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
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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