Sonoran Spring

I’m enjoying yet another Sonoran spring.

One of the advantages of a biologist’s perspective is an appreciation of the wonders all around us wherever that might be.

Arizona’s Sonoran desert is no exception. As the days lengthen and temperatures rise, foreshadowing the challenges of our summers, we’re also gifted with spring rains that refresh the desert and stimulate an explosion of fascinating and beautiful biological activity.

One can look at desert life systemically or individually.

Systemically, you have a solar driven engine.

Green plants use chlorophyll to capture solar energy, converting inorganic to organic matter. Chloroplasts facilitating photosynthesis are embedded symbionts, a partnership that enabled green plants to conquer the world.

They build on these  organic compounds, applying physiological energy and more inorganic resources, to build all the more complex organic chemicals required to sustain not only their lives but the entire Sonoran food web.

Carbohydrates. Lipids. Amino acids. Nucleic acids.

The stuff of life!

This solar driven engine consists of a stunning diversity of individual life forms cuing their lifecycles to temperatures and events like precipitation as they play out their respective strategies.

Strategies for how resources and energy are acquired, conserved, and invested.

Strategies that are graded in terms of reproductive success.

Every living thing we see around us is the result of a successful reproductive strategy.

Obvious?

Of course.

But the implications are profound.

Seasonal insect species rely on environmental cues to time their hatching. Hatch too soon, and there won’t yet be enough to eat. Hatch too late, and they risk competitive disadvantage or, for those species relying on spring rain wildflowers, the desiccation of their food before they’ve gained sufficient resources to reproduce.

Predators also play this game. If a mantis’ eggs hatch too soon, there’ll be no prey to consume. If they hatch too late, much of their potential prey will be too big.

And some seasonal insects may attempt more than one lifecycle in the same season.

This is a HUGE gamble. Pull it off, and each investment resulting in a reproductive offspring is compounded. But if the season ends before your grandchildren can deposit eggs for the following season, you’ve lost everything.

This morning’s musings were inspired by cactus blossoms.

Prickly pear. Hedgehogs. Saguaros.

Just gorgeous, especially given the contrast with the off-putting appearance of the plant itself.

What strikes me, though, is that they tend to be HUGE.

Consider a hedgehog cactus blossom.

The plant may live for decades with a substantial root network designed to harvest and store as much moisture and resources as possible.

The plant conserves its resources, limiting its growth and eschewing the broad green surfaces that serve spring wildflowers so well but expose them to desiccation as temperatures climb.

Yet, when the time is right, when the cues occur, the cactus makes a massive investment in a spectacular flower, synchronized per those cues with prospective mates, competing to attract pollinators to facilitate the reproductive process.

A quick and significant bet in the hopes of reproductive success before resuming its conservative lifestyle until next year.

So, yeah, I look at things a little differently!

But we all have expertise based on our education, profession, and interests.

Expertise that impact how immersive stories can be for us.

I cannot tell you how many times I’ve been distracted because the movie’s set in, say, southeast Asia but the characters are walking through what’s clearly a central American jungle. I can tell by the species of trees, reptiles, birds, etc.

So, when I tell prospective readers that my novels are a different, this is what I mean.

Yes. it’s my aspiration to offer readers an immersive experience by doing my homework, striving for the credibility that preserves canon.

But I also add the biologist’s perspective.

They’re monster stories with all that this entails. Peril. Horror. Plot twists. Characters that prevail through heroism and cleverness and perseverance.

The monsters aren’t just realistic, they make sense. Sense in terms of their individual lifecycle strategies and as cogs in the greater machine of their ecosystems Enriched by the kind of thorough and comprehensive world building that only a biologist’s perspective can offer.

Curious?

Whatever you do, DON’T BREAK CANON!

I read to be entertained, so I write to entertain.

What I love most about quality fiction, and my highest aspiration as writer, is the ability to immerse the reader in a world they’ve never known, and to make it so real they feel like they’ve really been there.

This applies to science fiction, historical fiction, fantasy, a detective story set in a city you’ve never visited, ...

Anything, really.

Achievement of such immersion is an art.

Failure is all too easy.

Poorly crafted writing will do it. Typos, poor grammar, repetitive words and phrasing, anything the jars the mind and thereby breaks the mood. A talented editor is your best strategy (thank you, Abigail!)

A greater challenge is credibility, which, in turn, breaks into two overlapping buckets (Venn diagrams, anyone?)

The first is accuracy.

Whatever your profession, whatever your pastimes, you have expertise.

When the story involves something that is, for your reader, an area of expertise, and you’ve failed to do your homework, you risk breaking the mood and losing your reader.

The second is canon.

As you weave your story, as you build your world, you set precedents.

And breaking those precedents also breaks the mood.

For hard science fiction, there’s a lot of overlap between these buckets. The more your world building is committed to real science, the easier it should be, at least in theory, to honoring canon.

But honoring canon is just as important regardless of genre.

