Category: Irregular ideas

You wake up in a hot, stuffy room. You don’t know how you got here. You don’t even know where here is. There are no windows, the walls are plainly painted and there is a distinct sterile smell. The florescent lights shine in your eyes, making it difficult to sleep, even as you lay immobile hour after hour. But no sense of time makes it impossible to know how many hours you have laid there. You can hear people speaking but they aren’t speaking to you. You are aware of people passing by but they don’t acknowledge you. When you do manage to speak to someone, they don’t know what is happening. We are waiting, they say, but they aren’t clear what you or they are waiting for, or how long the wait might take. So you lay there. Disorientated. Disconnected.

You aren’t a character in a dystopian sci-fi movie, you’re just another patient in a hospital.

Why then, that experience? Why, if you are in a place that exists to take care of you, is there so little human connection? Why would caring, compassionate people knowingly create a system of treatment that places the patients in that experience?

To the hospital, in fact to any system, a person has to be treated as an object. Systems can only understand objects, they are unable to understand subjects. Since the sixteen hundreds and the thinking of Descartes we have placed the ‘subject’, the person who knows they exist because they are able to ask themselves if they exist, at the centre of our philosophical world. And over five hundred years that subject used the power of reason to conquer the world of objects. They created science, maths, technology. Reason lead to amazing advances in medical treatment that saves millions upon millions of lives. Reason created the hospital system. That system treats subjects as objects, people as things. The French philosopher Baudrillard talked about the triumph of the object over the subject. Perhaps it is the surrender of the subject to becoming an object.

Accepting of yourself as an object, your experience abstracted away by a timeless placeless room, you loose your origin. It doesn’t matter how you came to be here, how you became ill or injured, all that matters is that within the system, existing as an object, you the patient is not a real person. You are merely a representation of a real person. And it is the representation that matters. Symptoms written on charts, blood pressure readings, test results, dosages of medication, records in databases updated and time stamped. All these objective measures of the patient represent them to the hospital system. To you, reality and experience have been replaced by the signs and symbols the system uses to represent you. You can no longer ask if you exist because you think you exist. The representation of you exists because the system says it does. You have no choice but to do what patients do. Your pain is not real, it is just a precursor to pain-relieving medication. Your sense of disorientation and disconnection is not real, it is just a consequence of the system being efficient.

There is no escape from the system. You wouldn’t even know what to escape from. As an object in the system you are as much a part of it as any other object. Like all objects, you are replicable, replaceable, disposable. As one patient leaves another takes their place. The hospital doesn’t care, you patients are all the same.

The system treats you to make you well, without treating you well.

Rome is lovely in the summer. Warm sunshine, amazing architecture, tasty gelato and of course, sparrows. Evening skies are filled with millions of sparrows flocking to the city to find somewhere to roost. These flocks create the spectacular murmuration of the sparrows, appearing like a single living thing, changing shape and direction, moving through the sky as one.

Such large flocks with such beautifully complex patterns are possible because the birds follow three simple rules; if the bird next to me moves away move towards them, if the bird next to me moves toward me move away from them, but don’t fly into the path of another bird. No single bird tries to keep track of what every bird in the flock is doing, in fact they only pay attention to their seven closest neighbours, or tries to control where the flock should go. When every bird behaves in these ways, and reacts thirteen times more quickly than we can, we see the murmuration with it’s awe-inspiring wave-like appearance.

Sparrows can do this because sparrows follow the rules.

There are two ways to bring about and coordinate behaviour in large groups. You can have the top-down control, with some kind of leadership that knows what the group should be trying to achieve and has a strategy for achieving it. Or bottom-up coordination where the group is self-organising, has no agreed upon goal, and where the actions of individuals affect the actions of others. We call this stigmergy.

Invented in 1959 by the biologist Pierre-Paul Grassé to explain the paradoxical observations of how insects work as if they were alone while their collective activities appear to be coordinated, stigmergy helps us see that we might achieve things without the need for leadership. Stigmergy initially described how termites are able to leave a trail of pheromones showing each other where food sources are without any means of direct communication or centralised coordination. The term has since expanded in meaning to include ‘indirect, mediated mechanisms of coordination between actions, in which the trace of an action left on a medium stimulates the performance of a subsequent action’, and has come to encapsulate the opposite of ‘strategy’.

Stigmergy helps us see that not all behaviour in large groups requires top-down leadership with a strategy.

The principle is that the sign or trace left in the environment by the action of an individual stimulates succeeding behaviour and actions by the same or different individuals. Those that respond to traces in the environment receive positive benefits, reinforcing the likelihood of these behaviors becoming fixed within a population over time.

When the first Neolithic person blazed a trail from their settlement to a river with lots of fish they left behind signs that others could follow without the trail blazer having to tell anyone where the river is. As more people followed those signs they created a footpath for even more to follow. As towns were built and transportation invented that footpath became a road. The more the road was used the more was invested in making it easier more people to use the road, tarmac-ing it, installing streetlights. This is stigmergic behaviour through the generations. People’s behaviour leaving signs that guides other people’s behaviour.

