Friday 29 Mar 2024
By
main news image

This article first appeared in Forum, The Edge Malaysia Weekly on May 18, 2020 - May 24, 2020

The pandemic has taken away one of the most brilliant mathematicians of the 20th century, John Conway (1937-2020), best known as the creator of Game of Life. This is a simple game of simulation on a grid of cells, each of which can be dead or alive depending on the number of neighbours that are alive or dead.

It helped computer programming in the 1970s, opening up new vistas in computer simulation, which, today, is almost a must in modelling unknowns into somewhat knowable trends. Conway’s child-like curiosity and story-telling ability made mathematics and computing fun, creating games that follow very simple rules to generate huge complex outcomes. He was a founder of combinatorial game theory, and his Free Will theorem to explain quantum mechanics in 2004 was staggering in terms of imagination.

The French mathematician Benoit Mandelbrot (1924-2010) also took very simple ideas such as fractals and showed how they evolved into very complex and beautiful patterns. Both mathematicians reduced complexity into simplicity, but both also knew how chance can change life’s direction in unpredictable ways.

The Covid-19 virus is even more primal than bacteria cells, but it has turned out to be extremely complex as it spreads, mutating from host to host. The pandemic also revealed that fear is viral in pattern, evolving from simple truths to outright lies and even complex conspiracy theories. We are in complex uncertain territory with few simple answers.

The dilemma is that even simple truths are not that simple. The neoliberal dictum that the market is always smarter than governments is only partially true. The economies that have done better in tackling the pandemic are those with effective government bureaucracies that listen to health experts.

Hence, we need to go deeper to basics if we want to find out how and why the pandemic is disrupting our economic and financial systems. Our standard operating theory in economic policies, macroeconomics, is still based on 19th century classic physics that is linear and mechanical in thinking.

Linear thinking relies on algebra, assuming that things will change along a path extending from the past. But we are no longer dealing with continuities from the past — we are facing serious discontinuities, where the past gives relatively little guidance on what will unfold in the future. The future will grow more complex, but we have not found the simple theories that help us manage that complexity.

Complexity science was invented in the post-nuclear age when different scientists and social scientists came together during the Los Alamos experiment to invent the nuclear bomb. Having discovered that it was fun working with people outside their own narrow disciplines, a group created the Santa Fe Institute, the first think tank dedicated to complex, multidisciplinary thinking.

How different is complexity thinking from the current paradigm? Santa Fe Professor Melanie Mitchell explains that complexity science comprises four key disciplines — dynamics (things are always changing); information theory (what is information and how communication works); computation (how systems process information and use them); and evolution (how systems adapt to changing circumstances).

Fundamentally, complexity science is multidisciplinary, drawing from very different disciplines to explain complex subjects. The more controversial complexity approach searches for a universal way of explaining complexity simply — what some call reductionist complexity thinking. When something becomes too complicated, you need a story to make disparate things easily understandable.

The language of complexity thinking borrows from many disciplines. The concepts of relativity, radical uncertainty, entanglement and chaos came from physics; emergence, evolution, adaptability and living systems from biology; and hierarchy, power, corruption, capture, competition and cooperation from sociology and politics.

Games and game theory play important roles as educational and rethinking tools to deal with complexity. Animal Planet programmes show how young cubs play with each other to learn leaping, stalking and fighting skills. As they grow older, the more experienced parents take them on hunts to teach them terrain, group cooperation and how to overcome their prey. We forget in our linear education system that games are not toys for kids, but serious tools that help even adults to think about strategy in an uncertain and complex world.

Every daily situation in the pandemic is a deadly serious game of cat and mouse. We need to isolate the coronavirus, detect it through repeated testing, and contain its outbreak. We cannot look for it only in the sunlight — the virus hides in places that the elites never thought of looking, among the poor in society, who are the most vulnerable because they are in high-density living quarters or crowded workplaces that facilitate the spread.

In dealing with the virus, we are not subject to simple either/or situations of binary choice — to save lives or save the economy. We have to do both with complex trade-offs and choices with different costs and outcomes. We need to think through second, third and even fourth order waves of infection. The US and UK economies are now living with the consequences of almost uncontrolled community spread, but the current levels are still not high enough to reach mass immunity. This means that, by opening up the economy faster, they would face higher levels of case infection and, presumably, more fatalities.

Since Europe and the US are the most important economies, their mistakes mean the reality is that we can no longer control the pandemic spread except through sporadic lockdowns until an effective vaccine or cure is found. This requires us to re-engineer our ways of production, distribution, consumption and social behaviour to prepare for not just this pandemic but more interactive mistakes that others make in managing natural disasters exacerbated by human failures.

Complexity differs from simplicity in terms of scale. Globalisation has given rise to pandemics of global scale, but different temperatures, physical conditions and hosts (human or animal) mean that each society or community can adapt very differently. But the options and impact are simultaneously asymmetric, systemic and reflexive, since the choices of one affect all the others and vice versa.

The reserve-currency rich countries can create trillions of dollars of central bank money to tackle their pandemic economic costs. The non-reserve currency poor countries do not have that luxury. But since the virus will hide in the poor regions, it will evolve and return to infect the rich countries. So, the rich countries cannot just isolate and take care of themselves but must treat the pandemic (and indeed climate change) as a systemic problem that affects us all.

The game of life therefore suggests that we need to evolve out of the partial individualism of the neoliberal order into a systemic view of life that is interactive and interdependent. Temporary aid or charity in terms of cash payments for the unemployed or stalled businesses is not sustainable. What we need is global trade to generate new resources for rebuilding the post-coronavirus economy. That is why simplistic protectionism is truly worsening the options for global recovery.

Working together in this complex world is tough. But that is the only way we may be able to overcome this global pandemic. A simple choice but very complex to execute.


Tan Sri Andrew Sheng writes on global issues from an Asian perspective

Save by subscribing to us for your print and/or digital copy.

P/S: The Edge is also available on Apple's AppStore and Androids' Google Play.

      Print
      Text Size
      Share