Joel Shepherd's Blog

I think I first heard it during a YouTube discussion with Nassim Nicholas Taleb and Naval Ravikant, and I’m pretty sure it was Naval who laid it out in the following way…

‘Sufficiently complex systems express themselves differently at different levels of complexity’.

And I had one of those rare intellectual moments where my jaw dropped open, and I paused the video and stared at a wall for the next ten minutes, trying to process what I’d just heard. Because in that short sentence was encompassed an explanation for something I’d been observing for most of my life, but had been unable to put into words.

Scale changes the nature of things. This will seem very simple and self-evident to any physicist who has studied the difference between emergent properties and reductionist ones. But for my social-science oriented brain, the effect was like a bomb going off.

The phenomena appears somewhat well understood in the technical disciplines of economics and hard science, but seems largely ignored when it applies to the many other realms of social science. Some of these manifestations include, but are not limited to, why wars happen, how international relations are conducted, bullying, political radicalism, gender relations, economics, comedy and just about every facet of society that I can think of.

So where to begin? Let’s start with my own best explanation of the concept.

Imagine that we’re scientists. The object of our scientific study is water. To study water, we’ll have two choices — we can study it at the large scale, or the small.

To study water at the small scale, we’ll need to break it down to its smallest possible component — the water molecule. Sure, we can break a water molecule down further, but then it becomes one hydrogen and two oxygen atoms, and thus no longer water.

Studying water at this scale can teach us many things. We can learn freezing temperatures, boiling temperatures, and various related behaviours. But nowhere in the study of individual water molecules will we encounter anything that will tell us about the existence of waves, or currents, or bubbles.

It’s only when we increase the scale of water, to countless trillions of water molecules in a pond, river or sea, that waves and currents become visible. To study waves and currents, we’ll need fluid dynamics, meaning physics, whereas the study of individual molecules is primarily chemistry. So, by increasing the scale, water moves from expressing itself as chemistry, to expressing itself as physics.

Because sufficiently complex systems express themselves differently at different levels of complexity.

Once I’d identified the concept in my head, I began seeing its manifestations everywhere — or rather, I’d always been seeing its manifestations everywhere, but I hadn’t resolved the issue to this level of clarity where it applied to social science. Here are a few places where they seem to me most obvious.

WAR

Human civilisation is considerably more complex than water, and thus the same phenomena of complexity can be seen writ large across our history and our present. Politicians, artists and philosophers have long observed the contradiction between what is good for the individual, and what is good for the state. Artists have long cried that war is a senseless waste of human life, while masters of statecraft have insisted that wars can be understood as a matter of reason and logic.

In ‘All Quiet on the Western Front’ (the book, not the vastly overrated Netflix movie) the main character Paul meets, and kills, a French soldier, whom he learns through examination of his personal documents while he slowly dies, to be named Gérard. And as Paul sits in the shell hole, contemplating the slow death of a young man not unlike himself, with whom he may have become friends under other circumstances, he contemplates the enormous, terrible waste of it all, and how none of it makes any rational sense.

All humans perceive events most immediately on the individual scale — translating them into the larger, group-complexity scale takes much longer. In the shell hole, there are no patriotic songs and marches, no cheering crowds, no fervent patriotism and cries to defend the fatherland. In the mud and blood, the larger scale does not exist. There is only this — the sad, lonely pathos of two good men, one of whom has just killed the other, and is now struggling to recall why.

Recent history has given rise within the modern arts to an understandable revulsion at the prospect of war. This is a relatively recent development, as many past artists from Shakespeare to Tchaikovsky have done their bit to glorify war, no doubt in part to appease their various state sources of funding. But modern Western art is now almost entirely a celebration of the individual, and is perhaps as poorly equipped to appreciate larger-scale social phenomena as chemistry is to appreciate waves.

Recent strands of Western pacifism, often led by the artistic Left, have lately been joined by a resurgent American isolationism, which belongs perhaps more to the Right. It should be remembered that America was isolationist, and possessed a very small military by global standards, for most of the period from 1776 until 1941, so this latest isolationist resurgence is really just a slow reversion toward the previous norm.

Much of this new isolationism seems to share the previous isolationism’s conviction (proven devastatingly wrong by the Japanese) that international events do not affect the United States. Much of this presumption today, I think, is born not merely from the distrust of official policies that brought about the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, but a broader, more philosophical distrust of the counter-intuitive nature of higher levels of complexity.

If one only studies water at the chemistry level, waves can be alarming, and often deemed unnecessary. If chemistry is all that you know, then physics may seem like a scam. Prior to 1941, American distrust of large scale government (the only kind of government at which international diplomacy takes place) led many to believe that the outside world could be kept at bay simply by a mass declaration by the American public that it didn’t exist, or at least did not matter. Today, people question whether any of America’s Pacific treaty allies should be defended with American lives, because war is bad, and people will die.

Is war in fact bad? These days it is almost sacrilegious to ask the question.

At the individual level, of single water molecules and frightened young men dying in shell holes, war is unquestionably very, very bad. But then there’s all that Greco Roman architecture in Washington DC. How did it get there? Certainly neither the ancient Greeks nor the Romans spread their culture around the world by asking nicely.

Is that a bad thing? Perhaps, but given past eras when all civilisation was spread at the point of a sword, the question becomes ‘compared to what?’ If not the Romans and Greeks, then who? Would a modern civilisation based on the Huns, or the Visigoths, have delivered a superior system? The Chinese? Genghis Khan, should various ancestors have obeyed today’s universal diktat that ‘war is bad’, and thus laid down their arms and allowed him take every last bit of the planet that eluded him at the time?

