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Is the World Getting Safer?

It’s common to hear that the world has become safer. Likewise, a common criticism of those who disagree is that they are ignorant of the facts. According to some measures, we have seen decades or even centuries of improvement in the form or lower violence, with instances of war or homicides per capita often presented as relevant factors.

Let’s look at how this relates to studying systems and unintended consequences.

From a talk by Steven Pinker on the topic:

“Homicide rates plunge whenever anarchy and the code of vendetta are replaced by the rule of law. It happened when feudal Europe was brought under the control of centralized kingdoms… It happened again in colonial New England, in the American Wild West when the sheriffs moved to town, and in Mexico…. Continue reading “Is the World Getting Safer?”

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Reversible or Irreversible? (Voting)

At the beginning of WWI, French soldiers entered battle wearing red pants, carrying swords, and depending on rank, had plumes in their caps.

That attire suited previous wars where the technology and tactics used were more similar to the Battle of Waterloo a hundred years earlier than anything they were about to face in 1914.

A lot was to change in WWI, including the first mainstream uses of camouflage, airplanes, radio communication, long-range artillery, high-intensity shelling, submarines, tanks, poison gas, and more.

After WWI there was no return to what now seem like quaint military practices.

We make the same mistake when we look at some risks as being reversible when they are irreversible. How can we tell the difference? Continue reading “Reversible or Irreversible? (Voting)”

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Amazon’s Unintended Consequences

Writing about a range of unintended consequences from a single company is a new format for me. I typically have either looked more widely at effects from a new technology, policy, or event. But many companies create or house second-order effects.

As a start, let’s look at Amazon. Amazon was an easy choice to start with since the company is big ($321 billion in revenue in the past 12 months), has multiple business lines, and is a mix of software, hardware, and people businesses.

This article is long and it really only scratches the surface of some of Amazon’s unintended consequences.

Continue reading “Amazon’s Unintended Consequences”

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That Hair Trigger

A month after the inauguration of Donald Trump I made a mistake in my classroom. I invited in someone — someone I didn’t know personally — to be a speaker.

He came recommended, we had a phone call beforehand, and the day was set. He was to speak about the topic of customer retention metrics (what I teach off of this blog is quite different than what you might expect).

Halfway through the class, at the appointed time, he arrived. He set up his laptop and started with an introduction to himself and his company. But things soon got sidetracked.

At about his third slide, a strange look came over him. He started to make references to the recent election and how upset he was about it. Then the following exchange happened, which I’m obviously repeating from memory since there was no video.

“The thing you have to remember about Trump is that he is the Antichrist,” he said.

I glanced around the room. Continue reading “That Hair Trigger”

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A Question of Timing (Erasing History)

It’s may be a bit overused, but I’m going to start this essay with a Kundera quote from The Book of Laughter and Forgetting.

“In February 1948, the Communist leader Klement Gottwald stepped out on to the balcony of a Baroque palace in Prague to harangue hundreds of thousands of citizens massed in Old Town Square. That was the great turning point in the history of Bohemia. A fateful moment of the kind that occurs only once or twice a millennium.

“Gottwald was flanked by his comrades, with Clementis standing close by him. It was snowing and cold, and Gottwald was bareheaded. Bursting with solicitude, Clementis took off his fur hat and set it on Gottwald’s head.

“The propaganda section made hundreds of thousands of copies of the photograph taken on the balcony where Gottwald, in a fur hat and surrounded by his comrades, spoke to the people. On that balcony the history of Communist Bohemia began. Every child knew that photograph, from seeing it on posters and in schoolbooks and museums.

“Four years later, Clementis was charged with treason and hanged. The propaganda section immediately made him vanish from history, and of course, from all photographs. Ever since, Gottwald has been alone on that balcony. Where Clementis stood, there is only the bare palace wall. Nothing remains of Clementis but the fur hat on Gottwald’s head.”

There are numerous examples of removing someone from history, mostly from national leaders who didn’t need subtlety in their actions.

Some of the most obvious examples come from authoritarians and apart from Gottwald, include Stalin’s historical removal of Leon Trotsky and Nikolai Yezhov, or Mao’s removal of Bo Gu. But how else do we remove people from history? Does the inability to ever truly erase something online change this?

 

Let’s look at ways we choose to eliminate history and when we do it. Continue reading “A Question of Timing (Erasing History)”

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The Tiktok Ban (and the Openness Trap)

While I often say that I don’t respond to recent business news here, I have also recently broken that rule a few times. So I decided to look at the potential Tiktok ban in the US. To connect this potential ban to my other writing I’ll go back to Merton’s five causes of unintended consequences to point out some less discussed reasons for why the ban might be good or bad.

Related to the discussion around Tiktok, I was reminded that this week marks the 30th year since I first visited mainland China. I remember this because I was in Beijing at the same time that Saddam Hussein’s Iraq invaded Kuwait — the first week of August 1990. The hotel TV did not black out that specific part of the news.

Since that time I went to mainland China perhaps around 50 times both for work and to travel. For a large country with big regional differences, I don’t count 50 trips as a lot. But I’ve found my perspective to be different from that of others who spent more time there simply because I have seen the country over a longer time.

Continue reading “The Tiktok Ban (and the Openness Trap)”

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Garmin Hack and Dependence

Last week we learned that customers of Garmin, maker of GPS-enabled tech for sports, automotive, aviation, and other use cases, couldn’t fully use their devices, sync, or connect for updates. As the story unfolded and the company eventually announced that this was the result of a ransomware attack, it reminded me of a pattern I’ve written about before — the trade-off between operational improvements and additional systemic risk.

Garmin, and many other companies, provide what has become essential technology. This article is an exploration of unintended consequences related to system dependence, navigation, international differences, hacker ambitions, and potential future outcomes.

Garmin uptime
A snapshot of Garmin’s recent uptime for its aviation service flyGarmin.

Continue reading “Garmin Hack and Dependence”

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A Second Step (to Systems Thinking)

When we want to change, build, or improve something we often only look one step in. That is, if we take action A we will get result B. End of story.

That’s only the end of the story because we stop looking.

Sometimes we only look that far because of a lack of imagination. Other times incentives are misaligned. Or when change comes at us too quickly. We also often only look one step in because considering more steps is difficult or impossible. The attempt to go beyond those problems is sometimes called “second-order thinking.”

Here are some recent events and proposal that clearly involve more than a single step when it comes to outcomes. Let’s look at ways the first step can result in unintended second steps and ways to change how we assess outcomes. Continue reading “A Second Step (to Systems Thinking)”

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Scaling a Scam (The Twitter Hack)

Today I was reminded of the first post I ever wrote on this blog (Voice AI, Telecom, Scams, and Co-evolution), back in 2018. My first article was focused on second-order effects of emerging voice AI capabilities and projected a number of scams that the technology would enable.

While this tech also has many positives, I always try to get a fuller picture by looking at the system.

The world is full of trade offs. In the case of voice AI in the article, we have the ability to scale up scams that historically worked, but only in small does. The “hey grandma” scam was one example. As I wrote back then:

“An older scam that this tech will scale is what’s known as the “Hey, Grandma” scam, where a grandparent gets a call from a “grandchild” in distress. There are different flavors of this. For US grandparents the story is often that the grandchild got into legal trouble and needs money wired. In China and Taiwan, it’s often that the grandchild has been kidnapped and is being beaten up. Again, wire the money.”

Continue reading “Scaling a Scam (The Twitter Hack)”

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