I just finished a book called "Hieroglyph: Stories & Visions for a Better Future", from William Morrow an Imprint of HarperCollins Publishers, a collection of science fiction stories and nonfiction essays, of techno-optimism that challenge us to image fully, think broadly, and do Big Stuff. It is a product of the Center for Science and the Imagination at Arizona State University.
CLICK HERE to the book's website.
The story that produced this post is "Degrees of Freedom" by Karl Schroeder.
Humanity's biggest problem isn't how to imagine or design solutions. Our problem is we can't agree to implement them.
How we decide important thinks in groups, is the "meta-problem" that trumps all other issues. If we solve it, our other crises become manageable. If we don't solve it, it doesn't matter how many fixes we come up with. If we can't get them implemented, we might as well not waste our time.
Many of our most important problems are ill-defined. There's little agreement surrounding possible solutions to such problems, and there's no way to verify if a proposed fix will work or if one that's been tried has worked. These are called "wicked problems" because you cannot simply engineer a solution to them. Fortunately, methods do exist to manage them, if not to solve these messes, to at least improve them. One such approach is called Structured Dialogic Design (SDD), which was developed by the Institute for 21st Century Agoras, primarily be cyberneticist Alexander Christakis. SDD builds upon decades of research into small-group interactions to providea process whereby people with radically, even hostile, agendas can sit down together and agree upon mutually beneficial plans of actions. An introduction to this process can be found in the book The Talking Point, by Thomas R. Flanagan and Alexander N. Christakis.
There is no single solution to the problem of human governance, because politics is a wicked problem. That doesn't mean we can't improve political processes at all levels by solving many smaller sub-issues using communications technologies, cognitive bias filtering software, decision-making strategies, and so on. SDD is just one example of how to do this. "Degrees of Freedom" showcases a possible set of such improvements, just a tiny subset of the many possibilities.
Some ideas about possible solutions:
Dorians
Humans are hardwired to detect extremely subtle differences in facial expression. In 1973, Herman Chernoff suggested using this capability to make complex multivariant data more easily visible to analysts. Different parameters of a complex data set are mapped to different features on these "Chernoff faces," making it easy for viewers to perceive small differences between sets.
Extending this idea. Dorians are pictured of yourself that are more or less happy, healthy, or fit depending on how your current behaviors or habits are trending. Basically, they show you your future self as you might look if you keep doing what you're doing. Dorians are a natural and intuitive interface for "quantified Self" apps such as sports and fitness trackers, though in this story they also interpret the results of more significant life choices.
In the story, you can see how the imagined augmented reality app "Nexcity" is a form of a urban development Dorain.
Liaisons
This is a concept developed by the story's author for a Canadian military foresight project in 2009. A Liaison is a Dorian that personifies a corporation, government, organization, or group. It can serve as your interface to them. For instance, when you do online banking you might choose to do so by talking to the bank's Liaison. The trick is that the bank doesn't control how the Liaison appears and behaves, instead its personality is an aggregate of the public's experience of the organization, its social media "like" and "dislikes". A company that tries to paper over bad practices, lies to its customers and the press, etc., will have a shifty looking Liaison. One that promotes philanthropic causes will look saintly, and so on.
Padgets
Padgets are a European Union experiment in democratic technology. It stands for "Policy Gadget".
CLICK HERE to find out how it works.
SimCanada
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change shows how large sets of diverse models can be ganged together to create robust quantitative simulations of the future. SimCanada and its imitators build on this technology by using climatic, economic, social, and cultural data to present constantly updated future versions of the country. Citizens can explore possible outcomes of economic and political policies, climate changes, and wildcard events by running them through the models. With a gamified graphical interface, the system will even let you walk through your city or province as it might appear years from now, in effect, as a national or urban Dorian.
GWAIICOIN AND THE BLOCK CHAIN
Gwaiicoin is an altcoin, a derivative of Bitcoin. Bitcoin while interesting, is a sideshow to the more important technology underlying it. This technology is a cryptographic system known as the Block Chain. It can be used for far more than "just" creating a revolutionary new form of money. The Block Chain can support decentralized, fraud-proof implementations of nearly any kind of registry. Everything from voting systems, citizenship and ownership contracts, constitutions, corporate structures, and decision-making processes. Faced with the question of "Who has ultimate authority?" on nearly any matter, the answer no longer needs to be some committee, statute, ministry, board, or person. The answer can be "the stakeholders, directly, using the Block Chain".
Project Cybersyn
Cyberneticist Stafford Beer partnered with the Chilean government of Salvador Allende from 1971 to 1973 to build a new form of government based on cybernetic principles. Project Cybersyn was a new model of socialism, a "Third Way" that was different from both capitalism and Soviet or Maoist communism. Cybersyn was based on advanced communications and feedback systems. When Allende was killed in the 1973 coup, the system was destroyed.
CLICK HERE for a book review and more information about these technologies.
NYC Wins When Everyone Can Vote! Michael H. Drucker
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