Testing Ground

Maura and I started the working part of our honeymoon yesterday, visiting one of three sites on Hawaii’s Big Island that WICO is using to integrate and test some of the technologies that will likely be deployed to rehabilitate land and water ecosystems as part of the global strategy. The site was one of WICO’s test communities until three months ago and has many of the original personnel still working there. I recognized several of the names from my brief time in Quality Assurance; and as their former boss, Maura was recognized by all of them.

“Invasives remain our biggest problem,” said Dan Rogan, the leader of the testing group, as he took us on a tour. “We’ve got robots out hunting the worst of them, most by air.” A small drone whirred past us, as if for emphasis. “They’re still a stopgap, of course, because those technologies have too high a footprint beyond about two years. You’re going to hate this, Maura, but we’ve been given a green light for biotech alternatives.” She stood stunned as he continued, “The effort is being led by a company that’s trying to get them to gorge on pollution and then safely decompose when it kills them.”

“Safely?” she asked. “How can something like that be safe? You’re not testing it now are you?”

“Two years,” I said as he shook his head, “Wouldn’t you need that long just for development?”

He shrugged. “I’m told that they’re fast-tracking it.”

“You don’t fast-track something like that!” Maura was as agitated as I’ve ever seen her.

“I heard the transition time might be cut in half. Maybe they don’t have a choice.”

“I doubt that will happen,” she said. “Nobody’s going to sign off on the resulting casualties.”

“We’ll be ready if they do,” he said optimistically. “Meanwhile, we’ve also got to deal with drought and typhoons. Some of the new portable building designs with attachable shielding and catchments are showing a lot of promise. As soon as they’re proven, the county will deploy them to vulnerable communities and safer areas that people can use as soon as possible.”

“What about volcano eruptions?” I asked while we walked to an area dominated by three demonstration structures that resembled lumpy yurts.

He explained that air pollution was the main issue after people got out of the way of lava. “In addition to portability, suitable filters and building materials are being designed into the buildings.” He then invited us to stay overnight in one of them.

Reality Check

The descriptions of the technologies are fictional and intended mostly as requirements.

Discussion of the timeline is based on multiple simulations related to the “C-low” scenario previously discussed. For example:

Historical Context

This morning, Maura tried out a lecture to a group of other professors (and me). It was a summary of the imminent extinction threat and the first public presentation of her preliminary framework for putting it in historical context. Following are some of the highlights.

“The last quarter of the thirteenth century is known for at least two technological innovations: eyeglasses and firearms. One allowed people to see better, and the other allowed them to kill more efficiently. Unknown until recently, it also marked the beginning of an era when the world’s human population would be dependent on the populations of the world’s other species. 

“Technological innovation progressed in tandem with scientific discovery, enabling advances in transportation, mining, agriculture, and construction that accelerated the conversion of everything into ‘resources’ that could be traded between people to increase how long they lived, how satisfied they were with their lives, and how many children they had.

“A second milestone was achieved in the 1930s. If we measure the amount of resources as the impact of actions on ecosystems, the resources consumed by the entire population was double what people needed to survive. After that, there would be more resources in stuff than in people. That new reality accompanied and was enabled by the creation of a global civilization marked by revolutions in science and technology, development of cheap fossil fuel, and conflict between groups of people who were trying to dominate or survive the merging of cultures into an interdependent whole.

“Rapidly accelerating per-capita consumption in the 1940s stopped growing in the 1970s, just as total consumption exceeded the amount of resources provided on a renewable basis by other species. This third milestone corresponded to a peak in life satisfaction that was achieved by four out of five people while the rest kept trying to reach that peak. Meanwhile, there was growing concern that fossil fuel production had itself reached a peak, and the status quo might not be able to be maintained.

“For more than two decades, population growth drove growth in how much of the world’s ecological resources humanity used, both in needs and wants. Science and technology contributed to more efficient use of resources that helped reduce per-capita consumption. At the end of that period, a fourth milestone was reached: the population consisted of people still pushing toward that happiness peak and people between that peak and a higher one that also corresponded to a peak in life expectancy.

“Per-capita consumption began to grow again in the mid-2000s, and most of what was added made parts of the world uninhabitable by other species and us. By 2015, more than one-seventh of the original resources were not consumable. Also, that year, a few percent of the population was not having children, reflected by a life expectancy of zero, and self-sustained impacts began cutting into the remaining resources.

