Risky Business

Twelve deep thinkers over at The Edge have a series on risk after the Fukushima disaster. I won’t try and reproduce the complexity and subtlety of their arguments, but risk and risk management are at the heart of what the Prevail Project is about. How can we think about risk in a domain of technological uncertainty? What does risk actually mean?

Risk is modern concept, compared with the ancient and universal idea of danger. Dangers are immediate and apparent; a fire, a cougar, angering the spirits. Risk is danger that has been tamed by statistics; this heater has a 0.001% of igniting over the course of its lifespan, there are cougars in the woods, and so on. Risk owes its origins to the insurance industry, and Lloyd’s of London, which was founded to protect merchant-bankers against the dangers of sea travel. While any individual ship might sink, on average, most ships would complete their voyages, so investors could band together to prevent a run of bad luck from impoverishing any single member of the group.

This kind of risk is simple and easy to understand. It is what mathematicians refer to as linear: a change in the inputs, like the season, correlates directly to an outcome, like the number of storms, and the number of ship sunk. The problem is that this idea of risk has been expanded to cover complex systems, with many inter-related parts. As complexity goes up, comprehensibility goes down, and risks expand in complicated ways. Modern society is “tightly coupled”, a concept developed by Charles Perrow in his book Normal Accidents. Parts are linked in non-obvious ways by technology, ecology, culture, and economics, and failure in a single component can rapidly propagate through the system.

The 2007 financial crisis is a perfect example of a normal accident caused by tight coupling. Financiers realized that while housing prices fluctuate, they are usually stable on a national basis, and so developed collateralized debt obligations based on ‘slices’ of the housing market nation-wide, which were rated at highly secure investments. When the housing bubble collapsed, an event not accounted for in their models, trillions of dollars in investments lost all certain value. Paralysis spread throughout the financial system, lead to a major recession. While this potted history is certainly incomplete, normal accidents are the defining feature of the times. The 2009 Gulf of Mexico oil spill, and the Fukushima meltdown are both due to events which were not accounted for in statistical models of risk, but which in hindsight appear inevitable over a long enough timescale.

Statistics and scientific risk assessment are based on history, but the world is changing, and the past is no longer a valid guide to the future. Thousand year weather events are more and more frequent, while new technologies are reshaping the fundamental infrastructure of society. When the probabilities and the consequences of an accident are entirely unknowable, how can we manage risk?

One option is the precautionary principle, which says that until a product or process is proven entirely safe, it is assumed to be dangerous. The problem with the precautionary principle is that it is different in degree, not in kind. It demands extremely high probabilities of safety, but doesn’t solve the problem of tight coupling. Another solution is basing everything off of the worst possible case: what happens if the reactor explodes, or money turns into fairy gold. System which can fail in dangerous, expensive ways, are inherently unsafe and should be chosen in favor that have more local consequences. This solution has the twin problem of demarcating realistic vs fantastic risk, after all, Rube Goldberg scenarios starting with a misplaced banana peel might leads to the end of the world. The second problem is that this discounts ordinary, everyday risk. Driving is far more dangerous per passenger-mile than air travel, yet people are much more afraid of plane crashes. A framework based on worst-case scenarios leads to paralysis, because everything might have bad consequences, and prevents us from rationally analyzing risk. The end state of the worst-case scenarios is being afraid to leave the house because you might get hit by a bus.

So the ancient idea of danger no longer holds, because we can’t know that is dangerous anymore, and mere fear of the unknown cannot stand against the impulse to understand and transform through science and technology. Risk has been domesticated in error; a society built on risk continually gambles with its future.

The solution involved decoupling, building cut-outs into complex systems so they can be stopped in an orderly manner when they begin to fail, and decentralizing powerful, large-scale infrastructure. Every object in the world is bound together in the technological and economic network that we call the global economy. We cannot assume that it will function the way it has forever, rather we should trace objects back to their origins, locate the single points of failure, the places where large numbers of threads come together, and develop alternative paths around those failure points. Normal accidents are a fact of life, but there is no reason why they have to bring down people thousands of miles away from their point of origin

Technological Citizenship

In this post, I will advance an explanation of the differences between law and technology, and how ordinary people can reclaim control over their lives through what I refer to as “technological citizenship.”