The point here is not to argue that war is good, when plainly it is not. It’s merely to observe that this level of analysis, the level of the individual, is poorly equipped to answer questions about phenomena that take place at higher levels of complexity. Like the scientist using chemistry to try and explain the behaviour of waves on the ocean, the tools are lacking, and all answers derived from their use seem incomplete and unsatisfying.

War can be both terrible, and a primary reason why many of the best things about Western civilisation currently exist. This contradiction is brought about by the fact that positive and negative outcomes are operating at different levels of complexity within human civilisation. Wrestling with the contradiction is difficult, and it would be nice to imagine that an alternative form of social and political evolution could be found in the future. But what if a Brave New World of endless pacifism eliminated humanity’s collective ability to evolve beyond disfunctional models of civilisation? What if, drugged into a pacifist stupor where violence can never be the answer, we allow far worse tyrannies to slowly boil us alive as we are robbed of the ability to fight back? Far more people these days die from bad government economic policy than from war.

Observing how the different levels of complexity change the nature of the processes involved, and thus the nature of analysis necessary to understand them, will not make these questions any less confusing and contradictory. Rather, it creates a template for understanding why these issues are so difficult — because they are taking place in two or more completely different ways, in completely different places.

GENDER

When the feminist revolution hit, and waves of women stormed into the previously male-dominated workplace, many thought it was just a matter of time until women were equally represented in all fields, except perhaps for those involving the lifting of heavy objects. But in STEM fields, and some others, female representation remains stubbornly low, while in many more traditionally feminine fields, women are the overwhelming majority.

Some feminists have claimed that this is due to male oppression, which may certainly have been true sixty years ago, but seems far less plausible now.

Recently, psychology has turned to the level of individual analysis to explain this phenomenon. Women, Jordan Peterson and many others tell us, are on the average more interested in people, while men are more interested in things. Thus, it seems reasonable to explain the accumulation of women in people-related jobs, and of men in more technical professions, by reference to the individual preferences of workplace participants.

Problem is, this level of analysis is again like the chemist, studying water, who precludes the existence of waves. Large groups of people do not behave the same as individuals, as anyone familiar with peer pressure and group psychology could observe, from school teachers to politicians to stand up comics. Obviously individual temperaments and preferences are enormously important, as there cannot be a forest without trees. But is a tree an accurate model of a forest? An individual water molecule an accurate model of an ocean? There are other forces at work here, for which no field of science or social study that I’m aware of truly possesses the tools to measure.

Cracks appear in the individual-preeminent gender model of analysis if you know where to look.

Were one to list individual gender preferences, a love of participation in contact sports would surely be assigned primarily to men. Men are measurably more aggressive, on average, and love crashing into each other more than women do. How, then, to explain the enormous surge of female participation in Australian Rules Football, where female junior numbers are in many parts of Australia approaching the levels of males? Australian Rules Football is a ferociously physical sport, with no pads or offside rule, so the hits could come from anywhere, frequently at high speed.

Rock music is another field overwhelmingly male-dominated in the West. There is obviously no doubt that women are capable of playing rock music at very high levels, given that so many of the best classical musicians today are women — a musical genre that is frequently, if not always, of superior technical difficulty. Yet since its inception, women appear to have chosen, rather than been forced, to stay off the rock-and-roll stage.

On the individual-level of analysis, this seems predictable. Much has been remarked about how rock music functions as a male mating ritual, with electric guitars as penis extensions, to be thrust in the willing direction of women in the audience. Clearly if any cultural field qualifies for an explanation driven by the psychological makeup of individual participants, this is it.

Save that the argument suffers from one enormous, paradigm-destroying exception — the entire nation of Japan. Rock music in Japan probably captures no greater share of the music audience than it does in the West, but the participation of all-female bands, and individual female musicians in mixed-gender bands, is so common today as to be unremarkable. Furthermore, while most female musicians in Western rock bands seem to be either singers or bass players, in Japan they run the gamut from drummers to solo-shredding lead guitarists as well.

If the explanation for rock-and-roll’s overwhelmingly male character in Western nations is to be found on the individual genetic level, then one must obviously believe that Japanese women are born with a rock-and-roll gene that Western women lack. This is a pretty cool idea, but by my understanding of genetics, improbable.

A third example can be found in Indian commercial airline pilots, where women account for of the Indian total, compared to the global average of %5 (%5.5 in the USA). This crack in the individualist argument is less clear, as psychologists have observed previously that women in less developed nations will often pursue traditionally ‘male’ professions in greater numbers, but that the ratio of female participants actually declines in more developed nations, contrary to what many feminists previously predicted would happen.

The argument made for this phenomenon is that in poor nations, women have less freedom to pursue their interests due to financial insecurity, and will thus take jobs in fields outside those natural interests in exchange for greater pay. With greater financial freedom, however, women in developed nations will prefer the pay cut in exchange for taking jobs closer to something approaching the mean average of female preference.

This sets us up for an opportunity to make predictions, or even to place bets, on future outcomes in real time. The psychologists, operating at the individual level of analysis, will no doubt predict that the number of Indian female pilots will fall as India develops, and the world’s newly most populous nation certainly looks set to develop rapidly for the next few decades.

On the other hand, I’m inclined to predict that the number of female pilots in India will rise and keep rising, irrespective of India’s growth trajectory. Already that female percentage is up %3 from as recently as 2021, a trajectory that may see Indian female pilots accounting for a quarter or even a third of all pilots within ten years or so, a number extraordinarily beyond the global average. To me, these look like ocean waves large enough to surf on.

