Category: Blog

Un-puzzling the Anthropocene

February 4, 2022

Society seems to get stuck when dealing with problems of the Anthropocene — problems like climate change, environmental degradation, and risks posed by the rise of artificial intelligence. There’s trouble because of a complexity that overwhelms the current problem-solving capacity of society. Despite increasing awareness of the problems/risks, and despite ongoing discussion of possible solutions, we have — as yet — no effective response to these global challenges. It’s as if society is faced with several huge jigsaw puzzles: various parts of each picture get assembled, but no one is able to finish the puzzles and devise a way to solve the problems of the Anthropocene.

At Humanity 2050, we are testing a new strategy, setting up and using “special focus teams” to help in assembling such puzzles. These teams will build on existing work by other groups, but they add a new level of analysis and careful thought to help society develop effective, actionable plans to address the problems of the Anthropocene.

We recently published a white paper detailing the reasoning behind our use of these special focus teams, and we offer a brief summary here. As explained below, we had begun our inquiry by asking a few basic questions about the challenges of the Anthropocene. One by one, these answers gave clues that let us see how to develop a better puzzle-solving strategy.

 

Our First Question and First Clue

We started by asking: Why are problems of the Anthropocene so hard? What makes this kind of jigsaw puzzle so difficult? And we had a key insight (discussed in previous posts) as we set up the following chart and used it to sort problems facing society into four different “zones” or “bins.”

Figure 1

We used two key criteria as we tried to rank and sort the different types of challenges now facing society. The horizontal axis shows the cognitive challenge — increasing towards the right — involved in developing effective long-range plans (as needed to address existing or emerging problems), and the vertical axis shows the degree of social and economic change that’s likely to be required when such a plan is implemented.

Typically, democratic society does OK in Zones I, II, and III of this diagram. Thus, for example, in the U.S. we’ve decided to all drive on the right-hand side of the road (Zone I). There’s more social tension in Zone II, with passionate debate about issues like same-sex marriage and abortion rights, but society makes and amends laws and muddles through. And, likewise, society usually does OK in Zone III, with problems like those involved in the approval of new drugs or the regulation of airline traffic.

But many problems of the Anthropocene — problems like climate change and environmental degradation — fall into Zone IV. In this zone, there is immense “cognitive complexity” involved in developing an effective plan (as on the horizontal axis), and there is immense “social complexity” (vertical axis) that will arise when attempting to implement such a plan. It’s hard to get agreement when changes needed to solve these Zone IV problems will affect the lives of almost every person on the planet.

Thus, our first clue comes as we see: there’s an underlying challenge of complexity that makes it hard for society to solve any such jigsaw puzzle, let alone the entire set of puzzles posed by the Anthropocene.

 

Our Second Question and Second Clue

We then asked: How much progress does society (with its current capabilities) make in attempting to solve these problems of the Anthropocene? Do we at least succeed in assembling a few parts of each jigsaw puzzle?

Taking climate change as an example, we note: There are wonderful studies and reports, as with those from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. We have data about the mechanisms of climate change, information about the dangers, and ideas about how to respond. Yet there is immense technical complexity, and ideas are spread among many different minds and documents, and different groups look at the problem from radically different perspectives. Ideas — arising as altered patterns of neural activity in the minds of people all over the world — never get sorted and integrated so as to offer some clear, acceptable, actionable plan that’s powerful enough to solve the problems of climate change.

Figure 2

Thus, the second clue: There are many relevant studies, and many groups have assembled parts of these puzzles. Society thus has a good start, but ideas are not yet sorted, integrated, and assembled to give acceptable, actionable plans that would let us solve these Zone IV problems.

 

Our Third Question and Third Clue

Noting this tendency to get stuck partway along the problem-solving pathway (as in Figure 2) led us to ask: Are there examples in which society got further, assembling the full puzzle and thus offering effective answers to problems with a Zone IV level of complexity? And, if so, what conditions enabled this kind of breakthrough?

Our white paper has other examples, but we take the U.S. Constitutional Convention of 1787 as a case in which a team was able to press ahead like this and make such a breakthrough. As the meeting started, delegates knew that the Articles of Confederation had failed to give the central government enough power, but there was no clear consensus about what should be done.

Yet they found an effective way to work, and ideas came together: James Madison had come to the convention with a rough plan, and delegates then worked for about four months under conditions of secrecy, with almost no outside distractions (or any running daily commentary on the partially formed plans).

This focus and careful deliberation allowed amazing progress. Delegates gradually worked their way through the full complexity of the Zone IV challenge and then drafted a proposed new constitution. This, as suggested in the diagram below, left the rest of the country with a far simpler problem of “planning,” since they could benefit from the way that delegates to the Convention had done so much of the hard part of the work.

Figure 3

The rest of the country still needed to decide whether to accept, reject, or modify the proposed document, but they did not need to consider the full range of options/alternatives involved in setting up a new system of governance. It was as if delegates to the Convention had transformed a Zone IV problem into a problem that had something more like a Zone II level of complexity. The rest of the country only had to ask themselves: Have the delegates assembled the puzzle in a satisfactory way? Does it seem reasonable to set up a constitution with these 4,500 words?

And thus, the third clue: if the right team of people can work together for long enough, and can deliberate under appropriate conditions, they may be able to assemble the full puzzle — delivering a clear, acceptable, actionable plan that can solve a Zone IV problem.

 

Combining Clues to Develop a Plan for Special Focus Teams

Thinking about these three clues, and about the various stages involved in puzzle-solving, led us to develop plans for special focus teams within Humanity 2050. Each such team will work as follows:

Figure 4

Each team (upper right side of figure) will focus on one of the major challenges of the Anthropocene. Work from many external groups (upper left side) will continue unimpeded, with special focus teams accessing this information. Thus, the new teams will be able to “stand on the shoulder of giants,” and teams will be set up so that members will have the time and the focus needed to develop a plan that is clear, acceptable, actionable, and powerful enough to address the problem at hand.

Note: We are not arguing that the people on these teams at Humanity 2050 would somehow be smarter than everyone else. The power of this strategy will come from the way in which these teams will complement and supplement existing efforts, and from the way in which these teams will — for months and years at a time — be able to concentrate on “scouting ahead” so as to find the safest possible path amidst the perils of the Anthropocene.

 

Testing the Idea of Special Focus Teams

As a first test case, we have set up a special focus team to look at the complex and controversial issue of climate engineering. The team considers prospects for spraying aerosols in the stratosphere (so as to deflect some small portion of the incoming sunlight and thus help to cool the earth).

Fortunately, there already is an excellent body of work exploring relevant scientific and technical aspects of climate engineering, and several groups have started to consider how such a program might be governed.

