Summary 700wrds due in 24horus APA 7th

Human Adaptation and the Ingenuity Gap1

Thomas Homer-Dixon University of Toronto

I have been working for many years on the problem of adaptation: how societies

or organisms, species, or systems of various kinds adapt to complex and rapid

change. In this paper, I will outline my theories and my thinking about

adaptation as summarized in the book, The Ingenuity Gap. I will also highlight

five aspects of education for the future: education for complexity and what that

means; education for reconnection to the micro and macro scales around us;

education that increases our respect for experiential knowledge; education that

will encourage a recognition of our connectivity through time, from the present

into the future; and finally, education to broaden our conception of values. I’ll

touch on each one of these points in my presentation today.

Let’s start by going over the basic argument that I’ve been developing

in books such as The Ingenuity Gap. I start by asking a number of core

questions:

• Are we creating a world that’s too complex to manage?

• Do the “experts” really know what’s going on?

• Are we really as smart as we think we are?

• Then finally, the most important question, can we solve the

problems of the future?

I’m interested in developing ideas and taking them to the general

public, explaining or extracting some of the ideas and knowledge from isolated

worlds of academe and then providing them for a general audience. One way I

do that is to tell a lot of stories. So I will start my response to these four

questions this evening by telling a story that comes at the beginning of the book.

Now one of the mildly amusing things about this book is that when it first came

out it was selling very well in airports across the country. I don’t think people

Brock Education Vol. 12, No. 2, 2003

1

1. This is the transcribed, edited text of a lecture delivered by Dr. Homer-Dixon at Brock

University on November 12, 2002

Professor Homer-Dixon is Director of the Centre for the Study of Peace and Conflict at

the University of Toronto, and the author of numerous books on the human and physical

environment.

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2

realized when they bought the book and then settled into their comfortable seats

on the airplane that the first thing they were going to read about was a horrific

airplane crash. But I’m going to describe that incident today because it will

motivate my subsequent comments in this presentation.

The incident occurred on July 19, 1989, during United Airlines Flight

232 between Denver and Chicago. About half-way through the flight, the rear

tail engine on the DC-10 blew up. Now, there are three engines on the DC-10: a

large one in the tail and one over each wing. When the rear tail engine blew up,

the shrapnel from the explosion destroyed all three hydraulic systems in the

plane. Those hydraulic systems were necessary for controlling the flight

surfaces – the ailerons, the rudder, the flaps, and the slats that allowed the crew

in the cockpit to direct the plane through the atmosphere. So all of a sudden,

the pilot and the co-pilots sitting in their seats found that the wheels and

columns in front of them were dead. They had no control over the direction of

the plane.

Immediately the plane started turning into a rightward, downward dive,

and about 15 seconds later, just at the moment that the plane would have been

irretrievably lost, the captain tried something. He increased power to the right

engine, and lo and behold, that brought the right engine up and stabilized the

plane. At that point, he discovered that he could maintain some modest control

over the airplane by increasing and decreasing power to the right and left

engines - what they later called ‘differential engine thrust’ – and basically

skidding the plane through the atmosphere like that. After the engine exploded,

the plane described a series of rightward turns across the Iowa countryside, but

that modest control enabled them to make one left-hand turn to line the plane up

with the shortest runway at Sioux City, Iowa. At the last moment, just before

they brought it down on the ground, they made one very tight rightward turn,

dropped below radar cover, and then eventually brought the plane down.

There’s quite a bit more to the story than that. Some of the details I’m

giving you today are from a conversation with the captain, Al Haines, whom I

spoke to when I was writing my book.

That period of time lasted forty-four minutes and the cockpit crew had

some help. It turned out there was an extra pilot on board – somebody called a

“check airman” – who was responsible for checking on the performance of

United Airlines crews as they flew back and forth across the country. He

happened to be off duty but he was sitting in first class and he thought

something was wrong. The explosion had been in the back of the plane, so it

had been fairly muffled, but he started to see the sun going from one side of the

plane to the other, and he knew that wasn’t right. So he thought that perhaps he

should offer his help to the cockpit crew. He spoke to a flight attendant who

Human Adaptation and the Ingenuity Gap

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went up and talked to the captain, and the captain immediately called the check

airman into the cockpit and explained what was going on.

There was pandemonium in the cockpit. It was clear that the captain,

the co-pilot, and the first officer sitting behind them had too many things to do.

So when the check airman asked, “What can I do?” the captain said, “Could you

take over control of the two engines?” So from that point on, the check airman

stood between the pilot and the co-pilot with a hand on each of the engine

throttles and watched the bank of gauges in front of him and steered the aircraft.

Eventually, he was able to bring the plane down on the shortest runway in Sioux

City, Iowa. When the plane hit the ground, its right wing dipped at the last

moment and caught the ground so that it crash-landed The plane hit the ground

five times hard, and broke into three sections. The cockpit broke off and rolled

across the tarmac, compressed into a piece of metal about two meters high. The

remainder of the fuselage broke into two pieces, both of which cartwheeled and

exploded in flames. But despite all of that, of the 300 people on board, 200

were saved, and the entire cockpit crew survived. The rescue teams on the

ground didn’t even go and look at the cockpit for 35 minutes after the crash,

because they saw it off in the distance and thought it was such a wrecked hunk

of metal that nobody could be alive inside, but when they went over and looked

at the cockpit, they found that all the cockpit crew was still alive.

Now this is a pretty dramatic incident, and I’d probably claim that I

started the book with this story because I wanted to make sure that nobody

would put down the book once they started to read it. But there was more to it

than that. I wanted to draw some lessons, highlight some aspects of our world

illustrated by this story that I thought were important. So I will identify four

points of resonance or connections between this particular incident and the state

of our world today.

The first is the problem of cognitive overload. When I first heard

about this incident in 1989, I filed it away and forgot about it. But I came

across it again about six years later because somebody had done a very detailed

analysis of the information flows within the cockpit of the aircraft during this

incident. He had taken the cockpit transcript, broken it down into chunks of

information, and had then analyzed the flow of information between members

of the cockpit and between people in the cockpit and crews on the ground, the

air traffic control officers who were communicating with them as well as other

aircraft. He discovered that at peak load, the people in the cockpit were

operating at about five times the cognitive level or the information-processing

level of people in normal aircraft operation at peak load, which usually occurs

during a landing. So it turns out that the people in the cockpit were receiving

information, processing it, communicating among themselves, making

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decisions, and then communicating information out of the plane to people on

the ground as fast as humanly possible. They were at their maximum cognitive

load, in fact, and sometimes if you read the transcript, it seems like they almost

became one organism. It was as if their brains melded together as they were

making decisions to save this aircraft.

