Embracing the System

From the Introduction

In the last decade of the twentieth century, a computer program defeated the world chess champion and groups of lawyers could not distinguish between computer generated summaries of law journal articles and those produced by lawyers. International trade grew to the extent that foreign exchange markets traded up to a trillion (million million) dollars per day. Yet the total amount of goods traded was about one twentieth of this and the dominant flow of money was pension funds and investments. Are the first two achievements history without precedent? The global financial trade requires a change in perspective which is difficult for most people. The techniques behind the computer accomplishments augur the emergence of a privileged class of super-specialists issuing arcane technologies which disrupt our perceptions of ourselves. We have entered an era where the complexity and size of social structure requires techniques in which the domain of intelligent judgement is invaded and replaced by calculations of extreme sophistication. On its own, this is an unprecedented challenge to humanity. We entered this stream of history in the closing decades of the nineteenth century, before the science which produced this challenge was invented. Its invention is a consequence of the systemisation.

For the prosperous of the Earth, the shape of our society is dominated by systems. We have cars, extraordinarily smooth roads, water free of harmful micro-organisms, flush toilets, an over-abundance of food and entertainment and, for many of us, too much to do. The history of how this came into being is the history of the industrial revolution, the history of commerce, the history of education and the history of science. This book concentrates on something which threads throughout all these separate histories. It is the concept of a system.

Today the word "system" elicits the image of information systems. This response has more to do with the success of powerful commercial concerns rather than what systems are. This book focuses on the idea of systems as things which transform inputs into outputs. If this is reliable we have a system. Thus clocks, locomotives, aircraft are systems. But, above all, the systems which have transformed our lives are the great manufacturing systems which grew up in the late nineteenth century and throughout the twentieth century.

It is argued that history has no sense of directions. But recent history has at least two: the accumulation of science and the movement towards growth and integration of systems. The two are interwoven but not identical. It is systems of all types which deliver to us the results of science. And it is science that provides the ability to produce the abundance of goods which is the shape of our society. It is this abundance which is the background to all the large social movements of recent history. Military histories detail battles but not the factories and social arrangements which produce the abundance of weapons. Histories of entertainment seldom detail the development of cameras, projectors, tape-recorders or the mass production of plastic records, lasers, compact discs, microprocessors and videos which have been part and parcel of the mass market for cinema, pop-music and videos.

Systems are boringly impartial and frequently infuriatingly indifferent to human variations, especially when we are on the (possibly not) receiving end. Boring and infuriating, they are a society’s only bulwark against caprice, chance and partiality. Much of what we think of as civilised is the result of the creation of social systems. Most of what we now accept as prosperity is the result of the creation of manufacturing and distribution systems. This creation of systems of production and distribution is systemisation: the replacement of rules of thumb, ritual and hereditary trade secrets with the creation of documented rules and functions designed to fulfil some overall goal of an organisation. The definition, such as one sentence can capture it, obscures a long evolution in thinking and one which is far from complete.

Humans are good engineers. Thinking about and then making things, the core of engineering, along with language, is what has distinguished humans from animals. Particularly the grand scale on which we indulge and mix these two skills. The spear, the knife and the bow and arrow are the crucial inventions of human evolution. It comes naturally to us to lash things together, to use the springiness of wood and to counterbalance or wedge material to form shelters and bridges. We easily understand the forces of air and water. All these things were available to humans for thousands of years before the tentative mathematical and physical descriptions were attempted. Handling the physical object is all the explanation we need. The physics, the diagrams, the explanations are not natural. It still takes some effort to describe a watch or a combination lock without a diagram. It takes more effort to describe them in terms useful to a computer.

The obviousness of a mechanical device becomes a long, forced description in terms of "whenever such and such", "while this part is doing . . . ", "if the . . . then . . . " which are so familiar to computer programmers. It can be done. Carburettors, anti-lock brake systems, governors and mechanical controllers of all sorts, even aircraft autopilots, have yielded to computer description. The programs are inevitably difficult to fathom in comparison to the obviousness of the physical system. The computer description has now been extended quite successfully to the less obvious chemical and industrial biological systems. But there is an underlying reason why this can be done. The physical, biological and chemical systems of interest are built as systems - to reliably convert one set of inputs into something new. It is this reason that permits the computer description. The devices are systems: they are there to work as mechanical, chemical or biological functions, transforming forces, chemicals or biological inputs into desired states, chemicals or biological products.