However, no one has yet developed an integrated, actionable plan for climate engineering, and our special focus team thus takes up this challenge — combining ideas about science, technology, governance, and operational strategy, and trying to foresee how the program might work over the rest of the century. True, there are risks when looking this far ahead, but having a draft version of an operational plan already has let us foresee problems that might otherwise have only arisen decades from now as “unintended consequences” or “unexpected side effects.” Some are serious enough to merit immediate attention and to force reconsideration of some of the standard assumptions about climate engineering.

* * * * * *

Over time, special focus teams will be assembled to address other challenges of the Anthropocene. This should dramatically improve the odds of finding effective solutions and thus helping to ensure a livable human future for our children and grandchildren.

Note: Readers interested in having more details about this new strategy will find them in our white paper entitled “Special Focus Teams” to Help Solve the Problems of the Anthropocene. We’d love to talk with anyone who might be interested in supporting this project or in joining one of these teams.

How to Tame Black Swans and Prevent the Next Global Catastrophe

June 2, 2020

As humans, we tend to do well with the typical, the ordinary, the expected. We rely on experience. This — quite naturally — makes it hard for society to anticipate, prepare for, and handle a pandemic like that seen with COVID-19. And — caught off guard — a crisis then demands our full attention: Failing adequate preparation, we desperately need “all hands on deck” to improve the prospects for controlling spread of the virus, helping the sick, developing a vaccine, and handling the crushing economic fallout of this pandemic.

As we eventually recover, the horror of COVID-19 will remind us to be better prepared and perhaps gain the ability to forestall some future pandemic. But there’s a risk that we’ll miss the deeper lesson, not seeing the danger that other, potential “black swan” events (Taleb, Nassim Nicholas (2007) The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable) also present for society.

Our current crisis arises in part because of the virus, but in part because we live in such a fast-paced, globally connected world. Given this rapid change, given this ever-increasing connectivity and complexity, we must presume that the risk of black swan events — in general, not just pandemics — will only increase in the future.

So, how do we look ahead? Now is a good time to consider the conditions that allow black swans to breed and to find new ways to reduce the risk for society. Read the full story on Medium.

complexity

Civilization and the Complexity Trap

January 30, 2020

Civilization has set a trap for itself. Humanity has made amazing progress over the centuries — progress made possible by the rise of the expert. But this progress creates a new problem, as ever-more-complex technologies are deployed at an accelerating rate. Billions of different devices, protocols, ideas, traditions, and people interact — second by second, all over the planet, creating an emergent complexity crisis.

Experts understand parts of this system, but the overall complexity is far beyond the comprehension of any individual — whether scientist, citizen, or political leader. This complexity presents a huge challenge for society: It’s hard to ensure the stability of the system if you can’t track all the key interactions and feedback loops that may cause trouble.

So how will we address the wicked challenges of the next decade? We need a “paradigm shift” in societal regulatory systems, with bold, creative new ideas to break us out of the complexity trap. Read about some of these ideas and see our call to action in the full story on Medium.  This is a challenge worthy of our brightest minds, working to help ensure a livable human future.

What Are the “100 Great Books for a Human Future”?

April 11, 2019

What are the 100 best books to help humanity prepare for the challenges of the human future? Which can best train our minds—showing the problems, the possibilities, the hope—as we try to build a world that we’ll be proud to pass along to our children and grandchildren?

Books have a power to help shape the mind. When writing, an author leaves a trace of their neural activity encoded in words. Readers then decode the words—re-hydrating this “freeze-dried” form of thought and producing fresh patterns of neural activity in their own minds as they accept, reject, or modify ideas gleaned from the text. In this way, written words let ideas jump across continents and millennia, allowing us to commune with some of the great minds in human history and with great minds all over the planet.

And, for ages, people have been selecting and sharing texts of exceptional wisdom. For some, this list would begin with a sacred, religious text—perhaps the Talmud, the Christian Bible, the Quran, the Sutras of Buddha, or the Hindu Vedas. For others, it might be the works of Homer, Plato, Thucydides, Cicero, Virgil, Shakespeare, Cervantes, Tolstoy, Dante, Darwin or others from the “great books” of Western civilization.

But the pressure of the modern economic system—the challenge of getting and keeping a job—makes students increasingly reluctant to major in the humanities and increasingly likely to study biotechnology or computer science. In these realms, students may focus on books like Molecular Biology of the Cell(Bruce Alberts et al.), Artificial Intelligence (Stuart Russell and Peter Norvig), Deep Learning (Ian Goodfellow et al.), How to Create a Mind (Ray Kurzweil), or a famous white paper on bitcoin and blockchain that was written under the pseudonym “Satoshi Nakamoto.”

I see the need for a new reading list, combining these realms, and also helping prepare us to deal with the global challenges of the modern age. We have challenges today that Plato and Thucydides had no way to foresee, problems such as climate change, environmental degradation, the rise of artificial intelligence, and the risk of nuclear war.

So what makes a book worthy of such special attention? What criteria can we use to select? To start, it is important to acknowledge that there is no central text (no one “bible”) telling us how to proceed as we try to ensure a livable human future amidst the complexity of the 21st century. No one has yet offered a plan, but we’re fortunate to have many “advisors” who’ve studied parts of the problem.

Our own choice of best books, i.e., the best members for this advisory team, reflects the key concerns and key goals of our work at Humanity 2050. This vision:

  • acknowledges and celebrates all the wonderful progress that has led to our modern world where many have a level of comfort, ease, and safety that would have been unimaginable in an earlier age, but nevertheless
  • notes and attends to challenges that society as a whole seems ill-prepared to address.

Thus, our library of 100 books for the human future must recognize the full spectrum—the progress, the potential, and the perils,

  • helping minds prepare for an active, engaged role in creating a livable human future.

Given the goals of Humanity 2050, these books should showcase human freedom and dignity, highlighting the possibility for prosperity without overwhelming our planet’s resources. They should reflect a worldview that accepts and celebrates all—religion, humanism, science, and technology.

With this rough guidance laid out, I now propose 10 shelves with these books for humanity, and start by suggesting a few books for each of these shelves. With these examples, I hope to set the tone and to start a discussion about which other books to include. (Obviously, those imaging a transhumanist future, or those preparing to move to Mars, will need to assemble their own reading lists, very different than the one started here. There’s not much point in getting the bookshelves jumbled together, or in arguing about specific authors, when the real point of departure comes via a fundamentally different choice of priority and purpose.)

*                      *                      *                      *                      *

Shelf 1: I’d start with a few books giving an overview of human origins, human history, and the human condition. We might begin with The Origin of Species (Charles Darwin), Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind (Yuval Noah Harari), Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed (Jared Diamond), and The Human Condition (Hannah Arendt).