“WICO projects that, if the global strategy isn’t implemented on schedule, a fifth milestone will be reached in 2023 as the world’s population reaches its peak. That will be followed by rapid population loss until 2030. Hopefully, we will settle into something between the third and fourth milestones, maintaining a smaller population by living mostly off of renewable resources produced by a healthier biosphere.” 

Reality Check

Historical events are correlated with the historical record until 1940. After 1940, projected global values for the simulation “Hikeayay” are used to identify the boundaries of the phases, which correlate to the “milestones” recited by Maura.

Programs

During the six days since WICO Secretary General Decatur asserted that the technology already exists to stop self-sustaining impacts, the press has been interviewing everyone they can to determine if it’s true. Maura was approached a dozen times for the source of “pretty good authority that he lied,” and each time she responded that the source insists on remaining anonymous.

The Sacramento Watcher has compiled the most complete list of impacts and related technologies that I know of, and reported that at least six unspecified new technologies are being developed that are classified top secret because of their potential to be used as weapons. I suspect - but can’t confirm - that most of the new technologies fall under the category of globaforming, and would be applied to the most difficult task of refreezing permafrost that threatens to release catastrophic amounts of methane and ancient diseases into the biosphere if it melts much more.

Possibilities from Responsibilities is in the news today, advertising guided nature walks in urban areas “to introduce more people to the wellbeing they can create during the transition.” The organization is providing transportation for those who don’t have it, and providing resources for adding greenery to areas with very little or none. The programs were about to be launched when I resigned, and it’s good to see them now underway.

Reality Check

“Globaforming” is a made-up word, meaning “surgical terraforming.”

Simplified Discovery

TIME TO STRATEGY EXECUTION: 56 DAYS

Three copies of the new Personal Environmental Assessment Kit arrived Saturday morning; and I spent most of the weekend trying one of them out while WICO’s Boulder field office and residents of TC-013 did a set of formal tests with the other two. Al accompanied me part of the time as an informal observer, recording my reactions and his while Sally monitored my progress (along with everyone else’s) via cell phone.

The number of assemblies in the PEAK was reduced to six, the largest being a compact device for measuring air pollution that relies on optical comparison and a reusable set of fine filters. Instructions were fewer too, with the design modified to be as intuitively obvious as possible without sacrificing functionality. As I wrote my observations in the kit’s logbook, I noted the simplicity of its new checklist format which together with an abridged guidebook removed context for the ecosystems being measured, and I wondered if useful understanding was being lost as a result.

“Consider the audience, Will,” Al said when I shared my concern during a lunch break yesterday. “You’re gonna have pros with cleanup tech out there with these folks who what they’re talkin’ ‘bout. No-one’ll be confused.” He picked up the can of biosafing solution. “Meantime, they’ll be usin’ this magic potion that’s general ‘nuff that it won’t matter what else they got.”

“I don’t trust that stuff, Al,” I said. “How do we know it won’t cause some other problem? The user should be able to tell if it does.”

“Someone close’ll know. That’s why they knocked the number of kits down to one per community instead of givin’ one to everyone.” That wasn’t the only reason, or even the main reason, but I wasn’t going to quibble.

“Sally,” I said, knowing the phone would automatically connect us. “What’s the reason for changing the formats of the guide and log?”

“Al was partly right, Will,” she answered over the speaker. “Although user feedback was very much appreciated, the major driver in the redesign was the ecological impact of kit production, maintenance, and recycling, and disposal. A reevaluation of education in the strategy was the second largest driver. It is now oriented toward discovery and relationship identification rather than information dissemination, with a focus on developing knowledge and understanding for the purpose of constructing a survival-constrained reality.”

“That’s quite a mouthful, cybercritter,” Al told her. “If I get what she-it means,” he said to me, “they bought your creation deal and ran with it.”

“Is that true, Sally?” I asked, suspecting it was more likely a logical outgrowth of the rules already in the strategy.

“Your edits and summaries of the rules are part of the substrate that led in that direction,” she said. “It made more sense to some of us when that context was identified.” By some of us, she clearly was referring to herself.

“How is the Education group managing that?”

