Building Civilizational Resilience
Posted by Jeriaska on January 3rd, 2009
Jamais Cascio is a Senior Fellow for the Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies, a research affiliate at the Institute for the Future, and blogs at Open the Future. He presented on the concept of engineering civilization to be more resilient in the face of catastrophic risks at GCR08, the November Global Catastrophic Risks conference in Mountain View. A day-long seminar on threats to the future of humanity, natural and man-made, the meeting offered various viewpoints on the pro-active steps we can take to reduce global risks.
The following transcript of Jamais Cascio’s GCR08 presentation “Building Civilizational Resilience” has been corrected and revised for clarity by the speaker. Video and audio are also available.
Building Civilizational Resilience
Okay: Everyone talks about the end of the world, but what do we really mean? I’ve discovered, much to my surprise that “end of the world” is one of the most popular searches bringing people to the blog I run, Open the Future. It’s not that I write about the end of the world very often—there have been a couple of pieces—but attention to this question of the way the world ends seems to actually be increasing.
The piece that I wrote that tends to generate this traffic is the Eschatological Taxonomy, the “Apocalypse Scale,” which is a somewhat more cinematic version of what Anders put up. This is basically a listing of how might the world end. Just how bad could it be? Everything from a regional catastrophe to human dieback, civilizational extinction, human extinction (engineered or natural), biosphere extinction—such asmassive asteroid impact—or Iceball Earth, planetary extinction and finally, planetary elimination. An example of that would be: post-singularity beings disassemble planet to make computronium. I’ve talked about this a few different places and the reaction is usually kind of “Huh?” I don’t expect to get a lot of “Huh?” from this audience. There is a lot of interest and a lot of fear around the end of the world. Taking this massive text, I decided to make a more internet-friendly version:
This is available on my flickr page and it’s under a creative commons license, so you’re welcome to it.
This is the way the world ends… and yet, it doesn’t have to end. The future is not a destination, it’s a process. We have choice in this, and one of the choices we have is to build the kind of society that is more capable of dealing with (not always successfully) but dealing with big, potentially catastrophic problems. The concept that most people like to talk about here is resilience.
Resilience as a term currently has the most weight in the realms of psychology and environmental science, but I think we are actually likely to see it used more broadly increasingly over the course of this next decade, simply because the resonance it has for issues of national security, energy security, issues around structuring a society to deal with the uncertain—the capacity of a system to tolerate disturbance without collapsing, to withstand shocks, to rebuild itself when necessary, to improve itself when possible. Resilience is not the same as resistance. Resilience is not the same as strength. You talk about something as being really strong and really resistant, and yet when it collapses these kinds of systems tend to be brittle. When they collapse, they collapse utterly. Resilient systems bend.
I’ve been doing a lot of work over the course of the past two years thinking about what resilience means. How can we integrate this concept of resilience into the larger set of practices? Most of the work that I have done has been in the realm of environmental futures. How many of you are familiar with John Robb? He writes a blog called Global Guerillas. He’s a specialist in terrorism and national security but he has adopted a bottom-up model for thinking about new types of threats and emerging challenges to traditional states and national models. John wrote a book that came out last year called Brave New War, well worth reading, but he is also working now on a book about social resilience as a way of responding to the emergence of networked, bottom-up super-empowered, angry individuals and groups.
When I say that resilience is on the upswing as a concept, there are lots of reasons why I believe this to be the case. In all of this research, I have been thinking about it as a design problem. If you are going to design a system, whether that system is a society, an element of technology, a model for infrastructure, a model for how we can think about problems, what are the rules that you would want to include? Here are my resilient system design principles.
When you think about the design of a system, what kinds of rules do you want to embrace? I’m going to go through a list of about a dozen or so. I don’t expect that every resilient system will include all of these.
Diversity. A resilient system is likely to have a diverse set of functional components, so you don’t have a single point of failure or a uniform monoculture of components.
Paralleling that is Redundancy. Here I have shown a computer network, but I think the classic redundancy argument that a lot of people here will be familiar with is getting off this planet so that we have another place where humans can live—not putting all of our eggs in one basket. The notion that redundancy gives you the chance to deal with a pretty catastrophic problem by going to your second, third, fourth system.
Decentralization. Here again is this notion that if you are designing a resilient civilization you want to avoid the all-eggs-in-one-basket problem. You want to avoid having a single point of failure. It dovetails and overlaps nicely with redundancy, but it all comes down to making sure that when you have a resilient system that it is a bubbling ecology and not a monoculture.
Transparency. Now, transparency here is used not simply to mean being visible in how a process works. It also means recognizing the importance of information as a tool for participation. You have designed a system, you want that system to be understandable, and want people participating in that system to see what is going on and understand what is happening, but also to be able to make changes to it if necessary. The only way you can make good changes is if you know how the system works. There is a saying in the maker community that an object is not yours unless you can take it apart. In a way, that is an important rule for resilient, sustainable systems—you have to be able to take them apart and see how they work.