Shelf 2: Given our vision for the human future, we’ll want to understand prospects for democratic governance, international diplomacy, and a stable world order, so we’ll start this second shelf with Leviathan (Thomas Hobbes), Democracy in America(Alexis de Tocqueville), The End of Power (Moisés Naím), International Organization and Global Governance (Thomas G. Weiss and Rorden Wilkinson, editors), Political Tribes (Amy Chua), Exodus: How Migration is Changing our World (Paul Collier), and World Order (Henry Kissinger).

Shelf 3: Of course, human history has also been marked by the horrors of war, totalitarianism, and genocide. So our third shelf might start with War and Peace (Leo Tolstoy), Eichmann in Jerusalem (Hannah Arendt), On Tyranny (Timothy Snyder), Hiroshima (John Hersey), Thinking about the Unthinkable (Herman Kahn), Cyber War (Richard A. Clarke and Robert K. Knake), LikeWar: The Weaponization of Social Media (P.W. Singer and Emerson T. Brooking), and 1984 (George Orwell).

Shelf 4: Next comes the role of religion, mindfulness, and meditation in the modern world. Regardless of our own individual beliefs, we need to understand this key aspect of human life and human society, and we thus begin our fourth shelf with The Varieties of Religious Experience (William James), Religion: What It Is, How It Works, Why It Matters (Christian Smith), The Art of Happiness (Dalai Lama), and with a set of sacred texts from the major religions around the world. We also consider secular ideas about morality, law, and social justice, including A Theory of Justice (John Rawls), Ethics for the Real World (Ronald Howard and Clinton Korver), and Ethical Know-How (Francisco Varela).

Shelf 5: To explore the beauty of (at least one branch of) art, to acknowledge the power of the human spirit, and the importance and meaning of love, I’d start shelf number five with The Divine Comedy (Dante); and Hamlet, King Lear, and The Tempest(Shakespeare). Obviously, choices here are far more personal—and there will be huge cultural differences—but I’d also include the collected poems of Emily Dickinson and of Walt Whitman, A Room of One’s Own (Virginia Woolf), Man’s Search for Meaning(Viktor Frankl), and A General Theory of Love (Thomas Lewis et al.).

Shelf 6: Turning to recent changes in science, technology, and communication and their effects on society, I’d start shelf six with The Fourth Industrial Revolution (Klaus Schwab), Superintelligence (Nick Bostrom), The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains (Nicholas Carr), The Filter Bubble (Eli Pariser), The Inevitable: Understanding the 12 Technological Forces that Will Shape Our Future (Kevin Kelly), and The Second Machine Age: Work, Progress, and Prosperity in an Age of Brilliant Technologies (Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee).

Shelf 7: In a similar way, shelf seven will have a collection of references on humanity’s impact on nature and the environment (including related concerns about population growth). Books here will include Silent Spring (Rachel Carson), Limits to Growth(Donella Meadows, Dennis Meadows, et al.), The World is Blue (Sylvia Earle), The Climate Casino (William Nordhaus), The Sixth Extinction (Elizabeth Kolbert), Drawdown (Paul Hawken, editor), and 2052: A Global Forecast for the Next Forty Years (Jorgen Randers).

Shelf 8: This continues on closely related themes, building on the ideas of the previous shelf to look toward the future, to consider how to feed and house and protect all these billions of people. Books here will include The Triumph of the City (Edward Glaeser), The Death and Life of Great American Cities (Jane Jacobs), Urbanism in the Age of Climate Change (Peter Calthorpe), Water: The Epic Struggle for Wealth, Power, and Civilization (Steven Solomon), Global Health Care Issues and Policies (Carol Holtz, editor), and Global Food Futures: Feeding the World in 2050 (Brian Gardner).

Shelf 9: No list would be complete without a look at the power and limits of human cognition, including a discussion of strategic thought. This shelf might include Thinking, Fast and Slow (Daniel Kahneman), Thinking in Systems: A Primer (Donella Meadows), Predictably Irrational (Dan Ariely), The Checklist Manifesto (Atul Gawande), The Nature of Scientific Revolutions(Thomas Kuhn), Superforecasting (Philip Tetlock and Dan Gardner), The Art of War (Sun Tzu), and On Grand Strategy (John Lewis Gaddis).

Shelf 10: And finally, we need a shelf on economics to consider classical ideas of capitalism, to explore issues of poverty and inequality, and to consider changes that may be needed for a new age on Spaceship Earth. I propose starting this shelf with The Wealth of Nations (Adam Smith) and Capital in the Twenty-First Century (Thomas Piketty). Trying to give some balanced view of progress and problems, I’d then include Factfulness (Hans Rosling et al.), This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. the Climate(Naomi Klein), Donut Economics (Kate Raworth), and Banker to the Poor (Muhammad Yunus).

*                      *                      *                      *                      *

For me, assembling this list and reading these books is a way to help prepare the mind to address some of the most fundamental questions of the modern age. While many wonderful people are doing great work to help solve societal problems, there is still much work to be done. We cannot pitch in and work effectively without learning as much as possible to help focus our efforts. Books can help create a society-wide neural scaffolding that will give us a better toolkit for creating a flourishing, positive future. Society needs some way to assemble the best advice we can get from minds all over the planet, and we hope to get your help in refining and filling out this bookshelf. (Please send any comments and suggestions to ideas@humanity2050.org; we’re especially eager to hear from anyone who has read enough on these subjects so as to already have one or two bookshelves full of their own well-worn favorites.)

This post was originally published at carlpabo.com. 

How a Notebook Empowers Thought

January 24, 2019

A notebook can be a powerful tool, helping you learn how to think more clearly. At Humanity 2050—where we focus on thinking about long-term challenges of the human future—we certainly need the kind of careful, deliberative frames of thought that can be cultivated by using a notebook. (Obviously, some of the specific ideas that emerge after years of work on a problem—as with comments about risks associated with the rise of AI—are complex enough that they need to be described elsewhere and combined with perspectives offered by other groups.) Yet some of the cognitive tools we use, like a notebook, provide a starting point that is simple enough that almost anyone can try it. Whether you hope to advance your career, need to make a big life decision, feel stuck in your current circumstances, or want to help us think about these global challenges, there’s one key step that can help with everything else: Start a notebook.

