FQxI
3 HN recommenders · recommended in 6 months, 2014–2018
40:51 · 23K views · Oct 2, 2011
Physicist Geoffrey West speaks at an FQXi conference on time about complexity and scaling laws. He covers how metabolism, growth and lifespan scale across organisms and how the same mathematics applies to cities and companies.
HN commenters recommend it as an accessible introduction to scaling laws and to why cities keep growing while companies and organisms eventually die.
8 comments from Hacker News
> It's certainly not easy to unseat a powerful company, but it also seems difficult to stay at the top. Whether it's inefficiency, inability to pivot to new ways of doing things, or just markets that dry up as they're replaced by something else, companies have a hard time staying in such powerful positions in our society for long. Geoffrey West makes a compelling argument that it's due to the scaling laws around growth itself. The capitalist system demands exponential growth, but companies eventually reach a size where all their resources are devoted to maintaining existing "biomass." The exact scaling depends on the scaling properties of the networks that "feed" each "cell" of the system — circulatory/respiratory networks for animals, infrastructural networks for civilizations, social network for companies/cities. Quite frankly most of the articles on Geoffrey West's work are hand-wavey bullshit, but he outlines it in this talk (including addressing this very question). this video
Even if you calculated as embodied energy instead of just looking at the energy spent directly on a task? Because a large part of the "inefficiency" of living creatures is physical maintenance of the body. If that is included for machines as well, I'm not so sure if they're better off. For now, of course - as soon as we realise energy is a real constraint, we'll surely start optimising for it. The third link I posted references Geoffrey West who has an interesting high-level physics approach to this issue, but it doesn't really do justice to his points. But I figured posting this 40 minute one, which is much more comprehensive, would be a bit much to ask: this video (also has a lot more phycisist's arrogance in the form of cursing, which I find entertaining myself) Actually, given that city energy spending also grows sublinearly, robot and AI networks probably would as well. So that argument likely won't hold against it.
This is why the largest animals in the world live in the sea: it's a better cooling system! Also, for those interested to know more, I recommend looking up Geoffrey B. West's stuff on complexity. It mentions the same things as this article and puts them in a wider context: this video
I thought that sounded familiar. Geoffrey West gave a talk there, delivering a much better explanation of his research on socio-biological scaling, growth, and sustainability than thepop sci treatments occasionally posted here. this video
For a great, accessible intro talk on this topic, check out Geoffrey West's "On Complexity": this video