Earth
Systems Engineering and Management
10/09/2007
5:00 PM 10"250 Brad Allenby, Arizona State University
Transcript.
Statements in bold letters are my
emphasis, while italics mean I may have a
comment which will be
referenced. [ ]
00:45
The question
about geoengineering was interesting to me, because in some ways none of us
would be here if in fact we weren’t already geoengineering this planet, that is the whole reason we are worried about it. The fact that we may have not intended to do it, the fact
that we didn’t think about it rationally, ethically, nor was it part of our design[1];
that is relatively immaterial from the point of view of the systems involved in
the planet. It’s a geoengineered planet.
Beginning from that perspective I think we have to ask some questions about
what our responsibility is.
I like to begin
by suggesting that these approaches to earth systems are critical but they all
tend to overlook perhaps the most fundamental earth system of all as we go
forward and that is the human system.
1:30
I propose
to talk about some of the aspects of the human in a couple of ways:
The first
is… I think that raises the complexity of the issues that we are dealing with
far more than we realize, one of the things that happens when you have meetings
like this, is that we all tend to come from roughly similar backgrounds in terms
of values and priorities. But there is a lot of people in the world that don’t
share them, that becomes an important criteria.
2:00
The second
is the we tend to assume that we have a reasonable handle going forward on what
some of the possibilities are and therefore we can talk about it with some
degree of rationality. I think that is at best an optimistic assumption.
2:22
(Quotes on slide)
“We are as Gods, and we might
as well get good at it.” Stewart
Brand, 1968, Whole Earth Catalog
“The future is already here;
it’s just unevenly distributed.” William
Gibson
“Now I am become Death,
destroyer of worlds.” Vishnu,
Bhagavad Gita. Robert Oppenheimer at Trinity Test, 1945. White Sands, New
Mexico
A couple of
observations,
I picked up
a couple of quotes that I like for a number of different reasons.
The first
one is from Stewart Brand, 1968, Whole
Earth Catalog:
“We are as Gods, and we might as well get good at it.”
The reason this is interesting is that this goes
back to a period when environment and technology were coupled. Stuart Brand was
talking about developing technologies than integrated the social, the cultural
and the environmental. He was talking about sustainability before it was hip.
What it's happened since then is that we have de-coupled those activities; the
sustainability discourse tends not to talk to much about technology.
The science discourse tends to talk about
technology but not understand its most important dimensions which is that it is
profoundly destabilizing of our basic assumptions
3:20
The second one is there because; first if you
don’t know it, you really should, it’s a very useful quote to use in all
occasions.
“The future is already here; it’s just unevenly
distributed.” William Gibson
One of the things that is fascinating is the way
that technology rolls on and most of us are blithe-fully un-aware of the
overall frontier of technology and the way it is changing.
I’ll make a couple of suggestions as some of the
most profound. But a very simple example, is the fact that in the biotech
community there is a reasonable probability that we will be able to extend
human life to somewhere between one hundred to one hundred and twenty in the
next decade or two.
My students are generally pretty excited about
that, I am not so excited.
Pretty interesting to me is... you could go the
conferences on industrial ecology in Stockholm last year and you could listen
to a number of very educated, very deep analyses virtually every one of which is
obsoleted if you assume that the life span in developing countries goes to a
hundred and ten or a hundred and twenty. There is a profound disconnect between
the implications of technology that is happening today and the assumptions that
we are so blithely building into our models.
4:50
The third of course, must of you are probably
familiar with,
“Now I am become Death, destroyer of worlds.” Vishnu,
Bhagavad Gita. Robert Oppenheimer at Trinity Test, 1945. White Sands, New
Mexico
What is interesting to me is the original quote
was by Vishnu, Bhagavad Gita, but when it was said by Robert Opnehamimer during
the Trinity test 1945.
If you want to look at the single cusp where the
human species went from the ability to just do interesting things to itself to
the being able to do serious damage to the planet that was the cusp.
5:30
A lot of this is not new, if you look at
Heidegger for example, which we will, I regret to say, he was writing in the
fifties about the implications of a world where technology was beginning to
dominate the structure. And this is Heidegger as promised
(slide)
So
long as we do not, trough thinking, experience what is, we can never belong to
what will be.
The
flight into tradition, out of a combination of humility and presumption, can
bring about nothing in itself other than self-deception and blindness to the
historical moment.
There are two things that can be said about these.
The first thing is that these are probably the only two sentences he wrote that
can be understood without the use of powerful pharmaceuticals...
he was a german metaphysician.
The second in particular, is that last sentence:
“The flight into tradition, out of a combination
of humility and presumption, can bring about nothing in itself other than
self-deception and blindness to the historical moment.”
I would
argue that not only do we deceive ourselves, not only are we blind to the world
that we have created and are creating in an ongoing basis, but we have every
incentive to remain so. To remain buried in our disciplinary boundaries because
it enables us to posture in ways that don’t involve taking responsibility for
the systems.
