<h1>Kauffman's Law</h1> <h2>by Dr. Mark White<br> Partner, White & Associates</h2><br> <h4>13 November 1996</h4><p> <p> Kauffman's Law says that technology -- what humanity knows how to do -- grows combinatorially. The initiated know that combinatorial growth is extremely fast. It certainly makes the frequent doublings of Moore's Law look glacially slow by comparison. Bleeding-edge digerati, who've seen Moore's Law transform their desktop boxes step-by-eighteen-month-step into monster supercomputers, will no doubt feel a bit overwhelmed that global technological evolution makes Moore's Law look like cold molasses -- no matter whether the prospect frightens them or heartens. Yet Stuart Kauffman's called it exactly right, just as Gordon Moore did before. And just like Moore, Kauffman's telling us something extremely important about our future.

To understand what Kauffman's saying, think about materials. Every time technologists discover a single new material, humanity then has the potential to make every known object in a new and potentially quite useful way. In turn, these new individual objects combine with known assemblies of objects to create further new possibilities. These possibilities then radiate out into the complements and substitutes for all known objects and object assemblies, creating further possibilities. Each and every new material expands the entire scope of human technology.

Of course, not every combination of new material and known object will be useful -- it's unlikely a new smart gel could make a better piston for a gasoline engine. Nonetheless, as each new material's potential spreads across the whole of humanity's existing technological base, it may create possibilities for a host of immediate and obvious applications, and perhaps another host of more subtle applications only perceptible at first to genius. Useful combinations are themselves new technologies, which may open the door to other new technologies, and so on, ad infinitum.

As Kauffman's Law applies to materials, so it applies to every kind of technology. A new optimization technique developed for factory scheduling creates an artificially intelligent commodities trader. A new financial technique developed for poor Bangladeshis gives birth to banks in Bolivia and Chicago. A new radiating device developed for military surveillance cooks up a different kind of oven. With technologists moving forward in literally millions of different directions every day, they generate possibilities for potentially useful combinations that grow explosively right along with the total number of combinations.

Kauffman's Law comes from thinking about the global economy as a complex adaptive system. Stuart Kauffman is an biologist by trade, but what he really does is think very deeply about how complex systems adapt. He's discovered that complex systems often adapt by growing in complexity -- accumulating close-at-hand knowledge of more and more useful combinations of their basic building blocks until they've arrived at a universal tool kit that lets them instantly create virtually any useful combination they might need. Natural selection presses the human immune system towards its innate potential as a universal tool kit for building new proteins to act as useful antibodies towards any --any!! -- bodies nasty enough to damage human cells. Likewise, accumulating experience with technologies that spawn and kill businesses pushes the human economic system towards its innate potential as a universal tool kit for producing goods and services to help fulfill any need or want motivating a potential client.

Experience has pushed the global economy towards that universal took kit ever since homo sapiens came on the scene, but when it took humanity thousands of years to slightly improve on a stone axe design, the pace wasn't as obvious as today. Even in historic times, civilizations that couldn't adapt fast enough for changing conditions collapsed into scattered bands. Now, ever more frequent launches of high-growth business gazelles and the corresponding deaths of obsolete businesses suggest that the global economy has already evolved enough complexity to pass the takeoff point where it explodes combinatorially into the space of potential goods and services. And while humanity took 4,000 generations of an exponentially growing population to rise from a handful to several billions worldwide, technology's combinatorial explosion should offer the 4,001st generation more economic niches -- ways to make a good living -- than the paltry few billions of people on earth.

This combinatorial explosion will change the human condition on the whole from a capital shortage and labor surplus -- more people than useful things to do and tools to do them with -- to a capital surplus and labor shortage -- more useful things to do and tools to do them with than people. For people, Kauffman's Law always was good news, even before Kauffman discovered it. Now that he has, we have a much better idea just how good things will be, and just how soon.

This introduction to my work-in-progress presents some implications drawn from Stuart Kauffman's and John Holland's observations on technological and economic evolution. I welcome your comments, questions, and requests for more sections (the paper is five sections long now) at 011(525)595-6045, fax 011(525)683-5874, or email white@profmexis.sar.net

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