For sparrows it’s quick reactions, for termites it’s pheromones, and for people it’s data that makes large scale behaviour happen.

Technology enables stigmergy on a scale and at a speed that we can barely comprehend. Forget ten million sparrows, we’re talking about the 4.6 billion people connected to the internet. And just as the sparrows show by only responding to the seven closest birds, we don’t need to be connected directly to everyone else in order for ideas and behaviours to spread and affect us.

These entangled technological systems, made up of all the ways in which data is collected, analysed and utilized, enable what Deleuze called Societies of Control. We are shifting away from Foucault’s Disciplinary Societies where people are coordinated and controlled by being enclosed within spaces (think about how schools and workplaces make such a big deal about people being in their seats on time) to a world where individuals are given the freedom to move around because it provides more data to power the systems.

The ‘app-ification of work’, whether by virtual meetings on Teams or Zoom or as an Uber driver being assigned a passenger or by updating a LinkedIn profile, shifts the power to the technology systems. Not to the worker, not to the manager, and not even to the organisation. With these systemised means of coordination and control there is no need for a manager to monitor attendance as the manager becomes one of those controlled by the systems as much as any one else. We are all connected always and everywhere.

When every business and government follows the same playbook of digitising their interactions with customers and citizens, then power is distributed across multiple technologies making it impossible to resist or challenge the affects of power. Control comes from the manipulation of flows of information.

But this is not a world of Big Brother or some other intentional centralised control imagined by Orwell. There is no one in charge. No political leader with aspirations of bending a country to their will. No master criminal sits in their evil lair planning how to take over the world. The apparatus of power can exert control over us precisely by letting us do whatever we want, and so there doesn’t need to a leader to control us or to rouse us to act.

We will have leaders in the future, but we won’t recognise them as leaders. Those who lead won’t be inspirational charismatic characters with lots of followers on Twitter, it will be those who programme the algorithms that caused all those people to become followers. It won’t be the presidents and prime ministers and CEO’s leading their people, it will be those who build the workplace apps and the messaging platforms that keep us connected. We will be led through the technologies that give us so much freedom.

Leadership of the future is distributed and decentralised across multiple interconnecting technology systems all responding to signs and prompting behaviours, and all without a centralised strategy or goal.

Economists want equality more than anyone. More than social change advocates, more than equality campaigners, more than any disadvantaged and discriminated person.

For an economist, success is when the global economy grows, which happens when more people enter the labour market and the spend money they earn. That requires greater equality. If you think I’m wrong, tell me why the standard measure for inequality is wealth distribution. We don’t measure inequality by how many people have the right to vote, or which countries maintain a standard of civil rights, we measure using the Gini index, which tells us how wealth is distributed across the citizens of any given country. A score of 0 on the Gini scale would tell us that everyone has the same amount of money, wealth is perfectly distributed. And a score of 100 would tell us that one person has all the money and everyone else has nothing.

By the Gini index, Slovenia is the most equal country in the world with a score of 24.6. With a score of 63, South Africa is the least equal. But why would we equate wealth distribution with equality? Is income inequality a solid proxy for equality in general? Probably not. Social equality is defined as having “equal rights, liberties, and status, possibly including civil rights, freedom of expression, autonomy, and equal access to certain public goods and social services.” What’s missing from that definition? Wealth. So, we don’t define social equality by wealth distribution, but we do measure social equality by wealth distribution.

Based on the logic of the Gini index, we could make society perfectly equal by just giving everyone the same amount of money. Every country in the world a Gini index of 0. And then what? How soon would the index climb above 0? As soon as any trade takes place. Once there is an exchange of goods for money then one person has less and another has more. The person with more money can now buy more goods to sell at a profit. This is how wealth distributes.

The board game Monopoly illustrates it. Everyone starts with the same amount of money but very quickly some players lose and some gain. The game ends when one player owns everything and everyone else owns nothing. The difference between Monopoly and real life is that in the game players take turns, whereas in real life no one is patiently waiting for the other players.

With the Matthew Effect, where the rich get richer and the poor get poorer, a perfectly equal society is impossible. If this were left unchecked, perhaps society would reach near perfect inequality where one person has all the wealth, just as in Monopoly, but in real life governments step in with regulations, taxation and benefits schemes to redress the imbalance.

Research by Norton and Ariely showed that Americans want better wealth distribution in their country, they just don’t want too much equality. Feelings of deservedness and effort played a part in their reasoning. They didn’t want lazy people to have the same income as people who work really hard, that just didn’t seem fair to them. So it seems that perfect equality as achieved by wealth distribution is nobody’s goal.

Maybe wealth distribution isn’t the best way to measure inequality.

Let’s go up a level. Wealth is just one type of capital, but it isn’t the only one. Broadly, we can say that capital is all the assets of value a person owns or has at their disposal. And there are lots of types of capital.