One of the ways you can see that is the way that
we talk about energy. The patterns are very clear… right?
I mean you got India and China, they are
developing rapidly, they are putting up cold power plants and we are arguing
about Kyoto. There is serious disconnect.
7:15
So a couple of things we should care about. We
mentioned the anthropocene .
Technology, the integrated impact of technology
is staggering and it is not well understood
(slide)
·
Welcome to
the Antropocene (Nature editorial in 2003)
-- Welcome to the human earth
·
Technology, especially the converging foundational streams of nanotechnology,
biotechnology, cognitive science, robotics, and information and communication
technology, is critical focus on accelerating evolutionary pressures.
·
The world is
becoming much more complex and
information dense, and information
structures are growing at every level – and information is culture;
accelerating ICT evolution is accelerating cultural evolution
Look at what the railroad did to things as
diverse as the pattern of business in the United States. Small business was the
dominant pattern before the rail road, why? It was a local economy.
Comes the railroad, what is the dominant pattern?
Trust.
What did that change, it changed the entire
financial structure of this country because in order to finance the railroad,
you had to change the way in which finance was done across the country. It
changed culture, it profoundly changed Americans view of their fundamental
theology was, their view of themselves. Before the railroad we tended to view
ourselves as Jeffersonian agrarianists, after the railroad that was impossible.
The railroad destroyed, tore up, Jeffersonian agrarianism, we changed into a
very different country.
8:16
Now we are facing not just the railroad, but an
integrated change in Nano which accelerates our understanding of materials down
to the lowest level; robotics, biotechnology, information and communication
technology and cognitive science. It’s all changing at the same time. The idea
that we understand this; that we can make projections out a hundred years on
anything is laughable! … With all due
respect.
The world is becoming much more complicated and
information dense. How much have we heard today about information structures,
the impact of cyber space and the difference in systems operation that is implied
by the information structures we are busy imposing on ourselves? Virtually
nothing, why? Because the discourse we are involved in comes out of the environmental
discourse which focuses on energy and materials… and environmental impact.
That’s fine, but if we want to understand this world we have to understand the
information dimensions of it and frankly that entire discourse is not plugged
into any of the things we usually talk about.
9:30
(slide)
Trends We Should Care About
·
Natural
systems become integrated with human
and built systems, and subject to their dynamics: (e.g., reflexivity,
intentionality) – examples
genetic engineering and IP: carbon cycle and sulfur cycle management.
There is no “natural history,” only human history.
·
Professionals
and firms are being charged by society with responsibility not just for their actions, but for their technology
systems (ef: Monsanto and genetically modified organisms).
·
Sustainability is becoming a powerful mythology
Part of the
way you can see this is… think about natural systems and the way they are now
becoming integrated into human systems with results that are very profound.
Perhaps the best example is biology; 50 years
ago, biology was something you study out there, we were beginning to get a grip
on ecology.. Odum… people like that, but we really were studying it like a subject
out there.
Now if you
think about what we are doing is as rapidly as we can and we are taking
information structure biology, genomics, proteomics; we are taking through it
the IP system, the intellectual property system, and we are turning it into
various kinds of economic products.
10:20
Synthetic biology, what is the goal of
synthetic biology in its design? Its goal is economic.
But what that does is, it takes a system that
was previously outside the human domain and it puts it squarely in the human
domain and it makes it subject to the constraints of the human domain and the
behavior of the human domain which are much more complex that some of these natural systems.
“Professionals
and firms are being charged by society with responsibility”
Not a bad
thing you would think, except if we have
to charge firms with responsibility for social issues what does it tell you
about the failure of your governance system?
It tells
you that the failure of your governance
system is pretty much accomplished. That’s what it tells you.
Because if it weren’t you wouldn’t have to take
firms and try to get them to do environmental and social responsibility because
the government would have those in hand and then would impose it on firms as
appropriate operating through the appropriate mechanisms trough regulation.
The fact that NGOs have to go to firms to try
drive firms to do it indicates a failure in the governance system, moreover,
it’s a dangerous failure. Why?
Because,
firms don’t know that much about social responsibility. So what do they do?
They
implement what gets them out of trouble. It
works for the NGOs because they are the ones that can establish the agenda. It
works for the firms because they can manage to stay out of trouble, whether it
works for greater social good is a different question.
12:10
Sustainability
is becoming a powerful mythology, this is important… by the way, by mythology I
do not mean it in a disparaging sense, mythology as in a sense of a fundamental
belief structure. The reason that it is important is because sustainability
becomes more and more of the dialogue in for example engineering, and if
engineers try to quantify sustainability it becomes very problematic. If they
understand it as a general social goal to which they must be responsive but it
may change in different ways depending on the system they are working on, then
they can understand the system.