“They’re holding what they call open brainstorming sessions with test communities, although the sessions don’t tend to match the technical definition of brainstorming. Their success is, however, undeniable.”

I relayed that discussion and the general progress of the tests to Maura when she called me this afternoon. She had already been briefed by the team, and expects to be back at work here on Wednesday. “I won’t be your boss anymore,” she added. “Samantha’s putting us together as a special ops team operating out of Boulder, where I’ll continue to be a liaison with the Extinction Response Unit. Meanwhile, you might want to read the latest copy of the strategy, which just dropped today.”

Reality Check

One of the elements common to most of my fiction is a selection of characters as observers who essentially report on what they see and experience in situations of interest. 

In this case, Will progresses through several roles that expose him - and the reader - to various aspects of his world’s preparation for dealing with its extinction crisis. The people he interacts with represent forces that could logically influence the trajectory of events or provide some insights into why things are happening the way they are.

Sanda/Sally is in the unique position of critically influencing events and understanding the underlying variables as parts of a simulation (which we’ve learned she experiences everything as). She also enables a fictional exploration of the human/technology interaction whose rapid evolution people in our world are being forced to experience. 

Brain Storm

TIME TO STRATEGY EXECUTION: 73 DAYS

Yesterday’s sense of relief was short-lived. The new information about how our ecological impact affects the self-sustained impacts revealed a huge downside of not pursuing the global strategy. Essentially, we would go extinct a decade earlier than if the self-sustained impacts immediately stopped.

I spent half of today participating in a brainstorming session about how to field test environmental conditions. Many of the ideas predictably included the modification and use of off-the-shelf measurement instruments, along with design requirements for new technologies. Leveraging of equipment and techniques already in use by the Widely Dispersed Pollutants group was a hot topic, especially since precedent had been set by a joint effort during the biosphere assessment which half the test engineers were part of before joining STRIDE.

My mind started to wander about two hours into the session, trying to imagine how someone with no technical experience or interest could be motivated or able to put the ideas into practice. I found myself focusing on one wall of the common area where someone had hung a pair of the latest Hope Charts, one showing business-as-usual and the other showing the expected effect of just reducing impact. Next to the wall was a table with some of the instruments being discussed, which looked totally out-of-place with the charts; and after a few minutes I understood why.

“How are people going to get the equipment?” I interjected during a pause. One of the engineers offered that they could be ordered easily online, but I cut her off. “What if no one can get the materials to make it?”

“Don’t be rude, Will!” Caleb Tosner warned me. He was acting as leader of the session, yet I sensed he had another motivation. 

“Ten years from now will that technology even be possible?” I pressed. The room went silent, which I read as an invitation to continue. “Also, can we count on the infrastructure needed to run it and get the most use out of it, like power plants and computers?”

“We’ll still have some of that,” Tosner said.

“We might, but what about the majority of other people, in a whole new - and more primitive - set of conditions?”

Like a wave, looks of awareness and agreement spread through the room. Then Sally joined the conversation, her voice coming from an array of speakers near the ceiling. “Will’s right. The economy will be like the 1960s in the most likely scenario. That’s what you should be planning for.”

Tosner looked up. “If that’s the case, then we’ve already failed.”

“Try again,” Sally said, and then told me that Maura wanted me in her office.

I was prepared for either a reprimand or a compliment when I joined Maura a few minutes later. She instead surprised me with an offer to help plan my permanent relocation, beginning with a trip to my home over the weekend.

Reality Check

My latest simulations show the consequences of inaction with and without self-sustaining ecological impacts mostly related to global warming. In the following graph, business-as usual without those impacts is shown as total consumption “R(NoW)” and population “P(NoW)” which indicate human extinction by 2041. If instead of reducing total consumption, humanity increases total consumption linearly in the presence of sustained impacts as indicated by “Rused(W)” as an approximation of business-as-usual, then the population will crash in all three cases of sustained impact (Low, Mid, High) by 2030.

This analysis supports the urgency of reducing humanity’s impact to buy time to limit the external impacts (shown below).

Discussions here and in elsewhere regarding testing are informed and inspired by my own experience as a test engineer, particularly in the test and verification of environmental measurement systems and their components.

