Phases of Perception

TIME TO STRATEGY EXECUTION: 118 DAYS

Professor Archibald Ali is famous as an expert on the ways that self-perception influences social dynamics at multiple scales from immediate families to cultures. Following are some excerpts from a wide-ranging interview that I had with him today.

He began by sharing some new information. “WICO’s new framework for the global strategy is very clarifying. Before the crash, I spoke with several people testing the assumptions built into the strategy. They wanted my opinion about a new version of the framework that they were developing to explain their results. Instead of four stages, they proposed seven ‘phases’ that are a closer fit to the relationships between the global variables they were tracking. 

“The biggest problem they had was with the first stage, growth, which misleadingly lumps together all but the last three decades of human history, and even today doesn’t account for a fraction of the observed variety in the regions assigned to it. In the new framework, that one stage would have three phases. The transition and peak would stay the same, but collapse would be split into two phases, one corresponding to the decline of happiness and life expectancy, and the other having just a falling population with no happiness or life expectancy.

“At the time the server crashed, WICO’s AI was in the midst of evaluating if and how application of the phases could enhance the global strategy. Unfortunately, we will never know the result. It occurred to me that the AI might have given you a clue about the status of its deliberations during your interactions with it.”

I couldn’t recall anything relevant in my conversations with Sanda that I hadn’t already reported. Then I realized how stupid I’d been. Sanda’s last message read “NR53X C310119JNK” which I misreported as referring to junk mail from January 19, when it actually referred to mail on January 31 that I wrote about at the time. The message said, “Prepare for the worst, work for the best, question everything, and fully accept nothing,” which for the purpose of identifying the attacker meant nothing.

Ali agreed with my interpretation of the message, but had a suggestion that made me feel even more dumb. “Readers like me assumed you had what you Americans like to call a brain fart, understandable given the stress of the event. What if it wasn’t, though? This is why I asked about your relationship with the AI last week. Maybe it knew you well enough to forecast the error, and the error referred to the real message.”

Five minutes later, I found another message, still in my junk folder, dated 19 January and from a sender with a slightly different name. This one read: “Climbing is stressful, destinations are for perspective, and trips down must be taken carefully or they end badly.”

“Sounds like stages beat phases,” I observed after some thought.

“No, I disagree,” Ali said. “It mentioned multiple destinations and trips down. The stages apply to one ‘destination’ or peak, and one trip down. The first three phases each have different degrees of effort, making the climb stressful, and last two phases are each a separate trip down. I would say that the AI was favoring the new framework.”

“Why send its conclusion before completing the assessment?” I asked him. “Also, what does this have to do with the servers crashing?”

Ali’s eyes lit up. “Perhaps there is one answer to both questions! My not-as-smart computers back up their data on a regular basis in case there is a serious failure of software or hardware. The AI trusted you enough to make your e-mail a backup destination when it sensed a failure was becoming probable, and sent you a retrieval code when the failure was imminent.”

I recalled the speculation by pundits that Sunday’s deadly protests were planned weeks ago. If there was a common source for the server crash and the protests, then Ali could be right, and new evidence would show that preparations for both were in progress on January 19.

Reality Check

The “phases” are based on points of inflection in global variables as functions of the population/nature ratio. In the following graph, the time is indicated for when the average world population reaches the end of each phase historically and in a business-as-usual future:

The fraction of the world population in each phase is shown below (in gray), and a triangle indicates the world average, for the simulated world’s mid-2019:

As for the misreporting of the date of the “message,” it really was due to a brain fart.