A notebook empowers thought in a way that can change your life. To begin, the simple physical presence of the notebook becomes a symbol and a reminder of your dedication to your own growth and development. It gives a frame and a support system that helps when making key decisions. A fresh insight—once written down—need never be lost. A partially developed plan will stay in place if you need to close the notebook and come back a few days later. You’ll gradually come to see how your notebook serves as a kind of huge flywheel. Ideas keep spinning round and changing form in a way that facilitates the function of mind. New lines of inquiry can open up with a simple query, expand as you explore leads and options, and then come to a focus as you develop a new plan.

Obviously, everyone will be at a different stage in life and will face different decisions, but this is precisely the reason that a notebook helps. Your notebook becomes the one book on the planet that’s devoted to your individual needs, your learning style, your life choices, and your future. Start by respecting yourself enough, taking life seriously enough to understand that your life is well worth the time and attention that a notebook entails. The skills needed to make better life choices are part art, part science; certainty is never possible. But a notebook gives a realm in which you can play with possibilities, blend different modes of thought, learn how to think at a new, much deeper level.

It’s quite easy to get started. If you don’t have one already, buy a notebook (preferably with pages about 8”x10”). Set the first few pages aside for later use as an index. (These will be filled in as your notes expand and you want a quick way to find key sections.)

Then print out and paste in the initial prompts—offered at the end of this post—about how to use a notebook. Note: There’s no need to study all the tips in detail right now; some of the comments will make more sense as you begin using your notebook. And there’s no pressure to memorize this list of suggestions. They’ll be there, right at hand, every time you pick up the notebook.

Turn to the next open page, enter the date, and get ready to make this notebook your own. Pause for a few minutes and think: What problems have been on my mind? What key decision(s) am I facing this year? What are the “branch points” that may help shape the rest of my life? Write down a few questions; perhaps make a sketch to show how “possible futures” branch out in different directions. Now pause for a few minutes and think: When will I next have 20 or 30 minutes to come back and pay attention to this notebook and to continue exploring these decisions? Write it down; make the commitment. Send yourself a calendar invite if that helps ensure that you can block out the time.

Now you’re set; you’re underway. You can pause for a minute and celebrate the new power this notebook will bring to your life. As you’ll come to appreciate, it provides a way for you—even in these most personal realms of thought—to take advantage of the power of written language. Mind never gets overwhelmed. You always have an easy way to augment working memory: you can write down all the intermediate stages of analysis, and can come back later as needed. (Rereading a few pages as you start the next session may help you “refresh” and get up to speed again.) Other modes of thought blend in easily: sketches and diagrams and mind maps can be added as you like; conscious and subconscious modes of thought both get called into play as you let ideas incubate and percolate between formal sessions with your notebook. Ideas arising at odd moments during the day can easily be jotted down on a card and tucked into the notebook for “processing” in the next session. (Or you can use email or phone messages, or a separate, miniature notebook for ideas that arise on the fly.)

Life brings tough choices. Day by day, you need to make the tough decisions. You cannot live via “what is known by others”; your life must be lived on the basis of ideas that are physically instantiated in your own brain, your own neural networks. Youmust take responsibility, and you may find that a notebook helps.

It takes work—a bit of discipline when starting—yet it soon becomes fun. Life is an amazing adventure, and taking better advantage of the power of the mind changes everything else. Every life will be different, and will gain fresh energy and power in a different way, but this notebook opens up a whole new world of possibility—letting you live life more fully, become your best self, letting you take advantage of the kind of notebook that Darwin and Da Vinci kept.

 

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Tips When Starting a Notebook

Note: You can download these tips as a PDF.

#1)  Give this process—learning how to use the notebook—a little time. It’s a bit like starting an exercise program: you may need a few weeks to adjust before you begin to have fun and to feel the full benefit. To get started, set aside some time—perhaps 20 minutes a day, perhaps 2 hours a week—when you can step back and think about the big “pivot points” in your life.

#2)  Learn to shift and to move easily across every level of thought—sometimes writing out the big questions, sometimes jotting down the names of a few people you want to contact, sometimes listing titles of books to read or articles to study. If you like, paste in some motivational or inspirational messages for yourself.

#3)  Be open: approach life—and every decision—with a kind of humility, wonder, and curiosity. No matter how smart, each of us knows so little that there are endless opportunities to learn and improve.

#4)  Don’t try to answer all the big questions and make all the big decisions immediately. You’ll often find that it helps to break them into a list of subsidiary questions. (Philip Tetlock and Dan Gardner emphasize this idea in their book Superforecasting.)  Each new question is precious; each helps engage some other background knowledge from your own experience; each opens new avenues for further exploration.

#5)  Use your notebook as a way of looking ahead, trying to see out over the horizon. Jot down a few notes—as necessary—to learn from your mistakes, but never confuse the role of this notebook with the role of a journal. It’s not a logbook to make some record of where you have been; it works in a realm of thought that always looks forward, that remains at the very boundary of the known and the unknown. You need to explore your dreams and see which might become real.

#6)  Don’t censor your notes, and don’t press too hard for some quick decision or some final, integrated perspective. The mind will first need time to change and grow as you study all the pieces, as you list and pursue all the subsidiary questions. Give yourself the privacy to explore ideas you’re not ready to say aloud—perhaps to consider a role so new, so bold that others might think you’re too ambitious.

#7)  Have fun and learn how to move easily among different “mental frames.” Learn to mix flights of imagination (exploring a fresh, open world of possibility) with the cold, careful use of reason (returning to ground and checking how well your plans might work). You don’t need to obsess to make good decisions. It’s all a question of learning how to think most carefully, not an exercise in cultivating new levels of anxiety.

#8)  To put it another way: use your notebook as a kind of sandbox in which you can safely play with possibilities. Much of the art comes here: there’s no point in having a world that’s entirely imaginary, but—equally—there’s no point in keeping everything rigidly fixed in the context of your current circumstances. Be bold, be brave; don’t hesitate to venture in new territory if you start to think you may have the strength to make the journey.

#9)  Don’t hesitate to write out concrete plans, but let them incubate before implementation. Give the subconscious mind some chance to react: see how you feel, explore any sense of fear or unease that may arise. Bounce the new plan off of friends. Remember: ideas can shift, reflecting moment-to-moment changes in the perception of our current situation. It takes time to be sure that new ideas and new plans are consistent with everything we know, with all other aspects of our life, with the full range of outcomes that is possible as we implement our new plan.

#10)  Use your notebook as a workspace where you can capture and explore good ideas in any form, from any source, at any stage of development. When—let us say—someone else offers you other ideas on how to use a notebook, just print them out, paste them in, and study them as you refine your technique. Every new idea offers a fresh opportunity for growth, but you can’t take full advantage until you understand the suggestion, evaluate the relevance to your own life, and update your plans. Your notebook, and the precious time you spend with it when planning and thinking, set up the kind of “metabolic system” needed for full development of mind. You may feed off the ideas of others, but you’ll be able to digest and rethink and rearrange and connect as you work to build a full, rich world of mind for yourself.

