From the perspective of thermodynamics, quantum mechanics, informatics, and artificial intelligence, we will look at the future era of digital intelligence
- Thermodynamics, entropy and "inner coil"
- Quantum Mechanics and VUCA
- Information entropy and cognitive anxiety
- Cognitive upgrade with new Homo sapiens
Author: Qian Wenying
Debut: Magnet Lab, Gravitational Field Laboratory
The full text is 5000 words, and the reading time is about 10 minutes
We have entered an era of uncertainty. The international political and economic landscape is volatile, the economy is in a recession cycle, and the smog and the new crown epidemic have sounded the alarm about the fragility of the physical world. As digitalization gradually eliminates the limitations of time and space, many individuals and businesses have begun to develop a sense of crisis that existing methods cannot make them better survive in the era of digital intelligence, and how to find the future direction in the moment when they cannot see the way forward.
"Every day we find the world more chaotic than the day before. It seems like everything is no longer working. The world is out of control and we're always tinkering... We are surrounded by mountains of garbage, and there is no pollution everywhere... Our only solution is to stay out of the house. ... Wherever we went we would line up or be squeezed into a corner. Everything is accelerating, and everything is progressing at all. We are in a quagmire, and society is in a quagmire. We are suddenly furious, whatever is in front of it, step over, and let the world mess up. ”
A passage from Jeremy Rifkin's 1987 book Entropy: A New Worldview seems to predict our current situation. He argues that the physical world is crumbling and the environment is changing rapidly, but that humanity is still confined to the same current worldview, which is "corroding everything it has created." That is to say, if we want to break the shackles of the physical world, the first thing we need to break is the worldview of the physical world.
<h1 class="pgc-h-arrow-right" data-track="14" > the age of digital intelligence, the worldview needs to be upgraded</h1>
The world view expresses the interpretation of the world summarized by human beings after a long period of practice, and is the general view and fundamental view of human beings on the whole world and the relationship between people and the world, including the view of nature, society, life, values, history, material, movement and time.
Our current worldview was formed around the time of the 17th century under the influence of the world of Newtonian mechanics. In this industrial revolution worldview, the world is developing according to the classical mathematical principles of precision and certainty, and we are faced with stable and absolute rules.
However, in the current world of black swan events and butterfly effects, we can no longer rely on experience and laws to predict things as in the past, and make decisions with the logic of linear thinking. The current world is a complex state full of chaos, and under the development of the first stage of the digital intelligence era, things are in interconnection, and individuals and environments are also in the interaction of moments. The original worldview is no longer enough for us to understand the world.
This change in the world can also be inspired by physics.
<h1 class="pgc-h-arrow-right" data-track="19" > thermodynamics, entropy, and inner volume</h1>
The first law of thermodynamics tells us that matter and energy in the physical world are conserved.
The second law of thermodynamics tells us that heat can always only be transferred from hot to cold (in its natural state). In a limited space and time, all physical and chemical processes related to thermal motion are irreversible. That is, matter and energy can only be converted in one direction, that is, from available to unusable, from valid to ineffective, from orderly to disorderly.
In order to more graphically describe this irreversible process, in 1865 the German physicist Clausius proposed the concept of "entropia" (Greek entropia), which in The Greek etymology means "intrinsic", that is, "the change of the intrinsic properties of a system". He argues that entropy increase is an irreversible process in which eventually the entire physical world will begin with a certain value and deconstruction, and then irretrievably move toward chaos and disorder.
From the first law of thermodynamics, in the physical world we play a finite game, a zero-sum game, our matter and energy only change in form, but the essence can not be created, can not be destroyed. Under such conditions, in the physical world, people, organizations, cities, and countries will cause more and more fierce competition for materials and energy.
From the second law of thermodynamics, everything in our physical world is limited, and life is constantly metabolized and eventually returns to death. In the past history of the earth, we have experienced a long period of biological evolution, and experienced a great explosion of human civilization driven by dynamic iteration, and the faster we establish social order and accelerate the expansion of human civilization, the more chaos and disorder will increase.
Extrapolating the future of the physical world from the two laws of thermodynamics, the results seem very frustrating. To use the Internet buzzword of the past two years in China, it is the inner volume.
Involution, the original meaning is that after a type of cultural model reaches a certain final form, there is no way to stabilize, nor can it be transformed into a new form, and can only continue to become more complex internally.
Through the spread of the Internet, "inner volume" has become a broader sociological term. It is a social phenomenon in which the whole society competes for existing resources in the absence of incremental resources and intensifies competition. This competition ranges from country to country, from student to student, to colleague to colleague.
The history of Earth's evolution described in our last article, The Age of Digital Intelligence and the Evolution of Technology. In the past, there were roughly two paths to starting a new round of survival games with limited resources:
One is finite games: the deconstruction and refactoring of finite resources.