We have individual capital in the form of skills, understanding, physical health and mental wellness. A person can hold intellectual capital in the form of knowledge, ideas, education, even patents and copyrights as a means of controlling access to their knowledge. Material capital includes all the physical goods and objects that a person owns which could be exchanged for other types of capital. Cultural capital refers to the traditions & customs, and artistic outputs such as paintings and poetry. Built capital is the infrastructure such as buildings, sewer systems, broadband and roads that we might have access to. How much influence a person has on decision-making makes up their political capital. Social capital is made up of all the connections with other people and good reputation that we may have. And of course financial capital, wealth, the money you have in the bank, the earning potential you have for generating income and access to credit. We all have all types of capital in very varying amounts.

All of these types of capital, and many many more, form the true breadth of value exchange in society. Not just in that each of them can be exchanged for financial capital, as is often thought of as the motivation for having natural resources like forests and cultural artifacts like paintings, but for the value that they all offer to everyone. Listening to the music someone plays is a cultural exchange of value. Driving down a road is utilising built capital that is available to you. Buying a sandwich utilises your financial capital and the shop owner’s material capital to exchange one type of value for another. Sharing an idea on social media is a value exchange of intellectual capital for social capital.

In contrast to only using wealth as a one-dimensional proxy measure for equality, the more of each of these types of capital available to the citizens of a country, the more value exchange will take place between citizens. The more value, of all types, that each citizen holds, the greater the equality of that country. And conversely, a lack of any or all these things is an indicator of inequality. This gives us a glimpse of what a truly equal society could look like. It isn’t one where everyone has the same amount of money, we know that doesn’t work. but it could be a society where all of these types of capital are considered valuable, and where the exchange of value is recognised.

The human desire to create, in all its forms, provides the capital of our society that we all utilise and benefit from. The more of all these types of capital our society or each nation has, the more it’s people can utilise them to create more. And so a nation grows and improves when it is more equal.

This is why we should all want a more equal society. Because we all benefit together.

The productivity paradox asks the question; why doesn’t productivity increase when we invest in new technologies?

The electrification of steam-powered factories in the nineteen hundreds should have yielded huge productivity gains. Factories no longer had to be located near water or rely on shipments of coal to run a single massive steam engine, so they should have increased their outputs. But they didn’t. The factory managers of the time were familiar with how steam-powered factories operated, and so all they did was use electricity the same way they had used steam. A new technology but very little change. It was a generation later, when new managers took over and redesigned the architecture of the buildings, how the factory was laid-out, installed smaller machines, created new workflow processes, retrained workers, etc., etc., that factories realised the benefits of electricity. This wholesale change of everything that made up the factory required a new way of thinking, but still the factories failed to produce more goods more quickly. The productivity problem persisted.

In the 1970’s and 80’s, companies replaced typewriters with computers and ledgers with spreadsheets. And in the 90’s and 2000’s, the invention of the internet, cloud computing, faster processors, new software development methodologies, remote working, so on and so on, all promised to make work more efficient. The economist Robert Solow argued that companies could increase productivity purely through introducing “labour-saving machinery to reduce labour cost”, but in fact what happened was more advanced technologies required higher-skilled employees who demanded higher salaries, and so the labour cost increased but the productivity didn’t.

New Growth theory, with its emphasis on knowledge creation and entrepreneurship, argues that technology can only ever produce limited growth for a company, but that knowledge is an intellectual asset that enables increased productivity as it is non-rival and non-excludable, meaning the value extracted is not restricted by the value of the asset. That’s why software, the ultimate corporate intellectual asset, is big business. All software is fundamentally an attempt to solve the productivity paradox. Has it done it yet? Well, no.

Today we ask, will artificial intelligence and automation technologies take our jobs? And companies ask, will removing people from the process increase productivity? If you work in a certain type of role, one that requires following predictable, codifiable processes which can be automated, and your role pays enough that it’s cost-effective to automate, then yes, those types of jobs will be replaced by AI. Jobs that either require uniquely human traits such as creativity and compassion or where the labor is cheap such as delivery driving, won’t be replaced. The AI that does replace some jobs will create more jobs, and many will be even more specialist and higher paying.

So you see the paradox. But there’s another problem.

Organisations are designed to create and maintain stability. They are designed to actively resist change in favour of stock prices and employee retention. Because the structures and systems they have in place are not designed to change, they struggle to keep pace with digital transformation across sectors, industries and all of society. When technology changes quickly, organisations change slowly, and mindsets change really slowly, we get what Stewart Brand from the Long Now Foundation, calls pacing layers. If we wanted an imaginary timescale to visualise the different layers we could say technology changes in a matter of years, organisations take decades to change, and mindsets last for centuries. That’s the kind of difference in scale we’re talking about, and that’s why change doesn’t occur on a schedule. Digital transformation has to happen across all three layers, and that takes longer than we’d like.

Just as we saw with the factory managers of their day, our current mindsets and organisations struggle to adapt to emerging technologies and the new ways of thinking about technologies that are necessary for digital transformation, quickly enough. We still think of computers as a box on our desks that we interact with through our eyes and fingers. We don’t think of computers as sensor-driven AI at-the-edge monitoring river levels and controlling dams, or as a decentralized, distributed computing platform made up of lots of machines like Ethereum.