Ethical
structures
(slide)
Trends We Should Care About
·
Ethical structures (macroethics) appropriate for complex adaptive systems have not yet
been developed.
·
Highly
likely that technological evolution will become discontinuous in terms of cultural ability to adapt.
·
Foundational
values and cultural constructs become contingent
over much shorter time frames (swamp/wetlands, jungle/rainforest, wilderness
evil to good; natural/supernatural to natural human).
·
End of Cold
War destabilized global power
relationships (fundamentalism vs. modernity – in Islam, Christianity, Judaism,
environmentalism, Hinduism, and else ware).
Ethical
Structures appropriate for these kinds of systems have not yet been adopted,
this is a major problem. Part of the reason is… think about the ethics that we
bring to things like, is this a good energy system? Is this a good regulation?
Those
ethical structures tend to be fairly
utilitarian, that is to say I figure out what the effects of my actions are
going to be and then I implement them in
such a way that I benefit the most people as much as I can.
13: 26
Oversimplified
but that is the general idea of regulation.
The problem
with that is that presupposes you know what that system is going to do. If we
get to a point where we are involved in these complex adaptive systems and we
don’t we should not be relaying on ethical systems that presuppose a knowledge
that we can’t have. We should instead be developing ethical systems that enable
us to interact with the system in ways that are rational, reasonable and
ethical given that we know the system will evolve in ways that are
unpredictable.
14:05
I don’t
want to get too much into It, but I do want to make the point that there is a
danger as we begin to go out pass the relative short term in assuming that we
are competent to understand what the future will want and able to impose it on
the future.
One of the
things that you find if you begin to look back at the history of critical
concepts; is that they change fairly dramatically over time.
The idea of
wilderness when the Europeans first came to this country tended to be
associated with the satanic; and it was not figurative, it was literal. Read Emerson,
read some of the transcendentalist, read Whitman and the job of the European
settler in North America is seen as overcoming the satanic wilderness and
creating a garden.
But now of
course wilderness is where you go when you died and have been good all your
life.
My point is not that one is right and the
other is wrong. My point is that we are inadequately sensitive to the fact that
our culture constructs are historically contingent, and we need to be sensitive
to that.
Because if
they begin changing more rapidly than our policies what we are going to be
doing is embedding culturally contingent concepts into policies that then
become imperialistic on future generations.
15:33
Case in
point:
I was at
the Smithsonian… actually it was MIT ???
first conference and there was an environmental economist there. And he spoke before
me and he put up a picture of New England factory with the smoke coming out of
the…
The
postcard saying how wonderful was because we all had jobs, and of course
everybody spent 10 minutes laughing at it, and how stupid they were…
And then
before I got up I had the sudden realization, struck on the way to Damascus, that
I was probably going to be saying things that would sound just as stupid and
just as out of place 20, 30, 40, years from now.
So I went
up there trying to figure out what was about to say that was in fact stupid.
Because
there is no guarantee that what we think now and what we are trying to impose through
our policies is any less contingent than that picture of the factory and what’s
even worse is… they may both had been right for their era. Which is truly
frightening because it means that our understanding of what we think we are all
about is more contingent than we think it is?
16:55
End of Cold
War destabilized global power relationships… why is that in there?
It’s in
there for a very good reason.
We tend to
get caught up in whatever activity we are involved in, and I think that is
important to go back at points and trying to figure out what the real issues
are. So for example with sustainability, one of the issues that came up in a
discussion that we had at ASU at the Global Institute for Sustainability is one
of the real challenges to sustainability in the short term, and of course one
of the real challenges is the democratization of weapons of mass destruction.
People talk
a lot about democratizing technology as if it were a good thing and in some
ways it is, but we have also democratize the dark side of technology.
The
biotechnology, I am sure that now there are many, many laboratories around MIT
where you can build the 1918 flu virus if you want. I don’t recommend it, I am
sure homeland defense doesn’t recommend it, but, it’s doable.
The
democratization of nuclear weapons is what scares a lot of the expert that look
at potential 5,10, 15 year meltdown scenarios for the world. Why? Because if
you set off a nuclear weapon in a mayor America city there is not city,
including NY that we couldn’t survive having disappear, as difficult and ugly
as that would be.
It’s the
after effects of such an attack, the United States very emotional, very angry, heavily
armed and undoubtedly very susceptible to demagoguery at that point.
That’s the
thing that people worry about in the State Department and in the Pentagon.
That’s the kind
of challenge we need to think about as we bring these other issues.
19:00
(slide)
Trends We Should Care About
·
Terrorism
and national security increasingly drive technological evolution (e.g.,
reversing cognitive enhancement to create cognitive de-enhancement weapons).
·
Role of
nation-state changing profoundly, leading to multinational governance power
structure.
·
The New
Great Game continues horses are EU, US, Japan, China, Russia, others. This
drives competitive technological explosion, especially of NBIRC.