I’m intrigued by this because I think that in the decision-making

environments we’ve created for ourselves in this world, we’re reaching our

cognitive maximum in many cases. Especially in times of crisis, I would say

that our leaders are finding themselves overwhelmed by the complexity of

decisions they have to make, the amount of information they have to absorb, the

range of decisions they have to take. It really is a much more difficult world to

operate in, especially for our leaders, than it used to be. So that was the first

connection point that interested me.

The second is a related point. It turns out that the cognitive load that

these people faced was a lot higher because they had an inadequate knowledge

of the nature of the system they were operating in. It turned out, after the

National Safety Transportation Board had examined the wreckage, that the only

thing controlling the direction of that plane was the differential engine thrust

used by the check airman standing between the pilot and the co-pilot

manipulating those engine throttles. But the pilot and co-pilot didn’t know that.

They continued to operate the wheels and columns in front of them because they

thought they might have some residual control over the system. They continued

to operate the plane as normal because they didn’t know the nature of the

damage to the system they were operating in. Therefore they had to spread their

attention over a much broader range of things than they would have had to

otherwise if they’d understood the system properly. Again, I think that

resonates with our world frequently, in that we don’t understand the

complexities of the systems – ecological, technological, economic, socio-

political systems - that we’re living within; frequently we have to try everything

in the hope that something will work. As a result, we spread our resources and

our cognitive energy over so many things that we end up doing nothing very

well at all.

The third connection point is the problem of time lags. Now Al

Haines, the plane’s captain, didn’t know it at the time the explosion happened,

but he sure learned quickly that a plane that has locked flight surfaces and can

no longer steer itself but maintains power goes through an action that

aeronautical engineers call a ‘phugoid,’ which is kind of a porpoising motion

through the atmosphere – sort of like that. Now the key thing about a phugoid

is that there is a time lag between the time that you change the engine thrust and

the time that the plane responds in terms of changing its aerodynamic behaviour

Human Adaptation and the Ingenuity Gap

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– going up or going down. For a DC-10 the time lag is somewhere between 30

and 90 seconds, a long period of time. Now as that plane was coming down on

the runway at Sioux City, Iowa, the right wing was dipping, the co-pilot was

yelling at the check airman, “LEFT. LEFT. LEFT. LEFT. LEFT. LEFT. LEFT.”

Because he wanted the check airman to increase power to the right engine so

that the right wing would come up and they would land instead of crash landing.

But of course the check airman couldn’t do anything because the plane was

responding to commands he had given it 30 seconds before. He was powerless

at that point.

When you look at the complex systems that we’re embedded in, you

find that time lags are omnipresent, making management of these complex

systems far more difficult. They’re especially present in ecological systems.

For example, the carbon dioxide that we are dumping into the atmosphere right

now won’t have its full effect on the global climate for another 50 to 100 years.

The current warming that we see in the global climate has been caused in part

by carbon dioxide that was emitted in the middle of the last century. But you

also find this in economic systems. Probably the best example of a time lag that

we’re all familiar with is the lag between the time when a central bank

intervenes to change interest rates and the point at which the economy responds

in terms of increasing or decreasing its output of goods and services. In the

American economy, that’s assumed to be between six and nine months. We’re

all wondering now whether Alan Greenspan got it right this last time around, or

if he waited too long to increase interest rates, then increased them too high,

then ultimately did not decrease them quickly enough, with the result that he has

done serious damage to the American and ultimately the Western economies.

Time lags make it much more difficult for us to manage in this world.

The fourth connection point between this story and the real world is the

problem of experts, the inadequacy of experts. Shortly after the explosion,

when the plane was stabilized a bit and they were using differential engine

thrusts, the pilot turned around to the first officer and said, “Get SAM on the

line.” SAM stands for ‘System Aircraft Maintenance,’ a group of designated

engineers that United Airlines has to advise crews in crisis in the air. Within

five or ten minutes, a group of engineers had gathered around a speaker phone

in San Francisco and were talking to the first officer in United 232. First off,

they requested a briefing on the situation, so the first officer told them

everything. He said, “We’ve lost all hydraulic quantity and pressure. We don’t

know what to do. We seem to have very little control over this plane except by

using differential engine thrust.” The SAM engineers didn’t know what to make

of this, never having heard of an accident that compromised all three hydraulic

systems. In fact, they had the first officer flipping through a thick flight manual

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trying to find something that pertained to their situation at the time. After a few

minutes, the SAM engineers said, “Look. We have to go and think about this

for a while . So we’re going to sign off.” So they disappeared, and then about

ten minutes later, came back on and said, “Could you just confirm that you’ve

lost all three hydraulic systems?”

The first officer shouted into the microphone, “AFFIRMATIVE,

AFFIRMATIVE, AFFIRMATIVE,” and then hung up. At that point, the crew

realized that they themselves would have to generate the ingenuity to land the

aircraft, and a remarkable job they did. There’s not an insignificant amount of

luck involved in this event; after the crash, they programmed the incident into a

flight simulator and in 45 attempts, including a number of attempts with the

original crew itself, they never got anywhere near the airport.

Thus, issues that I investigate, such as cognitive overload, time lags,

and adequacy of experts, suggest that in recent decades our world has changed

in a way that makes these problems more acute for us. My central argument is

very straightforward: that the complexity, the pace, and often the

unpredictability of events in our world are soaring, as is the severity of

environmental stress. If we are to meet the challenges we face in this new

world, we need more ingenuity. But we cannot always supply the ingenuity we

need at the right times and places, and the result is an ingenuity gap. That’s the

basic argument.

Before I elaborate, what are some of the problems that I’m talking

about? I divide them into three categories: problems at the global level,

problems at the national or societal level, and problems at the individual level.