For example, the collective extinction event of organisms occurred during the Cretaceous period, when more than 95% of the earth's organisms went extinct, causing the demise of the dinosaurs and ushering in the rise of mammals. For example, in the change of power in the successive dynasties of human civilization, when the social class contradictions intensified to a certain extent, the lower classes would resist by force, form a new regime, and complete the redistribution of limited resources. The world wars in modern society are also the intentions of some countries to reconstruct the political and economic pattern through war in order to obtain the redistribution of limited resources.
One is the infinite game: that is, looking to open up new worlds.
For example, during the Western Han Dynasty of ancient China, Zhang Qian sent his envoys to the Western Regions to open up a land route connecting the Mediterranean countries, that is, the "Silk Road", which was originally the main route for the export of silk in ancient China and became a comprehensive trade route during the Ming Dynasty. For example, in the 15th and 17th centuries, the Age of Exploration era represented by Columbus's discovery of the New World. After the 15th century, money replaced land as an important indicator of matter and energy in the physical world, and the development of commercial trade in Western Europe was urgently needed to develop new markets and new demands, which prompted more and more merchants and navigators to join the opening of new shipping routes. In the early 17th century, the British began to emigrate to North America, acquiring the much-needed New World in the New World discovered by Columbus through colonial means (i.e., deconstruction and reconstruction of limited resources).
Today, the reclamation of the physical world brought about by our dynamic iteration seems to have come to an end. The limited material and energy of the physical world are no longer sufficient to sustain the growth rate of global socio-economic development. Either we have to play a constant game of survival in a limited resource, or we have to seek the opening up of new worlds.
<h1 class="pgc-h-arrow-right" data-track="36" > Quantum Mechanics and VUCA</h1>
At the end of the 19th century, it was found that the old classical theory could not explain microscopic systems, so through the efforts of physicists, quantum mechanics was founded in the early 20th century to explain these phenomena.
In 1935, the Austrian physicist Schrödinger proposed a famous thought experiment , "Schrödinger's Cat". If there is a cat in a box, and a small amount of radioactive material. There is a 50% chance that the radioactive material will decay and release poison gas to kill the cat; there is a 50% chance that the radioactive material will not decay and the cat will survive. In the quantum world, when the box is closed, the whole system remains in an uncertain wave state, that is, the cat is in an uncertain state of superposition of both life and death. But once you've made an observation, the status is determined.
This phenomenon has been verified by scientists in the laboratory through double-slit experiments, they found that when an electron can pass through two gaps at the same time when it is not observed, but once observed, the electrons will choose only one gap to pass through.
In the quantum world, there is uncertainty about the state of matter and the relationship between matter and matter. This discovery subverts human understanding and cognition of the physical world.
Originally, human life and work were guided by a worldview based on Newtonian mechanics; and were heavily influenced by Descartes' philosophical idea that "the whole is the sum of parts." Under the in-depth penetration of several industrial revolutions, we have formed an industrial thinking characterized by precision, speed, accuracy, and the law of cause and effect.
The business management, strategy, and organizational behavior developed under this worldview are also based on this linear way of thinking. Loose links must be coordinated, defects and failures must be eliminated, and processes must be optimized for iteration. With this kind of thinking, it's even hard to effectively distinguish ourselves from machines.
And with the development of the times, this simple law of cause and effect has not been enough to explain the rapid changes in the world. The world is experiencing more and more uncertainty. The future of the physical world deduced from the perspective of quantum mechanics, described in the global network buzzword of the past two years, is VUCA, and the current world is full of volatility, uncertainty, complexity, and ambiguity.
Because of the rapid spread and amplification effect of the Network, Ding Zhen, a Tibetan boy who was living in a paradise one second and had no one to know about it, may explode on the Internet the next second and become a well-known Internet celebrity. The single "Plastic Love" by 1980s Japanese City POP singer Maria Takeuchi, which had disappeared in the river of time one second, may become one of the most popular Songs on YouTube in 2018 because ordinary people intentionally or unintentionally upload and click on it, fueled by algorithms.
Figure 2020 Forbes YouTUbe Influencer List
In the current era, the ten-minute cargo volume of an e-commerce live streaming influencer may far exceed the annual operating income of a medium-sized enterprise. The daily turnover of a community group buying leader/KOC may exceed the daily operating income of a medium-sized supermarket. The sales of a owner of a Weilai car through word-of-mouth communication in one month may exceed the sales volume of a large 4S store in one month.
Figure Only two of the top ten Chinese beauty KOLs are beauty company brands, and the rest are beauty networks
<h1 class="pgc-h-arrow-right" data-track="54" > information entropy and cognitive anxiety</h1>
Here, we will mention the concept of "entropy" again. Information is originally a very abstract concept, and it is difficult to say exactly how much information there is, such as how much information is contained in a 100,000-word best-selling book. It was not until 1948, when Shannon, the father of informatics, borrowed the concept of thermodynamic entropy and proposed "information entropy", which solved the problem of measuring information, and Shannon used information entropy to describe the uncertainty of the source.
