Path: utzoo!utgpu!water!watmath!clyde!rutgers!rochester!cornell!batcomputer!pyramid!hplabs!hplabsz!taylor From: swb@tcgould.tn.cornell.edu (Scott Brim) Newsgroups: comp.society Subject: Re: Solving social problems Message-ID: <1219@hplabsz.HPL.HP.COM> Date: 14 Dec 87 23:22:18 GMT Sender: taylor@hplabsz.HPL.HP.COM Organization: Cornell Theory Center, Cornell University, Ithaca NY Lines: 27 Approved: taylor@hplabs To change the subject slightly.... Actually, these days I'm feeling that so much of social structure and function depend on technology that keeping human society healthy is just as much a technical problem as one of human relations, government, etc. I don't mean that you need technology to keep our society running (although in the USA it's true); I mean the fabric of society itself is becoming technology-based. More and more of our accustomed and seemingly necessary interactions require it. Also, the kinds and frequencies of interactions are growing, and unexpected new ones which we aren't prepared to deal with will appear. The stock market problems are a simple example. They are indicative of the fact that a growing number of our technological solutions, which work well in an environment of little interaction with other such solutions and strong (usually human) damping of interactions between them, are becoming more and more interconnected, and the interaction times are becoming shorter. We haven't designed for this. There is little or no coordination of interconnections (we like it that way). We have no idea what the results are going to be. Even finding such interacting systems is going to be hard and full of surprises, so in making society work we're going to be playing rather desperate catch-up, patching as we can, just like we are with the stock market systems right now. Of course the rate of increase of such interactions isn't going to slow down at all, and our use of technology is going to increase in more and more critical areas. Hmmmm. Scott