Organization of People as an Emergent Computational Device:
“Building Computers Out of People”
“We have noted that a number of key Social Technologies innovations have an information-processing angle to them and earlier that ‘networks of information-processing things’ have the ability to compute. Once the evolution of ST’s reached the stage at which large numbers of people could form cooperative networks and had the means for communicating and storing significant amounts of data, human organizations took on a different character—they became capable of emergent computation.
“Organizations of people have the ability to process information and solve complex problems that individuals cannot process or solve on their own. British Petroleum (BP), for example, can be thought of as a computer built for solving the problem of how to extract oil and gas from locations around the world, refine it, and then distribute it to millions of energy users. At BP, there is no one who can tell you, in full detail, just how that immensely complex problem is solved. Think of the vast flows of data flowing into BP on a daily basis and of all the decisions that need to be made, decisions ranging from board-level judgments to the shift schedule for a rig in the North Sea. As much as we like to think of a CEO as being in command, it is impossible for a CEO even as capable as John Browne to be aware of more than a tiny fraction of the thousands and perhaps even millions of decisions being made at any given moment in a large organization. Yet, the hugely complex problem of finding, extracting, refining, and distributing oil is solved in a highly distributed fashion, day in and day out.
“Just like an anthill, or the brain, human organizations exhibit a form of networked emergent intelligence. The University of California, San Diego, anthropologist and cognitive scientist Edwin Hutchins has studied the problem-solving capabilities of individuals versus organized groups in a variety of settings. He concluded that organizations are capable of having collective emergent capabilities that do not exist individually within the group. In essence, not only is BP smarter than any one of its people, it is also smarter than the sum of its people.
“One can debate the role of large global corporations such as BP in society. But even the most hardened corporate critic would have to admit that an organization such as BP, with its 103,000 employees in over a hundred countries around the world, is a marvel of human cooperation. The vast majority of its people have never met and never will meet, but are bound together in a web of social structures, norms, protocols, legal structures, and incentives that enable them to work together for a common purpose. If one extends that web of cooperation beyond BP’s immediate employees to include its 1.3 million shareholders and thousands of supplier and other partner companies, then the scale of a social structure such as BP becomes even more remarkable.
“For an organization of BP’s size and complexity to exist, it must sit atop a vast mountain of ST innovations that society has evolved over millennia. These innovations include such ST’s as money, which was first used around 2,600 years ago in Mesopotamia and provides in essence a universal utility converter—it enables one person’s economic needs and wants to be translated into the same units as someone else’s needs and wants. Likewise, BP would have a difficult time functioning without a central nervous system of financial information provided by the ST of double-entry accounting, originally developed by Italian merchants in the thirteenth century. Nor could BP even exist in its current form without the invention of the limited-liability joint stock corporation, invented by the British Parliament in a series of Acts between 1825 and 1862. While BP depends on a legacy of ST’s to function, it is also a participant in the economic evolutionary system as its managers deductively-tinker their way to new methods of organizing and managing, and as successful ST’s are adopted and spread both within BP and outside it.” (p. 275-276)
In recent decades, the fall of the Soviet Union among otther communist regimes, have proven the fallacies of such an economic system. The few countries that cling to communism are either on the brink of collapse or have started to adopt capitalistic tendencies in conjunction with a centralized political structure. But even more current events around the world are showing us that capitalism is not without its own set of fallacies and improper assumptions. The collapse of many venerable financial institutions, with histories extending back for more than a century, is perhaps an early warning that unbridled greed in a purely capitalistic economy may potentially lead to a greater collapse of the entire financial and social system. The recent debacle has nearly imploded the entire global financial system, forcing governments to intervene in the private secotor to stabilize the economy. The lack of corporate transparency and the excessive use of leverage proved to be great factors which led to the current crisis. The entire world, most of who had nothing to do with those that caused this turmoil, are about to pay for the sins of others with their homes, jobs, their life savings, and their children’s future.
