doctrine as "a principle recognised in many parallel instances." Specifically, with regard to workers displaced by machinery, Jevons observed,
> The economy of labour effected by the introduction of new machinery, for the moment, throws labourers out of employment. But such is the increased demand for the cheapened products, that eventually the sphere of employment is greatly widened.
Jevons related the doctrine to the consumption of fuel, arguing, "Now the same principles apply, with even greater force and distinctness, to the use of such a general agent as coal. It is the very economy of its use which leads to its extensive consumption." This rebound effect has become known as the "Jevons Paradox" and is the central argument of Owen's book. "

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"Contemporary capitalism, we are often told, is characterized by the relentless pursuit of efficiency. In one telling, a more efficient economy is one that gets more output out of the same amount of labor and resources. But from another perspective, a streamlined and ultra-efficient economy is one which produces more and faster in normal times, but which can only do so by cutting out the safeguards and redundancies that protect the system from catastrophic failure when things go bad. Thus the global economy becomes simultaneously more dynamic and more fragile. As Felix Salmon puts it, “as a general rule, the more efficient something is, the easier it is to break.” Both the economics and the politics of neoliberalism are turning out to be very efficient and very easy to break.

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Unfortunately, thoughtless automation is driving the day. If we don't get off this train, it might have the same results it has had in other sectors of the economy: an unsustainable economy with high unemployment—and a lot of cheap, plastic crap.

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"We study a simple model for the evolution of the cost (or more generally the performance) of a technology or production process. The technology can be decomposed into n components, each of which interacts with a cluster of d - 1 other components. Innovation occurs through a series of trial-and-error events, each of which consists of randomly changing the cost of each component in a cluster, and accepting the changes only if the total cost of the cluster is lowered. We show that the relationship between the cost of the whole technology and the number of innovation attempts is asymptotically a power law, matching the functional form often observed for empirical data. The exponent α of the power law depends on the intrinsic difficulty of finding better components, and on what we term the design complexity: the more complex the design, the slower the rate of improvement. Letting d as defined above be the connectivity, in the special case in which the connectivity is constant, the design complexity is simply the connectivity. When the connectivity varies, bottlenecks can arise in which a few components limit progress. In this case the design complexity depends on the details of the design. The number of bottlenecks also determines whether progress is steady, or whether there are periods of stasis punctuated by occasional large changes. Our model connects the engineering properties of a design to historical studies of technology improvement. "

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"Some forms of technology — think, for example, of computer chips — are on a fast track to constant improvements, while others evolve much more slowly. Now, a new study by researchers at MIT and other institutions shows that it may be possible to predict which technologies are likeliest to advance rapidly, and therefore may be worth more investment in research and resources."

technology technology-cycles evolution complexity growth efficiency

"History, in the Googley view, isn't about what people do; it's about what they output with the help of machines. Before 1700 you could see history everywhere except in the productivity statistics.

The Google folks are Marxists in their historical materialism, but they seem blind to class-related phenomena such as the rapidly growing divide in wealth. Theirs is a happy, trickle-down world. "What rich people have now," Varian says, "middle class people will have in twenty years." What's he talking about? Private jets? Ranches in Montana? Income growth? "

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"To rehash briefly, complex systems biologist Jack Cohen argued that many failures in complex systems can be attributed to the hyper-emphasis on efficiency at the expense of robustness. Apparently inefficient systems are often useful under specific, but uncommon circumstances. Thus, removing these systems will increase efficiency in normal times, but promote dramatic failures under other conditions.

I was thinking about this distinction while reading James Scott’s fantastic 1998 book, Seeing Like a State."

efficiency robust systems complexity power sociology politics

News post on an optimistic report on changing world energy supplies. We just need to divert 3% of world GDP to efficiency, renewables, and infrastructure. Whew!

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THE MYTH OF THE RATIONAL MARKET A History of Risk, Reward, and Delusion on Wall Street.By Justin Fox
THE SAGES Warren Buffett, George Soros, Paul Volcker, and the Maelstrom of Markets By Charles R. Morris

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in list: Economic Crisis

This paper estimates the technological progress that has occurred since 1980 and the trade-offs that manufacturers and consumers face when choosing between fuel economy, weight and engine power characteristics. The results suggest that if weight, horsepower and torque were held at their 1980 levels, fuel economy for both passenger cars and light trucks could have increased by nearly 50 percent from 1980 to 2006; this is in stark contrast to the 15 percent by which fuel economy actually increased.

transportation research automobile energy oil efficiency regulation fear design

An early and prominent employee of Google, Georges Harik, recently made the assertion that pairs working together in startups are 20 times more productive than individuals working alone. The author has also personally experienced the boost of what is here termed pairwork in a university setting during the startup phase of several educational and interdisciplinary initiatives. The paper briefly explores pairwork in the history of technology and constructs both qualitative and little quantitative models of pairwork. The quantitative model under reasonable assumptions easily recovers Harik’s 20x boost. The paper also briefly examines the author’s recent experiences with pairwork in four interdisciplinary and educational initiatives.

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.. the data also suggest that if history now repeats itself – i.e. banking becomes a tightly regulated, low-margin business – then the relative skills and pay of bankers could stay low for years....But it may also carry some seeds of hope. After all, if finance no longer keeps monopolising the brightest and best workers, some of that talent could be diverted into other, more productive, arenas – for the good of the economy.

talent banking finance labor efficiency allocation

in list: Economic Crisis

economics efficiency markets theory

in list: Economic Crisis

Objections to private student lending ignore ways that government could save money now, even when it couldn't save money at the start of the program. Everything changes, even the efficiency of government.

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economics spending government infrastructure efficiency

in list: Economic Crisis

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