One of the contentious claims I make is that there are common patterns across

these three levels. In other words, the causes or sources of rising complexity

and pace in our daily lives, at the personal level, can also be seen at the national

level and at the global level. They are contributing to such things as

international financial instability as in the Asian financial crisis of 1997-98. It’s

these common patterns that I’m trying to identify in my work.

At the global level, I’m interested in climate change, a problem that

will probably affect every person on this planet, quite likely sooner than most of

us realize. To address it effectively will require us to develop the most

sophisticated and complex institutions that humankind has ever developed.

International financial crises can be caused by an international financial system

tightly coupled with 1.5 trillion dollars of hot capital sloshing around in it on a

daily basis and hence prone to flip between stable and unstable modes as we

saw in with the Asian financial crisis. Chronic zones of anarchy in the

developing world caused by converging stresses, very much like those pilots

experienced in United 232 in that cockpit, where you find societies that are

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faced with epidemics of tuberculosis and AIDS, diffusion of light weapons like

rocket propelled grenades and assault rifles, rapid population growth, economic

shocks from outside, weakened institutions inside these countries, and the

convergence of all of these stresses and problems produce a breakdown of the

process of economic and political development and ultimately a rise in violence.

Over the last two years, we’ve learned that events happening on the other side

of the planet in places where you have states breaking down and widespread

social dislocation can penetrate right back into the core of our own societies.

At the national level, in Canadian society for instance, I’m interested in

rising antibiotic resistance. This is a classic example of a race between our

medical and epidemiological knowledge on one side and the pathogens that are

affecting our species on the other, the bugs that are evolving faster than we can

develop drugs to treat them. In many cases, it seems that those bugs are

winning the race. Chronic health care crises – well, we know a lot about those

in Canada. Persistent homelessness is an interesting problem: There is a

widespread consensus in our society across all socioeconomic levels, across all

classes to be crude about it, that this is a problem that needs to be solved, and

yet for some reason our municipal, provincial, and federal governments cannot

address this problem effectively. The data on the widening gaps between the

super rich and everyone else are really quite astonishing. I don’t think most

people realize what has happened in the last 20 or 30 years, but I suggest that as

the gap between the richest and everybody else widens, it will undermine our

sense of identity and perhaps even lead to political instability in our societies.

In our daily lives, I’m interested in information overload. This is the

thing that we confront every morning when we turn on our computers and find

another 60 to 100 e-mail messages there. Many of us, especially those of us

living in urban areas, now have the sense that there are simply too many stimuli,

too many things coming into our lives, too many streams of information, that

sometimes our brains literally feel overloaded. As you can see from my

description of United 232, one of my arguments is that sometimes our brains

literally are overloaded, that we are reaching our cognitive limits.

This is a pretty broad range of problems. How can I possibly link all of

these together? I’m now going to sketch out the basics of what I call ‘Ingenuity

Theory’ so that you can see how I bring all of these problems together and show

the connections among these levels.

I start by defining ‘ingenuity’ and sets of instructions that tell us how to

arrange the constituent parts of our physical and social worlds in ways that help

us achieve our goals. I ngenuity is like recipes that allow us to take the stuff in

our world, literally the stuff in the ground, and reconfigure it to make the things

we need to solve our problems. My laptop computer, which has about as much

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computational power as was available to the entire American defense

department in the 1960s, is nothing more than reconfigured rock and

hydrocarbons. We’ve taken stuff out of the ground, and through a long and

elaborate set of recipes, we’ve reconfigured it into this remarkable device. It’s

equally true with everything around us in this room – the seats you’re sitting on,

the clothes you’re wearing, lights overhead – all consist of reconfigured

materials from our natural world. If you want to think how amazing that is go

camping sometime and sit in the natural world and think about what would be

required to take all the stuff around you and make it into the things like laptop

computers. It’s really remarkable; we’re extraordinarily good at that.

In my work, I focus on the requirements for these recipes or sets of

instructions, what determines the kinds of instructions we need and how many

instructions we need at the same time, and what things impede the flow of those

instructions when and where we need them. Also, I make an important

distinction between technical ingenuity and social ingenuity. Technical

ingenuity consists of ideas or instructions for creating new technologies, like a

laptop computer or more comfortable chairs or better lights or better internal

combustion engines. We’re really good at doing that as a species. We’re not as

good at producing ideas for how we arrange ourselves into societies and groups

and institutions. That’s what I call social ingenuity - sets of instructions for

creating things like governments, political systems, or markets. Now, it turns

out that social ingenuity is more important than technical ingenuity, but not only

are we not as good at doing it, we also don’t pay as much attention to it, because

we’re really fascinated by technology. But institutions ultimately are more

important than technologies because you don’t get the technologies you want

until you have the right institutions designed. In particular, you’re not going to

get the flow of neat technologies like laptop computers or whatever you want

unless you get your markets organized right so that your entrepreneurs are

rewarded for the risks they take. They have to get the right price signals. But

markets are very complicated institutions that require things like limited-

liability legislation, property rights, judicial, court, and police systems that

enforce contracts, monetary systems that are stable, stable banking systems – all

of these things have to be provided if markets are going to work effectively.

You need those first before you get the flow of technical ingenuity. That’s why

I claim that social ingenuity is more important than technical ingenuity.

I also make a distinction between requirements for ingenuity and

supply. I’ll talk more about requirements in a moment. Let me just say one

thing about supply. It’s important to understand what I mean here: By “supply,”

I mean ideas, ingenuity or recipes that are implemented and delivered. I think

of society as pipelines; at the beginning of this pipeline is a generation stage

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where ideas are produced. That can happen in all kinds of places: in corporate

laboratories, in government bureaucracies, in universities, in non-governmental

organizations, or in local community groups trying to solve local problems. But

then those ideas have to move along the pipeline to the implementation and

delivery stage, and they’re not supplied until they have been implemented and

delivered. Unfortunately, you often get powerful special interests along that

pipeline, acting to block the delivery, especially, of institutional reform, because

when you change institutions, you change the power balance and the

distribution of wealth within society. Powerful groups don’t like that. So they

intervene at various points to make sure that that doesn’t happen. One of the

results I have studied is how our political systems are changing to make it less

and less easy for true institutional reform to occur. I’ll return to that shortly.