The modern liberal state is defined by the rule of law, a fair and evenhanded treatment of all people according to clear rules. The most basic laws are constitutional, those that define the relationship between the parts of government, and government and the citizens. In democracies, and particularly in America, the Constitution has been carefully designed to allow for citizenship and participation in the law-making process. The Federalist papers debated and discovered how abstract principles like liberty and justice could be translated into the concrete institutions of policy, and despite occasional hiccups, and one major war, their framework endures today.

But laws are only half the story. The world is also full of technologies, and as Langdon Winner points out in The Whale and the Reactor, our technological constitution, the core systems for providing food, shelter, power, mobility, etc are not nearly as well-designed as the law. While the Constitution and the law grew through a process of considered debate and democratic input, technologies have accreted over time into centralized bureaucratic systems, operating according to a depersonalizing logic of efficient markets. For Langdon Winner, the power and omnipresence of these technological systems is a grave threat to democracy and liberty, as society become dependent on entities which are essentially autonomous from public control.

The democratic person is a political citizen, taking an active role in the process of governance by becoming informed on the issues, voting, communicating with their representatives and their neighbors. Our ideal of democracy remains ancient Athens (albiet with an updated version of who counts as a citizen), where every citizen participated equally in government, and positions were rotated regularly. The technological person is a consumer, and the end goal of technology is the 'utilitization' of everything, technologies becoming absolutely reliable, simple, and omnipresent. The more advanced a technology is, the fewer buttons, access panels, and failure modes it has; compare an early computer like ENIAC to an iPad. The best realized vision of this phenomenon is E.M. Forester's “The Machine Stops”, where planetary civilization is controlled by an immense computer system that is beyond the understanding of its inhabitants.

Now, reverse these roles. A political consumer is an unthinking, uncritical clod who unquestioningly obeys the dictates of The Party, whatever The Party might be. Political consumers are poison to democracy. But what is the technological citizen? By analogy, the technological citizen is somebody who takes an active stance towards technology, who is informed about the features and full scope of a given device or system, is prepared to think critically about the implications of that technology, and is not afraid to transform, adopt, or abandon technologies as alternatives become available. My friends at HeatSync Labs are great examples of technological citizens, actively experimenting with and adapting emerging technologies, and their lives have certainly been made richer through their close understanding of technology.

The challenge is therefore encouraging this new mode of technological citizenship. This will not be easy, citizenship demands deep, continuous engagement, (and political citizenship is on the decline in this country as well). And more and more technologies are becoming utilities, slick services that non-specialists can't even view, let alone think critically about. But conversely, with the internet, the cost of gaining expert technical knowledge is falling. As devices become smarter, making it easier to communicate with and analyze them should become a priority, such as a SmartGrid technology that tracks home energy usage room by room, device by device. Finally, education is a vital part of citizenship, and technological toys that are just visible enough should be developed to teach relevant skills, like computer programming, design and architecture, and ecosystems thinking. Personally, I've always been disappointed that Lego Mindstorms came out just after I lost interest in Lego; it would have made me a much better engineer. While developing technological citizenship is not easy, technological citizens will find it far easier to adapt and live in the future, and as partisan politics becomes increasing rancorous and alienating, technological citizenship may provide a new space for civic action and social development.

Serious Games

Predrag Boksic | perceptron

Games have been on my mind more than usual lately, both because of Jane McGonigal's new book Reality is Broken, and Bruce Sterling's review of The Art of Game Design. Games are fascinating because players perform pointless tasks that under any other circumstances would be considered work, and master arcane skills, all in the name of fun. If the energy put into playing games could be harnessed to external reality, whether economic or political, it'd be like building a social perpetual motion machine.