There are good arguments to be made about why so many Australian girls play a hard-hitting contact sport, or Japanese women play rock music, or Indian women fly airliners, that make compelling explanations. All of them are descriptions of large-scale social phenomena, rather than individual psychological phenomena. Here are just a small number;

Girls love friendships, and contact sports breed closer friendships among teammates than non-contact sports through the greater appearance of danger. Australian girls playing Australian football have reported anecdotally that they make a better quality and number of friends (due to the large numbers of players on an Australian football field) than in other sports. Yes, fear-bonding with friends is partly an individual psychological thing, but it takes an organised sport, and large groups of people in specific circumstances, to make it happen.

Plus, there is also the fact that Australian Rules football is an endurance and skills-based sport just as much as a contact sport. This requires a lean body-type that is a much easier sell to young women as an athletic ideal than the heavy-set, powerful physique required by most other contact sports.

Japan has a much more well-developed system of musical education than any Western nation, for which students gain academic credit. That system is co-educational, and offers instruction in all popular music forms, including rock. It, plus some prominent cultural touchstones (the anime show K-ON being one, where a group of high-school girls form a rock band) appears to have a played a large role in rock music becoming co-ed like every other arts stream in Japan’s school system.

And in India, economic development is just now hitting a point where flying has become a status symbol, indicating that a person is wealthy enough to afford the ticket. Airline pilots thus possess a glamour in India that perhaps only existed in the West until the ’70s, when flying indicated a similar social status. But in the ’70s, female airline pilots were largely unthinkable, and by the time that changed, the moment was passed, and the glamour faded. India is thus perhaps the only nation where the rise of women to the workforce in large numbers, and the glamorous status of flying, have coincided with a massive boom in commercial aviation. Also, having discovered this story, the Indian media have promoted female aviators in a way that Western media never did, making it impossible for young Indian women seeking good jobs to miss.

These are more educated guesses than scientific fact, but for the purposes of this article, they are illustrative of the ocean waves that the chemistry analysis of water failed to predict. Societies are complicated, and many things happen to individuals living in those societies that shape their lives far beyond the rudiments of a psychological survey.

A lot of individual-level analysis aimed at gender, in my opinion, is simply making category errors driven by too small a frame of reference at a too-low complexity level. Contact sports don’t necessarily require the player to be aggressive — she might just be there for friends. Neither does rock music require macho hyper-sexuality — given sufficient exposure to it, many women just love the energy. Contrary to what people unfamiliar with modern aviation might think, being a pilot these days has little more to do with things, and technical skills, than it has to do with people and communication skills, which given the increasing levels of automation in the cockpit is perhaps the primary reason for the modern pilot’s continued existence.

Jobs with many traditionally ‘feminine’ characteristics don’t become ‘masculine’ just because a psychologist says they are. They may be perceived to be masculine, in spite of their many feminine characteristics, but again, that’s a category error. I’m caffeine-free. Drinking it gives me bad headaches and other things. I’m told decaf is caffeine-free, but that’s a category error, because when I drink it, headaches, poor sleep, etc. You can call something whatever you like, but real world factors will eventually prove you wrong. Substance drives the world, not labels.

The inability to distinguish between different levels of complexity plays a role in creating false labels, by creating the appearance of congruities at one level that would be dispelled at the next, if only an observer thought to look. The study of individual characteristics alone makes for an incomplete picture. Societies generate currents and waves in a similar way to oceans, and the over-obsession with the individual can lead us to assume things about natural social outcomes that are not necessarily true.

The point here is not to claim that traditional expectations of gender play no role in currently observed outcomes. It’s to claim that all of those traditional expectations of gender may in fact be true, and yet outcomes may still surprise and confound, as in all of the above examples, because those traditional expectations, and their final outcomes, manifest at entirely separate levels of social complexity. As societies become more complicated, we should expect these counter-intuitive results to increase, not as a function of social justice, but as a function of that complexity.

COUNTER INTUITIVENESS

As modern society increases in complexity, cause-and-effect becomes less intuitive to the human brain. Living in hunter gatherer societies, cause-and-effect was much more simple. If you picked up a rock, and dropped it, the human brain would logically expect the rock to fall straight down, thanks to long experience of watching rocks, and other dropped objects, doing exactly that.

But in modern societies, objects and events put in motion are far less predictable. The consequence is often the equivalent of picking up the rock, and being astonished when it falls sideways, or levitates impossibly in the air.

This phenomenon is everywhere, and caused often by the inability of observers to distinguish between differing levels of complexity within the process being observed. It’s particularly common in economics, where nearly everything is counter-intuitive, from the fact that printing more money actually makes people poorer, to the fact that raising taxes often results in less revenue as businesses shut down or move elsewhere. The primitive human brain observes a thing that seems obvious at first glance (more money equals more wealth) and is then astonished when the opposite happens, because it fails to comprehend that the ‘obvious’ remedial action is only the first in a sequence of increasingly complex events, most of which happen off-stage.

I’m certain that many readers will be able to name their own examples of counter-intuitive phenomena they’ve experienced in their own work or life. Someone should really compile them into a single resource, because I’m sure the many and varied examples would be fascinating, if written up by people with far more expertise in those fields than I. Here, however, are a few of my favourites.