But not everyone thinks in old ways. There are those early adopters of emerging technology like AI, 5G, Blockchain, Internet of Things, 3D printing. These companies are not only leading the way, they are setting the pace of change. And it’s only getting faster.

All of which leads us to an interesting question: If there’s no productivity benefit for organisations because new technology does not lead to more output, and change is so difficult because organisations are designed to be stable, then why are so many companies trying to digitally transformation themselves? Do they even know why? Is digital transformation a fools errand of outdated organisations trying to keep up? Just as we see new technologies replacing old, is the only way for digital transformation to occur for new organisations to replace the old, and for new ways of thinking to replace outdated mindsets?

But even then, digital transformation still won’t solve the productivity paradox.

Excavator 288 is the biggest digger in the world. It can move 240,000 tons of dirt a day. How much dirt could you dig by hand in a day? More if you used a stick. Even more if you added some better technology such as a spade and wheelbarrow, but if you really want to move a lot of dirt you need an Excavator 288.

Technology multiples human’s efforts and endeavors. Excavation machinery multiplies our ability to dig. The printing press and publishing on the web multiplies our ability to learn. Bikes, cars and aeroplanes multiply our ability to move at speed. Technology is a multiplier.

And yet the big human problem that technology has yet to solve, and so multiply our ability for, is how to coordinate ourselves to achieve goals bigger than we can achieve on our own.

Some might say that we human’s have done pretty well coordinating ourselves to achieve big things like eradicating small pox or landing a man on the moon, or driving on the same side of the street, but there is still so much more for us to achieve. Technology played no small part in achieving those things, but perhaps technology can also help us solve our coordination challenges in new and better ways to achieve even more.

Humanity has always required some means of coordinating ourselves. It was that ability to plan and distribute tasks among a group that allowed prehistoric humans to hunt much larger animals. A small tribe of people would have regularly and routinely coordinated around achieving the shared goal of getting dinner. But of course, each individual would have also had their own goal of not getting hurt or killed in the process. So, if everyone helped then everyone benefited, but if one person did less, then they were safer but the chances of achieving the group goal were lessened.

This same thinking is still applied to the coordination problem today by economists and game theorists. It draws a distinction between the goals of the individual and the shared goal of the group, and it assumes that people are rational agents who make choices based on what is best for them, which often puts them in competition with the group goal. Game theory has lots of models to explain how choices play out in different scenarios, and from this perspective the coordination problem is an information asymmetry problem. If everyone all knew the same information and all knew what each other knew, then this transparency would drive vastly different choices. If all of the hunters knew that one intended to play safe, would that cause him to change his mind or would it cause other hunters to also play safe even at the risk of not having any dinner?

A posthumanist perspective would say that we aren’t really rational, intentional agents making informed decisions and that the systems we are part of affect our choices and behaviours far more than we realise or would care to admit. Although our morals and our legal system still centre around the responsibility of the individual for their actions, we are increasingly understanding how poverty affects crime, how commercial incentives affect business decisions, and how company culture affects behaviour within organisations, all things that aren’t the result of individual choice and behaviour.

Typically, our mechanisms for systemic change across society have been state-managed regulations and laws, often put in place because of market failures. If car manufacturers made cars that couldn’t break the speed limit, there would be no need for laws that set speed limits and punish drivers for breaking them. But they do, so there are. It’s expensive for water companies to have measures in place that prevent sewerage from entering streams and rivers, so they don’t do it well enough. Environmental conscious people don’t like it when waterways are polluted and so they pressure the government to introduce regulations. The regulations incentivize water companies to put protections in place by making the fines larger than the cost of the protections. And having put the protections in place, the water company increases the costs to it’s customers. These are the kinds of systems we are all part of. One where we’d usually blame the individual for driving too fast and one where we’d blame the organisation for choosing profit over protecting the environment, but all exist within systems that greatly affect behaviours.

Understanding how change happens in complex systems is essential for solving the coordination problem. It tells us that a single shared goal that everyone agrees with is probably the wrong starting point. We can’t say that ‘reducing inequality in society’ is everyone’s goal because it means something different to every single person who thinks about it, and not everyone agrees that it is the right goal, or how to go about achieving it. So we have to accept that everyone has a different goal in mind, that some of those goals will appear selfish, and we have to allow people to work towards a goal in their own way, even if it isn’t a way we’d choose or agree with. Without these kinds of freedoms built into the system coordination looks very much like centralised control.

The coordination technology of the future will operate within these most complex of complex systems. They’ll balance all of those players; governments, companies, individuals, and all of their actions; regulatory, commercial, moral, and they’ll achieve big goals. But what might the technology look like? Well, it already exists. It’s in it’s infancy, but it’s there. We are all already being coordinated by it.

Advertisers spent over seven hundred billion dollars in 2021 to get us all to buy things. That’s a lot of coordination. Social media platforms have 4.6 billion users. That’s a lot of coordination. Google processes more than 20 petabytes of data every day. That’s a lot of coordination. These technologies might not look like they are being used to make the world a better place, but they are most definitely coordinating huge numbers of people to behave in ways that further someone’s goals.

