The dynamic complex interactions that drive the evolution of computing toward multicellularity have a life of their own. Yet they are amenable to some steering. The question is: what roadmap should we steer by?
I argue that we should look to biological metaphors such as the four I have proposed to help us make multicellular systems more manageable. The fact that we are already seeing evolution toward at least three of the four principles suggests that they are indeed general enough and useful enough to provide us with good insights. That should come as no surprise since, without them, multicellular biological life would not be possible and the complexities faced by multicellular life are not unlike those faced by multicellular computing.
If we are more explicit and disciplined about making the transition toward multicellular computing and we learn from the lessons of multicellular life, we stand to make the transition smoother and perhaps even quicker. To that end, we need to foster, in our education and in our cultural transmission of received wisdom within the computing community, multicellular attitudes such as:
The stakes are high. We are just at the beginning of the computing equivalent of the Cambrian explosion – the period of roughly forty million years ending about 500 million years ago in which a fantastic flourishing of new types of multicellular biological organisms occurred. Most of the Cambrian experiments exist today, if at all, only as fossils that happened to be preserved in the Cambrian mud. Given how rapidly we have recapitulated a couple billion years of single cell evolution, perhaps we can recapitulate the forty million year Cambrian period in the next couple of decades. If so, it behooves us to pay close attention to how multicellular computing is progressing. Forward looking businesses and technologists will have much to do in the next few years. Great opportunities will be available for those who anticipate (or lead) the successful architectures and great peril for those who stick their heads in the sand or back the wrong horse. They face a choice between winning and being a fossil in the mud.
It is already clear that there are competing organizational strategies, e.g., completely decentralized P2P communities at one extreme versus centrally controlled hierarchical IT structures at the other extreme, with some compromise ideas, e.g., bot-nets, Map/Reduce server farms and Grid architectures, in between. And there are competing notions of how messaging should work, e.g., heavyweight SOA (which may sink under its load of complexity) versus lighter weight AJAX (which may fail to scale well). We also have competing vendors, each pushing the idea that what they sell is just what is needed for the future. Don't believe them!
Most of all, we have competing visions of how the evolving computing infrastructure interfaces with evolving business and cultural systems that use the computing systems. That is, different visions of what happens where the silicon meets the flesh. The digerati imagine cyborg-like symbiosis in which people are festooned with wearable or implantable computers that aid them in all manner of normal social interactions (or, perhaps, insulate them from normal human interaction). There are neo-Luddites who imagine that we can “keep computers in their place” which, presumably, is somewhere far from those who hold such views. And there are neo-fascists (or those who fear them) who imagine that every move we make and thought we voice will be surveiled by ever-present cameras, microphones, and RFID tracking devices. What all of these ideas share is a lack of understanding that the evolution of computing is already beyond our control. The coevolution of complex computing systems interacting with human social and economic systems already has a life of its own.
We should also remember that the processes that give rise to emergent multi-level complex systems do not stop, or even pause, at one level of emergent behavior. Before one level is fully fleshed out, another emergent metalevel likely will be forming based upon collaborations between the units at the lower level. And so it is with today's multicellular computing. Multicellular “Selves” made most visible by their stigmergy structures are collaborating to form even larger and more complex systems. We can think of some of the more public multicellular systems such as Google or eBay as organs in some larger “body” we have not quite envisioned yet. That is, some mashup may already be evolving in Web 2.0 that combines a Google plus a BitTorrent, plus a Skype, plus who knows what else acting as “organs” to achieve some larger goal. All that is certain is that each stage of multi-level emergence will surprise us.
Contact: sburbeck at mindspring.com
Last revised 7/12/2009