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. 

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.