The challenges for the future of coordination technologies are who controls them, how they use them, and to what ends.

1968 was the first time humanity left earth for another destination. Borman, Lovell and Anders orbited the moon in Apollo 8 and then came home. And a year later Apollo 11 landed on the moon.

Of the 3.5 billion people that were on earth at the time, almost none of them would have had an inkling about how important those events would be for the future of humanity. But then, they also had no idea that by the year 2000 the population of the world would be 6.1 billion and that the predictions would be for reaching a population of 11 billion by 2100. They wouldn’t have known that, although the estimations get less certain, the high end prediction is for 35 billion by 2300. They couldn’t have guessed that in just over three hundred years there could be ten times more people on the planet than there were the first time we left it.

So while the nineteen sixties space race might have been nothing more than cold war posturing and propaganda for the politicians of the day, it was the first step in humans becoming an interplanetary species. It planted the flag for an ambitious and awe-inspiring future for humanity.

And the next step was space tourism. That may seem a little disheartening after such an inspiring start, but the government funded endeavour had done it’s job. It took on the massive risk associated with doing something never done before and proved it was possible. It’s time for the corporations to take over. Dennis Tito was the first billionaire space tourist, with more well-known billionaires starting companies such as Space X, Blue Origin and Virgin Galactic to commercialise space travel.

What does billionaires in space have to do with billions of people on earth? Living off-planet might be the only viable option for an ever-increasing population with ever-scarce natural resources.

The other answer, obvious to some, is to control the population of humanity to match the resources available, just like the rabbits and the foxes do. The population of rabbits and foxes within a given area is controlled by naturally occurring feedback loops that mean when the population of rabbits increases, so does the population of foxes, which decreases the population of rabbits and so the population of foxes. Both populations are intricately linked through a controlling mechanism. Humans don’t have that. There is no naturally occurring control mechanism to keep our growth in check. But there is another mechanism at play that can help us understand what might happen as population increases and commercial space exploration becomes a reality. It’s a mechanism that helps to answer the question some may ask, “Why do we spend so much on figuring out how to live in space when so many people on earth don’t even have secure and adequate housing?”

The Matthew principle of accumulated advantage, where the rich get richer and the poor get poorer, reached an intersection point in 2015. The richest 1% had the same wealth as the other 99%. It was an even split. Fifty fifty. They had fifty percent of the wealth and we had fifty percent (I’m assuming no one reading this is a billionaire but if you are give me call, let’s be friends). The trend of wealth distribution had been heading this way for a while and there is no reason to expect it to change. Soon there will be another intersection point when the richest 0.1% own the same wealth and the other 99.9%, and then again for the richest 0.01%.

Those two trends mean a lot more poor people who keep getting poorer, on a planet with increasingly scarce natural resources such as clean air, water, materials for building, that eventually will run out. What then? There are three drivers of population change; fertility, mortality and migration. And we know that people migrate away from danger and insecurity towards safety and opportunity. When living in space offers a better chance of staying alive than living on earth, then we’ll go. But only if we can afford it.

If you were a future trillionaire living on an over-populated planet with no resources, what would you do? You’d build a business selling a better life in space to billionaires. Space stations, terra-forming Mars and Ganymede, mining asteroids. All very lucrative opportunities. The promise of huge economic return will be more than the trillionaires of the future can resist. Space tourism is just the start, living in space is the future. And what of 99.9% of humanity left on earth? There is only one way to go. No more earthlings. The Bezoians and Muskites will take humanity to the stars.

What started as a space race between two nations might turn humans into a space race.

Criminals are better at their jobs than you are. But don’t feel too bad about it. The fact is, it’s easier to be successful when breaking the rules than it is playing by the rules.

Drug running is such a profitable way to break the rules that Pablo Escobar had an estimated net worth in 1993 of $30 billion, which in today’s money is $85.2 billion. Amado Carrillo Fuentes was the head of the Juaréz Cartel and his net worth is $56.8 billion today. And Carlos Lehder, co-founder of the Medellin Cartel has a net worth of approximately $2.7 billion. Clearly, breaking the rules can be much more profitable than sticking to them.

What would it take to stop you from doing your work? Laptop breaks? Colleague interrupts you? Feeling sick today? Would Pablo have stopped drug-running if his laptop broke? Unlikely.

The reasons for individuals breaking the rules have been explored at depth by criminologists, psychologists, policy makers, etc., with reasons focused on the motivations of the individual such as greed and revenge, and on societal factors such as poverty and unemployment (and without much agreement). But we’re not so interested in why people break or follow the rules, but why the rules are there in the first place, why breaking the rules is often more advantageous than obeying them, and whether we really need rules at all.

Our concept of laws and rules as being about achieving balance, order and harmony goes back as far as humanity has been gathering together in groups. Rules exist to create order where there would otherwise be chaos. Without rules, and the vast majority of people obeying the rules, our social systems (nations, organisations, communities, tribes) would descend into anarchy, right? This is the prevailing common sense we base the writing of rules upon. All rule-making starts from the assumption that people will want to do things that the rule-makers don’t want them to, otherwise why would the rules be needed.

