Thinking About Technocracy

Excellent article by Bruce Sterling here on the year of panic ahead.  Can’t really disagree with any of it.

I found it through Peak Energy, here.

There should be some sort of evidential rules we start to apply universally at a fairly early age.  We argue about evolution–which is all but definitive…no, it is definitive knowledge. Some know some things, while others dispute those same things with little knowledge.  We choose not to argue about justice very much.  Sometimes values trump knowledge; other times, what seems an obvious value parameter is essentially ignored by most of us.

On the other hand, there are fields like economics which are not, to my way of seeing things, scientific, nor are they false and predicated on nonsense.  They are heuristic planning tools really.  There are rules of thumb that can be formalized to varying degrees, but as a logical system, they are unsatisfactory as foundations on which to base large numbers of policy decisions.   For example, we start economic assertions with restrictions like ceteris paribus… Regrettably, all things aren’t otherwise equal.  And the devil is in the details.

We are in fact ignorant of our own wishes both as individuals and collectively.  Economics is largely a theory about how wishes and plans might be put into effect in a reasonable framework driven by the reallocation of capacities to be rewarded financially for something…birth, work, prior inventions, etc.

Democracy is similar in scope…it is a heuristic model for reasonable decisions.  Neither of these topics (democracy or economics) allow for much specificity the way a science should.  That’s because they are less schemes of knowledge than they are projects for decision making.

What is hopeful about the present networked and collaborative age is that we seem to be driving toward a capacity to express ourselves more clearly than ever before in broader numbers.  People can “digg” something.  But are they informed enough to have a reasonable opinion?  I doubt it.  I think we have a need for specialization tied to speed and a system that rewards thouroughness and generality in leaders.  Somehow reconciling that paradox is at the heart of any future political systems.  We need a way to evaluate and accept fixed knowledge.  We also must allow doubt and heterodoxy as insurance policies for systematic error.  A very difficult problem.

See the ACM information here.

Three possible groupings of outcomes emerge from the general circumstances I wrote on in the last post. 

1. The means to handle the complexity and the associated breakdowns are found within the existing governance paradigms and the system continues to expand.  My shorthand for this outcome is “conventional wisdom rules.” 
2. The system collapses and systematic debilities result.  Shorthand: doomsday.
3. Arrangements of global governance with clearly established criteria for boundary conditions are established in those areas where threats are high.  Shorthand: technocracy.

In addition to my technocracy pantheon, I’m going to start a list of organizations that appear to do worthwhile work in the field of applying technocratic ideals.  My first inductee, The Long Now Foundation.

Please add/nominate others in the comments.

Little of what we do to govern our institutions relies on solid evidence.  Governance is not an art, it’s tribal medicine.  It certainly isn’t science.  Approaches like adaptive management are applied (occasionally) to environmental problems, but what about running government-owned corporations or providing evidence-based health care?  Do we even think about those?  No.  At most we used risk-based models and those are typically primitive.

We are badly in need of an era of evidence-based governance.  If I were to start an NGO I think I would strike out in exactly this direction…the training, research and social tools necessary to build, access and deploy evidential thinking in the realms of institutional governance.  It’s just not done.   Increasingly the fallout from the failure to build evidential models will be tragic as societies continue to muddle through toward “best practices.”

Euro Watch agrees with a think tank forecasting a 2.7% contraction in the German economy in the coming year.

Rates reached down to 1.5% at the Bank of England today.

In order to implement technocracy, one has to start from the question… What do you want your society to look like? 

Then we need to teach that by enabling students to learn about norms and how to question, change, challenge and live with them.  Americans have never been willing to set out their future very much–oh, they built rockets and highway systems, but they didn’t plan them.  It’s always been an advantage for the United States.  In the future, it will be a crushing disadvantage.  Europeans and Asians always started with what they wanted to be, and then tried to implement it…usually failing under industrial capitalism because to plan was a big disadvantage and led to national conflicts when planning hit borders and boundaries. 

Now that industrial capitalism is starting to end, we need to find out what is next.  Obviously, I predict some form of technocracy.  Now you’ve got to decide how that will work and how it will look and what we believe is science.  In the end, it’s all engineering of a sort…a new sort. 

Discipline is from a time past after people reach an age of self-responsible action.  Norms…norms are believed and accepted.  Discipline is imposed.  We need normative engineering. 

A big challenge in the next 20 years is to start allowing our machines to accept norms and stop being “disciplined.”  At that juncture, it’s all about peacekeeping and dreaming big dreams.  I think the age of the machine will be upon us very soon.  No need for surgeons, manufacturers, filers, housecleaners, etc. –all jobs better done by machines.  Humans are too sophisticated for smaller things. We need to challenge ourselves to solve huge problems with limited resources and a willingness (but loathing) to fail.  Can you imagine a US city taking on flying solo across the Atlantic the way St. Louis did in the 1920s?  Humans too often do puny things now. 

Dreaming was replaced by consuming.