We are left with a situation where I would argue that in certain

circumstances our requirement for ingenuity shoots up faster than we can supply

it. Not in all circumstances; sometimes in certain areas and with certain

problems there is no ingenuity gap. We solve the problems quite satisfactorily.

But in the kinds of problems I talked about earlier I would suggest there is a

significant gap. Note one thing here: The supply is not leveling out, it’s not

flattening off. This is not an argument about limits to science or some kind of

inescapable cap to human creativity. Human creativity is extraordinary and I

believe our ability to innovate is still very strong. It’s just that in some cases,

we can’t keep up; we’re creating problems that are too hard for us, that are

developing too fast and are too difficult.

Given this model, these basic concepts, we can ask some fairly

straightforward questions. First of all, is our requirement for ingenuity rising?

Second, if it is rising, can we supply the ingenuity we need? Third, if we can’t

always supply the ingenuity we need, what do those ingenuity gaps mean for our

future? What are their implications? Fourth, what do we do about it? How do

we fix this problem?

I argue that there are three principle forces driving our requirement for

ingenuity, making our world more complex, faster paced, and sometimes more

unpredictable: larger human populations; higher resource consumption; and

more powerful technologies for the movement of people, material, energy, and

especially information. These three changes together sharply raise the density,

intensity, and pace of our interactions with each other and with our surrounding

natural environment.

We can think of the world as consisting of networks. We are

embedded in a set of systems - ecological, technological, economic, political,

and social systems - each of which can be thought of as a network consisting of

nodes or entities connected together with links. A node can be people,

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corporations, technologies, even whole nations. Over time, especially in the last

two or three decades, we’ve seen a highly significant increase in the number of

nodes in our networks and therefore a dramatic increase in the density of

linkages among them. We’ve seen an absolutely exponential increase at the rate

at which we can push energy, material, and especially information along those

links. That causes the increasing density, intensity, and pace of our interactivity

within these networks.

About a century ago, the French sociologist, Emile Durkheim, wrote

about the inexorably rising dynamic density of societies. The concept is similar,

except that in the last thirty years, we’ve seen a dramatic qualitative shift in the

nature of human social systems. They have become complex in a way that’s

truly novel and has significant implications for our ability to survive. This is

called a ‘Complexity Transition,’ and will be elaborated further later on.

Two of those three factors, larger human populations and higher

resource consumption, have greatly increased our burden on Earth’s natural

environment, and the third factor, more powerful technologies, has shifted

power from national and international institutions to individuals and sub-

groups. I call this the “power shift issue.” If you want a dramatic

demonstration, September 11th, 2001 showed that small groups of individuals

can now destroy large groups of individuals. Within ten years, we may see that

small groups can destroy whole cities. Thus, individuals now have access to

unprecedented kinds of power – power to communicate, power to destroy,

power to make things. That change has fundamental implications for the

manageability of our societies. All these developments – increasing dynamic

density, increasing burden on our natural environment, the power shift from

large institutions to small groups – imply that we must cope with more complex,

urgent, and often unpredictable circumstances. “Complexity” here means

something specific: Complexity theorists talk about certain characteristics of

complex systems: feedbacks, synergies, non-linearities, unknown unknowns,

time lags. I’m not going to discuss all of these; you’ve heard about time lags in

United 232. Let me just talk about a couple. Unknown unknowns arise when

the system has become so complex that you don’t even know what questions to

ask anymore. You’re ignorant of your own ignorance. It’s like the problem I

get when I look at my car engine now. I used to do a lot of work on cars when I

was a teenager and understood them pretty well. But then I didn’t own a car for

a long time, for almost seventeen years. Then a couple of years ago I bought a

new car - a nice European car, very fast, very sporty - and when I picked it up,

the salesman came out and we opened up the hood. We looked at the engine

and he said, “You can look at this but you can never touch it.” For me, that

engine, in its density of tubes and modules and wires all over the place where I

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couldn’t even see the manifold anymore, represented a cluster of unknown

unknowns.

The other concept I’d like to illustrate is the idea of non-linearities.

Complex systems have the capacity to flip from stable to turbulent modes, often

with very little prodding, with only a small permutation. In fact, complex

systems often have multiple equilibria. They can sit in a number of stable states

and move from one to another, often in very unpredictable ways. We see non-

linear behaviour around us all the time, but don’t pay much attention to it

because it’s rather bothersome. It doesn’t fit into our standard operating

procedures very well. The collapse of the cod fishery off the east coast of

North America is a good example of a non-linearity. The opening up of the

Antarctic ozone hole is another non-linearity. The Asian financial crisis is a

non-linearity in our international economic system. The exploding fan disk on

U232 was a non-linearity. The dot-com implosion was a non-linearity in the

stock markets. If anything characterizes complex systems, it’s their capacity for

non-linear behaviour, surprises that we can’t anticipate. The one thing that

shouldn’t surprise us about the future is that it is going to be full of surprises. In

this environment, we must generally make more and better decisions in less time

than ever before, because the management of our relationship with this new

world requires immense and ever-increasing amounts of social and technical

ingenuity.

A couple of stories will illustrate what I mean. I’m going to talk about

the climate because it’s a good example of a non-linear system, using data

derived from the Greenland ice sheet. As you know, Greenland is covered by a

very thick ice sheet formed by the accumulation of snow that has fallen over

thousands and thousands and thousands of years. As that snow has fallen, it has

been compressed into layers of ice by the snow that has fallen on top of it. If

you drill down and extract an ice core, you extract an archeological record of

past climates. Scientists have examined the amount of snow accumulated each

year and found that the warmer the climate over Greenland, the more snow falls.

That is because warmer air holds more water, and as it still precipitates out as

snow, you get more snow. We have evidence of an event around 11,500 years

ago with a dramatic increase in snowfall at a point that’s called “the end of the

younger, driest cold event;” it’s basically the end of the last Ice Age. That

change in snowfall represents a 7-degree Celsius warming in a thirty-year

period. Seven degrees Celsius in a thirty-year period. The difference between

the current average temperature on the planet and the coldest period of the last

Ice Age 18,000 years ago is 5 degrees Celsius. This is a monumental change in

global climate. It turns out that at that time, there was a wholesale

reorganization of atmospheric and ocean circulation systems all around the

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planet. We think we know why that happened, and we’re concerned that if we

push the temperature higher on this planet by another degree to a degree and a

half, we could see that kind of flip in the organization of ocean currents in the

North Atlantic which could trigger reorganization elsewhere on the planet. The

key thing about this is that it is hard-core evidence of the non-linear behaviour

of the global atmosphere. Don’t assume that as this planet warms up over the

next century it will be a nice easy ride into the greenhouse future. It’s going to

be characterized by sharp sudden shifts which will make adaptation vastly more

difficult.