Simply put, the basic role of information is to eliminate people's uncertainty about things. But there are always noise variables in the propagation process of information, and the greater the uncertainty of the variables, the greater the entropy, and the greater the amount of information required to figure it out.
As mentioned above, every scientific and technological change and invention in human civilization has continuously realized the extension of human beings and the extension of space. The extension of people and the extension of space have not only brought about the diffusion of innovation, but also the diffusion of information and the acceleration of production.
According to british scholar James Martin, the doubling cycle of human knowledge was 50 years in the 19th century, about 10 years by the first half of the 20th century, and shortened to 5 years in the 1970s. It doubled almost every three years in the late 1980s. With the exponential growth of scientific and technological development, human information has also emerged exponentially. According to a report, in the past 30 years, the information produced by human beings has exceeded the sum of the information production of human civilization in the past 5,000 years.
Best-selling author Kevin Kelly imagines in "Necessity" that the future world will be a world facing endless upgrades, the rate of iteration will continue to accelerate, no matter how good you are at an area, a tool, endless upgrades will turn you into a "rookie". Everyone is a "rookie", and to survive in an uncertain future, you need to learn new information.
For many entrepreneurs today, the root cause behind anxiety is information entropy.
Because in the era of digital intelligence, information acquisition has become easy, and everyone can obtain a lot of new information every day, but this information is mixed with a lot of noise, so that the truly valuable information is flooded by noise. As a result, everyone is trapped in the entropy of information, and the cognition and judgment of the world are becoming more and more chaotic.
"Looking horizontally into the peaks on the side of the ridge, the heights and heights are different, and I don't know the true face of Lushan Mountain, but I am only in this mountain." The ancient poet Su Shi wrote in his "Title Xi Lin Bi". It's like the state we're currently faced with information. Under this anxiety about the future, people tend to fall into a vicious circle, thinking that because they do not know enough information, spend more time and energy on information acquisition and learning, attend more training courses, see more success stories, read newer books, but often the result is that information entropy is getting bigger and bigger, and it is more and more difficult to make the right decisions.
For many companies today, they face the same cognitive error – thinking that gathering more information will eliminate uncertainty. But most companies do not make good use of information to help improve decision-making, but fall into the trap of data collection, data collation, and data analysis, and the cost of information processing has exceeded the value of the information itself.
<h1 class="pgc-h-arrow-right" data-track="64" > cognitive upgrade and new Homo sapiens</h1>
In the Age of Digital Intelligence, in addition to renewing the worldview, human beings also need to reconstruct their cognitive boundaries and ways of thinking.
In A Brief History of Mankind, Yuval Harari argues that over a period of nearly 4 billion years, every creature on Earth evolved according to the laws of natural selection. After about 10,000 years of the Agricultural Revolution, humans have begun to transform other creatures by breeding and domesticating. In the 21st century, under the rapid development of science and technology, human beings have begun to transcend these boundaries. Wu Sheng proposed the concept of "new Homo sapiens" in the book "New Species Explosion". He believes that if Homo sapiens represents the evolution, selection and triumph of previous natural people, then the new species forms represented by technology-enabled natural persons, biological robots and robots are "new Homo sapiens".
As the new Homo sapiens, our physical and mental strength has been continuously expanded and extended under the empowerment of technology. But if we still follow the previous cognitive model, it is difficult to break through the limitations of previous thinking in the digital world.
In his book Cognition: The Mind and Intelligence Behind Human Behavior, Herbert Simon, the pioneer of artificial intelligence, corresponds human cognitive activity to computers to explain human cognitive mental processes.
Just like how computers work, people go through several stages in the cognitive process:
Information input and storage: how people perceive which features of objects, how external information is stored in the mind;
Information processing: what relationships people see between things, and what information people use when solving problems;
Information output: what kind of thinking strategy people adopt.
In the early days of the digital intelligence era, we focused our main attention on information input and storage, and neglected to improve the ability to process and output information.
This will be the main direction of our cognitive upgrade.
<h1 class="pgc-h-arrow-right" data-track="76" > How to cognitively upgrade the "Age of Digital Intelligence"? </h1>
< to be continued >
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About the Gravitational Field Laboratory
The Gravitational Field Laboratory is dedicated to insight and research on new changes in business forms and group behaviors in the hyperdimensional era, focusing on four directions: industrial interconnection, digital twins, hyperdimensional experiences, and the nomad economy.
Author of this article
Qian Wenying is an industry analyst and a business researcher. Loves to study everything new and peculiar.