#11)  After a month or two—after you see how well things work with a pen and a physical notebook—it’s time to pause and ask yourself: would some other system be better? Are you more likely to return to your “notebook” if it is on your computer instead? (Or does that bring too many risks of distraction?) Remember, the only real issue involves learning to understand how you think, learning how you can best develop your own mind and your own methods of thought. Don’t be afraid to experiment, but do try to have some kind of notebook that helps you keep this flywheel spinning, that helps you mix all these myriad modes of thought, that lets you move above all the day-to-day demands of your career and family life.

#12)  If you are—perhaps—inspired to help tackle some of the hardest problems on the planet, please get in touch with us at humanity2050.org. (And please sign up for updates as we discuss other “tools for thought” needed to reach your full potential, and needed when addressing the challenge of ensuring a livable human future.)

This post was originally published at carlpabo.com.

Cognition, Complexity, and Humanity2050.org

October 1, 2018

What will it take to address our key global challenges and thus help ensure a livable human future? How can we develop a useful strategy, working with others and coordinating efforts around the globe?

I am writing to introduce Humanity 2050 (humanity2050.org) and to advocate a more comprehensive, coherent way of thinking about the human future. Like other public policy institutes, we’re concerned about challenges facing our planet—challenges such as global warming, environmental degradation, nuclear proliferation, and risks posed by the rise of artificial intelligence. Yet we bring a fresh perspective: we emphasize the underlying cognitive challenge inherent in every other global problem that we face. There is a crisis of complexity that often overwhelms our human minds and prevents us from finding and implementing real solutions. We’ll need to tackle this problem of thought as we work to address everything else. And Humanity 2050 can help.

It’s important to remember that “Spaceship Earth” (as per Buckminster Fuller) is an astonishingly complicated system—including 7.6 billion people, all other forms of life and energy, all biochemical, geochemical and climatic cycles, all the computers and machines we use, and all the information we’ve ever acquired. It’s all connected, and each component affects the others. And control of the system is further complicated since it’s not clear who is in charge, who is responsible, what to do, or how to develop a useful plan.

This challenge of complexity explains our focus at Humanity 2050: we work to develop new “cognitive algorithms” (new ways of organizing data and new patterns of thought) that can facilitate careful planning amidst the otherwise overwhelming complexity of these global challenges. Humanity 2050 will serve as a platform for developing, testing, and disseminating new ways of thinking that will be needed to help address pressing global challenges. As humanity faces its toughest test to date, we will help human minds get ready for the task.

It may—at first—seem surprising to comment here on the nature of thought, but our work at Humanity 2050 is shaped by an underlying awareness that thought and ideas are just specialized types of physical structures and physical events in a physical world. We cannot wait for some magical moment of insight to save us; “insight” comes when neurons are trained to see larger systems. Only then will we make wise choices.

To have any realistic chance of solving these global problems, ideas must fit in the human mind and must be accessible in the moment when citizens vote, in the moment when leaders act. Ideas must accurately reflect a world of mind-boggling complexity, and contain enough information to have real predictive value and to help ensure a livable human future in the world of 2050 and beyond.

At this stage, Humanity 2050 has several strategies designed to help facilitate clear thought and coherent action amidst the extreme complexity of the modern world. One approach involves a very deliberate attempt—when first tackling some hyper-complex problem—to invest more effort in the initial stages of thought. At Humanity 2050, we always begin by asking: what else do we need to know before we can even start to think clearly about problems at this level of complexity? We consider limits imposed by available data and the capacity of working memory, by differences among multiple situations and perspectives, and by constraints inherent in the moment of speech and action.

Humanity 2050 will collaborate with other individuals and groups already addressing these global challenges (as in the diagram below). Our new “strategies of thought” will be most useful to those already struggling with complexity, and we can learn the most from others who dedicate their lives to addressing these global challenges. These brave people—dedicated citizens and leaders, social entrepreneurs, academics, government representatives, and many others—have done beautiful work and offer the best current hope for our planet. But we believe their efforts must be supported and supplemented with new cognitive strategies.

Different collaborations and different projects will require different approaches, but we’re already setting up workshops on “how to think,” offering lectures on “human thought and the human future,” developing a set of “Cliffs Notes for Planet Earth” (anchored with ideas and data organized so as to respect our human cognitive limits), exploring prospects for using AI to help with these efforts, and more. Most importantly, we’re setting up meetings to brainstorm with others about how we can best work together.

We hope you can join this adventure to help secure prospects for a livable future. We seek to collaborate with others who share our concern for the human future, who maintain a commitment so clear and compelling that it becomes the central focus in their lives and the development of their minds. If you are such a person—already pressing against the limits of human thought—we hope you will get in touch with us via info@humanity2050.org. Let’s start a conversation, and work together to help prepare our species for its biggest test yet.

 

Sincerely,

Carl O. Pabo

Founder and President, Humanity 2050 (humanity2050.org)

 

This post was originally published at carlpabo.com.

AI, Democracy, and the Human Future

October 27, 2017

Just a few days ago, officials in Saudi Arabia granted citizenship to a robot.  One might laugh this off as a PR stunt designed to showcase recent work on AI, but this raises serious issues that will affect the whole future of our species.

When we look at this event in a larger context, it serves as an urgent reminder that we need to establish a framework for regulating AI if we want to maintain prospects for a livable human future.

It’s easy – at least in the Western world – to look at human society and human history and say:  I’m going to bet on democracy, capitalism, science, and technology.  These have served us well and worked well together – giving great freedom to the individual, increasing life expectancy, and improving the general standard of living.

But there’s a question:  Is there any assurance that this “D, C, S & T system” will always work well?  Can this system handle all the unintended consequences of the new technologies it creates?

We’ve already seen ways in which the system can falter and fail — how the burning of fossil fuels leads to global warming, how new technology used in fishing can deplete vital seed stocks, how development of the computer and the Internet has led to cybercrime and cyberwarfare and new ways of meddling in the electoral process.  And new developments in AI now pose an even deeper risk.

I’ve eagerly followed work in this field since the mid-1980s when I started thinking about how AI could be relevant to problems of protein design.  And – as a scientist – it’s exciting to see all the recent advances, reading about the increases in computer power and new coding methods that have allowed computers to beat humans at checkers, then chess, at the quiz show Jeopardy, and most recently, the game Go.

But I’m concerned about the implications of AI for society, and – more broadly – I’m concerned because it’s hard to foresee or to measure or to address the side effects and the cross terms arising from all these recent advances in science and technology.