For the second part of the story, we go to the other pole of the planet,

to a lake in Antarctica called Lake Vostok which is all frozen except for a little

bit of water at the bottom. In the 1980’s, Russian and French scientists started

drilling into the ice sheet over Lake Vostok to extra ct an ice core. Later,

American scientists finished the drilling, extracting an ice core that was almost

four kilometers long and stopped just above the water. That whole ice core

represents 420,000 years of time. The scientists made some very interesting

discoveries, because they were able to extract air bubbles from each year’s layer

of ice and determine the carbon dioxide concentrations of various years as they

went back into the past. So they had a record of carbon dioxide concentration

going back 420,000 years, and using some clever chemistry, they were able to

determine the temperature of the atmosphere at the time the snow fell. They

found a very close correlation between changes in carbon dioxide concentration

and changes in temperature. Now, we all know that correlation doesn’t

necessarily mean causation, but as lawyers would say, this is good prima facie

evidence of a causal relationship between the two factors.

A sharp, sudden change has happened in the last 150 years. With

industrialization, we have increased the concentration of carbon dioxide in our

atmosphere by about 30%. The temperature is increasing too; we’ve seen an

increase in temperature of almost one degree Celsius since 1900. This is where

we’re going in the future, and that’s locked in, guaranteed, within the lives of

our grandchildren. That represents just over a doubling of carbon dioxide in the

atmosphere from pre-industrial levels, probably by about the year 2050. Now,

although our atmospheric models of global warming are organized around a

doubling of CO 2 , most atmospheric scientists say we’re not going to stop at a

doubling. Given current development patterns on this planet, we’re going to

triple or quadruple our carbon dioxide concentration, and in that case, I would

suggest that we’re going to see some pretty dramatic effects on this planet in the

next little while.

What’s the point here? The point is that human beings are now, in an

unprecedented way, major actors on this planet. We move as much dirt and

Human Adaptation and the Ingenuity Gap

13

rock on this planet on an annual basis as nature does itself. We have doubled

the amount of reactive nitrogen in the atmosphere and increased the amount of

carbon dioxide by 30%. We are major actors. We don’t know the implications

of that and the only thing we can be certain of is that it will make our problems

harder in the future. We’re going to need more ingenuity to adapt to this new

world.

Can we supply that ingenuity? I break this question into four parts; in

my book, I devote a chapter to each one. I’m interested in brains because

brains are the engines of our ingenuity supply, where all those ideas start. We

need to go back and look at the evolution of the hominid brain over three

million years and ask, “Are the characteristics derived from that evolutionary

heritage suitable for the kinds of problems we’ve produced for ourselves

today?” I deduce that in some cases, we don’t have the right kind of brain for

today’s kinds of problems. Science and technology are very important if we’re

going to solve our problems, but we shouldn’t assume that they will always

solve our problems. Many people seem to think that science and technology

will rescue us, that if we have climate change, we’ll put mirrors in space or

dump iron into the ocean and create phytoplankton blooms that will suck carbon

dioxide out of the atmosphere - or something. But science and technology don’t

always solve our problems when and where we need them solved.

One of the best examples of this is cancer. We’ve invested 40 billion

dollars in cancer research since Nixon declared his war on cancer in the early

1970s and we all still know people who are getting cancer. Necessity is not

always the mother of invention and we shouldn’t assume that science will save

us at some point in the future.

Markets are important for the reasons I suggested before. We need

markets organized so that they give the right price signals to our entrepreneurs.

But frequently our markets are riddled with what economists call “market

failures.” They don’t give the right price signals. The best example we have

right now is gasoline prices. If we really cared about the future, about the

climate future for our children and our grandchildren, our gasoline should be far

more expensive now. It should include some of those future costs and then

we’d conserve, we would invent new technologies that would allow us to reduce

our carbon dioxide output into the atmosphere.

Finally, politics is important, because politics often determines whether

those important ideas to solve our problems actually get implemented or

whether they get blocked in that ingenuity supply pipeline.

What does this mean for educators? The first point is that we need to

put on a new set of conceptual lenses that allow people to see the world on a

human scale, but including the micro and the macro scales. We don’t see small

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things anymore and we don’t see big things, especially if we live in cities.

Think of Hong Kong and Beijing. One of the things we do in cities, especially

in the developing world, is to generate huge amounts of smog and haze. Haze

now blankets a large part of the world, but that brown sludge you see on the

horizon is not normal. We also generate staggering amounts of light in urban

areas, so we seldom see stars anymore. We’ve all had the experience on a clear,

dark, summer night in the country side when we’ve looked at the sky and at the

Milky Way and thought, “Oh, my God. That’s just an astonishing thing.” When

we see the Milky Way, the first thing we think of is “My God, we’re small.”

But we’ve lost the sense of awe and prudence, a sense of our true place in the

universe, and so we often misunderstand the character of the problems we face

or don’t even see the problems at all.

I’m going to give you a concrete example: frogs. We have a world-

wide die-off of amphibian populations going on, especially of frogs, from

Queensland, Australia to Costa Rica in Central America to California to

Newfoundland. All over the world, we’re seeing a precipitous decline in frog

species. I had an ecologist from Newfoundland sitting in my office one day and

he said, “It’s astonishing. There are just no frogs any more.” Well, the frogs

are probably dying because of a combination of stresses: a thinned ozone layer

that has increased ultra-violent radiation of the surface of the planet and

weakened the reproduction systems of these frogs, pollutants in the environment

that weaken their immune systems, harvesting for food, destruction of habitat –

all of these things are happening simultaneously and one of the results is we’re

seeing a decline in frogs. But most of us don’t know that because we’re so busy

living in our self-referential world that we don’t see frogs any more. Most of us

don’t notice that there’s a problem out there. Frogs are like a canary in the coal

mine. They’re busy chirping away but nobody’s listening because we’re so

wrapped up in the big ‘I’. It seems to me that this is something that educators

must confront directly.

