#9 Leibniz to artificial intelligence to technology
Three useful applications of abstraction in social science
Many new technologies are complex and embody high levels of technical sophistication, and applying them should require significant knowledge and experience. Yet, the rapid adoption and incorporation of these technologies into other innovations seems inconsistent with the expertise needed to make them work. In this paper, we propose increasing levels of abstraction as a strategy for speeding the adoption of new technologies. Higher-level abstractions package complexity in ways that makes them easier to understand and recombine, and they decrease the resources needed by firms to deploy sophisticated technical know-how. Increasing the level of abstraction is a way to push forward the innovative frontier by making such difficult- to-use technologies readily accessible to other innovators. Although this framing has been used in engineering and software development to describe modular encapsulation and cumulative innovation, we propose its use in the management literature to describe more broadly the uptake of new technologies and their facile recombination. This framing casts a different light on cumulative innovation and exposes new managerial questions to explore … The innovation model described here provides one explanation for the rapid uptake of sophisticated new technologies. An innovator can raise the level of abstraction of a technology to make it easier to incorporate and economize on the know-how, both tacit and explicit, that is required to use it.
Willy C. Shih, "Increasing the Level of Abstraction as a Strategy for Accelerating the Adoption of Complex Technologies." Strategy Science 6, no. 1 (March 2021): 54–61.
It is evident that in the last analysis the direct and indirect methods of demonstration coincide and that the Scholastics were right in observing that every axiom, once its terms are understood, may be reduced to the principle of contradiction. Thus any truth whatever can be justified, for the connection of the predicate with the subject is either evident in itself as in identities, or can be explained by an analysis of the terms. This is the only, and the highest, criterion of truth in abstract things, that is, things which do not depend on experience — that it must either be an identity or be reducible to identities … The authority of the senses and of other witnesses once established, we may prepare a record of phenomena from which a mixed knowledge can be formed by combining with them truths abstracted from experience. But we need a particular art for arranging as well as for ordering and combining our experiments, so that useful inductions can be made from them, causes discovered, and general truths and postulates [aphorismi et praenotiones] set up. The carelessness of men is amazing, wasting their time in trifles and neglecting the matters by which they could take care of health and well-being. For perhaps they would have within their power the remedies for a great part of their ills if only they would make right use of the great wealth of observations already available to our century and of the true analysis. Our human knowledge of nature seems to me at present like a shop well provided with all kinds of wares but without any order or inventory.
Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, ‘On Universal Synthesis and Analysis, or the Art of Discovery and Judgment’,1679, in Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz Philosophical Papers and Letters, A Selection translated and edited by Leroy E. Loemker, 2nd ed. Klueger 1989.
In a 716,000 square foot warehouse in Olathe, Kan., Accelerate360, the company that puts magazines and other products in the checkout aisles of more than 90% of the grocery stores in the U.S., is using one of the most highly automated robotic fulfillment systems in the world. Built by a Canadian company called Attabotics, its biggest and most striking feature is a gigantic and nearly featureless white cube that sits in the middle of the warehouse, looking as much like contemporary art as it does a piece of technology. Inside it, robots the size of large suitcases, which the company calls “ants,” move on tracks up and down as well as side to side, grabbing bins of goods stored anywhere within the cube. The system allows for much faster access to goods than competing systems Accelerate360 considered, says Chief Strategy Officer Matt Ratner. Other systems’ robots only move in two dimensions, across the tops of similar storage systems, and must “dig,” by pulling up other bins of goods, to get at bins that are buried underneath, he says. The way the system was designed was inspired by actual ant colonies, which are built vertically rather than horizontally, says Scott Gravelle, chief executive of Attabotics.
Christopher Mims, Technology columnist, The Wall Street Journal, The Technology That’s Helping Companies Thrive Amid the Supply-Chain Chaos Startups are developing better ways to move products around, from snapping up goods stranded by logistics snafus to automating warehouse work, Feb. 12, 2022