Peak Sabotage

TIME TO STRATEGY EXECUTION: 83 DAYS

Mark Linster was one of nearly ten million people residing in what WICO identifies as Region 35, part of the urban corridor from Washington, D.C. to New York City. By day he worked as an information technology engineer for one of the nation’s ten largest defense companies, helping to maintain security for its world-wide computer network. At night he pursued his interest in future technologies, especially the further development of artificial intelligence.

In July of last year, Linster learned that the most advanced AI, Sanda, was near the end of its test phase, and was about to be used to analyze several years of data collected by WICO about the world’s ecosystems and physical processes. One goal of the analysis had already leaked to the press: performing a detailed threat assessment of ecosystem degradation and climate destabilization as a follow-up to the global scientific community’s warnings of growing extinction rates that could soon extend to humanity. This prompted Linster and a group of former coworkers and classmates to begin a discussion of its potential impacts on their professional and personal lives.

Six of the twenty-two group members were in biotechnology, and saw their industry as the savior of the species. Another ten had aerospace background that they felt was the key to the future through exploration and colonization of other planets. The remaining six, Linster among them, were putting their hopes in the development of virtual reality that could enable human consciousness to be embedded in machines and potentially live forever. None of the options they considered was viable without technological development; so, when they considered possible worst-case scenarios, the back-to-nature approaches promoted by many environmentalists were easily among them.

The Global Emergency declaration confirmed their greatest fears. To Linster and the others it was an abomination that one of the world’s most sophisticated technologies was being used to sell the idea of scaling down civilization’s ecological footprint to fight the threat of imminent global extinction. They viewed the preferred strategy as a betrayal of a future where people could reach their full potential as masters of their lives and potentially the Universe. In a choice between life and death, WICO was advocating that humanity become more vulnerable, not less, to forces it had spent tens of thousands of years gaining dominance over.

Linster watched in horror as political leaders signed onto WICO’s approach and developed national strategies that mirrored its guiding principle. In an unfortunately recorded conference call with everyone in the group on January 16, he advocated activating a plan he had been secretly enabling since August. They agreed, and six days later he and fourteen hackers used Sanda’s first connection to the global data network to test infiltration and espionage software that would ultimately be used to take down the information infrastructure supporting WICO’s strategy development.

“It was the hardest thing I’ve ever done,” Linster said during his testimony yesterday, “working to take down one of the greatest creations in order to save future ones. But it was the right thing to do.” He pointed his finger at the panel of six judges sitting above the witness chair in the well of the Tribunal Chamber. “YOU are the criminals here! We weren’t trying to kill everyone. We were savinga future worth having!”

Today Linster and the original group, the hackers, and their financial backers were all convicted of attempted omnicide and sentenced to ten years of pollution cleanup.

The summary above is in the public record. For my part, I gave brief testimony on Saturday, which involved verifying what I’ve reported in public, and then spent most of the weekend observing the trial and talking with various people about what happened. There was something about the motivation that didn’t seem complete, so I asked Maura if I could take some time to investigate. 

“What did Sally say about the location clue?” she asked when I suggested it might have something to do with where he lived, given what Sally sent me right before the servers crashed.

“She told me that people just passing the life expectancy peak would be aware of the risks of conditions getting worse, but be hopeful that they could find another path to improvement since they hadn’t yet seen a precipitous drop in happiness or life expectancy. The range of wealth in that region with the projections she had available at the time indicated that there was still access to the necessary capabilities. Then she admitted something rather remarkable. She said that it was her best guess.”

“Really,” Maura said after a pause that revealed her surprise.

“That makes it worth checking out by itself. Don’t you think?” I waited, and then added, “There’s also this: one of the investigators testified that included in the offsite cached data was a list of regions with their population to nature ratios. That narrowed the search considerably.”

“What about the others that were close?” she said.

“Exactly. I’d say there’s at least a security reason for looking at those too.” 

Reality Check

Sally’s “guess” is my guess. The projected number of people within half a percent of a 53% normalized population to nature ratio is about 100 million. I don't know how many of them are in the DC - NYC corridor.

Education on Hold

TIME TO STRATEGY EXECUTION: 95 DAYS

I met with Education group leader Victor Lansing to discuss how the group’s efforts match with the set of rules in the strategy’s agreements section. My hope was that we could collaborate and save time in both of our activities, as well as ensuring that we were consistent. “We saw some value in what Sanda wrote in that section,” he told me, “but there is too much there, and it is too complex for average users to understand and use. Also, the rules tend to be far too general for our purposes.” Rather than borrow from it, they decided to start from scratch with guidance from Sanda like the hand analogy she/it shared with me last month. 

