[ 14/September/21 ]
Bill Cravens does quite accurately note some of the major problems, but I think he is entirely wrong when he claims there are no solutions to them.
If you actually spend time looking seriously at strategy in the face of multiple levels of uncertainty, then there do appear to be reasonably stable solutions, and complexity theorist David Snowden is a fairly good champion of some of the major classes of them.
I agree with Bill that central control has more dangers than benefits most of the time and in most contexts. The solution to that is genuine cooperation between multiple levels, sets and classes of agents/systems.
Genuine cooperation allows for what is essentially “random search” of the available “solution spaces” via the simple expedient of “multiple ‘safe to fail’ experiments” run concurrently. It may seem wasteful to short term economic thinking, but a deep understanding of strategy and long term efficiency delivers quite different outcomes. Sometimes the supposed experts are not the best at handling actual novelty, as the biases necessary for the “expertise” blind them to possibilities that they have never considered.
So an optimal society is one where automated technology is used to empower all individuals to do whatever they responsibly choose to do that isn’t actually an unreasonable threat to anyone else. Such a society is based in cooperation between all levels, classes and instances of agents. It acknowledges that all levels of freedom demand appropriate levels of responsibility if they are to be survivable. Freedom without responsibility is necessarily destructive of the boundaries required to maintain the levels of complexity that gave rise to the possibility of freedom at that level.
In all the resulting diversity, some of it is likely to be able to solve whatever threats actually show up.
Ted Howard NZ's Blog 