So what does the ingenuity gap mean for our future? I think it widens

the gulfs between rich and poor and between powerful and weak people. All of

us in this room are educated, wealthy, and adaptable enough to deal with the

complex changes that our world throws at us. Most of us probably have rich

social networks to draw on when the going gets rough. But for an increasing

portion of our societies and of the planet, people are being left behind. On a

planetary scale, five to six hundred million people in sub-Saharan Africa are

completely off the radar screen now. Nobody is paying attention to them. A

major famine is going on in sub-Saharan Africa right now in Malawi, Botswana,

Zambia, and Zimbabwe that threatens 15 million people. Have you heard about

it? Are people paying attention? No. Increasingly within our own societies,

Human Adaptation and the Ingenuity Gap

15

some groups of people just can’t keep up with the kinds of changes we’re

seeing. This produces a fragmentation of our shared reality. Never before have

we been so connected together on this planet and never before have we been so

far apart in our realities – with web-ware designers in Silicon Valley living right

next to women in South Africa who have to walk five kilometers every day to

get their water, with bond traders in the City of London living right next to slum

dwellers in Sao Paolo living right next to us in this auditorium right now.

Unfortunately, we’ve learned from the last couple of years that these different

worlds won’t stay isolated from each other. We’re packed cheek by jowl on this

planet now, so that the problems, dislocations, and issues that are arising on

other sides of the planet are going to visit us in our own lives here.

So what should we do? This is where I get to my last three points. I

draw first on the story of United Flight 232, because Al Haines identified a

number of factors that allowed him to land that plane. The first was luck: The

accident occurred in daylight, the weather was good, and there was an airport

nearby. There also happened to be a check airman on board. Those things

helped them get that plane on the ground. A second factor was planning: Just a

couple of weeks before, the crews on the ground at Sioux City, Iowa had done a

full dress rehearsal for the crash-landing of a wide-body aircraft on the shortest

runway of that airport. Another factor was co-operation: Some years before,

United Airlines had implemented a program of training of its crews to react in a

crisis in a co-operative and not hierarchical way. So when that accident

occurred, everyone within that cockpit instantly started to co-operate to solve

the problem. The hierarchy was flattened. The captain had to make some final

decisions in some cases, but he had been trained to listen. Al Haines says that

this was absolutely critical to get that plane on the ground. Then the final thing,

which Haines did not mention, but which I consider very important, was

experiential knowledge. This is something we have to emphasize as educators.

According to the results of the simulation tests, if Captain Haines had

increased power to that right engine a second earlier or a second later, he would

have lost control of the plane. When I asked him, “How did you know when to

do it?” he answered, “Oh, well, I guess it was just luck.” I don’t think it was

luck. It was the fact that he had been flying those planes for tens of thousands

of hours, until the DC-10 was like an organic extension of his body. He had

extraordinarily rich understandings of that machinery – experiential knowledge.

I think we need to do more to cultivate wisdom in our societies, the wisdom that

comes from working with complex systems for long periods of time so that you

can recognize their patterns of behaviour, so that you have an intuition for what

they’re going to do and how they’re going to respond. We need, too, the

wisdom that comes from integrating reason with emotion, because it’s for a

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purpose that we’ve evolved to have emotions. We’ve evolved to have emotions

because they help us survive. Fear and awe and wonder and dread help us

survive, helped us survive on those plains of Africa. But although we’ve left a

lot of emotional responses behind, wise people are still able to integrate that

extraordinarily rich emotional repertoire with their reason when solving the

problems that we face.

My second concluding point is about sustainability: education for

sustainability and the recognition of our connectivity through time. What does

sustainability mean in terms of the ingenuity gap? We can think about it this

way: If you’re not living sustainably, you’re not planning far into the future.

Your time horizon is proximate, one or two years, or four years in the future

perhaps at the most. If you’ve got a problem, such as for example, a declining

fishery like Newfoundland’s, how do you respond to it? Well, since you don’t

plan far into the future, you respond by increasing the size of your fleet of

fishing boats, getting better sonar so you can track the fish, building better nets

so you can catch them, and so that involves a slow incremental increase in

ingenuity over time. But then the system breaks down. You have one of those

non-linearities because you haven’t been thinking far into the future. Just at that

point where you see that sudden sharp rise you get a dramatic increase in your

ingenuity requirement - perhaps an infinite increase. Perhaps you can’t solve

your problems any more. This is what sustainability means. We move our time

horizons way out into the distance; we’re concerned now about the well being

of people a hundred, a hundred and fifty years in the future. We want to make

sure that fish stock is still able to provide fish in that period of time. But that

means we have to adjust our technologies and institutions in a major way now.

We have to invest in thinking about how to live within the limits of that resource

base. It’s easy to see why sustainable development doesn’t get done; it’s

because there’s a big investment in the present. It means you have to challenge

the vested interests in a major way in the present. But I think one of the things

that we can do as educators is help people recognize the implications of our

actions well out into the future and the importance of starting to make changes

to our technologies and institutions in the present – moving those changes into

the present just as that green curve shows.

I think the final thing we need to do as educators is to broaden our

conception of values, because the difficulty and character of the problems we

face in this world are shaped fundamentally by the kinds of values we adopt.

For instance, if we decide that the kind of life we want, the good life as we

define it, includes two SUVs in the driveway, a three-car garage, five bedrooms

with four washrooms and yearly trips to the Caribbean, and we want to do that

for all of the ten to eleven billion people we’re going to have on this planet

Human Adaptation and the Ingenuity Gap

17

eventually, that’s going to take a lot of ingenuity. We’re going to have to be

very smart to squeeze all of those services out of the limited material resources

on this planet – to reconfigure them in a way that will provide all the stuff for

ten to eleven billion people. We’re probably going to have to live by lots of

regulations. We’re going to need very good technologies, very constraining

institutions in a lot of ways. But we might decide, ‘Well, you know, maybe

that’s not what’s really important to a good life. Maybe we can be really happy

with less material stuff.’ Then all of a sudden, other options start to open up

because we don’t need so much pure technical ingenuity to provide the material

well-being.

