Our Age of Complex Steampunk
A BEYOND BORDERS column by David Krakauer, President of the Santa Fe Institute.
Charles Babbage — Lucasian Professor of Mathematics at Cambridge (follower of Newton), co-founder of the Analytical Society (turncoat champion of Leibniz), life-long advocate of super-natural causes, and designer of unbuilt calculators — made his name in 1832 with the publication of On the Economy of Machinery and Manufactures.
Babbage’s book was received as the definitive survey on the efficiency and production of machinery designed to supplement or supplant human work. Babbage described the project in his introduction as a review of:
“the effects and the advantages which arise from the use of tools and machines; — to endeavour to classify their modes of action; — and to trace both the causes and the consequences of applying machinery to supersede the skill and power of the human arm.”
Karl Marx in the much-discussed, unpublished seven-volume Grundrisse, or Foundations of a Critique of Political Economy, included extensive reflections on automation inspired by Babbage’s researches:
“But, once adopted into the production process of capital, the means of labour passes through different metamorphoses, whose culmination is the machine… a moving power that moves itself; this automaton consisting of numerous mechanical and intellectual organs, so that the workers themselves are cast merely as its conscious linkages.”
Babbage conceived of his book as “one of the consequences that have resulted from the Calculating-Engine, the construction of which I have been so long superintending.” It was not Babbage’s intention to inspire a radical political economy, but to assay the most efficient means of manufacturing calculating engines:
“This much-abused Difference Engine is, however, like its prouder relative the Analytical, a being of sensibility, of impulse, and of power.”
The insights of Babbage and Marx sound as if they were written in the last several months in response to AI.
The life and society of Babbage is exemplary of the nineteenth century and its obsessions with machines, engines, designs, efficiency, scale, populations, evolution, and revolution. Babbage hosted super-sized parties at his home and laboratory at 1 Dorset Street in Marylebone, London. Charles Darwin, Michael Faraday, Lord Kelvin, Charles Lyell, Ada Lovelace, Henry Fox Talbot, and Alexis de Tocqueville all attended. It would not be a stretch to describe Babbage’s informal soirées as the founding meetings in the precognition of a possible complexity science.
What we now broadly think of as complexity, the domain of far-from-equilibrium, self-organizing, and selected mechanisms of adaptation, grew directly from the work of Babbage’s guests and contemporaries. The age of steam provided the phenomenological set of necessary elements for complexity: thermodynamics, uniformitarianism, evolution, and computation. Their union would be pursued in the twentieth century through the work of Alan Turing, R.A. Fisher, Norbert Weiner, John von Neumann, Claude Elwood Shannon, the Santa Fe Institute, and others.
This work cannot be described as physics, biology, or sociology, but a larger endeavor to make sense of the principles governing purposeful matter. We follow in the footsteps of the belligerent Babbage, with a troublemaker’s attitude to mechanisms, making a stand for steampunk:
“Chaos was my philosophy. Oh, yeah. Have no rules. If people start to build fences around you, break out and do something else.” — “Johnny Rotten” John Lydon, the Sex Pistols
— David Krakauer
President, Santa Fe Institute
From the Spring 2024 edition of the SFI Parallax newsletter. Subscribe here for the monthly email version, or email “news at santafe.edu” to request quarterly home delivery in print.
