When the Bough Breaks...
The problem with the predicting Big Events.
There is always something, something big, looming in the future these days. Especially now. When will the AI bubble burst? When will Trump declare martial law? When will the “Big One” send 9+ Richter scale tremors through the Pacific Northwest? A more troubling question I’m hearing lately is “when will civil war break out?” What is so interesting about these events, and perhaps part of their fascination, is the question of “when.” How long have we got?
The problem is that each of these predicted events is the result of emergence, which we can describe as the behavior of a complex, self-organizing system. These systems are everywhere, in nature, in commerce, in society. One definition has it that “Emergence refers to the existence or formation of collective behaviors — what parts of a system do together that they would not do alone.” So, stock markets. Voting patterns. Storm systems. Power grids. The Internet. The human brain. Their behavior resists precise prediction.
But while complex, self-organizing systems can be unpredictable, it’s also possible to spot trends and even major changes, like a stock market correction. The biggest area of uncertainty is the timing. Example: the city of Rome is taken and sacked in 410 CE. One would think that would signal the end of the Roman Empire—at least in the West. But the (significantly reduced) empire managed to limp along for another 67 years before it finally winked out.