If you, early in your story, introduce a notion about what’s lethal to vampires or how magic works or how, historically, elves and dwarves have gotten along, you just can’t change those rules on the fly.

I’m a particularly challenging audience in this regard for two reasons.

One is that I’m a detail oriented guy and the other is that I have a diverse resume.

My background is in evolutionary biology and theoretical ecology, but I went into the tech industry. I worked in precious metals exploration modeling ore bodies. I managed data centers and telecommunications for an aerospace company. I worked as a strategic planner and solution architect in semiconductor manufacturing and professional services. I ran R&D for a tech company developing prototypes and filing patents related to distributed computing, IoT, and AI. I’m a dive instructor (not currently active). I’m a photographer.

I could go on.

Bottom line? There are a LOT of things that come up in books, movies, TV shows, etc., that I know enough about to recognize when an author hasn’t applied due diligence and I’m sufficiently detail oriented that it kills the story for me.

The movie’s set in southeast Asia but the actors are walking past central American trees or rock formations unique to somewhere in the US?

Drives me crazy!

The hacker starts banging away at a keyboard and somehow magically breaks into an alien spacecraft’s network?

No way!

We’re on an alien moon filled with absolutely gorgeously envisioned alien lifeforms but, for some reason, despite ALL the vertebrate alien life forms having 6 limbs the intelligent life forms are humanoids with only 4 limbs? And, somehow, they’re able to mate with their hair and the same braid ‘joining’ is how they interface with whichever 6 limbed life forms they’re riding?

C’mon!

And it REALLY drives me up the wall when there’s a fundamental and unexplained capabilities of our heroes or villains. Somehow, unexplicably, an attack the monster was able to shrug off at the beginning of the story is now deadly. Or (see if you recognize the movie) the hero tells us, early on, that the surviving armed and trained space marines cannot rescue their friends but, somehow, miraculously, is able to singlehandedly rescue the little girl that’s become her substitute daughter.

I mean, I still LOVE these movies, but find these things jarring every <censored> time I watch these otherwise fantastic movies.

I could go on...

So, as a writer, what can you do?

One reason I love hard sci fi is that the story could really happen!

Another is that it should be easier to preserve canon if canon is based on facts.

But regardless of genre, being that detail oriented guy and being a hyper organized dude, I believe in documenting canon.

As I write my stories, I have a growing compilation I use as a reference.

Character backstories. Detailed designs of every vehicle, every structure. Detailed descriptions of the taxonomy, structure, and behavior of every organism described in every story. A high level future history. I’ve even modeled the populations for every colony referenced in the stories throughout our solar system and beyond. I’ve referenced typical birth and death rates under varying conditions. Space allocations on ships. Agricultural productivity per hectare.

EVERYTHING I could think of.

And a lot of it never shows up in my novels, but I record it anyway. Sometimes to help me envision things accurately for those details that DO show up in the stories, and sometimes because, well, you never know, do you? Something recorded for thoroughness might become relevant to a future story, right?

All of this said, I do recognize that it’s certainly possible that I’ve fallen short of my own ideals.

There are times I’ve done my best to be scientifically accurate, but I’m particularly concerned that I may have fallen short with respect to some aspects of physics and astrogation.

And, if I have, I apologize.

But I’ll say this.

If I have fallen short with respect to specific aspects of physics and astrogation, I have certainly remained consistent.

Because, if nothing else, whatever you do, DON’T BREAK CANON!

Understanding Waves of Automation

I spent a lot of years in the tech industry, and, for a lot of those years, my job was strategic planning.

So, a recent social media post that reminded me most of us don’t recognize that we are living through an ongoing profound socio-economic upheaval, primarily because the last few years have been a period of relative stability within the punctuated equilibrium of that upheaval.

Neither the agricultural nor the industrial revolution happened overnight. People didn’t go to sleep one night as nomads and wake up the next morning with plowed fields, nor did they ride horses home one night and go back to work the next day in an automobile.

These transitions took decades.

So, when I read this post (essentially, ‘if the economic policies of the current administration are bad, why is my retirement account doing so well?’), it reminded me that, while most of us recognize that we are living through an information revolution, most of us aren’t recognizing it as a succession of automation waves.

It’s instructive to understand the ongoing information revolution as a punctuated equilibrium. It has been, and continues to be, a series of upheavals facilitated by technological innovations but driven by productivity gains realized through successive waves of digitization.

Think of any organization, business or government, as a set of processes.

Then think of those processes as groupings of activities performed by humans, with one grouping after another digitized by a set of technologies.

Then recognize that each wave of digitization, by displacing humans, improves organizational productivity by running faster, better, and cheaper.

But not without profound socioeconomic disruption.

In the 1950s, a ‘computer’ was a human, armed with a slide rule tasked with performing calculations related to maintaining the general ledger, populating actuarial tables, and other bulk calculatory tasks.

These jobs were replaced by mainframe computers.