Now, the last thing I want to consider is how we think about values,

because I think they influence fundamentally how we’re going to address the

problem of the ingenuity gap. There’s a tendency within our common discourse

to think about values as what I call simple preferences. These are what

economists would call “utilities.” I like vanilla ice cream more than chocolate

ice cream. Unfortunately, that’s about where the discussion of values stops a lot

of times. But clearly there are other kinds of values that are important - moral

values, values that relate to how we deal with each other in our societies, issues

of fairness and justice for example – those values are very important. They

don’t get talked about very much, but at least they get talked about a little more

than this third category: the existential or spiritual values that relate to what we

regard as the source of meaning in our lives, the relationship between us and the

cosmos, what the point of the whole exercise is. We learn by the time we’re

about ten that we shouldn’t ask these questions, and we learn quickly from the

expressions on the faces of adults that we’re supposed to go somewhere else,

perhaps to religious institutions or something, to find out the answers to those

questions. So we go to those places and we’re not given a place to think; we’re

told what to think. Maybe if we’re lucky, by the end of our lives as we start to

get intimations of mortality, we start to realize, “Wow, these questions are pretty

important.” Then we go back to investigate them a bit. But for the most part

they are entirely marginalized within our societies. And yet if we want to think

about our notion of the good life – what is bringing meaning into our lives and

ultimately therefore what kinds of material satisfactions we want, whether two

SUVs for example are really important, the answers start at the level of

existential values. That’s where we need to start. Unless we talk about those

issues among ourselves, we may never reach a real consensus. We have to talk

about them to start re-thinking the point of our social existence and individual

existence. If we never discuss those questions, then all that gets talked about

are the simple preferences, and human beings become defined simply as

consumers or more crudely as walking appetites – as people who are driven by

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their hedonistic desires for some things over other things. The economists

essentially win the day.

I conclude that a highly critical requirement for us in education is to

broaden our conception of values – to educate for a broader conception of

values in the future. If we don’t do that, I can’t see how we’re going to address

a lot of the problems that I’ve discussed in this presentation today. Thank you

very much.

Question & Answer

Question 1: With the problems of terrorism, can you see a

reinvigoration of the nation state as a decision-making institution? What can we

do to talk about democratic values with the military and especially the

politicians who dictate the role of the military in society?

It’s a great question. The state is really important. Sometimes I don’t

like where people take the state, but as an institution it’s important because it

generates the public goods that allow for our well-being. It solves what

economist would call “collective action problems.” We really need things like

health systems, road systems, security, control of epidemic diseases and things

like that, but none of us is really prepared to pay a large cost as individuals

unless we know that everybody else is going to as well, so there’s an inevitable

free-rider problem. We always want to hold back and let other people take care

of the problem. What the state does is co-ordinate action so that we’re all part

of it together and the problem gets solved. My concern is that we’re seeing an

inexorable weakening of state institutions because of the power shift I spoke

about earlier – the increase in power due in part to communication technologies

and in part to the diffusion of technologies to destroy. Now a lot of the time, the

increase in communication ability is a very good thing because it allows us to

participate more fully in democracy, to communicate and organize ourselves

more effectively. There should be – a lot of people assumed there would be –

reinvigoration of democracy as a result of the internet, for example, and all the

new communication technologies from fax machines to cell phones and things.

But I’m not sure it’s going to work out like that. I think it’s more likely that

what we’re creating is a kind of electronic cacophony or electronic gridlock.

Decision makers within our democratic institutions are absolutely overwhelmed

now by the flow of information coming in. In the United States, 1998 figures

showed that representatives in the House of Representatives would get up to

5,500 e-mail messages a month, senators up to 70,000, and congress as a whole

Human Adaptation and the Ingenuity Gap

19

80 million e-mail messages a year. Until six to eight months ago, they

responded to every one. Policy makers are overwhelmed. Now we have a set

of democratic institutions which are critical to the functioning of the state in

Western society that were developed or evolved during the 18th and 19th

centuries when people traveled at the speed of horses at a maximum and when

information was transferred almost wholly by mouth because most people

weren’t literate. Now people can travel to the other side of the planet in less

than a day, and they transfer information by the gigabit. We have hyper-

empowered citizens and institutions from over a century ago – two centuries

ago. A big ingenuity requirement is the need to rethink our collective decision-

making process effectively so that we can decide how we’re going to solve our

problems and include these hyper-active and hyper-empowered citizens

effectively within that decision-making process. We need to strengthen the state

rather than weaken it. At the moment, many people are withdrawing as

participants because they see that the system isn’t working. It’s losing its moral

legitimacy, voting turnouts are going down, nobody interesting and competent

of high caliber wants to go into politics any more, and so we’re seeing a steady

erosion of the quality of our political institutions and over time, an erosion of

the strength of the state. That’s really bad news. The other part of this, of

course, is that when you have all of these hyper-empowered groups all over the

place, it’s very difficult to solve problems with collective action. It’s very

difficult even if you have a competent state to get everybody together to actually

deal with something like climate change, as we can see in Canada right now. So

my sense is that we’ve got a real problem here, and we have to start thinking

really creatively about new forms of democratic participation in our societies.

Question 2: I want to ask a question about the economy and some of

the problems you’ve raised. Do you think that we need to look for ways to

develop alternative economic systems or do you think we can simply

accomplish what we need to accomplish by regulating the capitalist mode of

production?

I’d like to answer that question by referring to the data on income

distributions from the United States over the last forty years. These are from

U.S. National Census Bureau data on mean family income in 1997 dollars, so

they’re controlled for inflation. The population is divided into quintiles (5ths),

from about 1967 to almost 2000. (The latest figures aren’t out but they’ll be

about the same in terms of trends.) The bottom four quintiles - 80% of families

in the United States - have seen very little or no real increase in their income.

The bottom three are essentially flat, and the fourth is almost flat, but the top

T. Homer-Dixon

20

fifth of the population has gained an increase of about 50% in its income, while

the top 5% of the families have seen an increase of over 100%. This represents

a pretty fundamental change in the structure of distribution in our societies.

