Simulation, aka the ability to generate knowledge maps in various formats and languages, resides at the heart of the convergence that is expanding human capability and driving the systemic creation of knowledge . It is absolutely critical to accelerating change in information, technology, problem solving, etc, and deserves a more central role in our models of economy, intelligence, society and living systems.Accordingly, it is no accident that the market for humans who generate complex simulations is growing, as reported by the NYTimes earlier this week:





But how far back does simulation go? And what role does it play in our broader life system, not just social, informational and technologicial systems?



Philosopher Jean Baudrillard, who has many great thoughts to offer on the matter, posits that



So where then do we turn for an updated version of this thinking?



In his recent excellent Atlantic Monthly article,

"According to Calvin, the reason we survived is that our brains changed to meet the challenge: we transformed the ability to target a moving animal with a thrown rock into a capability for foresight and long-term planning [aka simulation]. In the process, we may have developed syntax and formal structure from our simple language." Technology scholar and

"[T]he more complex any system becomes, the better it models the universe that engendered it, and the better it seems to understand its own history and environment, including the physical chain of singularities that created it." "..there is something about the construction of the universe itself, something about the nature and universal function of local computation that permits, and may even mandate, continuously accelerating computational development in local environments." Of course, thinkers such as Richard Florida, Rise of the Creative Class , and Alvin Toffler, The Third Wave , have long argued that society's demand for creative prosumers is expanding as we continue to free up brains for abstract endeavors not directly tied to classic survival behavior. Only now, having seen the formation and resulting efficiencies of simulations such as Google Earth (geospatial), Wikipedia (lingual, memetic), Blue Brain (human brain), Blue Gene (genomic), Facebook (social), fictional Virtual Worlds (imagination), etc, we can confidently confirm that these prescient forecasts were indeed right on the money.But how far back does simulation go? And what role does it play in our broader life system, not just social, informational and technologicial systems?Philosopher Jean Baudrillard, who has many great thoughts to offer on the matter, posits that simulation began with modern media technology . But I think that's a bit too clunky and binary, if you will, especially considering the work on conceptual metaphors as the basis of thought done by cognitive theorists such as Steven Pinker . Though Baudrillard's focus on externalized technology vs. internal processing of reality is very useful when analyzing a stretch of human history, it doesn't fit well with long-term and acceleration models. (Great work, but the abstractions need to be pruned to fit with modern theory. I do think that the hyper-reality argument has a lot of merit. More on that in the future.)So where then do we turn for an updated version of this thinking?In his recent excellent Atlantic Monthly article, Get Smarter , futurist Jamais Cascio convincingly argues the critical nature of simulation in human history, citing neurophysiologist William Calvin's research on our evolutionary development:Technology scholar and Singularity proponent Ray Kurzweil goes even broader in his assertion, contained in The Singularity is Near , that the ability to model, or simulate, is essential to life forms of varying complexity:My personal take on the matter ( original article ), in alignment with both Cascio and Kurzweil's views, is that as organisms evolve and life's complexity increases, new species with brains capable of greater quantification and abstraction (simulation!) emerge at a regular clip. Over time, these organisms discover ways to expand their knowledge by communicating (actively or passively) information to one another and letting the network manage their quantifications and decisions. Then, eventually, the higher-level organisms figure out how to extend their knowledge into the environment through technology that allows them to communicate and retrieve it more easily than before. This is accomplished directly through technologies like language, writing, or classical maps, and indirectly through the hard-technologies like spears, paint, and paper that critically support knowledge externalization.





In other words, I believe that simulation plays a critical role in not only the evolution and development of the human species, but also of all forms of life on this planet and probably in our known universe (as suggested by recent findings that physical matter millions of light years distant closely resembles our own).





Consequently, I find it likely that we will soon discover a proof, power law or other theorem







This perspective or paradigm is useful in that it can 1) help us recontextualize and simplify much of what's going on in exploding domains such as search, the semantic web and structured data for enterprise, and 2) help to streamline the abstractions we use to describe our system upn which we can then build cleaner new theories.



It's particularly interesting to observe the web trending toward advanced simulation. As I noted above, many of the web's most valuable properties are rooted in super-simulations - massive bodies of structured data that can be viewed as a whole or sub-sections. It is clear that the major players are now racing to add both more data and more structure to these simulations in order to fend off sharp-witted competitors and amass more resources, a very life-like behavior indeed.



Math savant Stephen Wolfram, the big brain behind "computational knowledge engine"



Wolfram then extrapolates this capability, suggesting that search may subseqently move onto "creat[ing] things that have never been created before, in real time".



That's right. One of the brightest structural minds on the planet sees our knowledge processors first becoming amazing simulators, then using that simulation data to piece together new structures that have never existed. (Pretty cool that he's also running an influential business.)



It kinda sounds like the human process known as thought or imagination, the ongoing processes of input-sorting-output, just dramatically scaled and accelerated. Which brings us full circle to my initial assertion that simulation is a critical component of accelerating change and to the tandem argument that it deserves a more central role in our models of economy, intelligence, society and living systems.

for complex systems that correlates increased simulational ability with increased 1) control over environment and 2) survivability . It may look a little bit like the following diagram , with the added explanation that simulation drives the creation of more knowledge as our informational inputs are expanded by technology that steadily increases the data we mine from withion our environment (inner space) and across the universe (outer space):This perspective or paradigm is useful in that it can 1) help us recontextualize and simplify much of what's going on in exploding domains such as search, the semantic web and structured data for enterprise, and 2) help to streamline the abstractions we use to describe our system upn which we can then build cleaner new theories.It's particularly interesting to observe the web trending toward advanced simulation. As I noted above, many of the web's most valuable properties are rooted in super-simulations - massive bodies of structured data that can be viewed as a whole or sub-sections. It is clear that the major players are now racing to add both more data and more structure to these simulations in order to fend off sharp-witted competitors and amass more resources, a very life-like behavior indeed.Math savant Stephen Wolfram, the big brain behind "computational knowledge engine" Wolfram Alpha , who has written convincingly about his belief that life evolves from basic micro-interactions that he describes using the example of cellular automata , lends credence to the argument, claiming that search engines will soon have the ability to "simulate in real time based on [text input] descriptions", which makes sense to me considering the growing amount of structured data (thanks in large part to an increase in data, semantic tagging and knowledge engines such as Alpha, Google and IBM's enterprise quantification software) that can easily be converted into visual formats and models.Wolfram then extrapolates this capability, suggesting that search may subseqently move onto "creat[ing] things that have never been created before, in real time".That's right. One of the brightest structural minds on the planet sees our knowledge processors first becoming amazing simulators, then using that simulation data to piece together new structures that have never existed. (Pretty cool that he's also running an influential business.)It kinda sounds like the human process known as thought or imagination, the ongoing processes of input-sorting-output, justscaled and accelerated. Which brings us full circle to my initial assertion that simulation is a critical component of accelerating change and to the tandem argument that it deserves a more central role in our models of economy, intelligence, society and living systems.

CONCLUSION: Simulation is crucial not just to our contemporary economy, but to life's knowledge engine(s) at many different levels. Understanding this can help us to better simulate our environment, history and future.