At the Prevail Project, we've been throwing around a few ideas for games. Games are undoubtedly educational, every game must at least teach players how to play the game. The military is investing heavily in games, and in fact, through Axis & Allies and Dungeons & Dragons, many modern games are able to trace their ancestry to Kriegspiel, the war game of the Prussian General Staff. The experiences of games can be immersive, epic, transformative. But aside from warfare, educational games exist in a ghetto of boring vocabulary flashcards and math drills. How can we use games to tell people stories about the world in a way that translates into becoming better citizens? Fate of the World is one such game, where players must solve global crises, learning about energy, climate change, and balancing political constituencies.

Another side of games is socialization. The typical charge leveled against gaming is that it's an anti-social activity that takes a person out of their community. McGonigal presents research saying that gamers are more cooperative that the average person, and that games provide a social space that introverts feel comfortable in. Schell in The Art of Game Design has an interesting anecdote about designing an MMO (Massively Multiplayer Game) for Disney where the mechanics encouraged cooperation and politeness, leading to a better player culture. Multiplayer gaming with people you know can be a great way to bond. The question is how to make the social aspect of games more real, and not 'thin' connections that draw a player away from the real world.

The last area of games that we're interested in, and on which relatively little research has been done, is the use of games to help collective decision-making. If I may get theoretical, there are basically three ways we collectively make decisions. The first is democracy; we vote for some people on the promise that they'll do right by us. The second is expertise; we delegate questions to people who claim to know something, and do what they say. The third is economic; we pay people to do things we want, are rewarded for doing useful things in turn. All of these methods have problems. Democracies are slow to make and implement decisions (“You can always count on Americans to do the right thing - after they've tried everything else.”--Winston Churchill). It's hard to evaluate the advice of experts, and expert advice is rarely followed, and the economy is in thrall to next-quarter thinking, and many people find their jobs (if they're lucky enough to have a job) pointless and alienating. But maybe the principles of game design, experiences, flow, the right mixture of emotions and incentives, can be used to improve upon the money economy. If there was a platform for people to experiment with various forms of currency, reputation, and reward, then a diversity of options might help us discover a way to collectively make decisions that is effective, legitimate, and most of all, fun to participate in.

Augmenting Humanity @HeatSync Labs

Let's start this year off with a bang! I just got back from HeatSync Labs, where the local hackers are taking their eyes off of 3D printing, near-space missions, tesla coils, and cylon Roombas and working on something a little closer to home: themselves.

Okay, that requires a little explanation. HeatSync is a Phoenix area hackerspace, a place for technically inclined people to come together, pool resources, and work on interesting projects. Hackerspaces started in the nerdvanas of Silicon Valley and Route 128, but the movement is spreading across the country, and expanding from electronics to biotech. With the democratization of technical equipment, almost anybody can be a scientist. The hackerspace movement scales up the joy of just messing around with blinkenlights to an adult level, and it might just serve as the incubutator for the next wave of innovation.

Augmenting Humanity @HeatSync is a small group of hackers with an interest in transhumanism, and with using their DIY skills to improve themselves. They're well on their way. Jacob has an experimental magnetic sense, and wants more radical alterations. Harry is a recreational neuroscientist. He already has a 14 channel EEG he freed from an Emotiv controller, and his next step is to make an Arduino board DC neural stimulator, as well as his own version of ze goggles. With all this, he's well on his way to doing some real interesting science. Jeremy is into quantified self, and wants to use smartphones and wireless sensors to make data collection trivial. Bryan is blind, and is working with Apple to improve the accessibility of iDevices, while trying to find hacks to make his life easier. The current project is a liquid level sensor. As a father of three, Bryan spends a lot of time filling bottles, and a device which beeps at the proper level would be good for everybody.