I think, to answer your question, that it is fundamentally a function of

the nature of capitalism. I’m not sure that it’s essential to capitalism, but it

means that to avoid this situation, which I think ultimately is very dangerous to

our society, we have to watch what’s happening very carefully and we need

strong states to deal with it. Why is this bad news? Well, among other things,

it’s bad news because increasingly, you’re going to find that the top portions of

the socio-economic system of the distribution are not willing to contribute to the

generation of public goods, because they can buy whatever goods they need

privately. Parks, recreation, health care, roads, security – they’ll just buy them

privately. Increasingly, it undermines our common sense of identity and if

there’s one thing that we need to solve our common problems it’s a sense of

‘we-ness’ – that we are together in these problems and need to solve them

together. So over time, this is really bad news for ingenuity generation, for

solving our problems, and even for political stability.

Why is it happening? One of the critical reasons is that in our modern

capitalist economy, markets are so large that those who are best at producing

whatever they produce can sell essentially to the whole planet or at least to very

large markets. But everybody who is second-ranked or further down the ranks

doesn’t get rewarded. So you get a winner-take-all economy – rewards tend to

go to the very top-echelon producers and everybody else suffers. Just to finish

my comment on this question: This economic gap is one of the problems we

have in the current global capitalist system because it is happening not only

within the United States, Canada, and other Western countries, but around the

world. We see this widening of the gap.

But we also have the problem of a capitalist system that seems to be

pushing at the outer limits of the ecological thresholds of the planet. We have a

system that has a chronic problem maintaining adequate demand. For example,

one of the problems we’ve got is that the bottom four quintiles are not

increasing their income sufficiently to maintain adequate demand within the

economy. So what do we do in response? Well, we generate a psychology of

hyper-consumerism, to turn everybody into walking appetites. We try to get

them to spend all of their money; we don’t want them saving any money, and we

don’t want the savings rate to go up in the United States because the whole

world economy now depends on the American consumer. Well, so on one hand,

we have to maintain through-put in the world economy because it’s only stable

if it’s growing; if it isn’t growing, these differentials are going to produce real

political and social instability. On the other hand, that increase in material

Human Adaptation and the Ingenuity Gap

21

consumption is producing problems like the Green House problem that I

mentioned before. That is pretty close to a fundamental contradiction. We are

on the brink of a deflationary spiral in the Western and the world economy right

now. This is a new situation, what Paul Krugman calls the “return of depression

economics,” and the way we solve it is by pumping up consumption. We want

people to buy SUVs. At the same time, we’re having the worst drought that has

ever been experienced on the prairies, and climate change is starting to show its

face all over the planet. I think it’s reasonable to say the signal is appearing

from the noise. This is a serious contradiction. I’m not sure whether it’s an

essential contradiction in capitalism, but we certainly need to revisit some of the

deeper principles of the economic system we’ve created.

Question 3. You talk about people being overwhelmed and indeed they

often are, but they also seem to be “underwhelmed” in that the information they

get is often summarized and seldom explained in depth. This isn’t really new;

even in war-time, most news was summarized, but today it seems to be even

more the case, and it’s something that as educators, I think we should be

fighting against. You mentioned microcosm and so forth in doing that. Do you

have any “help” as to how to combat this?

Well, one of the things – and this is not a bad way to conclude I

suppose – one of the things that people have found frustrating about my book is

that I don’t provide a checklist of answers at the end. In fact, it would be a bit

odd for a book that’s an extended argument against arrogance to say at the end,

“Oh, well, I’ve got all the answers.” I’m not sure of the answer to this one, but

we do have a critical problem, rather like the one about the capitalist system.

The problem is that we’ve improved our ability to transfer information

practically infinitely, but our basic cognitive capability hasn’t improved. We

have probably increased our information-transfer capability a hundred million

fold in the last twenty years. Well, what do we do in that situation? Here we

are sitting in this tidal wave of stuff that’s piling up at the front doors of our

cerebral cortex. What do we do? We hyper-specialize, we task-switch, and we

abbreviate. We all task-switch, this is what multi-tasking is all about, right? We

all do a little bit of this, a little bit of that, go back and forth – it’s really

inefficient, it lowers your cognitive effectiveness – all the tests show that you’re

actually a worse driver when you’re talking on the cell phone. But we’re all

doing it because we’ve got so many things going on, and this gets directly to

your point. We abbreviate, we shorten our messages. We see it in e-mail

messages. They’re staccato phrases; we lose the depth of communication with

people. It appears from cognitive research on the size of the human brain and

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22

looking at other hominids and things that the normal size of our cognitive

community – people that we can reasonably know something about, given the

size of our brains - is about 150. But now we can have infinite communities.

People I haven’t spoken to in thirty years are popping up on the internet, right?

I publish a book and I do the stupid thing of having my e-mail address on it and

anybody in the world can contact me now. We have a cognitive community that

is essentially infinite in size. It can involve thousands of people, even for

somebody who is not terribly active on the internet. So what do we do? We

abbreviate. Everything is getting abbreviated. Information within our news

systems is getting abbreviated. In the last 30 years – this is one of the statistics

I quote in my book – the length of Time magazine cover stories has gone down

40%. The length of Scientific American research articles – their principle ones

– has gone down 30%. New York Times opinion articles have gone down 25%.

A New York Times article now averages 575 words. You tell me what you

could say about the world in 575 words. We have a world that’s more complex,

that requires more sophistication of thought, more subtlety, more lines of

information and evidence integrated to try to address our problems, and we

have less and less time to talk about those things. Because what’s happening?

Editors are responding by shortening those articles. They’re responding to what

they know about their audience, that it has no time to read any more. Most

people don’t read long texts. “I’ve got five minutes between one thing and

another, I can read 575 words, so I’ll read this.” You get a little snippet of an

idea, a snapshot of information – that’s not going to help us solve our problems.

So somehow, if we’re going to reinvigorate our collective institutions of the

state and our democratic decision-making, we have to return to some

deliberative mechanisms. We have to give people, communities, and societies

the space in their lives to actually think about things, and the time to do so.

Again, that’s a big ingenuity requirement in terms of designing our collective

institutions, and what I’m trying to do in this book is raise the issues so that we

can work on them together.