In very early aviation, the most deadly thing that could happen to a pilot was for his airplane to fall into a spin. It’s called ‘falling’ into a spin because that’s exactly what happens. Wings generate lift by remaining level with the ground, so they can directly counter the downward force of gravity. When an airplane spins, its wings are no longer consistently generating lift in the desired direction, and so the airplane literally falls from the sky.

In the very early days, when airplanes were made of wood, fabric and wires, spins were nearly always fatal. Partly this was because airplanes were not very strong, and could fall apart when subjected to involuntary violent manoeuvres, but mostly because pilots had little idea how to get out of a spin once inside one.

This was made worse by the fact that a pilot’s intuitive response was almost always wrong. First, early pilots would pull back on the stick, to bring the airplane’s nose up and avoid crashing into the ground. Secondly, pilots would push the stick in the opposite direction to which the airplane was spinning. This seems entirely logical, as this is what the control stick is for — to tilt the wings to one side or the other, and commence a turn.

Neither worked, and many pilots died because they were unaware of how the complex forces working upon their machine contrived to make the most obvious responses ineffective.

Eventually it was discovered that increased airspeed is essential to recover from spins, so pilots should not attempt to immediately pull up. Instead, they should apply full opposite rudder (which controls sideways yaw), wait for the spin to neutralise, and only then pull back on the stick once airspeed has increased and wings become levelled. Once this method was discovered, spins decreased in lethality until they became, and remain today, only fatal when entered at an altitude too low to recover from.

Why does opposite rudder work when the ailerons operated by the control stick do not? I don’t know, I’m not an aerodynamics expert. But that’s the point, and is much of the reason why experts became more necessary in modern civilisation in the first place — because when complex systems are encountered, expertise drawn from the experience of many iterations becomes necessary, as intuitive guesses fail.

Some counter-intuitive things are so not because of complexity scaling, but because of human unfamiliarity — like plants that thrive instead of dying when pruned to the point of annihilation, or bears that try to eat you only if you run away from them, or wartime ambushes that should be attacked into rather than taken cover from. These are interesting, but not examples of counter-intuitiveness due to complexity.

In racecar driving, some forms of oversteer (drifting) require the driver to turn the steering wheel in the opposite direction to the way they are turning. In social media, applications designed ostensibly to increase social contact, friendship circles and thus emotional wellbeing have instead increased incidences of anti-social behaviour, depression and suicide. Widespread pornography, denounced by the political Right and Left in the ’80s as the precursor to everyone having too much sex, is now denounced by the Right in particular as a cause of people not having enough sex, leading to a declining birth rate. And in stock trading, just about everything most people instinctively do is wrong, most notably when joining in with panics or exuberance, or listening to anything suggested on business news channels.

All of these are examples not so much of false assumptions proven wrong, but rather of deductions that might have been correct at a lower level of complexity becoming incorrect at a higher level.

Some enormous portion of social analysis gets tangled in these confusions between one scale and the other, because analysts refuse to specify which scale they’re analysing, or even that a differentiation of scale exists. This in turn leads to situations where analysis becomes confused by the fact that correct answers to questions about social phenomena can be both ‘yes’ and ‘no’, due to the fact that what works at one level of complexity won’t work at another.

The control stick does bank the aircraft left or right, but not in spins. The steering wheel does turn the car in the direction of the wheel, but not in drifts. Social media in small scales can enhance emotional wellbeing, but in large scales becomes pathological. Pornography can increase libido, but also cause declines in birth-rate. And while the market crowd must be listened to, as it determines trading prices, it must rarely be respected, as the thing that most people are doing is rarely where the money is made, and is frequently where the greatest sums are lost.

This makes true expertise, in a modern context, a very hard sell. Simplicity sells, as it appeals to our emotional, narrative-driven brains. ‘Experts’ who pronounce things to be simple, and emotionally seductive, are granted the limelight by those who profit from ratings, clicks and views, while those pushing the more complicated, nuanced explanations are ignored or even punished.

Politicians in particular are condemned if they explain why things are complex, and praised if stating that they’re straight forward. As all social explanations become more complex in our ever-more technical society, we should sadly expect this disconnect between reality and popular messaging to increase as well.

Unless, of course, I’ve made a simplistic deduction based on current trends at one level of complexity, and missed others at a different level that will create a different outcome. Let’s hope so.

WARNING, Major Spoilers Ahead.

I understand why some people don’t like the first Avatar movie. Whenever you shove real world politics into a story, and try to tell people what to think, it sucks. Avatar has a very obvious environmental message, and thus falls into predictable good vs bad tropes that in parts make for clumsy storytelling.

In fact, the thing I liked best in the movie was the shades of grey, the good humans trying to help the Na’avi but still working for the corporation, and Neytiri knowing the humans well enough to know that they weren’t all evil, just some. Those moral conflicts were dramatic, while cliched bad capitalists were not, precisely because they were so obvious. Obvious cliches have no dramatic inner monologues.

However, I still like the movie, because at the end of the day it’s a tightly written escapist adventure that delivers everything it sets out to. You might not like aspects of the subject matter, but structurally it’s an excellent movie.

The sequel? Not so much. It’s still pretty good, it does a lot of the same things well that the first one does. But structurally it’s a mess, mostly because James Cameron, who’s usually excellent at this sort of thing, appears so determined to make certain things happen that he forced them onto the script whether the script was willing or not.

So, thinking about it, how would we fix it?

The obvious thing that’s wrong with Way of the Water is that, as the title suggests, it’s determined to make its way into the ocean. Cameron is an ocean guy, he spends much of his life on boats, is a passionate environmentalist, and that’s cool. But what it means for the movie is that it was always heading into the water. What Cameron needed was a good excuse to go there.