These guys are definitely aware of the social and political aspects of what they're doing. They view themselves as citizen-scientists, in the vein of the old Royal Society, and they want to both improve themselves, and generate useful knowledge that the standard scientific research process won't touch, either because it won't be funded, or violates medical ethics (note: ethical medical research must treat a disease, so by definition, enhancement is unethical. The current work around has been 'medicalization', creating a disorder for people who want to be enhanced. Many people, myself included, think this is a major problem.) They also are very forward about getting their work out there, and connecting with like minded hackers across the world. In the absence of formal journals, all of this is being organized through social media, blogs, wikis, and video chat. We are lucky enough to live in an era where information can be shared easily, and advanced technology is cheap. In the next few months and years, I hope to spend a fair amount of time with Augmented Humanity, develop some projects, and get them out there. But for now, rest easy knowing that these people have the future well in hand.

((I'll also be taking suggestings on projects/topics to talk about with these guys))

Humanity's Quest for Immortality

One of humanity's oldest impulses has been to conquer death. From Egyptian mummification to the Christian heaven, the idea that some way, through material or spiritual works, we can transcend the mortal coil and live forever is highly seductive. These day, since and technology promise longer lives and immortality, ranging from the modest and sensible precautions of eating correctly and exercising, to the radical biomedical revolutions professed by Aubry de Grey and Ray Kurzweil.

Between antiquity and post-modernity lies a broad area of research into immortality that hasn't yet been explored. John Grey has come out with an interesting new book examining the quest for immortality in the Victorian and Soviet eras, revealing a fascinating secret history of spiritualists, eugenicists, Soviet utopians, and the science fiction writer HG Wells.

Darwinism is impossible to reconcile with the notion that humans have any special exemption from mortality. In Darwin's scheme of things species are not fixed or everlasting; there is no impassable barrier between human minds and those of other animals. How then could only humans go on to a life beyond the grave? If all life were extinguished on Earth, possibly as a result of climate change caused by humans, would they look down from the after-world, alone, on the wasteland they had left beneath? Surely, in terms of the prospect of immortality, all sentient beings stand or fall together. Then again, how could anyone imagine all the legions of the dead – not only the human generations that have come and gone but the countless animal species that are now extinct – living on in the ether, forever?

Science could not give these seekers what they were looking for. Yet at the same time that sections of the English elite were looking for a scientific version of immortality, a similar quest was under way in Russia among the "God-builders" – a section of the Bolshevik intelligentsia that believed science could someday, perhaps quite soon, be used to defeat death. The God-builders included Maxim Gorky, Anatoly Lunacharsky, a former Theosophist who was appointed commissar of enlightenment in the new Soviet regime, and the trade minister Leonid Krasin, an engineer and disciple of the Russian mystic Nikolai Fedorov, who believed that the dead could be technologically resurrected. Krasin was a key figure in the decisions that were made about how Lenin's remains would be preserved.

Weakened in Britain, belief in gradual progress had ceased to exist in Russia. An entire civilisation had collapsed, and the incremental improvement cherished by liberals was simply not possible. The idea of progress was not abandoned, however. Instead it was radicalised, as Russia's new rulers were confirmed in their conviction that humanity advances through a succession of catastrophes. Not only society but human nature had to be destroyed, and only then rebuilt. Humans did not go on to a new life on the other side. There was no other side. When humans died they returned to dust, just like other animals. But once the power of science was fully harnessed, the God-builders believed, death could be overcome by force. Eventually all of humankind could look forward to scientifically guaranteed immortality, but the process of technological resurrection would begin with the most valuable of human beings – Lenin.

Read the full excerpt at The Guardian.

The protagonists of John Grey's book are the immediate sources of the current technological quest for immortality. Though the scientific barriers we face today are different, the philosophical quandaries and contradictions of physical immortality are similar. What will life mean without the end of death? How can society evolve when the powerful never relinquish their power? Is living forever truly the highest goal that we can devote ourselves to? There a difference between individual immortality, and the continued survival of humanity as a whole. For our species and our culture, death is tragic, but ultimately necessary and even unavoidable.

Should we seek immortality, or are our scientific resources best used elsewhere? John Grey's history of the strange quest for immortality may help us decide.