We tend to just add new technology, mix it with everything else on the planet, and wait to see what happens.

As I consider potential effects of AI, I’ll skip all the Pollyanna scenarios in which AI is only used for the general human good; and I’ll skip all the dark scenarios in which AI leads to dangerous new modes of cybercrime, warfare, and financial fraud.  I’ll just talk about the middle path and consider some relatively straightforward extrapolations from what’s already happening.

To be clear:  I try to look out a few decades ahead, and everything below is based on the assumption that technology will continue to advance at a rapid rate.  It’s hard to pick particular winners and losers – as one needs to do when investing as a venture capitalist.  But there’s so much effort, so many billions of dollars invested, so many new approaches being tested that – as Ray Kurzweil has emphasized for years – rapid progress seems assured.

The first and perhaps most obvious social problem that arises with advanced computing technology comes from the way in which so many workers lose their jobs (as we already see with factory workers, office workers, and the retail industry).  There’s no good way to predict the precise rate and extent of job loss, but this will certainly be disruptive in a “knowledge economy.”  Money and power will accumulate in the hands of a technological elite who have the most computers and the best software.  Unemployment and underemployment will be devastating for others, and may disrupt the very fabric of the social system.  There’s a potential for increased use of drugs, increased crime, and increased risk that some demagogue will appear who promises to fix all our problems.

These concerns have led to some initial experiments – as with those by Sam Altman – to see how it might work to hand out money and thus help ensure that everyone has some “living wage.”  But there’s nothing in the tax structure in the U.S., in the mood of the president and the Congress, or in the current financial stability of the country (with a cumulative federal debt now over $20 trillion) that would suggest the U.S. is ready to offer help at this level.

And there’s another – perhaps even scarier problem for democracy – that lies just behind this first shock wave of unemployment:  The whole purpose of an educational system gets undermined if there’s no meaningful prospect for a job after decades of study.  We may soon wonder:  Why bother funding a system of public education?  Why study hard?  How could citizens – dependent on handouts – ever save the money needed for college, and why would anyone ever bother with the expense?

Thus, with little need for an educated (human) workforce, one simultaneously undermines and eliminates the kind of educational system that has produced the informed citizenry that can elect wise leaders and help deal with the challenges of the modern age.  We thus risk a kind of multilevel disruption of society:  We risk undermining the very mechanisms of democratic governance that might (otherwise) offer some hope of sorting out challenges inherent in this first tidal wave of disruptions.

Some of these risks will be hard to handle, but we need to try.  We need to do the best we can to protect our society against these dangers – at the very least, working to maintain a system of governance that can help us deal with all the other challenges.

I’m open to discussion on details, but I’ve studied human thought long enough to know that we’ll need to work at several different levels of detail if we want a plan with some overall coherence.  If we want to preserve prospects for a livable human future, we’ll need a few guiding principles:

#1)      We’ll need to insist that all robots – all autonomous computational agents that we’ll soon find spread out on the streets, in the skies, and on the seas – have some kind of “dog tag” identifying their human owner, and we need to insist that the owner take responsibility for any damage caused by the robot.  (Without this, society just bears the cost while the manufacturer keeps the profit.  This is patently unfair to those who will not benefit from the new revolution.)

#2)      We must prohibit the development of human-machine hybrids and of radically enhanced human beings, and we must not grant citizenship to robots and avatars.  I don’t say this because of any moral qualms – which might be entirely appropriate as well! – I say this because democracy cannot survive amidst a caste system in which some “enhanced” people are inherently “better” than others.  It’s hard enough to achieve consensus in our current multicultural society (with genome sequences differing by some small fraction of one percent).  We cannot risk the further levels of disruption inherent in a “multi-species democracy” – with members constructed out of elements from different parts of the periodic table, working at radically different processing speeds, and communicating via different wavelengths of the electromagnetic spectrum.

Change at this level would disrupt all the belief systems underlying our social/legal system:  Our laws and our democracy are dependent on shared beliefs – ideas about what it means to be human, what it means to commit a crime, how punishment should be meted out, and how rehabilitation might be achieved.  These, in turn, are based on our shared history and on a shared set of human needs and desires, on a shared set of physical principles underlying the operation of the human body and mind and brain.

Of course, legal standards have evolved since the time of the Code of Hammurabi back in ancient Mesopotamia.  But there’s a rate of change in these normative, cultural patterns of thought that’s radically different than anything involved in the development of this new technology.  Society has no simple “update now” button (as with an Excel spreadsheet) that would let us recalibrate everything in the legal system, update and resynchronize every way in which every citizen thinks about the meaning of “being human”.  We’ll have enough trouble understanding how people can handle this new technology without simultaneously introducing new, hybrid, transhuman entities.

In short:  We’ll need some broader legal frame that will help keep us grounded in existing traditions.  We’ll need some “pole star” to guide us as we work to address all the other challenges of the modern age.  We’ll need to remember what it means to be human, to live in a community that works together so as to help maintain prospects for a livable human future.  We cannot afford to be pressured by the high-tech industry when the entire future of our species now lies at stake.  It would be silly to listen to complaints to the effect that “this will slow us down too much” when the very speed of the change is one aspect that makes it so hard for society to respond in an effective way.

 

This post was originally published at carlpabo.com.

Humanity 2050

Helping Democracy Think

June 28, 2017

My time as a Visiting Professor at Caltech went quickly: I’ve moved back to San Francisco and had fun hiking again in the hills near Muir Woods. I’ll miss my friends and the students at Caltech, but it’s exciting to be back, ready to finish my book, ready to start my new institute and help address some of these critical global challenges.

While at Caltech, I kept thinking about differences between the type of thought needed in the academic environment, and the type of thought needed to address the broader challenges of the modern age. In many ways, scholars in academia have a better prospect of making steady, reliable progress. They can focus on a small part or single aspect of the world. They pick a problem that the mind can manage, and their ideas often are shared with (and judged by) other academic experts with a similar background.

But it’s harder for anyone working with the type of Zone IV challenges mentioned in my previous posts: Ideas here still need to retain some real meaning and substance, yet they also need to encompass a larger view of the world AND need to be formulated in a way that allows them to be shared with a broader public.

But there’s a painful irony here: Given the rough and tumble world of politics, these harder, global problems often get less careful, deliberate attention. Elected officials are so busy that they must rely on their staff. And staff members rely on policy reports, and these reports, in turn, depend on advice from domain-specific experts. But many of these Zone IV problems – concerns about global warming, about the financial system, about health care, etc. – are so hard and so open-ended that they transcend the “field of view” accessible to any given expert. There are challenges when ideas get shuffled around like this, and when proposed legislation is so complex and so full of jargon that it’s hard to read and evaluate.