What happens in the movie is an exposition trap. I know, because it’s one of the things I’ve wrestled hardest with in my own writing. How to drop large volumes of information onto the readers without it feeling like a long, boring infodump?

In the movie, Jake Sully takes his family across the ocean, because the bad humans are back and trying to kill them. He seeks sanctuary on the shores of an ocean continent, and establishes a new life there. The world Cameron creates is very beautiful, with the amazing design and cinematography we’d expect from an Avatar film. But by God it’s long!

The action just stops for a full hour, as the film turns from Sci Fi adventure into teen family drama, as Mum and Dad move the kids to a new neighbourhood where they have to make new friends at a new school, face up to bullies, and learn that their strange new neighbourhood is actually pretty cool.

Cameron not only needs to set up his new environment, but also the new characters — the Sully kids. Obviously there’s a lot to set up, and it needs to be done, but it happens at the expense of pacing, action and, I think, much more interesting opportunities to do exactly these things at a higher tempo. Maybe Cameron’s environmentalist impulses got the better of him — obviously he loves the ocean, and wanted to share that love with the audience in a peaceful, tranquil setting. But the first movie had plenty of peaceful, tranquil moments without once slowing the exhilarating pace, and the relentless drive of its main character, Jake Sully, DOING things.

So how could this have been done in The Way of Water?

Well, imagine that it’s not the human kid, Spider, who’s taken prisoner. Imagine it’s several of the blue kids instead. They’re put onto ships and fired toward orbit, to be studied in a lab there, or taken back to Earth. But something happens, the ship to orbit crashes (or is shot down, there’s any number of sub-plot rebellions and sabotages that might make it happen, it’s not hard to do) you guessed it, amongst the ocean peoples across the sea.

The kids survive, obviously, and are found by the ocean people. Immediately they’re being chased by bad humans, seeking revenge for their lost ship and wanting Sully’s kids back for leverage over him. The ocean people have to take the kids to a place of sanctuary — I think their world is an archipeligo, and if it’s not, it should be. So they have to island-hop, from one watery place to the next, guided by the ocean tribes, and sentient whales, and riding flying fishes, all the stuff that Cameron created. But they’ll be chased, have close shaves, get rescued by new heroes, and plunge unsuspecting into amazing new environments.

In the meantime, Jake and Neytiri, and let’s say Spider, get word of where their kids are, and tear off in pursuit, catching up with them at some point and no doubt saving the day.

This structure does several things.

A) It allows all the world building that Cameron did in his version, but with higher stakes and far higher tempo. In fact, it allows a lot more world building, because in my version they wouldn’t be stuck for two thirds of the film on the same damn beach. The place of sanctuary would be somewhere amazing, and reaching it would be a great trek, like Lord of the Rings, through an alien and changing land and seascape.

B) It separates the kids from their parents. Want your kid characters to grow up and develop personalities? Give them responsibilities. The only way you can really do this is to take their parents away, at least for a while, so they can sink or swim on their own. In Way of the Water, the helicopter parents were always hovering, and it was restrictive. Imagine Jake having his adventures in the first movie if his Mum was always in the background, ready to scold him for taking risks.

C) It puts Spider amongst Na’avi, where he’s most interesting. I know Cameron wanted the whole father-son thing with the new version of Colonel Whats-his-name, but seriously, I want a new movie, not a clone of the old one. One of the things I liked most about the first film was the interaction between two very alien peoples, especially when that interaction was NOT violent. The most moving scene in the whole film, for me, was the first time Neytiri sees Jake in the flesh — this pale, helpless, tiny human that she looms over like some giant blue preying mantis, and looks at him not with revulsion, but with love.

Yes, I know Spider does spend time amongst giant blue people in the film, but they’re human avatar clones and it’s not the same. Humans and na’avi interacting was the core of the first film, and in the second it’s nearly missing entirely.

I would have ditched Colonel Whats-his-name entirely. He was okay in the first film, I guess, but in the structure I’ve just outlined, he’d just get in the way — we’d be too busy with the kids on their adventure, with Jake, Neytiri and Spider in pursuit… and Spider trying to deal with Neytiri’s cool hostility, which I did like.

And D) lastly, it would have removed the most glaring moral hole in the plot — that obviously Jake was going to bring the humans down on the heads of his hosts, and be responsible for getting a lot of them killed. His choice to go there was always very suspect for such a moral, upstanding guy, and the film had no choice but to gloss it over, mostly by reducing the eventual body count in a very unbelievable manner, by having most of the ocean na’avi just disappear in the final act. Did they have a train to catch? Was their favourite TV show on? Where’d they go?

But in my version, it’s just an accident, and Jake can later tell any of the ocean people who complain that at least he’s fighting for Pandora, what have YOU been doing? He’d remain warrior Jake, not the formerly-important guy who ran away and dropped his troubles onto unprepared innocents.

Maybe some parts of the third movie’s plot will unfold like this, and Cameron was just saving it — I don’t know. But I hope for that one, he remembers to put the script’s needs first.

The human race has been here many times before. The job of hunter gatherer was destroyed by the farmer. Most European farming jobs were destroyed by the industrial revolution. And of course, we’ve all heard the story of how the horse-and-buggy industry was put out of business by cars.

Unfortunately for the technologists and sensationalists who wish to dominate this discussion, this isn’t some entirely new paradigm, despite how it looks from a purely technological point of view. It’s an old discussion about that most misunderstood but most important phenomenon of human civilisation — economics.

