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

When I first started thinking about refinement, in the context of addictive consumption (as in, refined cocaine), I had examples such as American fast food in mind: precisely engineered concoctions of key refined substances (salt, sugar and fat) designed to cause addictive over-consumption.

The pathologies of consumerism can be traced to an entire universe of such refined goods. I offered the term gollumized to describe humans who end up being entirely defined by a pattern of such consumptive behavior, much like the character of Gollum in the Lord of the Rings, with his addictive, enslaving attachment to the One Ring: a highly refined, pure essence.

So interchangeability creates a social network of (say) machine guns. There are functional linkages within complex artifacts that make them useful, and substitution and reuse linkages between them that make them reliable (redundancy inside an artifact is merely a semantic distinction: think of it as carrying interchangeable spare parts inside the boundary of the artifact, with the capacity to automatically switch out broken parts). Interchangeability and standardization make every machine gun less unique, and more a part of a sort of hive-machine-gun beast.

Dramatic as this effect is, it pales in comparison to the effect of commonalities across the needs of different types of complex systems. This connects all complex artifacts into a giant social network. The One Machine.

A high-tolerance part can serve a low-tolerance function, but not vice versa. Economies of scale then kick in and dictate that many components become more refined than they need to be, for typical artifacts that make use of them. The result is that systems gradually get more refined than they functionally need to based on immediate intentions. The needs of a few artifacts drive the refinement levels in all technologies.
 

This creates a refinement surplus. Industrial technology, unlike craft work, runs a continuous refinement surplus. The surplus was initially triggered by the need for interchangeability to solve the reliability problem, but that turned out to be a case of using a sledgehammer to kill a fly.

Both Moore’s Law and Hall’s Law in the speculative form that I have proposed, are exponential trajectories. These trajectories generally emerge when some sort of runaway positive-feedback process is unleashed, through the breaking of some boundary constraint (the term break boundary is due to Marshall McLuhan).

The positive-feedback part is critical (if you know some math, you can guess why: a “doubling” law in a difference/differential equation form has to be at least a first-order process; something like compound interest, if you don’t know what the math terms mean).

Loosely speaking, this implies a technological process that can be applied to itself, improving it. Better machines with interchangeable parts also means better machine tools that are themselves made with interchangeable parts and therefore can run continuously at higher speeds, with low downtime. Computers can be used to design more complex computers.  This is not true of all technological processes. Better plastics do not improve your ability to make new plastics, for instance, since they do not play much of a role in their own manufacturing processes.

This is the inner, technological positive-feedback loop (think of an entire technology sector engaging in a sort of 10,000 hours of deliberate practice; a major sign is that the most talented people turn to tool-building: Blanchard and Hall for Hall’s Law, people like the late Dennis Ritchie and Linus Torvalds for Moore’s Law).

But the technological positive-feedback loop requires an outer financial positive-feedback loop around it to fuel it. You need conditions where the second million is easier to make than the first million.

This means tycoons who spot some vast new opportunity and play land-grabbing games on a massive scale.

Both Hall’s Law and Moore’s Law led to wholesale management and financial innovation by precisely such new tycoons.

For Hall’s Law, the process started with Cornelius Vanderbilt, the hero of A. J. Stiles’ excellent The First Tycoon, who figured out how to tame the strange new beast, the post-East-India-Company corporation and in the process sidelined old money.

It is revealing that Vanderbilt was blooded in business through a major legal battle for steamboat water rights: Gibbons vs. Ogden (1824) that helped define the relationship of corporations to the rest of society. From there, he went from strength to strength, inventing new business and financial thinking along the way. Only in his old age did he finally meet his match: Jay Gould, who would go on to become the archetypal Robber Baron, taking over most of Vanderbilt’s empire from his not-so-talented children.

Vanderbilt was something of a transition figure. He straddled both management and finance, and old and new economies: he was a cross between an old-economy merchant-pirate in the Robert Clive mold (he ran a small war in Nicaragua for instance) and a new-economy corporate tycoon.  He transcended the categories that he helped solidify, which helped define the next generation of tycoons.