We can see these challenges, for example, with the Dodd-Frank Act (passed in 2010) that was designed to help regulate the U.S. financial system. This bill is so long (848 pages) and so complex that it’s unreadable – indeed, it’s unthinkable. (I know, as I bought a copy and tried.) A bill with this level of complexity leads to a kind of pretense and charade that undercuts the very foundation of democratic governance. When ideas do not fit in mind, there’s no chance for meaningful thought, no way to cast a meaningful vote.

So, I ask: Is there, perhaps, a better way of addressing these Zone IV challenges? Do complex problems of the modern age always require such complex solutions? Or is there some chance to work at a deeper, more strategic level – some way to maintain human comprehension and control, some way to ensure that the largest, most fundamental choices are made correctly?

Yes, I think we can do a better job. As I argued when teaching at Caltech, there are cases in which deep thought – like that used when drafting the U.S. Constitution – can give a fresh perspective and lead to a better plan. It can help us move beyond stopgap solutions and thus start with a more solid foundation.

My upcoming book will offer a few examples showing how deep thought can help, but my analysis of the economic and financial system – worked out over several years of study – is summarized below. Beginning with the basics, let’s note: we’ve moved beyond the barter system, but we’re still as dependent as ever on a flow of physical events for food, clothing, shelter, transportation, entertainment, and everything else. And we remain just as dependent on others, just as dependent on community, as we would be in a barter system – it’s just that we now track “contributions to” and “withdrawals from” this shared public realm via the use of money.

In outline: You can get paid if you bring something useful to this public marketplace; you pay money if you want to take something home.

I describe this basic, mutually beneficial pattern as one of “work+/+”. Let’s take for instance, the summer job I once had as a roofer. There was a simple bargain here, a simple “social contract”: I got paid only as I left a favorable physical residual for others. I was happy to have the money, and the homeowners were delighted to have a new roof.

And the real failure of the Dodd-Frank Act starts right here: It’s written as if the overall stability of the financial system were the only issue of concern to the government. The bill fails to consider these other, equally fundamental aspects of the social contract. It fails to consider that much of the risk to stability, and much of the public anger and cynicism about government bailouts of banks, arise because mutually beneficial patterns of work+/+ have been replaced by parasitic processes of work+/- (described below).

There are many such parasitic processes in the modern economic/financial system – many ways to take money off the table without leaving any residual benefit for others. (See, for example, John Cassidy’s 2010 article in The New Yorker entitled “What Good Is Wall Street?”)

One of the most obvious forms of work+/- involves high-speed trading of stocks, commodities or currencies, and a prototypical pattern is illustrated in the diagram below.

Nothing is created here; nothing is left behind that would be worth so much as a crust of bread in the barter system. Hedge fund managers simply try to take advantage of vagaries in pricing, and their profits come at the expense of other traders who move less quickly. And it doesn’t really matter whether the holding period here is seconds, minutes, hours, or days. This type of “investment” never lasts long enough to offer any real benefit to the company – never allowing them to hire a new employee, buy new equipment, open a new plant, etc.

Other schemes for work+/- include ways of “shorting the market” (profiting as the value of a stock falls), many ways of using “financial derivatives,” and investment banking schemes that take a big fee before waiting to find out whether the reorganized company actually works more effectively.

The net effect is that work+/- need not rely on, and need not facilitate, any actual progress of the underlying economic system. It doesn’t need any forward progress of the economic engine. It can extract money from the fluctuations, the vibrations – it can make money as the engine spits and splutters.

It’s worth noting that a work+/+ transaction (deemed favorable by the two parties involved) can have unfavorable system-level consequences for others. Thus the purchase of a pack of cigarettes supports an industry that may entice young people to take up smoking, and the work+/+ transaction involved when filling my car’s fuel tank will contribute to the problem of global warming. And yet, trying to frame everything in terms of work+/+ at least helps us clear away part of the problem and begin to see who, if anyone, will benefit. Everyone on Main Street needs to struggle to survive in a world of work+/+, while much of Wall Street can siphon off the money through schemes for work+/-. Adam Smith would be appalled at the way this invisible hand is so often busy picking someone else’s pocket.

I’ll discuss these ideas in more detail in my book – 1) summarizing the risks to society – including risks of complexity and instability – that arise with these new schemes and then 2) proposing changes to the tax law that could lead everyone to focus on work+/+. Our failure to regulate these parasitic modes is a critical problem for society, but I also use this example to make a more fundamental point: There are times when careful thought allows us to reframe problems in ways that will help democracy think more clearly and that will let more people participate in the decision-making process. This helps control complexity, producing ideas that:

1) give some adequate description of the world, and outline some useful plan of action, and yet also

2) fit readily in the human mind.

In a system of democratic governance, we desperately need this new kind of currency, this new denomination of thought – ideas that are simple enough to fit in the human mind, yet powerful enough to change the world and help maintain a livable human future. This new path, this via sapiens, gives fresh hope for humanity in an age of complexity.

 

This post was originally published at carlpabo.com.

Hope for the Human Future

May 15, 2017

I’m having fun at Caltech – teaching my course on “The World in 2050,” having dinner with friends and colleagues, meeting for coffee at the Red Door Café, hearing about some of the latest advances in science.

Yet – in my lectures – I’m focused on these tough “Zone IV challenges,” problems (as mentioned in my previous post) so complex they threaten to overwhelm the capacity of the human mind, yet so important that they have profound effects on everyone in society.

As I told my students on the first day of class, the modern university system has failed to provide effective preparation for working at this Zone IV level. Everything in academics is divided by department and topic and course level. Each professor stands up and talks – as it were – about the patterns on one little tile. But, leaving the university, students will find that the world is like a vast mosaic. The isolated tiles they studied in detail are just tiny fragments of the wickedly complex patterns of the larger world. If they want to be ready to help address these challenges, students need help in developing ways to think at this larger level.

Of course, I know the appeal of expertise, and the power of this approach: I had worked this way when teaching biophysical chemistry at MIT and when studying protein-DNA interactions. Everything was divided up, or partitioned off, or otherwise analyzed in a way that allowed the mind to achieve full mastery.

But I’ve looked at the larger mural for the past 15 years, and thus have set a novel goal in teaching my course at Caltech. I’m trying to understand how to train minds to work at this new scale, how to teach students to look out at the full world.

Each week, I stand up and talk about some wildly different topic – juxtaposing problems of global warming, financial reform, artificial intelligence, urbanization, world political order, etc. It’s taken some years to learn how to move easily among all these different fields. And I’m honest with my students: No one can track all the details when looking out at the world as a whole. We’re each stuck with a mind of finite capacity. We’re confronted with a world we can never understand in full detail (not the least because it contains seven billion other minds with lives as full and rich as our own).