Collaboration is another element of all of this. You can begin to see how the skeleton of this concept is assembled. When you start thinking through what a resilient system includes, what kinds of things will fit into it, this is in some ways the intersection of the diversity argument and the transparency argument.
What is probably a little bit more surprising is Graceful Failure. Everything fails. You are not going to design a system, whether it is a technology or a society, that is invulnerable to failure. Acknowledging that failure happens, how can you design your system in order to make the failures when they do happen less catastrophic? This is an air brake from a semi-trailer truck. It turns out that the way these brakes work is if they fail, the default condition is to have the brakes slowly engage so you don’t have a runaway truck. The notion here is that if you can design a system such that when failure happens it happens in a way that does not dramatically reduce the number of choices you have to succeed. If you can employ that kind of design, then you have gone a long way toward building a resilient system.
A parallel to that is Minimal Footprint. This is a community garden in Santa Monica, California. The notion here in thinking about minimal footprint is that the fewer resources you depend upon, the less damage you do to the environment around you, figuratively or literally, the better you will be able to withstand unexpected changes. That is really what resilience comes down to—the capacity to deal with unexpected changes. Minimal footprint is simply a baseline condition. Very likely, you cannot eliminate your footprint entirely, but what you can do is minimize it.
Flexibility is another core element of resilience. That then starts us thinking about how you can design systems such that they offer us economies of scope. We are all very familiar with economies of scale. An economy of scope is where you have a system that responds to one problem, but that system also provides solutions for a multitude of indirectly related problems.
There was a question to Anders about the question of “Do you want to design for broad social resilience or to deal with narrow issues?” Since there is so much uncertainty, since the core issue underlying the concept of resilience is how to deal with uncertainty, by designing your resilient systems to embrace economies of scope you put yourself in a position to be better able to deal not just with the problems you have identified, but with the problems you have not yet identified.
Related to this, Openness. Openness is another element that weaves back in the collaboration and transparency, the concept here being that if you are making this an open system people can be not just subjects of that system but co-creators of that system. Open Architecture Network is a group of architects who essentially make all of their building designs, especially with regards to emergency shelters, available for any other builder to use. The bottom-left is an image from the open biotech project CAMBIA, that is actually operating out of Australia. Upper right is the trypanosoma parasite, which is one of the targets of the Tropical Disease Initiative, which is an open source response to diseases that simply are not profitable for your standard pharmaceuticals. Believe it or not, on the bottom-right is an open source hybrid car design. All of these have lovely world-changing aspects, but they also provide different examples of how openness can provide resilience.
This is the one that is my favorite but is probably also the hardest to really wrap your hands around—Reversibility. I started thinking about the notion of a reversibility principle when looking through the debates between the proponents of a precautionary principle and of a proactionary principle—that is, people who say “don’t do something until you know what the impacts are” and people who say “do something and pay attention to the impacts in case you need to stop.” That’s a gross simplification but you get a sense of the tension between those two concepts. What occurred to me is that it may be possible in many situations to make choices as to how you do something so that you can step back and say, ‘This started to have a result that I really didn’t like—let me pull back and reverse that effect.’ Can you do that all the time? No, of course not. That then becomes a design principle for building your system. Can I build this system in a way that reversibility is a possibility, so I can enable people to pull back when they start to see problems emerge?
The last element of a resilient design system is Foresight. I include this not just because it’s my bread and butter, but because if you start thinking about how you are going to design systems to deal with the unexpected, one of your best tools for thinking through the unexpected are tools like scenario planning, futures mapping, and a variety of these kinds of foresight techniques that have been developed over the course of the last couple of decades to confront issues around global scale uncertainty and the need to make big decisions. This is the Svalbard seed vault, a wonderful project. It is built into a glacier in Norway and it is designed to hold heirloom seeds from around the world, just in case. That’s literally the intent of it—build this vault for seeds just in case something happens and you need to get access to the original seeds again, whether it’s just in case of a massive asteroid strike, a war, whatever kind of reason. Go down Anders’ list and you have reasons to want to have a back-up of your seeds.
How do these all come together in thinking about resilient design? This sounds kind of simplistic, but at the same time what I have seen from working with designers and people thinking through social and technological systems is that embracing this kind of concept at the outset does change the nature of the designs they come up with. How do you make those happen?
ONLY YOU… in this case it’s “can prevent gray goo,” but only you. That is, this is a participatory phenomenon. Resilience is not something that you can let other people do and just sort of slack off. Resilience works best when you have broad collaboration and broad participation. I know we have some time for questions, so thank you very much.
