Strange Attractors: Technology Centers
March 31, 2020
DarkCyber spotted this story: “Indianapolis Tech Firms Hold Their Own Amid Growth Elsewhere.” The write up references a report from the Brookings Institute. Curious one of the team scanned the article and spotted an interesting paragraph:
“All of this points to the extent to which innovation-sector dynamics compound over time, leaving most places falling further behind,” the report stated.
The “this” is the fact that 90 percent of technology employment growth from 2005 to 2017 was “generated in just five major coastal cities: Seattle, Boston, San Francisco, San Diego, and San Jose.”
The DarkCyber team member was not aware that San Jose had an ocean exposure, but the main point is that “dynamics compound over time.”
Graphic of a the strange attractor. Centers emerge. Iterating calculations can cause new attractors to appear.
Is this an example of a human crafted strange attractor? Does the compounding of dynamics exert a magnetic pull on certain types of individuals? Can an excess of compounding trigger a downstream event: Homelessness, for instance?
The Dark Cyber team member observed, “Perhaps the absence of concentration provides a way to measure the “importance” or “value” of a particular effort?”
If data were available about a particular technology—for example, Loon balloons or hyper converged infrastructure—would insights into the potential of that “technology” reveal interesting insights.
What’s clear is that these centroids of technology can increase disparities in pay, talent, and innovation. What are the signs of attractor failure? Maybe disease, homelessness, a decline in certain demographics?
The implications of innovation centers compounding over time are interesting to consider.
Stephen E Arnold, March 31, 2020
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