Offices used to pay people to maintain rooms filled with filing cabinets storing documents related to all sorts of records related to human resources, customer accounts, payment processing, and so forth.

These jobs were initially replaced by minicomputer based departmental systems that have now, in turn, been replaced with ERP systems like SAP.

Offices used to pay administrative assistants to take dictation, prepare documents, generate presentations, and host of other functions replaced by office suite software products running on personal computers.

Companies used to pay people to generate and distribute physical catalogs, and other people to receive and process orders received by mail and then phone calls. These jobs were replaced by the Internet and e-commerce.

Again, each wave of digitization has, by replacing humans, improved organizational productivity.

Each wave has, by replacing humans, created profound disruptions. One set of people discovered opportunities related to enabling and maintaining the automation systems that put another set of humans out of work.

And we, here in the US, have, generally, done a very poor job facilitating this transition, with the humans whose skills were no longer required struggling to navigate their new reality, which has often had geopolitical ramifications.

But organizations that failed to capitalize on these waves of automation and their associated productivity gains failed to survive.

As painful as it is to recognize that your job is being replaced by a machine, the fact is that, if your company doesn’t replace you with a machine, the company that puts your company out of business will.

The same can be said for offshoring work. We complain bitterly about companies that offshore work at the expense of domestic jobs, then enjoy the lower prices offered by the companies that outcompete those companies that refuse to offshore or automate.

And, eventually, even the jobs that have been offshored are, subsequently, automated out of existence, enabling the companies that have capitalized on offshoring and automation to continue to offer better products and services at lower prices.

We should all bear this in mind when politicians glibly promise the impossible. Yes, it would be lovely to restore these jobs, but we are the ones that, by choosing the best products and services at the best prices, drove the replacement of those jobs through offshoring and automation.

There is a profound irony to watching consumers with a ‘buy American’ bumper sticker transfer imported products from their shopping cart to their car, which, even if it has an American car company badge, is likely to have been imported entirely, or, if not an import, is definitely comprised of a long list of imported parts.

The competitive advantages related to each wave of digitization are irresistible.

Organizations that fail to capitalize on these waves will not survive competition with organizations that take advantage of them.

Gravity sucks, but, if a rock is falling, you’d best step out of the way, because all the campaign promises in the world are not going to spare you a lot of pain if that rock hits you.

As stated above, these waves of digitization create a punctuated equilibrium, periods of relative stability interrupted by upheavals as organizational adoption of technological innovation digitize business processes.

It’s also worth noting that each upheaval follows a pattern.

As new technologies emerge, organizations must weigh when to get on board. Early applications tend to focus on applying the new technology as an incremental improvement.

To my mind, the best example of this would be smartphones.

There was a brief flurry of excitement as early devices provided the ability to access the Internet, but, as the novelty wore off, the tiny screen and traditional telephone keypad failed to offer a satisfying experience.

Incremental improvements were made. Tools were developed that allowed websites to tailor content for smaller screens. Keypads were improved.

But smartphones didn’t drive an upheaval until we shifted from trying to recreate a PC experience to offering a profoundly new experience through ‘apps’ on iOS and then Android devices.

We shifted from trying to do the same thing better to doing a better thing.

Another part of the pattern is the emergence of new companies and industries related to each wave. IBM and the mainframe. SAP and ERP systems. Cisco and networking. Intel and Apple and Microsoft and PCs. Amazon and Google and the internet. Meta and social media.

And it’s worth noting the companies that bet heavily on doing the same thing better but failed to do the better thing suffered as a result.

Digital Equipment Corporation insisted PCs would never be more than a better way to engage their minicomputers. Intel insisted smartphones would never displace PCs.

So, where does that leave us with respect to that social media post?

Why, if current economic policies are widely decried by economists, is the market soaring?

Because we are in the foothills of the next disruptive wave, and the investments related to that wave are driving up stock prices despite the economic fallout of tariffs and trade wars.

The disruptive enabling technologies are Artificial Intelligence, Internet of Things, Sensory Computing (not just ‘visual computing’ but other sensory modalities as well), and Augmented Reality.

Because we are in the foothills of this disruption, we’re focusing on doing the same things better.

Discussions of IoT, Sensory Computing, and Augmented Reality have been displaced by discussions of AI, but realizing the full potential of any of these capabilities relies on blending them.

We will see a lot of companies make expensive ill advised early bets based on trying to make incremental improvements to existing solutions, thereby missing the revolutionary potential of these capabilities.

We will see startups become behemoths as they offer better solutions fully capitalizing on these capabilities.

We will see at least one, if not multiple, market upheavals as bad bets lead to disillusionment followed by realization of what this upheaval can bring.

And we will see profound disruption in the workplace as yet another wave of human facilitated processes are digitized.

I am profoundly concerned that an electorate that doesn’t understand how these punctuated equilibria progress will miss the forest for the trees, and think the current administration’s economic policies are driving market performance rather then being obscured by the productive advancements of the next wave.