“Our group’s focus has been on teaching about the main drivers of extinction, and how to reverse them. The simplest, but not the easiest, are population and over-harvesting, which take extensive cultural conditioning to limit. Habitat loss can be reversed by tearing down buildings and avoiding or breaking up roads so animals can move easily between contiguous areas of land. Pollution is the hardest, because it typically requires technological aid to identify, remove, and detoxify, and we are deferring to the WDP group for guidance on that subject. Invasive species can be very difficult to eliminate, especially if they are established in an ecosystem or easily spread by animals or plants whose movement we cannot - and often do not want to - control; we are mainly providing guidance about how not to move them in the first place.”

What he described seemed far too complex for the approach I expected they were using. “In my experience, analogies tend to fall apart fairly quickly,” I shared. “How much detail can you teach without putting everyone through the equivalent of a college-level course? Also, how do you deal with the fact that technology typically used for such teaching, including books, is going to be phased out as the strategy is implemented?”

I was prepared for him to be annoyed, but I was totally surprised by his response. “Sanda was helping us with those issues. We have been on hold since the crash to find out how the strategy will be affected, so we do not waste time and resources based on the wrong idea of what is needed.”

“Isn’t what you just talked about fairly straightforward?” Even someone with my limited knowledge could put together a decent package, with placeholders for what wasn’t known.

“The stories we might tell would have a lot of potential pitfalls, as you anticipated. We need an expert like the AI to ensure we do not go down a proverbial rabbit hole by picking the wrong representatives for the concepts and facts.”

I offered to help, but he insisted that the best approach is to wait for Sanda to come online, which we are expecting tomorrow. Of course, they are counting on the questionable assumption that there won’t be serious problems uncovered during testing.

Reality Check

The discussion of extinction drivers is based on my understanding. Views of my alter-ego are also my own.

Uncertainty

TIME TO STRATEGY EXECUTION: 108 DAYS

I spent yesterday contacting members of the strategy test team and discussing their impressions of Sanda’s performance and general fitness. It like talking about a dead friend in an effort to clear her reputation, despite the fact that the friend was a super-sophisticated computer. The journalist in me was more interested in learning whatever I could about the global strategy, and the team members were quite happy to share what they knew.

Perhaps the most useful insight came from lead data analyst Rico Sanguini, who explained, “There are several gaps in the strategy which would have propagated uncertainty no matter what Sanda did.” He showed me a spreadsheet that he compared to a list of some important locations from a map of the entire test operation. “We’re supposed to verify these requirements, and you can see that over a third of them are marked TBD. About half of those depend on technologies that don’t exist yet, and the rest are based on unknowns and unproven assumptions in predictions of the biosphere’s physical dynamics.”

“Isn’t that the basis of the hope chart?” I asked about the last part, in an attempt to connect what he was saying to something I thought I understood. 

“That’s right,” he said. “The whole point of cutting back on our ecological impact is to give the rest of nature a chance to repair the damage that is sabotaging the planet’s life support system, which is reflected in the trajectories of so-called ‘external impacts’ and humanity’s total impact. The basis of those trajectories is only crudely understood, and we’re gambling that we’ll learn the rest, along with how to better influence them, in time to avoid catastrophe.”

“So Sanda had to guess what might fill those blanks?” I anticipated.

“Much more than that,” he corrected. “It extrapolated and interpolated from every source of data and theoretical understanding we could connect it to, including research and development of new technologies.”

I tried imagining what it must have been like to do all that processing, and what the results might have looked like. Then I came up with a guess of my own. “Can you show me the updated spreadsheet?”

“This isthe updated matrix,” he said, confirming my guess. Sanda had likely found more questions than answers, and essentially gave up on trying to simplify what it learned. 

“And you went ahead with testing anyway?” I wondered if anyone had challenged the unchanged TBDs, and what Sanda’s response was if they did.

“Sanda offered to tell us what we needed to know, depending on the situation. It said that each TBD would otherwise fill a book, and therefore be too unwieldy to use.”

“Was that at the beginning of testing andafter you tripled the number of regions?” I suspected that adding regions was Sanda’s suggestion, in order to reduce additional uncertainty revealed by the early testing.