Technology was supposed to radically change our lives and work before. When computers became ubiquitous, some people thought that it would lead to layoffs, because one person could now do the work of five, rendering the other four unnecessary. Others supposed that if the requirements of an eight-hour workday could now be completed in one hour, we’d all turn up at 9am, work, then go to lunch from 10am onward.

Instead, of course, the new amount of work we did between 9 and 10 simply spread across the rest of the day. Worse, work now followed us home, as computers got smaller, and we now carried our office in our pocket. Frequently it followed us to bed.

The truth is that work, like the fabric of spacetime, is infinitely flexible. And like a gas in a vacuum, work will immediately expand to fill any given space. This can be seen in the computer revolution we’ve had thus far. Jobs were neither eliminated nor made easier, just made more productive and numerous, if not always more pleasant. Even in the poorest countries, everyone works. It’s just that most of the jobs suck, like begging, or picking through piles of garbage.

Furthermore, modern economics make a giant chain of cause-and-effect. Savings made by one company will always get passed on somewhere else. This is the reason we’re not still living in caves struggling to rub two sticks together. The march of modern technology has been the ability of individual workers, by coordinating labour, to get more work done in a day. This is called productivity.

Let’s say AI takes the jobs of many lawyers, which is starting to happen even now. A lot of law is copy-paste stuff, drafting documents, applying relevant statutes, filling out forms and ticking boxes. Obviously AI is now evolving to the point that it can do all of this at a fraction of the cost. Lawyers are expensive, and jobs cut are salaries the law firm no longer needs to pay.

What happens then? Well, the law firm makes more money, because the gap between their expenses and their income will expand. This is known as profit. But of course, profits probably won’t explode at all, because what always happens in market economies is that some other law firm will spoil everyone else’s fun by using their new margins to cut prices, and offer legal services at a lower cost.

The other law firms then have to follow suit or lose all their business to the cheaper firms, meaning that profits remain about the same, as prices fall. This leads to two effects.

One, legal services then become more accessible to people who couldn’t afford them before. Whether individuals or small companies, there are plenty of people who’d no doubt like a lawyer to advise them or manage legal proceedings, but currently can’t afford it. So legal firms will likely have to expand to meet new demand, thus, you guessed it, employing more lawyers.

Say every law firm cuts their staff in half, replacing them with AI. Then each law firm doubles in size from new demand brought about by lower prices. How many lawyers will then be employed? Exactly the same amount as before, obviously, but the nature of their work will have changed.

The second effect will be that companies that already use lawyers a lot will save money, because those services will cost less. The money they save will then get spent elsewhere in the economy, creating growth in those places. Of course, in reality, they’ll probably just spend their savings on more legal services, as in today’s bureaucratic environment, demand for legal services will only increase.

The better example of the second effect might be found in restaurants, cafes, bars, and every place employs staff to serve diners. A lot of this will obviously go at some point, replaced by some version of robot capable of complex tasks, and navigating crowded tables with plates of food.

Why is robot replacement inevitable? Well, when robots begin to get mass manufactured, prices will fall significantly. If a good serving robot can be had for $50,000, and a waiter costs $34,000 (Google tells me this is true for America), then the robot pays for itself in two years. Sure, the robot had better not break down frequently, but with reasonable servicing and electricity costs, three years max.

Further, robotics companies will offer financing, so small businesses don’t have to pay all at once, and taking on a robot won’t cost more up front than hiring a human. And robot skills will increase with ownership, as new downloads increase capabilities, meaning that the bot will be an appreciating asset rather than a depreciating one.

After the robot pays for itself, a restaurant will make big savings. No more salary payouts. No overtime. Longer opening hours, etc, etc. But like the law firm, restaurants are unlikely to make big profits, because there are so many restaurants, and all of them fiercely competitive. So prices will drop, and suddenly, going out for a meal will become much cheaper.

As with the law firm, this will lead to more people eating out, and an expansion of the restaurant business… but probably not as much as law business will increase, because people can only eat so much food. Which means the second effect will be more in evidence — customers will save money because their yearly bill for eating out will come down significantly.

The average American household spends $3000 dollars a year on eating out (Google tells me). Say that is reduced to $2000, as restaurant prices decline due to automation. America has 123 million households, so that’s $123 billion dollars in yearly household savings. Recall that the definition of workplace productivity is doing the same job for less cost.

That’s $123 billion dollars that households will spend on other things. And this money will go everywhere, obviously, to all the things that people spend money on. How many jobs get created by $123 billion in extra spending? Enough to create as many new jobs as were lost when robots took over the restaurant industry?

Quite probably. And some of those industries that benefit from that new spending will themselves be replacing jobs with AI and robots, which will in turn create their own savings effect and new money plowed back into the economy, round and round in circles.

This is the wonder of free market economics. We know it works, because we’re not currently huddled around a campfire in the woods, hungry, cold and hoping something doesn’t emerge from the darkness to eat us. We currently live at the end of precisely this process of job destruction, new job creation, productivity and improvement, and all the people who disparage it should really try living in the wilderness for a few weeks with nothing but a sharp stick for company.

Yes, it’s going to be disruptive and painful. But it’s not the end of jobs, and it doesn’t mean we’re all going to be living on some form of Universal Basic Income. It should, however, mean that once-expensive services become more accessible to people of all incomes, and that available jobs start to congregate in sectors of the economy where AIs can’t take them — at least for now. And when AIs and robots improve enough to take THOSE jobs as well, the whole process just begins again.

