You Want the Future?You Can’t Handle the Future!Perspectives on Sustainability

Brad Allenby

Founding Director, Center for Earth Systems Engineering and Management

Lincoln Professor of Engineering and Ethics

Professor of Civil, Environmental, and Sustainable Engineering

USBCSD

October 18, 2011

Relevant Trends• Welcome to the Anthropocene – the human earth.• The world is becoming much more complex and

information dense. • Natural systems become integrated with human and

built systems, and subject to their dynamics – examples: genetic engineering and IP; carbon cycle.

• Professionals and firms are being charged by society with responsibility not just for their actions, but for their technology systems (cf: Monsanto and EU on GMOs).

• Sustainability is becoming important social myth.• Technology is critical locus of accelerating evolutionary

pressures, and major framework for integrated natural/built/human Earth systems in Anthropocene.

Straws in the Wind

• Students and Google: why are you still teaching facts?

• Augcog and distributed cognition.

• ASU workshop with Sandia National Laboratories on cognitive enhancement.

• Use of cognitive enhancement drugs to enhance routine academic performance.

Straws in the Wind• Ambient atmosphere carbon capture

technology: design your own world

• Grow your own Neanderthal, and AI on the other side: the human as design space

• Radical life extension

• Privatization of governance: war and private military contractors; EU using NGOs to handleforeign aid; space (DARPA and 100 Year Starship Study)

Sustainability• A highly normative, egalitarian scenario.

– Note that many other scenarios are possible and, given current trends, perhaps even more probable

• Has become increasingly ambiguous over time as different institutions adopt different definitions to suit their requirements.

• What is to be sustained? The Earth? Biodiversity? Human life? Existing economic and power structures?

• Mismatch between degrees of freedom of managers and technocrats, and global sustainability issues.

• Oversimplifies complexity of current and future environments, especially given accelerating technological evolution

– Focus on resource use, versus information structures– Fails to consider even very foreseeable trends such as radical life

extension

Sustainability and Basic Political Values

Libertarian: justice is equality of opportunity

Communitarianisn: welfare is optimized by individual being absorbed in community

Egalitarian: justice is equality of outcome

Corporatism: welfare is optimized by free economic activity of individuals

Sustainable

Development

U.S. polity

Problem Statement• Power of emerging technologies poses huge

governance and social challenges– Sustainability and radical life extension?– Changing cognitive patterns among young?– Geoengineering?– Technological change as major unappreciated Earth

system (no discipline of technology studies)?• Military and security needs major driver of

technological evolution, especially of Five Horsemen (nano, bio, robotics, ICT, cogsci)

• Military and security competence heavily dependent on society’s technological competence (US v. BRIC v. EU)

Complex Issues at Many Scales• Struggle for long term cultural dominance, with

technological competence a major factor (China versus US)

• All assumptions become radically contingent– Psychological and individual: are we redesigning the

human as an industrial-mil/sec strategy?– Governance: are we redesigning society as an

industrial-mil/sec strategy?– Institutional: roles of different institutions shifting

rapidly and unpredictably

Some Ways Forward• Technology analysis: policy response

matrix

• Technical CSR: Industrial Ecology

• Take charge of sustainability dialog for your firm– Unlike activists, you can’t afford to ignore your

portfolio of obligations– You need to manage technological change:

not just for firm, but for society as well

Technical CSR• Themes:

– Must try to understand lifecycle (easy for material in specific use; harder for complex product; harder for service – what is the “lifecycle” of the Net?)

– Must include not just environmental, but social dimensions – Serious normative issues: who gets to define what is to be

sustained, what social values to prioritize?

• Services much harder to design, evaluate implications, than products– Where is boundary between product, service, and earth system

(e.g., jet airplane, a product, enables tourism, a service, which is part of broader system of global travel including impacts on previously unreachable environments, airplane as disease vector, etc.)

Information Infrastructure Boundary Issues

Level Method of Study Main Impact (Physical v. Cultural)

Typical IE Design Issues

Artifact manufacture Traditional environment and safety compliance

(end-of-pipe)

Physical Energy consumption in manufacture; toxics in manufacturing processes; industrial hygiene issues

Artifact over lifecycle DfE, LCA Physical Understanding conditions of use; energy consumption in use; end-of-life management; toxic in product

Construction and maintenance of

networks

Systems engineering

Physical Evolution of technology (from telephony to internet protocol, wireless); interactions of systems components; efficiency per unit service; systems boundary

Services (e.g., broadband to

home)

N/A Physical/Cultural Definition of “service”; relationship of service to physical network and social practices

Social practices based on services

(e.g., teleworking)

N/A Cultural Both short and long term impacts important (and may not align); difficult to predict because of cultural component; triple bottom line implications, especially social (“digital divide”)

Knowledge economy/ infosphere

N/A Cultural Impact on social constructs (“wilderness”, “environment”). Enable postmodernist fragmenting of values? Enable world as artifact (real time comprehensive monitoring systems)? Substitution of information for energy/materials? End of “natural history” w/ human contingency built into natural system?

Changing Dimensions of Work

Manufacturing Paradigm

Flexible, virtual time and space

TIME/SPACE

Defined, clock time

Dedicated, co-located

PLACENon-place based, individual choice

Full-time employment

EMPLOYMENTSelf-employed,

full spectrum of

relations to firm

Fixed, impermeable

LIFE BOUNDRIES

(e.g., family/work)

Porous, constantly shifting

MODEL

OF FIR

M

Evolvi

ng

netw

ork w

ithin

globa

lizat

ion

netw

orks

Stable, fi

xed

institutio

n

Knowledge production, defined by intranets

Firm

Facility-based, physical

production

SKILLS

Dynamic,

complex,

individualize

d, unstable Stable,

clearly defined

Knowledge Economy Paradigm

Policy Response Matrix: Cyborg Insects Policy

Response

Technology

Level

Goals and Effects Policy Response

Level I:

Military effectiveness

Reduce collateral damage and increase operational efficiency in counterinsurgency operations

Goals and technology align; therefore adopt technology

Level II:

Security effectiveness

Protect civilian populations from terrorists and, through mission creep, criminals

Implement technology, but technology alone may not lead to achievement of stated goal

Level III:

Social and cultural effects

Ensure orderly society; likely to reduce privacy and enable “soft” or “hard” totalitarian state; shift of power to technologically rich organizations (e.g., private firms).

Optimistic goals likely to be undercut as those in power adopt cybersect technology to their own ends; Level I and Level III implications potentially in fundamental conflict

“He, only, merits freedom and existence

Who wins them every day anew.”

(Goethe, 1833, Faust, lines 11,575-76)