This is the mess we’ve gotten ourselves into. We’ve created systems that enable people to do things that go against maintaining order, and then we have to put rules in place to try to ensure people don’t do those things. What if, instead, we designed systems that enable people to do things that maintain order, and make it difficult to create disorder, and so don’t need rules to control and punish people? What if we made it easier to be successful by following the rules?

The Code of Ur-Nammu, the earliest written record of laws, dates from the 22nd century B.C. The laws are written in a casuistic form of ‘if you commit this crime, then you’ll get this punishment’. So, ‘if someone severed the nose of another man with a copper knife, he must pay two-thirds of a mina of silver’. We don’t know how much nose severing with copper knives happened back then, but it seems these written laws were an attempt to create clarity about the consequences of breaking a rule. This was only possible because there was an authority that could not only write the rules but also ensure the punishment was carried out. Without that, the rules would have been useless. This is a pattern followed in nearly all later codes of law. They express a rule, which if broken leads to a punishment, which is enacted by an authority more powerful than any individual.

And this has been the pattern for all rule-making ever since. Throughout the rest of history we have accepted that people could walk around with copper knives and that sometimes noses might get severed, but if that happened someone would be punished. Never did someone decide to take away all the copper knives so that noses couldn’t be severed.

In more modern times we’ve come to realise that crime and punishment are better considered separately, and that the relationship between an individual and other members of society and it’s institutions might be more complex than can be expressed on a stone tablet. In the 16th, 17th, and 18th centuries Hobbes, Locke, and Rousseau explored the concept of the ‘social contract’. This implicit agreement among the members of a society to cooperate for social benefits, even where there is a cost to the individual, was used as a means of explaining the origin of government and the obligations of subjects. Unsurprisingly, the ideas were used to reinforce the dominant morals of the time and provide philosophical reasoning for things like land ownership by rich people and conscription into armed conflict for the greater good of one’s country.

The history of law, state rule and legal authority is complicated, spanning many countries and centuries, but the trend we notice is how obeying the rules becomes more deeply embedded in the psyche of people, those who adhere to the rules get no benefit, how those who don’t get caught benefit greatly, how for those who do get caught punishment creates more disorder, and that there is always a need for more rules. Never is there an attempt to design social systems that enable cohesion-creating, order-maintaining behaviour by default.

Perhaps we should think about it in a different way.

What if speed cameras fined those that break the speed limit and sent the money from the fine to five drivers who were driving below the limit? What effect might this have on the behaviour of drivers? Or better than that, what if we implemented speed-control devices in all vehicles that make it impossible to exceed the speed limit? Then we wouldn’t need to punish those who break the limit, and those that live in the area would benefit from safer roads and lower air pollution.

What if companies were led by socially-aware people who aimed for their work to benefit stakeholders across the global rather than a small group of shareholders? What if the global economy rewarded companies for being responsible for the externalities of their operations? Then we wouldn’t need fine companies for causing environmental damage or boycott those using child labour, then our climate and children wouldn’t suffer.

In the past, our society has had to rely on the authority of institutions or social contracts between members of society to create cohesion. But our future might look very different. The technologically advanced society of future centuries could rely less on rule-making and breaking, and more on enabling and empowering. Less on humans attempting to control others, and more on technology creating the right environments for cohesive societies.

Is this the rosy future we should all be hoping for? One of total control where no one can do anything wrong because our systems are so perfectly designed as positive enablers? Of course not.

If we removed all rule-breaking, we would halt the progression and evolution of society. Rule-breakers are a dynamic force for driving improvements in society. We only have the child protection laws that we do because of the awful things that have happened to children in the past. If tomorrow, we were able to shift to a radically different means of maintaining cohesion across society, one that didn’t rely on rules but enabled only positive behaviours, and it didn’t also have mechanisms for introducing change, then would society stagnate.

Whatever the systems of creating social cohesion we have, they need to allow for chaos and order so that our society evolves. Too much chaos and there is nothing stable to build upon. Too much order and nothing changes.

Maybe our system of rule-making and breaking works exactly as it should.

A few people saw the shiny discs skipping through the sky of the mountains over Washington state in June, 1947. Kenneth Arnold was the one who reported the sighting, but others saw it too. They all described disc or saucer shaped objects but couldn’t explain what they were. A few days later, and 1,700 miles away in Roswell, New Mexico, another strange sighting occurred. Reported as a crashed flying disc and then a downed weather balloon, it’s from the newspaper reports of these incidents that we get the terms flying saucer and unidentified flying object. From then to now a subculture of interest in alien life visiting planet earth has developed.

Even when some scientists became interested in the search for extraterrestrial life, it remained a niche subculture, not taken seriously by the mainstream. But, in 1985, in earnest, SETI began listening for radio signals from other civilisations. The universe is vast and there is so much to listen to that SETI points it’s radio telescopes at each star for only half an hour before moving onto the next. It’s the intergalactic equivalent of swiping left because with the briefest glimpse, that star doesn’t look like an attractive prospect.