·
Technological
changes undermines our language and the disciplines we try to use to understand
and model our world. Evolutionary biology segues into synthetic biology, and
the biodiversity crisis becomes a cusp as biology changes to a design space.
·
Our
Ignorance is profound, and hidden by ideology, fundamentalism and fear.
I think
here the point of technological change, and this is something that Leon Cass
points out and it does so very effectible from his perspective. His argument is
that the difficulty with technological change is that it is extraordinarily
destabilizing… and he is right. The problem is that this technological wave
that is coming down on us is going to be very difficult to avoid. It will be
destabilizing but in way we are not prepared for.
So for
example, one of the arguments that one
hears is that the biodiversity crisis is not a crisis, that is a cusp that what
you are seeing is a shift in the information content in biological systems from
evolved biodiversity to design biodiversity, and that the amount of
information in the system is going to become even greater as we move towards a
biology dominated by design systems.
I don’t
know if that is true or not.
I don’t
even know how you measure biodiversity because if you are doing traditional
biodiversity you use species; if you are doing designed biodiversity it’s not
clear that you use species as a meaningful grouping of information structures,
because you can change them at will.
20:32
So there
are those measurement problems, but more importantly, until we begin to think
about those possibilities, you don’t begin to think about some of the implications,
such as:
Natural biodiversity tends to evolve towards
stability. Evolved (designed?) biodiversity tends to evolves because
we want to accomplish something, usually economic. Those to drivers create very different kinds
of systems and arguably an economic
biodiversity structure is far more fragile. If that is the case, then we
need to understand that before we get to the point where we start shifting
biodiversity over from natural to design systems at significant scale.
What is
liable to drive that? Look at some of the slides you saw earlier. Some of the
slides about agriculture for example. What is one of the obvious responses to
the challenges to agriculture? to develop different kinds of bio designed species.
Before we do that we need to think about stability issues and you don’t think
about that until you begin to understand the contingency that is now beginning
to creep into virtually all of the aspects of our systems, human and otherwise.
21:49
(slide)
Key Concepts
·
“Earth systems”
include economic, technological, and cultural systems, not just physical
systems. Moreover, the human natural built integrated systems of the Anthropocene
cannot be understood through just one worldview, be it scientific, theological
or postmodern.
·
Complexity
and focus on systems
·
Mutually
exclusive but equally valid ontologies
·
The world
as design space (e.g., from withdrawn from using fossil fuels to designer
atmosphere)
·
The human
as design space
·
Result:
radical contingency
What are
some of the key concepts?
Earth
systems includes not just the ones that we are used to thinking about but also
include economic, technological, and cultural systems. They have a lot to do
with what we end up with.
It’s very hard
for example to talk about island biology without knowing that there was a large
European migration which affected the biology of most islands that it came
across one way or another.
The second
one is the complexity and focus on systems.
Everybody
says this, but we still don’t know how to do it, we like to think in terms of
simple systems, we think in terms of
disciplinary structures and we react badly when we are pushed beyond
disciplinary structures at the edges of our community.
I like the answer that was given to the
question about shouldn’t scientists be skeptical about geoengineering…
absolutely they should!
But the point is not that the scientists are
skeptical, the point is that what they are doing is preventing publication at
all.
In law that
is the difference between, for example
saying what you published about me is wrong and actionable, which you can do;
and preventing publication at all which under American law, Constitutional law
is very, very difficult; because the framers of the constitution basically say
is: Hey look the way you get the truth
is by dialogue and debate. We tried
the other way and it doesn’t work so well.
Dialogue and debate
What is
happening now is communities are cutting out dialogue and debate, that’s very
problematic. It’s understandable but it’s very problematic
23:30
• Mutually exclusive but
equally valid ontologies
This is
really, really hard. This is not just
engineers sitting down with scientists, which is hard enough. This is engineers
and scientists sitting down with postmodern English critics… and that is very,
very hard! It’s hard on all sides. And the problem is you go to the scientists
and say look, you need to understand the complexity of human systems far better
than you do. So they say ok, and they go out and they pick up some book by
some whacked out postmodernist and it gets into some neo-Marxist jargon and it
falls apart completely you know; If I wanted to read about forwardism I’d read
a science fiction novel.
It’s a
problem! But it is not a problem that is
solvable by retreating to our own disciplinary boundaries. It is a problem that
is inherent in the complexities of the human world. If you don’t like it you
should have been born 300 years ago. If
you want to be responsible in this world you need to learn to talk across those
boundaries, and not add to them which unfortunately happens to much of the
time.
24:40
The World
is designed space
This and
the humanist designed space are what really is going to cause the most
problems. We are talking in terms of some of this model about a hundred years,
some even more than that. Well within that period there is lot of evidence that
probable scenarios, and any time you start talking in the future as regards to
technology you are talking scenarios, and the question should be: is it
reasonably probable; is it, no very
probable Not, is this what is going to happen. Because nobody has a clue what’s
going to happen. Well… no body knows the path, you can make fairly broad
statements about boundaries but you don’t know the path between those
boundaries.
