The limits of control in the face of accelerating growth: a complexity economist’s view

Abstract

The promise of effective and beneficial control inspires social scientists far more than a sober discussion of its limits. Effective control is often conflated with humanity’s progress and a loss of control, its downfall. In this paper I introduce concepts from the theory of open-ended evolution and demonstrate that effective control of the growth trajectory of a system becomes peculiarly unwieldy when supposing an open-ended combinatorial growth process with an accelerating relative rate of change. Effective control in this case can be modeled as an attempt to keep the system arbitrarily close to a repellor state, instead of a more-manageable but less-plausible attractor state in the standard theory of optimal control. Furthermore, the theory implies that the prediction horizon of feasible control is shortening, rendering effective control increasingly implausible. I then discuss the implications of these results for degrowth and the stability of command-and-control states with market characteristics.