Whatever Arnold saw, and whatever crashed at Roswell, and however many stars SETI listens to, we are compelled to keep asking; are we alone?

But why? Why are we so interested in the possibility of the existence of intelligent life? To find out that we are not alone would be the biggest event in the history of humanity. It would change everything. We could learn so much from an advanced intelligence, exchange knowledge and culture, science and technology. But perhaps the real reason we keep asking is because we don’t want to be alone.

As individuals we ache for connection, so it seems undeniable that our species, made up of individuals, aches for connection too. We look into the night sky and we don’t want to believe that, as vast as the Universe is, intelligent life could only have emerged once… but, as vast as the Universe is, we have to accept that we aren’t going to find it anytime soon.

And if we did find it, would we be ready for it? Not just ready to believe and accept, but ready to connect. When Brené Brown talks about creating connection she describes how it depends on showing vulnerability. Connection is a vital human experience, it gives purpose and meaning to our lives, but in order for connection to happen we have to allow ourselves to be seen. We have to feel worthy of belonging, have the courage to be ourselves and be imperfect, to show up where there are no guarantees. So many of us don’t have that. We don’t show our vulnerability as individuals, as communities, as nations, and certainly not as a species.

To connect, we communicate, and for many of us technology is the answer. We’re just not sure what the question is. Maybe we want to know if listening to radio waves from space, joining video calls, or using dating apps will give us the connection we need. Will the mask of technology make it easier for us to share our vulnerabilities, or does seeing other’s perfect Instagram bodies make it harder? Many studies have concluded that in-person communication results in significantly better emotional connection than that which is technology-mediated. But anyone who has kept in touch with distant friends and relatives by using video calls might say that technology-mediated communication is better than no communication at all.

Even if other intelligent life does exist, we need to connect with each other before we can connect with it. If we don’t form those connections, then we are alone.

Climate change is a big deal. Left unchecked, the warming of the planet will result in rising sea levels, the extinction of many species, the death and displacement of lots of people. So yeah, pretty big deal. But, not by a long way, is it the most catastrophic problem facing the ecosystem. Plastic pollution poses a far greater threat, we just don’t realise it.

When we think of plastic pollution we perhaps picture a bird caught in plastic can holders or the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, a floating islands of rubbish, but these images hide the real problem. We’ve been told that the problem with this plastic pollution is that it doesn’t bio-degrade, that plastic lasts pretty much forever. And that’s true, but it doesn’t tell the whole story. If every plastic bag remained a plastic bag then it could be dealt with as a plastic bag. Although plastic might last for ever, plastic bags don’t. Through the affects of UV radiation and the movement of the waves plastic objects are broken down into smaller and smaller pieces. 8 million tons of plastic is dumped into the sea every year, and it is all breaking down into microscopic plastic beads.

Fine, we might think. Plastic so small we can’t even see it. Problem sorted.

Microplastics with the size of 2 millionths of a metre or less are small enough to pass through the ‘blood-brain barrier’ that prevents hazardous substances from being absorbed into the brain. Let’s let that sink in. Plastic in our brains. And in the brains of any, and eventually every, animal on the planet.

Absorbed by ocean-living organisms such as plankton, which are eaten by fish, the microplastics work their way up the food chain to pose a threat to humans. Once consumed and excreted by us, they pass into other animals and eventually into every part of the ecosystem.

Microplastics are toxic to living things. They can cause cells to stop dividing, alter immune responses, increase vulnerability to neuronal disorders, damage vital organs and cause behavioural disorders. Knowledge of how microplastics affect individual organisms continues to increase but we have no way of predicting what effect they might have on an entire ecosystem. Or, as one scientist put it, “our understanding of their effects on ecosystem function, behaviour and metabolism of organisms remains elusive”. Whilst we don’t know what effect microplastics might have on life on earth in the future, we do have experience of humanity tackling these kinds of problems to look at. And for perspective, back in the real world, plastic pollution continues to mount up. In 1950, 2 million metric tons of plastic was produced globally. By 2015, it was 381 million metric tons. Over the last 80 years more than 6.3 billion metric tons of plastic waste has been produced, and most of it is never recycled. So what might we do about this problem?

Erica Cirino, science writer, author and artist, writes about the how the key to solving the problem of plastic waste lies in holding accountable those industries that make and sell plastic products. These industries, she says, must be made to stop using their exploitative and dangerous systems. “Hopefully, plastic will one day be replaced with reusable solutions that help us outsmart corporate interests and change our wasteful, damaging habits altogether.”

This is one approach to solving a problem; remove the cause. It seems simple and obvious enough, but we can never tell what consequences may result. Complex problems almost never have simple solutions. And every solution invariably has unintended consequences.

Tech-optimism might take a different approach to the problem. It might say that given enough innovation a solution can be developed for any problem, no matter how complex. In applying plastic production technology in an attempt to solve a post-war economic problem, we created an ecological one, but no reason not to believe that applying technology to an ecological problem couldn’t be effective.