The world
is going to be a designed space; and the human is going to be a design space.
This is
very, very difficult.
Now,
talking about climate change for example. If you start talking about trying to
change cultivars through genetic engineering, you are going to get a fair
amount of push back. I can’t imagine what it’s going to happen down the line as
we begin to talk about changing what it means to be human.
If you think that is funny. Walk into a
classroom and see how many kids have their computers up and are on google… what
does that say?
That says
that facts are irrelevant to an education… you can get the facts. What we need
to be teaching you as educators is frameworks, and patterns and models and how
to build meaning out of these different kinds of realities.
Why can we
not do that?
Well, for
the most part, we haven’t been trained to do it.
Look at the
way we are sitting today… you could walk into a medieval university and they
would understand this. I am here talking to you, you are there listening to me,
everything is right with the world. The great chain of being is in place. But
that’s wrong.
The way
that students think these days is profoundly different that the way their
professors think. Those kinds of changes are critical to understanding the
world that we are in. The result is that those things that we base our policies
on, our values, our structures, we know we are right; all of those are partial
and contingent, and what’s happening is they are being undermined by technology
and culture and evolution in ways that are very problematic more rapidly that
they have been in the past
27:30
Ok, what’s
one example?
(slide)
Case Study: The Autonomic City
·
Trend 1:
increasing integration of ICT at all scales in urban systems: smart materials,
smart buildings, smart infrastructure, regional sensor systems of all kinds –
an all interconnected. –
And increasingly virtual: highly complex Net-based systems (e.g., Google Earth)
are being mashed up against these evolving “smart urban components” to create
far more complex information topographies.
·
Trend 2:
ICT itself evolving to be qualitatively more complex
-- automatic ICT at all scales, from chip, to PC/assembly, to global
communications networks.
--
Piggybacked on Net, an auto-catalytic, self-designing system.
·
Result: The
Automatic City, already here, profoundly different from anything we know, but
essentially invisible to us.
One of my
favorites is sort of the autonomic city.
There is a
couple of things that come together in ways that we don’t understand which
means I don’t have to try to explain it which is all to the best.
We are building
information structures in the cities at all levels. We are building smart
material so that we know when they are going to fail, we are trying to build
smart buildings, we are trying to put sensors in, so we can keep track of
things like water systems; we are trying to create information structures that
override the electric systems. We are building information in every way that we
can think of.
Now some of
this is problematic. The idea of putting new information kiosks along roads
that pick up the transmission from your car so that we know where cars are at
all times… you know… it depends on how much you trust the government if you
like that one. But it’s getting built in.
Now that
would be difficult enough.
What’s
really interesting is that at the same time we are changing what ICT systems
do, so that information communication technology systems, ICT systems, are now
floating virtually on a series of different kinds of infrastructures.
The result
is, we can make these floating systems that are called autonomic. That is, they
can detect problems, they can design themselves in real-time, they can re-design
in real-time, they can heal themselves in real-time and we are building
learning processes into them.
Why?
Because the
consciousness of both organizations and individuals is the most limited aspect
of most of these systems, so we need to build in the ability for these systems
to manipulate themselves to get them to work in these complex structures. It’s
called augmented cognition, augcog.
29:29
Now, the result
is that we are building a profoundly different information infrastructure at
the same time that information infrastructure is getting built in the cities at
virtually every scale of the build environment.
Do we have
any idea what that is going to do?
No!
Remember
black Monday.
This is
turbulent example what happen, pretty easy to tell.
People
started to put in computer trading into their systems. The computer trading
programs were design to begin selling at a certain point. When you started
losing enough money you told the system, just start selling, get me out the
market and I’ll go back in tomorrow.
So what happens, well, the market starts to
drop, some of these computerized trading systems kick in; the negative feedback
is obvious right? Boom! Bottom falls out of the market. Um.. Positive feedback
falls out of the market.
What that
did, in the absence of any mayor economic change or phenomena it crashed the
market. Now notice that was a place where:
A, people
where paying a lot of attention, because it’s money, right? So they cared;
and b, it’s
pretty simple. If you have a bunch of sell programs and they all click in they
are going to be in deep yogurt! And it happened!
Now if we
couldn’t get that right, what on Earth makes us think we understand what we are
doing with our cities as we pile all this information in?
31:09
Another
case study
(slide)
THE HUMAN AS DESIGN SPACE: IMPLICATIONS
·
Given
economic, national security, cultural competitiveness, psychological and other
drivers, it is highly unlikely redesign of human and nature will be stopped
·
“Meaning”
will become clearly contingent, deliberately construed phenomenon (by the
elite? By democratic choice?). Think Fox News.
