Behind the Lines

TIME TO STRATEGY EXECUTION: 55 DAYS

The global strategy for dealing with the imminent extinction threat is more than a decision tree and a set of conditions, rules, and definitions. If you read behind the lines as well as between them, it tells a story of possible futures that branch from a common past and each create an entire new world.

I know as much as anything that it’s true. Unfortunately, I don’t know how to read behind the lines. That’s embarrassing to admit after countless hours of study and editing previous versions, especially with my background as someone who’s supposed to be an expert at such things. Each section makes sense in its own way, but I cannot comprehend it well enough to identify the full range of outcomes from following it. 

There are many graphs, such as the famous “Hope Chart,” which provide abstract sketches of how a range of variables could play out over time as the result of sets of actions. Teams of experts, testers, along with the world’s first living machine (and most sophisticated artificial intelligence) vouch that the projections are as good as the data that went into them, some of which I’ve collected myself and enabled collecting by others. Even taking that as a given, I can’t see the story it contains, and it’s driving me crazy.

I have been asked more than once why I care. That’s a story I can tell. Imagine standing anywhere, and wondering what kind of future a particular action will contribute to: one that promotes life, or one that promotes death. How will you find the answer, and do it soon enough to avoid finding yourself on a path to more death? What could be more critical to success than enabling the vast majority of people to choose a future with more life?

Sally the living AI can answer specific questions about probable outcomes, as she did when I asked her to describe the end-state of the most likely scenario. We recently spent some time talking through several scenarios, testing my ability to guess what might happen under certain conditions at certain times. For example: What if birth rates increased above a certain amount in a given year under the condition of greatly accelerating self-sustained warming in the Arctic. Taken as an average, I guessed right a dismal one-in-twenty times. Sally’s answers were always prefaced with an estimate of uncertainty, which disconcertingly was sometimes as high as twenty percent.

Getting close to giving up for the day, I thought of Maura and her father accompanying a moving truck on the way to Colorado Springs, where she plans to live with her parents until she can find an apartment to rent that’s in the Denver-Boulder area. I would bet that she never expected to be back there at this point in her career. From the time I first met her, I’ve envied her ability to make forecasts on the fly, and translate them into recommended changes to the strategy; which is effectively what I’m trying to do. I ascribed that ability to basic talent and her training in history, a combination that limits the odds of transferring the skill to many others (including me), but as Sally often says, the most basic assumptions should routinely be tested.

I plan to ask Maura tomorrow if she has any suggestions for making her skill transferable. If she doesn’t, then I’ll ask her to share the story that she sees in the strategy.

Reality Check

Will highlights something I consider a huge issue with creating a survivable future: making it relatable to the majority of people so they can make decisions on their own. Simulations and writing are part of my approach to teaching myself and sharing the results with others as part of a grand - if not always explicit - collaboration where I learn from them too.