you want the future
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Perspectives sustainabilityTRANSCRIPT
You Want the Future?You Can’t Handle the Future!Perspectives on Sustainability
Brad Allenby
Founding Director, Center for Earth Systems Engineering and Management
Lincoln Professor of Engineering and Ethics
Professor of Civil, Environmental, and Sustainable Engineering
USBCSD
October 18, 2011
Relevant Trends• Welcome to the Anthropocene – the human earth.• The world is becoming much more complex and
information dense. • Natural systems become integrated with human and
built systems, and subject to their dynamics – examples: genetic engineering and IP; carbon cycle.
• Professionals and firms are being charged by society with responsibility not just for their actions, but for their technology systems (cf: Monsanto and EU on GMOs).
• Sustainability is becoming important social myth.• Technology is critical locus of accelerating evolutionary
pressures, and major framework for integrated natural/built/human Earth systems in Anthropocene.
Straws in the Wind
• Students and Google: why are you still teaching facts?
• Augcog and distributed cognition.
• ASU workshop with Sandia National Laboratories on cognitive enhancement.
• Use of cognitive enhancement drugs to enhance routine academic performance.
Straws in the Wind• Ambient atmosphere carbon capture
technology: design your own world
• Grow your own Neanderthal, and AI on the other side: the human as design space
• Radical life extension
• Privatization of governance: war and private military contractors; EU using NGOs to handleforeign aid; space (DARPA and 100 Year Starship Study)
Sustainability• A highly normative, egalitarian scenario.
– Note that many other scenarios are possible and, given current trends, perhaps even more probable
• Has become increasingly ambiguous over time as different institutions adopt different definitions to suit their requirements.
• What is to be sustained? The Earth? Biodiversity? Human life? Existing economic and power structures?
• Mismatch between degrees of freedom of managers and technocrats, and global sustainability issues.
• Oversimplifies complexity of current and future environments, especially given accelerating technological evolution
– Focus on resource use, versus information structures– Fails to consider even very foreseeable trends such as radical life
extension
Sustainability and Basic Political Values
Libertarian: justice is equality of opportunity
Communitarianisn: welfare is optimized by individual being absorbed in community
Egalitarian: justice is equality of outcome
Corporatism: welfare is optimized by free economic activity of individuals
Sustainable
Development
U.S. polity
Problem Statement• Power of emerging technologies poses huge
governance and social challenges– Sustainability and radical life extension?– Changing cognitive patterns among young?– Geoengineering?– Technological change as major unappreciated Earth
system (no discipline of technology studies)?• Military and security needs major driver of
technological evolution, especially of Five Horsemen (nano, bio, robotics, ICT, cogsci)
• Military and security competence heavily dependent on society’s technological competence (US v. BRIC v. EU)
Complex Issues at Many Scales• Struggle for long term cultural dominance, with
technological competence a major factor (China versus US)
• All assumptions become radically contingent– Psychological and individual: are we redesigning the
human as an industrial-mil/sec strategy?– Governance: are we redesigning society as an
industrial-mil/sec strategy?– Institutional: roles of different institutions shifting
rapidly and unpredictably
Some Ways Forward• Technology analysis: policy response
matrix
• Technical CSR: Industrial Ecology
• Take charge of sustainability dialog for your firm– Unlike activists, you can’t afford to ignore your
portfolio of obligations– You need to manage technological change:
not just for firm, but for society as well
Technical CSR• Themes:
– Must try to understand lifecycle (easy for material in specific use; harder for complex product; harder for service – what is the “lifecycle” of the Net?)
– Must include not just environmental, but social dimensions – Serious normative issues: who gets to define what is to be
sustained, what social values to prioritize?
• Services much harder to design, evaluate implications, than products– Where is boundary between product, service, and earth system
(e.g., jet airplane, a product, enables tourism, a service, which is part of broader system of global travel including impacts on previously unreachable environments, airplane as disease vector, etc.)
Information Infrastructure Boundary Issues
Level Method of Study Main Impact (Physical v. Cultural)
Typical IE Design Issues
Artifact manufacture Traditional environment and safety compliance
(end-of-pipe)
Physical Energy consumption in manufacture; toxics in manufacturing processes; industrial hygiene issues
Artifact over lifecycle DfE, LCA Physical Understanding conditions of use; energy consumption in use; end-of-life management; toxic in product
Construction and maintenance of
networks
Systems engineering
Physical Evolution of technology (from telephony to internet protocol, wireless); interactions of systems components; efficiency per unit service; systems boundary
Services (e.g., broadband to
home)
N/A Physical/Cultural Definition of “service”; relationship of service to physical network and social practices
Social practices based on services
(e.g., teleworking)
N/A Cultural Both short and long term impacts important (and may not align); difficult to predict because of cultural component; triple bottom line implications, especially social (“digital divide”)
Knowledge economy/ infosphere
N/A Cultural Impact on social constructs (“wilderness”, “environment”). Enable postmodernist fragmenting of values? Enable world as artifact (real time comprehensive monitoring systems)? Substitution of information for energy/materials? End of “natural history” w/ human contingency built into natural system?
Changing Dimensions of Work
Manufacturing Paradigm
Flexible, virtual time and space
TIME/SPACE
Defined, clock time
Dedicated, co-located
PLACENon-place based, individual choice
Full-time employment
EMPLOYMENTSelf-employed,
full spectrum of
relations to firm
Fixed, impermeable
LIFE BOUNDRIES
(e.g., family/work)
Porous, constantly shifting
MODEL
OF FIR
M
Evolvi
ng
netw
ork w
ithin
globa
lizat
ion
netw
orks
Stable, fi
xed
institutio
n
Knowledge production, defined by intranets
Firm
Facility-based, physical
production
SKILLS
Dynamic,
complex,
individualize
d, unstable Stable,
clearly defined
Knowledge Economy Paradigm
Policy Response Matrix: Cyborg Insects Policy
Response
Technology
Level
Goals and Effects Policy Response
Level I:
Military effectiveness
Reduce collateral damage and increase operational efficiency in counterinsurgency operations
Goals and technology align; therefore adopt technology
Level II:
Security effectiveness
Protect civilian populations from terrorists and, through mission creep, criminals
Implement technology, but technology alone may not lead to achievement of stated goal
Level III:
Social and cultural effects
Ensure orderly society; likely to reduce privacy and enable “soft” or “hard” totalitarian state; shift of power to technologically rich organizations (e.g., private firms).
Optimistic goals likely to be undercut as those in power adopt cybersect technology to their own ends; Level I and Level III implications potentially in fundamental conflict
“He, only, merits freedom and existence
Who wins them every day anew.”
(Goethe, 1833, Faust, lines 11,575-76)