·
“Truth”
will be replaced by contingency and constructed behaviors and networks at
perceivable timescale: “All that is solid melts into air” (Marx).
The human
as design space
Leon Kass
starts out saying:
“Victory
over mortality is the unstated but implicit goal of modern medical science.”
Whether you
like that or not depends on whether you think is going to happen in your life
time.
He is probably wrong, that is probably the
unstated goal of most technological evolution in the west since about 1200, but
leave that be.
The
important thing is, that these kinds of, for example, life extensions are
beginning to involve very different communities in very different ways of thinking about these systems that heavily
depend on information; so the IEEE Spectrum is writing articles in how to
engineer the human to live to a hundred and twenty. The IEEE Spectrum… C’mon, they build chips!
But what
they are doing is, they are extending that engineering to a different domain. Those
kinds of jumps could be very productive, but they are very, very dangerous in
terms of ethics and social responsibility because no one is keeping track of
them.
32:30
(slide)
THE HUMAN AS DESIGN
SPACE: IMPLICATIONS
·
Given
economic, national security, cultural competitiveness, psychological and other
drivers, it is highly unlikely redesign of human and nature will be stopped
·
“Meaning”
will become clearly contingent, deliberately constructed phenomenon (by the
elite? By democratic choice?) Think Fox News.
·
“Truth”
will be replaced by contingency and constructed behaviors and networks at
perceivable timescales: “All is that is solid melts into air” (Marx).
The
important thing on this slide is that there is a lot of talk about slowing down
technology and trying to regain social control over these technologies; I think
this is very unlikely for two reasons. The first is the military and the second
is Scostsdale
32:50
The military is obviously very interested in
these programs which mean we are very unlikely to see these technologies before
they are already being rolled out. Augmented cognition is already a mayor, as some people here I’m sure probably
know but won’t talk about, is already a mayor investment area for the US
military. And what it reflects is the fact that now we have the ability to feed
more into a soldier, than what that person can possibly integrate in real time
in a combat situation, so we are building information structures that enable
him or her to do that.
We are not going to find out about those kinds
of technologies until they are already in place and that makes it hard to control.
The second
one is Scottsdale, there is an argument that the “aug” factor is going to
control these technologies and that people won’t want to change what is human.
I would say that Scottsdale core competency is plastic surgery. If you give
those folks an opportunity that is biologically based to enhance their
capabilities… its over! Look at professional sports.
34:00
(slide)
Case Study 3: Ambient Air
Capture of CO2
Technology for ambient air
capture of CO2 being commercialized (approx. $200 -$150 per ton CO2)
Global climate change is not
inevitable, but a price point issue.
Focus on fossil fuels use is
obsolete as is existing regulatory/treaty process (strong institutional and
individual opposition as a result)
Undermines use of global
climate change as lever for social engineering
Relevant question becomes much
more fundamental: What kind of world do you want – 280 ppm equivalent? 360?
550? – and who gets to choose?
Distributional effects are potentially significant.
I want to
point out something else in the details that
we were talking about , I want to point out that last fact, there is a
huge difference between the Kyoto approach that basically says; let’s just draw
back, let’s just not impact, let’s cut back 90% whatever it takes. Which
arguably… this may be a little controversial…
it’s arguably un-ethical because it presupposes that we are going to be
able to control India and China emissions, it pre-supposes that, that approach
actually has a chance of working. It might.
But I would
argue the chance that it won’t, which means that the fact that we don’t have a
good back up for Kyoto becomes a mayor gap in our ability to manage climate
over the longer term.
But the
second question is…
There are
profound differences between saying… let’s just draw back and not impact the
world and the kinds of technologies that are coming down the pipe, assume this
is a scenario for now, there is a firm in Tucson that is commercializing this…
yeah... I can’t talk about any of it! Because I am under an NDA and I don’t know
if it’s going to work, so let’s assume this is a hypothetical still, think what would happen if we are able
to capture carbon… who gets to decide what atmosphere we get? Dow we go back to
280, 360?
Do we give
Canada and Russia more growing time?
Who gets to
decide?
The
assumption here would be any rational person would decide to put it back; but
that’s because we all tend to think along the same lines. It’s not clear to me
if you open that up to a real global dialog that is the answer you would get. I
don’t know what answer you would get. I do know that it’s a profoundly
different question than simply saying let’s stop impacting.
**36:10
(slide
un-readable)
Some principles
that help us understand these systems
The first
is: Only intervene when necessary and only to the extent required.
The second
is: Model and dialogue with them before we jump into them… why are we doing the
hydrogen economy before we have some kind of road map that tells us where maybe
problems with our hydrogen economy
The third
is:
We need to be much more sensitive to the
boundaries of our analysis in term of where their validity lies and doesn’t
lie, a scientific analysis is absolutely great but it does not resolve values
questions.
