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Narrative Capture

Before we talk about narrative capture, let’s look at capture of another type.

Regulatory capture

Regulatory capture involves situations where a regulator ends up serving the interests of an industry, specific company, or other group. The people who are supposed to be making the rules end up following the lead of the very groups that they are supposed to be regulating.

Sometimes this is intentionally planned and financially supported and sometimes it just happens because of system design.

For a glimpse of thinking about regulatory capture during the late 1800s attempt to regulate railroads in the US, we have this attorney’s letter to a railroad president:

“My impressions would be that, looking at the matter from a railroad point of view exclusively, [repeal of the Interstate Commerce Act] would not be a wise thing to undertake…. The attempt would not be likely to succeed; if it did not succeed, and were made on the ground of the inefficiency and uselessness of the Commission, the result would very probably be giving it the power it now lacks. The Commission, as its functions have now been limited by the courts, is, or can be made, of great use to the railroads. It satisfies the popular clamor for a government supervision of railroads, at the same time that that supervision is almost entirely nominal. Further, the older such a Commission gets to be, the more inclined it will be found to take the business and railroad view of things…. The part of wisdom is not to destroy the Commission, but to utilize it.” — Richard Olney, letter to Charles E. Perkins, 1892

Or, as I’ve heard someone say, “I like having a big board to report to because they never get anything done.” Continue reading “Narrative Capture”

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Onward, Robot Soldiers?

I’ve written multiple times about basic values, technology trends, and how they can be causes of unintended consequences.

Today I’m exploring the topic of autonomous weapons, reasons behind their development, and potential outcomes. This is a big topic that I will certainly return to multiple times.

Autonomous weapons are characterized by understanding battlefield goals and finding ways to achieve these goals without human action. Such weapons are currently being researched, developed, and tested as intelligent wingmen for fighter pilots, as support vehicles carrying supplies and fuel, and as offensive weapons. Continue reading “Onward, Robot Soldiers?”

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Self-Driving Safety and Systems

Summary: Who wouldn’t want to improve the transportation status quo? But we’re looking at self-driving car safety in the wrong way. Self-driving cars will also lead to an increase in systemic risk, shifting some gains in safety. Over the next decade or so, there will be more serious discussions on autonomous vehicle implementations. Based on the way these companies have framed early public discussions I worry that people will look at risk in unhelpful ways. 

A recent paper titled “Self-Driving Vehicles Against Human Drivers: Equal Safety Is Far From Enough” measures public perception in Korea and China. Since I’ve written about self-driving cars or autonomous vehicles (AVs) a few times I wanted to comment on it and ways to look at risk in a new system.

The paper outlines studies estimating how much safer AVs need to be for the public to accept them. The authors estimate that AVs need to be perceived as 4 to 5 times safer to match the trust and comfort people have with human-driven vehicles.

I’m going to go through a few parts of the paper and tell you why I think the findings aren’t relevant to the AV discussion (though they are interesting). Continue reading “Self-Driving Safety and Systems”

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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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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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Autonomous Vehicles and Organ Donations

Recently I decided to look into the potential impact of autonomous vehicles on organ donation and found that this is a subject that many others have covered — even years ago. Surprisingly early in the history of AV development. Why this topic resulted in so many articles I don’t know. I’ve written about systemic risk and autonomous vehicles before but barely mentioned the potential impact on organ donation. However, after looking into the topic I came to the opposite conclusion of the other authors.

All the articles I found pointed to a coming shortfall of transplantable organs due to AV safety. However, I do not think that the impact will be big or even noticeable. Note that I am using a range of data I found about this, much of which seems noisy. If you have better sources or work in related industries, let me know if there are more accurate inputs that I should use.

(Note that this is different way than I usually write. In this article I’m not identifying an unintended consequence as much as I am saying that a stated one does not exist. And also note that this is a macabre subject.)

Continue reading “Autonomous Vehicles and Organ Donations”

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Should We Reevaluate the Precautionary Principle?

In March 2011 a 9.0 magnitude earthquake triggered a tsunami which led to the automatic shutdown of the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear reactor in Japan. While the reactor’s shutdown sequence started well, waves from the tsunami breached the nuclear plant’s seawall to flood and disable backup generators. Without the generators cooling the reactor’s nuclear core there was a meltdown and radioactive leakage. In this extreme series of events, what was the best way forward?

The Japanese government took action and required approximately 154,000 people to evacuate, the seemingly safe choice.

But was seemingly safe the right choice? Continue reading “Should We Reevaluate the Precautionary Principle?”

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Do We Create Shoplifters?

Those of you who work in a large organization occasionally might find yourself shaking your head thinking about a colleague: “What do they do all day?” Some of you might even think that about yourselves. Or you might think that about people in another department, especially those with whom you have an adversarial relationship.

At the same time, you also might be uncomfortable with the automation of certain tasks and possibly seeing those jobs disappear. Even those jobs of the unproductive humans you shook your head at. Fear of job automation and its unintended consequences has people thinking, but what are the roots of this thought?

Isn’t the history of technology about removing humans from a task and replacing them with machines, even simple ones?

Here’s an example from Vaclav Smil’s book Energy in World History.

Do you really want to be a glass polisher? And do the unintended consequences of job automation include creating shoplifters?

Continue reading “Do We Create Shoplifters?”

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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”