Conditioned on this frame being roughly correct, it raises the question of whether to expect a fourth wave at some point—and what the strategic implications of predicting a wave roughly every seven years or so (albeit with low confidence in the frequency estimate) might be.
To address that, I propose a (literal) toy model of EA as a board game. I have Settlers of Catan in mind, but other games may work. The game has the following characteristics:
Resource allocation is an important part of the game. Your resources are wood, brick, sheep, wheat, and ore (money, talent, new ideas, public support, organizational capacity?). You can invest in facilities that will produce a certain type of resource, but the lead time before those facilities start producing can be considerable. There are complex rules by which you can convert existing resources into others, but it’s often not very efficient and usually takes a a turn (year) or two.
About every seven turns, the game enters a new phase in which the objectives and scoring rules of the game, as well as some game mechanics, significantly change. Some resources may become easier or harder to acquire, and some may become much more or less important to scoring well.
The person running the game will tell you when a new phase has started . . . but may not tell you for a few turns more what the new objectives/scoring rules are. You can make educated guesses about what new objectives and scoring rules might now be in play, but cannot have high confidence in your guesses.
The consequences of being short on a specific resource will depend on the specific rule changes. Resources may be complements (e.g., you need grain and ore to build a city), co-factors (e.g., you need a little sheep to build a port), or have other interactions.
But in many cases the resource:impact relationship will not be linear. For instance, it’s really painful to not have any wood or brick production in the standard rules of Catan; you get a lot of utility out of the first marginal units of production.
In this model, a rational player will significantly consider the universe of plausible new phases when making decisions about current resource stocks and production. In particular, the player will likely devote some attention to procuring a minimum level of supply for each resource that may be critical under a plausible rule change.
Coming back to the real world, the toy model suggests that once the contours of the third wave are better defined, it might be better not to focus EA “resource production” as heavily on its particular needs as was perhaps done at certain points in the second wave. Rather, ensuring a basic supply of potentially critical resources for the fourth wave would also be an important goal.
Conditioned on this frame being roughly correct, it raises the question of whether to expect a fourth wave at some point—and what the strategic implications of predicting a wave roughly every seven years or so (albeit with low confidence in the frequency estimate) might be.
To address that, I propose a (literal) toy model of EA as a board game. I have Settlers of Catan in mind, but other games may work. The game has the following characteristics:
Resource allocation is an important part of the game. Your resources are wood, brick, sheep, wheat, and ore (money, talent, new ideas, public support, organizational capacity?). You can invest in facilities that will produce a certain type of resource, but the lead time before those facilities start producing can be considerable. There are complex rules by which you can convert existing resources into others, but it’s often not very efficient and usually takes a a turn (year) or two.
About every seven turns, the game enters a new phase in which the objectives and scoring rules of the game, as well as some game mechanics, significantly change. Some resources may become easier or harder to acquire, and some may become much more or less important to scoring well.
The person running the game will tell you when a new phase has started . . . but may not tell you for a few turns more what the new objectives/scoring rules are. You can make educated guesses about what new objectives and scoring rules might now be in play, but cannot have high confidence in your guesses.
The consequences of being short on a specific resource will depend on the specific rule changes. Resources may be complements (e.g., you need grain and ore to build a city), co-factors (e.g., you need a little sheep to build a port), or have other interactions.
But in many cases the resource:impact relationship will not be linear. For instance, it’s really painful to not have any wood or brick production in the standard rules of Catan; you get a lot of utility out of the first marginal units of production.
In this model, a rational player will significantly consider the universe of plausible new phases when making decisions about current resource stocks and production. In particular, the player will likely devote some attention to procuring a minimum level of supply for each resource that may be critical under a plausible rule change.
Coming back to the real world, the toy model suggests that once the contours of the third wave are better defined, it might be better not to focus EA “resource production” as heavily on its particular needs as was perhaps done at certain points in the second wave. Rather, ensuring a basic supply of potentially critical resources for the fourth wave would also be an important goal.