We try to
do that all the time, particularly in the climate change and environmental
communities, and it is dangerous because if we get caught doing it, then we are
not only liable to lose the argument about values but we are liable to undercut
the validity of our science, because people are going to think that that also
is nothing but our effort to get across our own values.
The actors
and designers are also part of the system they are purporting to re-design.
37:20
Think this
isn’t a problem? If the IPCCC is right they are wrong.
Let’s say
the IPCCC is right and all this bad things are going to happen and everybody
reacts and we stop them from happening then everybody goes back to the IPCCC
and ask where the hell did you get those ideas from?
It’s a major
problem! If you get your model right you are going to disprove your model what
are you going to do about that, how are you going to explain that to the
public?
37:55
Implicit
social engineering agendas
One of the
interesting things about the climate change debate is that it always phrased in
terms of scientific values. Very few people are willing to say… and by the way
we got to get those Americans to change their consumption patterns.
Where this
comes out is if you work with one of these technologies, like the ambient air
capture technology and you go to different environmental groups, the
environmental groups that are interested in a particular species, the
preservationists, they tend to like the technology because it will stop climate
change if its rolled out at scale.
The activist
environmental groups hate it because it doesn’t force people to change.
So there is
a question you need to answer… are you in this to force people to change or are
you in this to try to change the system itself or if you think it has to be
both are you really willing to try to take the chance, again, that you’d get
caught doing it.
39:05
*Transparent
governance, yes, how do you make that happen? That is the question.
39:10
*We must
learn to engineer and manage complex systems not just artifacts
This a very
critical thing that none of us do well. We don’t know what this systems are
going to do, what we net to do is to get much better at dialoguing with them
and much less concern about specific short term actions
*Insure
continues learning, great we should try that.
*whenever possible engineer changes should be
incremental and reversible
Look at the geoengineering approaches across
the board and apply this single metric and it will kick some of them out.
You do not want to do something mayor that you
can’t reverse.
I don’t like putting sulfur in the air
primarily because it doesn’t solve the problem of acidifying oceans it’s a
partial fix and not a very good fix at that.
On the other hand do I like it better than
trying to put something in space that I can’t get at? Yes, because sulfur runs out
eventually, so it has a limited time frame, it’s reversible. [2]
So I think
we know how to do some things we don’t give ourselves enough credit about it,
we just have to get more explicit about it.
40:30
*we need to
work on resiliency not just redundancy. And the difference is
With resiliency
you look at the entire system including the social and the human dimensions.
New Orleans
failed and still fails not because the levies broke, because a huge number of things,
some of which are very subtle, like the absence of the MPs that could have
restored order had not all been sent to Iraq. That created a huge vulnerability
which was completely unrecognized until after the fact… when it was too late.
If we focus
on resiliency of these systems and in developing option spaces which enhance
our ability to create resiliency then I think we are beginning to get at the
kinds of behaviors that are going to be critical as we begin to move into a
world that is essentially uncharted.
Thank You.
-------------------------
One of my
questions is:
[1] How do
we know it wasn’t by design?
The fossil
fuel industry aided by the transportation, maritime shipping and air, has
denied the effects of fossil fuel emissions on climate, even now. While cheerfully
preparing for the “Coming Arctic Boom”
After all
the melting of the Arctic has been proposed before:
P.M. Borisov's Proposed Method of Melting the Arctic Ice Cap
“This material
presents the plan of Petr Mikhailovich Borisov for melting the Arctic ice cap.
If the Arctic ice is once melted much less of the sun's radiation will be
reflected out into space and therefore the arctic ice cap will not re-form. An
ice-free Arctic Ocean would be a great boon to oceanic shipping, especially
between Europe and East Asia. Much land in northern Canada and Siberia would be
freed of permafrost and made suitable for agriculture. Borisov believed that an
ice-free Arctic Ocean would lead to increased evaporation of water and hence
increased rainfall worldwide, including the region of Sahara Desert leading to
grass growing there. Borisov considers all of the impacts of the melting of the
Arctic ice cap to be beneficial. He asserts that the melting of the Greenland
ice cap would raise sea levels at a rate of only 1.5 to 2 mm per year.”
“The idea of melting the Arctic ice cap goes
back at to 1877 when Harvard geologist Nathaniel Shaler proposed channeling more of the
warm Kuroshio Current through the Bering Strait. Carroll Livingston Riker in 1912 proposed using a 200 mile jetty
off Newfoundland to divert more of the Gulf Stream to the Arctic Basin. Julian Huxley while he was head of UNESCO
proposed, in 1946, to use nuclear weapons to break up the Arctic ice cap.
Borisov in his article lists the more recently suggested methods for melting
the Arctic ice cap.
