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Autonomous Vehicles and Scaling Risk

I want to see mainstream autonomous vehicles (AVs), but I remain bearish about mainstream high-level autonomy.

My reasons for bearishness are not related to the technology that powers self-driving cars, or demand for AVs. Instead, it’s the systemic risk that wide-scale AV deployments create. What will change when we have numerous fully autonomous cars on the road?

Most of the commentary about AVs doesn’t consider second-order effects in their deployment so I’d like to start a discussion on that. (In this post I take high-level autonomy as a technological eventuality and assume a political climate that supports that.)

Continue reading “Autonomous Vehicles and Scaling Risk”

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The Difficulties of Elimitigation

It’s said that to successfully eliminate something you must replace it with something new. We see this in the history of systems where people eliminated and replaced part of it long ago. They survived and so are examples of the cycle being applied well. But why is this method applied poorly? Where does it break down? Since there is uncertain ability and low desire to understand changes that might come after eliminating something, whether there is a replacement or not, how should we mitigate the risks that might emerge?

Between eliminating and replacing something there is another way, which I’ll call “elimitigation,” with “elimitigate” being a portmanteau of “eliminate” and “mitigate.” Continue reading “The Difficulties of Elimitigation”

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The Long Reach of Short-Term Interests

I write these posts in order to explore how systems work, especially the unintuitive, unseen parts of them. One commonly experienced cause of unintended consequences in systems comes from when actors pursue immediate interests, or short-term thinking. 

Short-term interest is one of the causes of unintended consequences listed by Robert Merton in his paper on “Unanticipated Consequences of Purposive Social Action” that I’ve referred to in the past (the other causes being error, ignorance, basic values, and the self-defeating prophecy). Merton actually called it the “imperious immediacy of interest,” but I’m sticking with “short-term interest” in this post.

Let’s look at what short-term vs long-term interests are, why we have them, and how they impact us in unexpected ways. Continue reading “The Long Reach of Short-Term Interests”

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Systems for Spreading (Diseases and Religions)

How do things spread? How fast can something spread? To how many people can one “infected” person transmit a condition?

Let’s look at some of the unintended consequences of systems for spreading in diseases and religions. And I’m not saying that diseases are religions or religions are diseases, just that they have similarities in the way they spread. Understanding that helps us understand our history. Continue reading “Systems for Spreading (Diseases and Religions)”

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Victims of Fashion

Individuals typically fit in with the fashions of their time rather than entirely invent their own. What happens to be popular during our lifespans, and especially our younger lives when we more often seek fashionable options, is a matter of luck. Most of us have only a slight impact on these decisions. What are the unintended consequences that can follow? Continue reading “Victims of Fashion”

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Vultures and Ventures (Structure of Growth and Decline)

Vultures: Why are vultures dying in large numbers around the world? What else happens when the vultures decline? And let’s ask the question few are comfortable asking: How much is a species worth?

Ventures: Why do well-funded, fast-growing startups die? What else happens when they die? And let’s ask the question that is often ignored: Who wins in the process? Continue reading “Vultures and Ventures (Structure of Growth and Decline)”

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Eradication’s Good Intentions (Mosquitoes & More)

While AIDS, cancer, and heart disease get the headlines, malaria still kills large numbers of people. An estimated range of annual deaths from malaria is 435K to 720K a year (2015), with 90% of deaths located in Africa. These numbers have decreased significantly in the last 10 years but also note that 70% of deaths are from the under 5-year old age group.

Unlike the other diseases mentioned above, the way people get malaria and the way the disease spreads is different. That means when it comes to considering eradicating the many species of single-celled plasmodium parasite that cause malaria, some plans actually call for the eradication of mosquitoes — the vector carrying the parasite and infecting humans.

This post is speculative since malaria and mosquito eradication have not been tried except locally. But there are proposals for global or regional mosquito eradication. In a connected global ecosystem, where connections are not well-understood (or are they?), where do you take a risk? Would the decision to eradicate mosquitoes already have been made if malaria deaths were mostly based in other parts of the world? What could be unintended consequences of mosquito eradication? Continue reading “Eradication’s Good Intentions (Mosquitoes & More)”

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A City Too Familiar (the Spread of Disease)

The impact of diseases and epidemics on human life is as old as humanity. Disease is mentioned in texts thousands of years old, its presence changed political and economic history, cultural habits, and even morality. But often we think of disease as a stranger. It’s something that comes from somewhere else. But the systems that are in place affect how easily disease moves among us.

Let’s look into how disease impacts us with unintended consequences. First, a view from fiction.  Continue reading “A City Too Familiar (the Spread of Disease)”