But we need to try, and I’ve set out to show that this can be done in a way that still has real substance and meaning and significance, done in a way that offers real hope.

Oddly enough, there’s something that feels almost old-fashioned or “retrograde” about my efforts to maintain some broader perspective. I am inspired, for instance, when reading about the U.S. Constitutional Convention of 1787, and I think their “strategy” – their way of orchestrating the flow of thought – may offer a useful paradigm for the best way to address Zone IV challenges.

When meeting in Philadelphia in the summer of 1787, the delegates did months of careful work at the Zone IV level. And they met without any of the distractions we impose on ourselves today – no cell phones, no press conferences, no staff furiously rewriting versions of a document that would be too long to read.

As they finished, they had a plan – a proposed solution to the challenge – that was short enough and clear enough (just over 4,500 words with signatures) that it could easily be read and debated and discussed.

I think that our hope for the human future depends on an ability to work in similar ways – developing and supporting strategies that allow deep thought in Zone IV (as at the Convention), but producing answers so clear and so simple (as with the Constitution) that the proposed solutions can be considered by the broader public.

Let’s not forget: The problems we see on the mural are hard enough that we cannot expect the general public to have the background, or the time, or the interest to explore each problem in full detail. (We can’t always bring the public over to Zone IV.) And yet there’s no sense in trying to ignore or sidestep the deep complexity of problems like global warming or financial system reform: We can’t hope to treat the problem itself in the same way we’d treat a Zone II problem.

But Thought++ provides fresh hope, for it begins by exploring deep patterns amidst the flow of ideas. If minds are well prepared and given time, it’s quite possible that some of our “Zone IV challenges” can be transformed to give potential “Zone II solutions.”

I have to get ready for class right now, but I’ll write more soon, showing how this strategy (looking for “Zone IV to Zone II transitions”) fits with basic patterns of human cognition – thus making best use of our minds – and showing how it might work when addressing some of our current global challenges.

– – – – – – – –

Credits: As we proceed, I’ll try to acknowledge some of the amazing people who have played a vital role in this project. Today, I want to thank Megan Acio (http://wigt.com), who has helped over the years with hundreds of sketches used to illustrate these arguments. Thanks, Meg! Wonderful work!

 

This post was originally published at carlpabo.com.

Is Human Thought Ready for the Human Future?

April 20, 2017

After working for years on Thought++, developing new ways to think about complex problems, it’s exciting to start this blog.  And it’s wonderful to be here at Caltech as a Visiting Professor, giving my new course on “The World in 2050.”

This class, which just started a few weeks ago, will focus on the cognitive challenges that arise as society tries to address the major problems of the 21st century – among them ecological damage, global warming, resource depletion, artificial intelligence, etc.

Despite the need to cover these sobering topics, I think this class will be fun. Students will pick projects and work to develop their own creative, new ways of addressing some of these key global challenges.  And, in the lectures, I’m introducing my own new “theories of thought.”  I’m presenting ideas in a way that should help students think more effectively about key decisions in their own lives – about family, and career, and the next stages in their own academic work.  I thus continue my lifelong role as mentor and advisor (always a key facet of my career), but I now do so with another new set of tools to offer the students.

As the class examines these global challenges, I’ll keep asking some of my underlying questions about the power and limits of human thought:

            “Do we know what we’re doing? Or does our species have trouble formulating ideas that are adequate for handling these global challenges? 

            Are good ideas – clear, powerful, plausible ways of addressing these problems – perhaps the critical limiting resource for the human future?

            And, if so, if thought is the limiting resource, what can we do to help?  How can we learn to think more clearly, more creatively? How can we learn to work more effectively?”

 During this course at Caltech – and in subsequent posts to this blog – I’ll keep coming back to a simple chart that highlights one of the key challenges for the human future.  I’ve set up this diagram by taking some of the problems facing the United States and sorting them into four bins, considering both the complexity of the problem (horizontal axis) and the degree to which an answer will demand some fundamental changes in society (vertical axis).

Stepping through these four zones helps us see the underlying challenge for the United States and perhaps the key question for the human future.

There’s no need to worry about problems in Zone I:  Problems like setting out the basic patterns for the flow of traffic on a highway are unlikely to pose any fundamental cognitive challenge or cause any real disruption when addressed.

Problems in Zone II – such as concerns about gay marriage, abortion, family values, etc. – can lead to heated debate.  But there’s no need for any advanced studies in systems theory, calculus, or computer science. Everyone makes up his or her mind and votes, and democracy moves along in a haphazard way.

Likewise, we have reasonably good mechanisms for solving problems in Zone III.  There are challenges here – such as regulating aircraft or the development of new drugs – that require an agency to have some employees with advanced technical knowledge.  But, with this type of problem, most people are willing to let bureaucrats work out the details:  Most people are just grateful that planes fly safely, that cell phones work, and that new drugs are tested for safety and efficacy before they get approved.

However, problems in Zone IV – like concerns about global warming, concerns about the stability of the financial system, concerns about healthcare, etc. – present a special challenge for a democratic system.  Problems like these are complex enough that they require experts to help analyze the options, yet decisions here will have profound effects on the lives of all citizens.

Everyone seems to wonder:  Why trust the experts?  How can we know whether they are serving the real needs of society, or whether they’re speaking on behalf of activists, and lobbyists, and other special interest groups?  How can we judge a proposed bill in Congress when it’s too long and too complicated for anyone to read?  (How, for example, can anyone evaluate the Dodd-Frank Act of 2010 when the bill itself is 848 pages long and now has about 22,000 pages of associated regulatory documents?)

In short: Democracy often gets deadlocked when trying to deal with Zone IV problems, and I sometimes think the diagram should be shown as follows:

Of course, this is discouraging, since most of the problems I’ll discuss in the course fall into Zone IV, and I start to wonder:  What are the long-term prospects for the United States, for patterns of democratic governance, if we have difficulty dealing with the challenges of the modern age?

I wouldn’t teach the course if I didn’t have hope, if I didn’t feel ready to offer some suggestions about better ways to orchestrate thought and address Zone IV challenges.  But I posed this riddle to my class in the opening lecture, and explained that we’d need time to discuss some of the power and limits of human thought before I could outline my new way of tackling these Zone IV problems.

I’ll get back soon, but – in the meantime – please send an email if you think you can see a general way of addressing this challenge.  We need a better way of working together as a society, and we’ll need all the help we can get as we try to build a livable human future.

 

This post was originally published at carlpabo.com.