The Soviet Scientist Who Dreamed of Melting the Arctic with a 55 Mile
Dam
By Derek
Mead
“As much as we worry about climate change
today, a warm, melted Arctic was actually a dream of geoengineers since at
least the 19th century. But at the height of the Cold War, a Soviet scientist named Petr
Mikhailovich Borisov proposed what may be the most ambitious Arctic melting
project ever conceived: a dam spanning the 55 mile Bering Strait that would be
big enough to redirect the currents of the world's oceans and force warming
water to melt the Arctic Ocean forever.”
As the warm
Gulf Stream turns into the North Atlantic Current on its path towards the
Arctic Circle, it gradually loses heat as it's bombarded by cold flows heading
south from the ice. Eventually, it cools down completely, and powered by cold
Pacific streams heading through the Bering Strait, turns back around, as shown
in the offset figure below.”
Source: P.M.
Borisov, "Can we Control the Arctic Climate?", Bulletin of the Atomic
Scientists, March, 1969, pp. 43-48.
The Coming Arctic Boom As the Ice Melts, the Region Heats Up
By Scott G.
Borgerson
July/August
2013
“Of course,
while Arctic warming is a fait accompli, it should not be taken as a license to
recklessly plunder a sensitive environment. If developed responsibly, however,
the Arctic’s bounty could be of enormous benefit to the region’s inhabitants
and to the economies that surround it. That’s why all the Arctic countries need
to continue their cooperation and get to work establishing a shared vision of
sustainable development, and why the United States in particular needs to start
treating the region as an economic and foreign policy priority, as China is.
Like it or not, the Arctic is open for business, and governments and investors
have every reason to get in on the ground floor.”
Earth
Systems Engineering and Management
10/09/2007
5:00 PM 10"250 Brad Allenby, Arizona State University
MIT description:
If you take
as a given that humans now live on a geoengineered planet, then what is our
responsibility for the future? Before discussing how to deal with Earth
systems, Brad Allenby asks that we think carefully about the complexity of
human systems, especially our tendency to generate far more complexity than we
realize, and to assume "that we have a reasonable handle going forward and can therefore talk about (the
future) with some degree of rationality."
In a talk
that kicks off with quotes from Stewart Brand, William Gibson and Vishnu,
Allenby pulls together some trends "we should care about" when
discussing solutions for global issues. He notes that just as railroads changed
American culture and “self" perception in unexpected ways, so will the
integrated impact of technology. Nanotechnology, robotics, biotechnology,
information and communication technology are all changing at the same time,
"so the idea that we can make projections out 100 years is laughable."
Allenby also notes that, to our peril, we're integrating natural systems into
human systems, handing off what had been public concerns to commercial
interests, failing to develop a governing ethical structure for "complex
adaptive systems," all at a time when the end of the Cold War has
destabilized global power relationships.
Allenby
worries that we are dabbling in systems management well over our heads,
building information structures into our cities' infrastructure, for instance,
and utilizing humans as "design spaces." Don't forget how the global
stock market crashed, in spite of carefully designed computer trading systems,
he reminds us. How can we approach earth systems engineering in a way so as to
do no harm, much less leave things better off? Some principles Allenby
recommends: "Only intervene when necessary and to the extent
required;" model complicated systems before implementing them, and
whenever possible, make incremental and reversible change; acknowledge the
social engineering agendas that underlie the climate debate, and the interplay
between scientific analysis and values; and bring all parties to the
discussion, "not just engineers sitting with scientists, but with
post" modern English critics."
About the
Speaker(s): Brad Allenby spent more than 20 years working for AT&T as
counsel, senior environmental counsel, research vice president for technology
and environment, and environment, health and safety vice president. During that
period he also served for two years as Director of Energy and Environmental
Systems at Lawrence Livermore National Labs, and as the J. Herbert Holloman
Fellow at the National Academy of Engineering.
He also
taught as an adjunct professor at Yale University School of Forestry, Columbia
University 's School of International and Public Affairs, Princeton Theological
Seminary, and the University of Virginia 's School of Engineering and Applied
Sciences.
His
publications include Reconstructing Earth (2005) and with T.E. Graedel,
Industrial Ecology. He is the president of the International Society for
Industrial Ecology.
Host(s):
School of Science, Center for Global Change Science
CREDIT
MIT World
-- special events and lectures
LICENSE
MIT TechTV
Other links:
Updated July , 2013
Messing
with nature? Exploring public perceptions of geoengineering in the UK
Open Access Article
Adam Cornera, c, Karen Parkhilla, c, Nick Pidgeona, c,
Naomi E. Vaughanb, c
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0959378013001015#
Our effect
on the earth is real: how we’re geo-engineering the planet
By: Mike
Sandiford Director, Melbourne Energy Institute at University of Melbourne
16 June
2011
Earth
Systems Engineering: The World As Human Artifact
Author: Brad R. Allenby
Managing
the Earth’s complex systems and their dynamics is the next great challenge for
the engineering profession.
How are humans going to become extinct?
By Sean Coughlan BBC
24 April 2013
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