Martin Henry MYDOOM, THE fastest spreading computer virus ever, was accounting for up to one-third of Internet traffic within 48 hours of its launch, according to the BBC. The virus is allegedly aimed at a few giant providers of cyber-services to pry their 'secure' systems open for later attack.
Spam is now accounting for nearly two-thirds of all Internet traffic and threatening to gum up the cyber-highway. The European Union has just launched an anti-spam campaign with tougher laws. The United States is locked in the fight.
Bugs and spam are conscious, human-made aberrations in the complex, interactive system which the Internet is. What about the unintended and unpredictable quirks which must occur in such a complex, integrated system? The wired world had a major scare with the Y2K bug which at the twelfth hour did not bite as hard as was expected. That bug was widely anticipated and some preventive action taken. What could be the next big one arising spontaneously out of the very configuration and operation of the system?
There are quite a few scary current examples of how relatively small and unpredictable changes in highly integrated complex systems can lead to major 'avalanche effects'. And as the world becomes more integrated, these events are becoming the biggest, the fastest, the worst ever.
GREAT BLACKOUT
The recent great blackout across a massive chunk of the United States and Canada is a good example. Some relatively minor breakdown in the huge inter-connected grid, a breakdown which no one saw coming and which has not even been clearly identified, rippled through the system and shut it down.
SARS has been one of the fastest spreading epidemics in history, hopping borders via aircraft within hours. Thankfully, our worst fears did not materialise this time and the disease was brought under some control, at least for the time being, with the application of some stiff, old-fashioned quarantine methods.
The SARS virus is still lurking about, and bird flu is now threatening to make another major disease cross-over from an animal population into the human population as AIDS supposedly did by one theory. The epidemiology of these new plagues will be determined by a complexity of factors from variations in human genetics, to economics, and value systems.
It is quite conceivable that a post-occupation 'complex' Iraq, with its explosive mix of oil, Islam and ethnicity could be a flashpoint for extensive global conflict. And some relatively small, unpredictable event could be the match. But anywhere else in the world, now out of the eye of the media camera, could be. And in a highly integrated, globalised world the possibilities are greater now than when the avalanche effect of the First World War took place.
'The flapping of a single butterfly's wing today produces a tiny change in the state of the atmosphere. Over a period of time, what the atmosphere actually does diverges from what it would have done. So, in a month's time, a (devastating) tornado doesn't happen. Or maybe one that wasn't going to happen, does'.
This 'butterfly effect' is perhaps a little overdrawn but is very expressive of the essence of what has come to be called chaos theory: A small change in the initial conditions of a complex system can drastically change the longer term behaviour of a system.
'AVALANCHE EFFECT'
More often than not the system self-corrects, but every now and then the little change precipitates catastrophic big change in an 'avalanche effect'. And there is no means of predicting outcome from a little change or to control either its occurrence or its results.
Appropriately, chaos theory began with the weather. Back in 1960 meteorologist Edward Lorenz was attempting to develop computer models for weather prediction when he stumbled upon the observation that the tiniest changes in data input from 12 equations, down to the last of the six decimal places the computer was using in the calculations led to vastly different results.
Quite apart from the emergence of chaos theory, Lorenz' work made it quite clear that there is an in-built reason why the weather, the creation of extremely complex air-land-sea interactions, cannot be predicted with any accuracy. And the further we go from today's millions of initial conditions, most of which we don't even know, the more meaningless any attempt at prediction.
Chaos theory has escaped the boundaries of pure mathematics and computing to speak to issues in ecosystems, economies, political systems, physiology, and even traffic systems. A researcher, Benoit Mandelbrot, an IBM employee who has made some of the most seminal contributions to chaos theory did so studying fluctuations in cotton prices from 1900, among other mundane things!
One of the big, painful lessons of chaos theory is that complex systems are inherently unstable and unpredictable. And by complex we are talking about systems with more than just a handful of variables. Natural ones like ecosystems, heart beats, and the weather system possess elaborate feedback mechanisms for regulation and control. Potentially catastrophic random little events are neutralised by these feedback mechanisms and the avalanche effect avoided. When humans mess around too much and too fast with these systems we may shoot their delicate homeostatic mechanisms and create catastrophe from small changes.
Human-made systems, like economic and political systems, traffic management systems, IT systems and sand piles, used as a fairly simple complex system in the experimental study of chaos are far more crude and are therefore more vulnerable to unpredictable catastrophe from small events randomly arising or deliberately sown. And the more we elaborate and integrate these systems, the greater the magnitude of risk and the higher the probability of risk realisation.
Perhaps there is a larger point, after all, to the biblical story of the Tower of Babel. The tower, in a unified world of one language, one economy, one political system, and one intent, was a complex project which was terminated by the Divine scattering of humankind in response to their hubris.
Martin Henry is a communication specialist.