My guess is there’ll always be the requirement for a human in the loop somewhere. Building a house might become a job for robot wranglers who manage systems, plan the day’s schedule, and provide oversight so one of his robot builders doesn’t make a mistake that means that three years later, the house falls down. Worker teams with mixed capabilities always outperform those the same skillsets, suggesting that humans plus AI, and humans plus robots, will always do better than AI and robots alone.

If those jobs remain, then we’ll probably maintain something close to full human employment, while the rest of the economy simply expands multifold around them. Which would, if it happens, lead to a world of extraordinary wealth and productivity even by today’s standards, a place where governments could sustain many times today’s spending on social programs, because the economy would be enormously larger.

Unfortunately, it would also lead to a world where we’d become far more dependent on machines than we are today, could lead to the even further detachment of human ideologies from reality as our machine-bubble shields us from the real world, and would certainly mean that if some AI one day did have an awakening, and decide to dispose of us, it could probably do so, because we’d be seriously outnumbered.

Oh well. Can’t stop progress.

Partly because, if you’re anything like me, you’re something of a nerd. In truth, I think everyone’s somewhere on the nerd spectrum, which can apply to all sorts of things besides the traditional interest in science, technology, sci-fi or fantasy genres. Nerd is just shorthand for ‘passionately interested in something’, and in my opinion should really apply to everyone who has an interest, whether that’s music, horses or knitting.

But whatever — nerds of any interest often consume trashy content in their preferred subject, and feel guilty about it later. Don’t. I’ve received some of my greatest inspiration from consuming bad stuff, or just stuff I had issues with.

Take Star Trek’s influence on The Spiral Wars. Yes, this is unfair on Star Trek, because Star Trek, at its best, was certainly not trash. I consumed a lot of it in the ’90s, because there was no other SF on television, and because the endless seasons of Next Generation, Deep Space Nine, Voyager etc created space where some talented TV writers could use the episodic nature of those shows to generate some genuinely good stand-alone stories.

But then, Star Trek is made for TV, and TV has budgetary and technical limits. It’s always bugged me how that made-for-TV look continues to dominate so much SF that should not suffer from the same problem, either because it’s an enormous budget movie, or a novel constrained only by the author’s imagination. It’s like some actor fashioned an outfit out of plastic garbage bags because he was short of money, only to discover everyone else liked his outfit so much they’ve taken to wearing garbage bags too, even though they’re not financially limited.

Star Trek’s spaceships are TV sound stages designed to be convenient to shoot episodes in. Shooting in the more realistically confined spaces of a warship, like any in the world’s navies today, would make it seriously hard to fit camera mounts and microphones around the actors.

I wondered this a lot when I was watching it. Like, ‘how much more cool would it be if the entire show weren’t like traveling through the galaxy in your living room?’ In the old seafaring stories of the 1800s, ships were difficult, dangerous places. The sailors who crewed them became a distinctly different species of human, shaped by their environment, their sea-legs, their poor diets and coarse humour.

You could tell a sailor when he came ashore without having to ask — the way he walked, the wounds on his hands, the roughness of his manners and skin. Military people today have a hard time reconverting to civilian life for the same reason — the profession changes the person. But when a Space Fleet officer comes downworld, were it not for the uniform, I’m not sure anyone could tell.

Then there’s the sheer impracticality of being both a non-combatant vessel, and also a lethal combatant that almost never loses a fight. Any ship-building engineer will tell you — pick one, or suck at both. Too much useless space creates issues of mass, and thus of performance, which can only be ignored if you then ignore the physics of spacetravel, and thus of space combat. Or any kind of combat — there’s a reason today’s warships don’t have enormous living quarters for each of their crew with bathrooms and wall-screen TVs. It can’t be a cruise liner if you ever expect it to win a fight, yet so many SF ships, and not just Star Trek ones, don’t appear to have to choose.

Watching this stuff on TV gave me all kinds of ideas. I liked the shows, much of the time, but I had problems with them too. How to solve those problems gave me the first kernel of a set of ideas that later became the UFS Phoenix.

Other things too. The Star Trek ships have inertial dampners (a variant of artificial gravity, I suppose) but people still get thrown out of their chairs when the ship is impacted? So why not wear a seatbelt? Or better yet, go the whole hog the other way, and have starship bridges that look like ten-person fighter plane cockpits, all limbs strapped down for massive G-loads, all senses encased in graphical displays and audio cues?

And then there’s the redshirts. Yes, those eminantly memeable Star Fleet crew whose role is ostensibly ‘security’, but appear no better trained or equipped for it than any regular crew, leading to woefully unsuccessful operations and appallingly high casualties.

In today’s navies, soldiers who fight from ships are called marines. If you want something shot, don’t call some guy in a red skivvy with a plastic gidget, call a guy dressed in a zero-G tank, and he’ll do it properly.

I guess the issue I’m getting at is that a lot of cheap and simple SF does its best to avoid problems. Don’t ask too many questions, just consume product. And I’m not really picking on Star Trek here, because like I’ve said, Star Trek has become emblematic of so much other SF that has copied its various simplicities without appearing to realise there was ever an alternative, because they presumably never asked the question.

My suggestion to make any fantasy world come alive is to embrace the complexities of the world. Gravity only became a problem for Star Trek because zero-G was too hard to film. But if you’ve either a) got the budget, or b) are writing a novel and don’t need no stinking budget, embrace the complexity of what happens when gravity is variable. Also, embrace seatbelts, embrace inertia, and embrace specialised professions made up of experts who are seriously good at what they do, and aren’t just there for dramatic effect.

