Stasis vector
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The JC’s amateur guide to systems theory™
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Stasis vector
/ˈsteɪsɪs ˈvɛktə/ (n.)
Information technology: Of any revolutionising technology that promises to democratise or disrupt an established way of doing things, the vested interests, unconsidered by the thoughtleaderati, that will divert, co-opt and ultimately bend it to the will of those interests, ensure it operates to reinforce, rather than knock down, the ramparts.
On how systems work to confound our simple conjectures.
When predicting the trajectory of new tech — when thought leading — it is tempting to get carried away with the utopian possibilities. But remember: No technology exists in a vacuum. All are stocks, flows, loops and triggers of an intricate organic system whose bounds disappear beyond your comprehension. A new technology won’t disrupt a system any more than a dam will stop a river. It just changes its critical path.
So first consider “stasis vectors” in the system that might resist, pervert our counterbalance the putative change. Ask: how will what is already there influence new technology? Corrupt it? Rain on it?
Remember: word processing didn’t make life better for the consumers. It didn’t make life better for typists or mail clerks. It made life better for the lawyers. The typists and mail clerks got fired. Contracts got longer, wordier, and pissier. Bills went up. The number of lawyers went up.
And remember, too: first and foremost, AI is a text generator. What you do with that text is a second-order priority.
The futurologist’s methodology — The family Susskind refers — sees that uncontextualised, optimistic path as the likely one: and sure, that one sells: it swoons the clients and frightens the bejesus out of the practitioners, but it has not yet played out. It is not clear why this time is different.
Dominant players in an established market absolutely will not behold new technology and go,
“Wow! How cool! Jetsons, here we come! Let’s use our scale and present advantage to immediately obliterate our own protective moat and make this awesome and cheap for clients!”
They are most likely to do this when the technology they behold is one they have invented themselves: Kodak did this with digital photography.
Where the technology sieges from without, the reaction is more likely to be:
“Okay, now this new technology could be a problem if we let challengers in, but we can head them off and turn it into an opportunity if we move fast. How do we get ahead of this and use it as deftly as possible to reinforce our moat?”
A realist will presume that established players will make better use of new technology, over the long term, than challengers — any derogation from that principle should explain how a structurally dominant position was inherently a weakness in the face of this new technology.
It has made things that were hard easy, and that makes them cheap, and that makes (a lot of them) valueless.
We are way too swooned by the supply side of the equation and not thinking hard enough about the demand side: what do we need this technology for?
Take music: in 1980 you had to pay tens of thousands of dollars a week to hire out a 24 track analogue studio, and lug tens of thousands of dollars worth of instruments and kit into it and hire engineers and so on get it to work. half the drama was working out how to get all the sounds onto the limited number if tracks.
Now you can have 128 tracks, AI backing band and sound engineers and virtual versions of every amplifier, synthesiser, microphone and signal processor known to humankind on a £800 laptop.
Has this led to better, more inventive, more experimental, more engaging music?
It has not.