“Just at the beginning,” Sanguini said. “After the redesign, which was basically scaling up what we were already doing, there wasn’t any need to change the deal. We focused on retesting the other requirements, which was easy because the problems we found the first time were still there.”

I decided to sidestep his apparent sympathy for Sanda and faith in what it told him. “Did Sanda ever answer any of your questions in two clearly opposing ways?”

“You mean, was it talking crazy or lying?” he asked, and I nodded. “A couple of times it sounded that way,” he said, “but that’s my interpretation. Maybe something changed that I wasn’t aware of.”

I recalled Sanda’s insistence to me that the United States was in a state of collapse, the elaborate history it recited including that assessment, and then its partial retraction after more regions were added to its analysis. Everything it said was justified based on the information it had at the time, which in my case it chose to share.

Perhaps the best explanation for Sanda’s odd behavior was that people didn’t or couldn’t have the knowledge or ability to judge it properly, which forced a reliance on faith that could never be totally justified. Unfortunately, this was a moot point, because Sanda was gone, and those who depended on it now had to depend on themselves as they inevitably would have. In light of this predictable reality, Sanda’s creation of simple lists started to make sense.

Reality Check

I spent much of my previous career as a test engineer working to become fully aware of all the variables affecting what I was testing, including the biases of what and who was doing the testing (including myself). The requirements themselves were also subject to evaluation, based on real world experience. Built into the effort were two assumptions: that everything relevant can be observed; and what is observed can ultimately be understood by people, at least to the extent that it affects them. 

With new technology and conditions comes new challenges to all of the above, which simulation using both math and fiction can help us to at least partially prepare for. That is one of the contributions I am trying to make here.

Industry Leaders Warn of Existential Threat

TIME TO STRATEGY DEADLINE: 17 DAYS

Today leaders of the world’s largest transportation companies held a public forum at a hotel near WICO headquarters in London to protest the imminent extinction response as an existential threat to their industries and the world.

Expansaerospace CEO Mark Luke summarized their concerns in opening remarks to over 400 attendees and nearly a million online observers: “The goals and strategies being considered by the world’s governments would decimate our collective ability to move people, products, and resources as needed to maintain even a semblance of global civilization. Humanity might not go extinct, but the world we create won’t be worth living in.” Revealing his opinion of the entire effort, he added that “the last time global GDP was at the target provided by the whackos at WICO was sixty years ago, when there were two billion fewer people than what they say we’ll have at the end of this experiment thirty years from now. If isolation is as bad as they told us yesterday, or worse, then what they want us to do will make it unavoidable.”

Among the attendees was a group of energy industry representatives who co-opted the meeting after the first hour. Renewable energy icon Ronald Wingate announced a partnership between his conglomerate Expansivtek, the two largest oil companies, and the top three biotech companies to promote a research and development project called Evolution over Devolution. “ED will create technological solutions that provide all the needs of a growing population at a standard of living that builds on the work of past generations instead of spitting on it.” Wingate defended the late timing of the announcement: “We have been incubating this project for five years, and it’s just a lucky coincidence that it is ready now to help our friends and customers in transportation and other sectors of the economy that would be hurt by doom-and-gloom extremists who have hijacked the debate over our future.”

In a statement following the forum, WICO Secretary General Decatur sharply disagreed with the dominant characterizations of the crisis and strategies based on WICO’s recommendations, and rebuked the notion of Wingate’s ED as a viable alternative. “I must remind everyone, once again, that time is of the essence,” he warned. “We are collectively hurtling through a minefield toward a cliff, and we don’t have the luxury of trying to build an airplane as we go instead of putting on the brakes and attempting to defuse the mines.” 

Reality Check

Luke’s description of projected GDP and population match simulation of the baseline strategy. His concern about resulting isolation are exaggerated but something to think about, given that the scale and complexity of transportation would be much less – like virtually everything else in a sustainable future that relies on natural systems.

WICO’s call for detailed strategies is acknowledgement that without preparation the present economic order (on its world and ours) would likely react to strong economic contraction like a deep depression with a lot in common with the early stages of collapse. 

The portrayal of the energy industry’s reaction to reducing consumption is based on observed (and previously experienced) reactions to similar proposals.