3 ms·

“For all the talk of ‘Society's Will’ we are teetering on the brink of abdication of all human will, at least with respect to the digital technologies before wh

“For all the talk of ‘Society's Will’ we are teetering on the brink of abdication of all human will, at least with respect to the digital technologies before which we bow.” Because we will lose control over/ability to understand the decision making? Because limits to growth will force austerity? Because increased technological complexity leads to incomprehensible stochastic risks? Because…?

nonrandomstring 5y ago
Those are all good risk models/mechanisms you mention. But clearly the gamut of risks is unbounded. Human responses to those risks is not quite the same thing, so your "because?" questions need more context. > lose control over/ability to understand What someone from the Union of Concerned Scientists once called something like the "problem of the pulled-up ladder". I gave a talk on this, and relating to Thomas Thwaites "Toaster Project" [1], on the fact that we no longer have an education strategy that recognises that one generation cannot hold the knowledge to reconstruct technological society (100 years ago we could). > Because limits to growth will force austerity? Not necessarily, no. We've escaped Malthusian traps before, but staying ahead of the curve gets more precarious as our failure tolerances get tighter. For example fusion will be a positive step change, but we might arrive at a point where near-unlimited energy is still not sufficient to fix things (like a soil chemistry debt). > complexity leads to incomprehensible stochastic risks? Somewhat. We've always had that though. DDT, PFAS and Microplastics kinda caught us with our pants down. We have to be careful getting into Black Swan speculation. But in the cybersecurity realm _yes_, I deeply believe that we are constructing systems that _will_ fail catastrophically with almost total certainty. The focus then needs to be on mitigation, resilience and maintaining contingent technologies. I have said plenty on where I think the "cashless society" is leading. At present it's the psychological/sociological issues that most intrigue me - there's no doubt we're well into an era where we recognise solutionism is making many things worse, and are addicted/dependent, but don't have the psychological apparatus to societally extricate from what are widely understood as harmful courses of action. How we'll solve that is one of the most interesting questions of the century, I think. [1] http://thetoasterproject.org/ http://thetoasterproject.org/

nonrandomstring 5y ago

Those are all good risk models/mechanisms you mention. But clearly the gamut of risks is unbounded. Human responses to those risks is not quite the same thing, so your "because?" questions need more context. > lose control over/ability to understand What someone from the Union of Concerned Scientists once called something like the "problem of the pulled-up ladder". I gave a talk on this, and relating to Thomas Thwaites "Toaster Project" [1], on the fact that we no longer have an education strategy that recognises that one generation cannot hold the knowledge to reconstruct technological society (100 years ago we could). > Because limits to growth will force austerity? Not necessarily, no. We've escaped Malthusian traps before, but staying ahead of the curve gets more precarious as our failure tolerances get tighter. For example fusion will be a positive step change, but we might arrive at a point where near-unlimited energy is still not sufficient to fix things (like a soil chemistry debt). > complexity leads to incomprehensible stochastic risks? Somewhat. We've always had that though. DDT, PFAS and Microplastics kinda caught us with our pants down. We have to be careful getting into Black Swan speculation. But in the cybersecurity realm _yes_, I deeply believe that we are constructing systems that _will_ fail catastrophically with almost total certainty. The focus then needs to be on mitigation, resilience and maintaining contingent technologies. I have said plenty on where I think the "cashless society" is leading. At present it's the psychological/sociological issues that most intrigue me - there's no doubt we're well into an era where we recognise solutionism is making many things worse, and are addicted/dependent, but don't have the psychological apparatus to societally extricate from what are widely understood as harmful courses of action. How we'll solve that is one of the most interesting questions of the century, I think. [1] http://thetoasterproject.org/ http://thetoasterproject.org/