Except that technology solutions often follow the same pattern. They take the resources of the past, to fuel progress in the present, and push the costs and consequences into the future. Technology is time travel. Technology took the oil created by the decomposing bodies of prehistoric life, turned it into plastic products to make life more convenient for us, and created an ecosystem-wide catastrophe for generations to come. But this realisation doesn’t mean we’ll change our ways. We will give ourselves no choice but to deploy more technology to solve the problems of the present and in turn create greater consequence for the future.

Perhaps Max More and the other transhumanists wouldn’t want us to change. They “seek the continuation and acceleration of the evolution of intelligent life beyond its currently human form and human limitations by means of science and technology.” Transhumanists see a future where human beings become increasingly augmented by technology. Although they consider a “perfectionist ethical imperative for humans to strive for progress and improvement of the human condition” they have always lacked a rationale. Why would we want to become cyborgs? The effects of microplastics might give us no choice. We may have no choice but to transform ourselves into battery-powered cybernetic devices no longer dependent on the ecosystem for survival because we destroyed our own food chain.

The planet earth of the future might be one unable to sustain animal life, not because of climate change but because toxic microplastics poisoned every species.

One day, our future will catch up with us.

1979 had it’s fair share of firsts. First female prime minister in the UK, first McDonald’s Happy Meal, and the first death caused by a robot. Robert Williams was working at a Ford Motor company plant when he was killed by an industrial robot, breaking Asimov’s first rule of robotics for the first time ever. That same year, and completely unrelated to William’s death, a manager working at IBM wrote in a presentation, “A computer can never be held accountable. Therefore a computer must never make a management decision.” Eighteen years later IBM’s Deep Blue became the world champion of chess and in 2011 IBM’s Watson won the TV quiz show Jeopardy!. Perhaps IBM decided that machines making decisions wasn’t such a bad thing after all.

Why couldn’t a computer be held accountable for it’s decisions? By definition, being accountable carries the expectation of being able to justify actions or decisions. Surely we could expect a computer to be able to explain the decision-making process it took better than any human. Perhaps instead because, when we say accountable, what we really mean in punishable. Professor Charles Perrow wrote about how when things go wrong, someone always gets blamed. Whatever the cause, we look for someone to punish. So, we cannot hold computers accountable because we can’t punish them, we can’t make them suffer personal consequences if they make bad decisions. If a manager makes a bad decision we can withhold their bonus or fire them, so we expect the threat of punishment to motivate them to make good decisions. This classical economic theory belief, that we are all motivated to maximise individual gain, informed that IBM manager’s perspective on accountability but were they right to apply it to computers?

This theory can be tested with a thought experiment that applies equally to people and computers. Anyone who has read any critique of self-driving vehicles will have come across the trolley problem. The trolley problem sets out a scenario where the person taking part in the experiment has to make a decision between doing nothing which results in the death of a group of people, or doing something which results in the death of one person. The experiment is meant to help us appreciate how difficult the ethics of our decision-making can be to understand and explain, and to consider how this might apply to computer decision-making in life and death situations.

So, which do you choose? Which option maximises your individual gain? If you choose to do nothing more people die but you aren’t responsible. If you actively choose to kill one person in order to save the group, you are culpable for that death. We can blame you for it. Economic theory and the desire to avoid blame suggests that an individual would let the group be killed. But computers aren’t encumbered by these things, so should we expect that computers will make better decisions than we would? Could we expect that machines would be programmed to maximise gains for the majority and so make the decision to kill one person to save a group, even knowing that it wouldn’t be held accountable, because computers can’t be.

If computer’s can’t be held accountable, can people ever really be? Whichever choice you make in the trolley problem, isn’t it the system that put you in that situation that is really to blame? The system that makes you choose between the interests of the individual and the group is the system of individualist, humanist, secular thinking that emerged from the Renaissance. This way of thinking replaced God as the central concern for everyday life with the individual, and gave them the power to think for themselves, make their own choices, and yes, be held accountable for those choices.

Over the last six decades we have stared to learn that this individualistic view has problems. It places the individual in conflict with the group, but even more problematic is that it fails to recognise the effect systems have on both. Everywhere we turn we are affected by the systems we are part of. From systems of thought to political, environmental and technological systems, they are unavoidable.

Another thought experiment: How would you reduce the 15 million general practice appointments that are booked each year but then not attended?

Would you blame an individual for missing an appointment with a doctor and contributing to the £216 million that missed appointments cost the NHS every year and consider some penalty system that punishes them? Would you still blame that individual if you knew they were a single parent on a low income with caring responsibilities for an elderly relative and suffering from social anxiety? With the first question we tend to answer yes, let’s blame the individual for their misdemeanor. But when we find out that they face barriers such as not having anyone to look after their children or elderly relatives, are unable to afford the taxi fare, and finding leaving their home a mental health challenge then we start to realise that it isn’t the individual that is to blame, but that the appointments system is not set up to enable everyone to attend appointments. If we want to reduce the costs of missed appointments then we should tackle the societal barriers that cause people to miss them, rather than blaming the people.

But how do we hold systems accountable for the effects they have on individuals and groups? Can systems even be held accountable?