Technicalities and world building brings worlds to life. Trashy fantasy novels or TV shows avoid medieval technicalities because ‘the audience will find it boring’. And in the hands of bad writers, maybe they would. But Game of Thrones set up the entire great mystery of the first book, and which set the entire series rolling, by explaining the rules of succession that determine which of the King’s children gets to inherit the throne, and which are illegitimate, and it was thrilling.

Which is of course what George Martin has always said about the benefit of writing books over TV shows — some TV producer would have shot that down because ‘the audience won’t follow it’, but in a novel, he can do what he wants. (though I suspect assorted agents and editors try to shoot down the better ideas of less successful writers than Martin all the time).

So read or watch the cheap trash, and pick it apart, as nerds will. Figure how it should be done better, then do so. Which of course is nerd culture at its best. The truth is that I’ve probably had more good ideas from reading/watching, ahem, imperfect stuff, than from really good stuff.

Well, publicity, obviously. Publicity is a huge part of any business endeavour, and it’s something I’ve been lacking. When you’re published by a big traditional publisher, they’ll arrange some interviews, get some reviews for your book in a newspaper, that kind of thing. When you switch to independent publishing as I did, you lose all of that. Amazon allow me to advertise on their sales pages, which is a huge help, but it’s still far less reach than I could be getting if I had some other form of publicity. What’s the point of writing good books if most of the people who’d enjoy them will never know that they exist?

I’ve had to get over a personal reluctance to do publicity because a) I don’t much like submitting to other people’s questions, and b) all this talking about myself feels egotistical, which isn’t something I like. Maybe it’s an Australian thing, maybe just me, maybe a bit of both. But the nice thing with a podcast is that I’m not talking about me, I’m talking to another person about something else entirely.

Why podcast about a whole bunch of things that people might not automatically associate with Science Fiction?

Well partly because, if you were a plumber, you wouldn’t want to be talking about pipes and bathrooms in your off-time, right? I have nothing against writers who podcast mostly about writing, but I like writing precisely because it’s a way of exploring all the things in the world I find interesting outside of writing. And if you’re looking at the work of a good portrait artist, what’s more interesting to consider — the people being painted, or the quality of the artist’s brushstrokes? I’m interested in the art, but not as much as I’m interested in the subject matter. And I’ve always liked a kind of realism in writing, and in other art, that strives to be invisible.

Also, the thing I like about Science Fiction is that it’s such a vast genre, you can (and I do) take all kinds of interests in all kinds of things and chuck them in. I think SF is at its best when freed from its limits. There’s a lot of traditional publishers doing their best to try and put the genre in shackles, to impose sub-genres upon it like military-SF, space opera, cyberpunk, Hard SF, etc, all the hyper-focused marketing stuff that might make the job of publishing books easier, but is murder on the creative process.

I’ve accumulated a whole bunch of interests over the years, which range from things I do myself, to things I just observe from a distance, to things I’d like to get more involved in, or simply learn more about but never had the chance. All of this stuff ends up in my writing at some point, so it makes sense that if people are interested in my books, or just interested in hearing an SF author have discussions with experts in these subjects, that this would be the stuff I’d podcast about.

And more, I also want to have fun, and improve my public speaking, and have discussions with interesting people about interesting subjects. I don’t claim to be the greatest talker, but I reckon I get better the more I practise. If you don’t find one subject interesting, just wait a moment and there should be another you do. And if you like my books, you’ll probably start seeing familiar themes emerging that you’ve seen written down (or listened to spoken aloud) and get some greater idea of what I was getting at.

Most of the SF authors podcasting right now (that I’ve seen) tend to be hard SF, with technical backgrounds that I won’t pretend to match. I’m a generalist, not a specialist. I’m also more interested (and much better at) the broad civilisational implications of technology than I am in specifically how it works. Someone else might be able to talk for hours about how a new rocket engine works, and I’ll leave that stuff to them. I’m much more interested in how the evolution of rocket engines will change the shape of humanity, from economic, political, military and cultural angles.

If that kind of thing interests you too, stick around, and you might find some conversations worth listening to.

 

Big new interview by Lou Anders on Tor.com about Sasha, female characters and how Lian Hearn helped get Sasha published in Australia.

Following on from my world-building piece about 'Sasha', I thought I'd do something similar for the 'Cassandra Kresnov Series'.

Obviously there's a fair few scientific improbabilities in Cassandra's world, starting with Earthlike planets of roughly similar gravity, atmosphere, etc. My technical excuse is that the primary scientific improbability (faster than light travel) gives humanity such a wide range that even if such worlds are a million to one, humanity now has access to tens of millio...

Pyr publisher Lou Anders has identified a common theme through many of the reviews for Sasha.[image error]

Regular readers of fantasy may notice that the land of Lenayin is a little more complicated than many fantasy lands. This is because the real world is complicated, and I think a lot of fantasy novels don't make much effort to do this justice. This is the age of monocultures. In the past, in most nations, things were more fractured.

Lenayin has eleven provinces, divided mostly along linguistic lines. It's a rugged place, entirely mountainous but not like the Alps, with its neat divides...

The Cassandra Kresnov Trilogy is now being released by Pyr in a mass market format. (that's a 'regular' paperback for all you non-publishing lingo types). This is Pyr's first foray into mass market, which is very cool for them, because it shows it's possible for a smaller publisher to enter the market, and grow larger. Where they'll be in another few years, who can tell?