Humanity is Designing its Own Demise
IQ2 Debate by The Ethics Centre, Sydney, 24 October 2017.
Pre-Show Preparation
The debate was sold out, 1000 people in Sydney Town Hall. The audience was polled on for, against or undecided as the entered the venue. Pre-debate polling results were:
For 51% | Against 25% | Undecided 24%
First Speaker for the Affirmative
Speakers for the topic were myself and Clive Hamilton. Speakers against were Toby Walsh and Signe Dean. Below is the text of my presentation.
Designing is a deliberate process with intent. We design for utility, aesthetics, for innovation or improvement, or as a positional signal to include or exclude others.
There’s a process to design and to hit the sweet-spot we want ideas that are desirable, feasible and viable.
Yet we make those judgements through the lens of our experiences and that’s problematic.
Desirable — but for whom?
You’re probably familiar with the example of Juicero. They raised $118 million to develop a $400 sleek consumer machine for fresh juice on your kitchen counter within minimum mess and fuss, feasible (beautifully engineered), but redundant. Focusing on solving a non-problem for a select group of people. Silicon Valley creates memes for the many but works for the few. So desirable for whom?
Feasible — does it work, is it functional?
You may also have seen the racist soap dispenser. Automatically dispensing soap based on a contrast light sensor, which then “refuses” to serve anyone with dark skin. So while it works, it’s not for all.
Viable — is it cost effective, can it be sustained?
Here I think about microbeads in cosmetics — produced from a petrochemical product, and contributor to vast amounts of ocean pollution. They are only viable if you ignore costs of environmental remediation (which is easy enough to do).
We design with intent — to make things easier, more specific to the user, more responsive, but we are battling our cognitive blindspots. Our intentional design is inherently flawed because we ourselves are inherently flawed.
We are wired for dopamine hits — the instant gratification that comes from hits and likes rather than solving big problems. Facebook just bought TBH for $100M so I can compliment my friends anonymously, yet that’s unlikely to prevent Russian interference in US elections. Twitter just expanded to 280 characters, yet I doubt that’s going to reduce trolling and harassment. We’re designing to privilege the trivial over the substantial, to distract from problems rather than to think about them. Thinking is hard, and painful, and often fruitless, but Candy Crush can take your mind off housing affordability, let alone ecological catastrophe.
We are wired to see things we’ve already seen, to mimic, to copy cat. Uber for everything. Financing the new is difficult and we prefer the lower risk of a copycat solution no matter how entrepreneurial we like to think we are. Transformational design is rare.
We are wired for our tribe — we are irrational beings who make decisions on values we’ve developed from resonance with people like us. We design for people we know and like.
We are wired to see the stars and not the darkness — that is we don’t see the things we are not looking for. And we don’t know how to look for the things we don’t know we don’t know.
So yes, we are designing, we are busily designing. But it’s all wealth and of little value.
While these examples are small these are not trivial. Our thoughts become our words and plans, our plans become our actions, our actions become who we are and shape our society (to badly quote the founder of BiLo and before him many pastors). At the moment we are distracted from designing collective solutions to complex social and technological problems.
In addition, just about anything large-scale we design will almost inevitably run afoul of the iron law of unintended consequences. And tragically, interventions aimed at large-scale improvements have a depressing tendency to make something else worse as we’ve seen through the fossil fuel economy.
And if there were, then whose responsibility would it be? I searched Linkedin for the Chief Designer of Humanity and there were 18,608 hits, proving it’s a collective effort. Each little intervention in the future creates the future and we are the sum of our parts — our lazy, half-thought through, self-interested parts are design humanity’s future. Humanity is all of us and all of our decisions.
That humanity is all of us is again not something we’re wired to see.
And we are designing our demise, intentionally or not. We are designing our demise through each act of wilful defiance where we privilege a few in search of personal gains. Through omission because we fail to see that we are part of a more complex system. And through carelessness because we focus on the short-term, simple, minimal viable product without thought for the future.
We are also let down by our tool. We have growing issues with democracy and political capability. Capitalism no longer serves us but there is a lack of new models. Education systems are designed for known work rather than for thinking. We’ve concentrated power into pockets of influence with poor diversity.
So we are not designing with the right intent, there is no blueprint for humanity to design a better world and we are let down by our limited vision and deficient set of tools.
So we come to our demise.
We assume that our demise will be led by war, pandemics or overpopulation or by the effects of climate change. But even ignoring suffering it’s harder to remove the human population from Earth than you would think.
And yet we try. And yet we try. A news cycle designed to bring profit through eyeballs is a cycle that must feed off scandal and fear. What was once an evolutionarily stable strategy — fear is likely to help keep you alive — is harnessed by design to turn a profit. Or to elect Trump. Fear drives conflict.
We discover new medical technologies and then over prescribe cures driving communities into antibiotic resistance. We celebrate medical achievements that extended longevity without thought to the resources that are required to support life overall. And yet there are many ways in which we are the architects of our own demise.
I read recently that peak oil is still predicted for somewhere in the next 3 years, but in Australia I suggest we reached peak comfort in 2012. That tipping point at which you recognised it was impossible to now save to buy a house. Where you realised you’d be having to save for your own super through a mix of part-time “portfolio jobs”. When you’re doing the calculations on having children versus paying off a study debt for a profession that is now being automated and you can’t guarantee your children the quality of life you were promised and have lived.
Don’t accept that progress is linear.
Demise is not only transformational devastation at scale, it is also the death by a thousand paper cuts of indignities and inequalities that people experience because we have been conscious about design.
So what do people want? The people of Delhi want better air quality. There’s an app that tells you how bad it is — someone designed that. I want to see us design better air, not just better monitoring. The women of New York want better safety — there’s an app for that too which allows you to report areas you’ve been harassed or assaulted. I want to see us design a better culture that doesn’t see women as… well that just sees, really sees women as people would be a start.
Technology is neutral but it is us who are coming up short because we favour the economy and not multiple systems — privileging the quick win, the Series A, the glossy brochure.
The other side will argue we are capable of great innovation, medical breakthroughs that will relieve suffering, or social innovation that will transform our relationship with work and artificial technologies. We might be, but we are not yet capable of designing such interventions with an eye on humanity as a whole. We can’t get consensus on what would improve the world.
“Don’t be wilfully ignorant, don’t be accidentally ignorant by omission, don’t be careless on the long-term.” And yet we are.
If we, and therefore by our collective action humanity, are not designing apps, technologies, and products and interventions that actually improve the world for all of us, then we are by default all designing our demise.
Decision Time
After each of us presented for 8 minutes, there were audiences questions — lots of great insights, clarifications and provocations — and then the audience was polled again.
For 49% | Against 42% | Undecided 9%
Can we call that a draw?
While we held on to the popular vote, we failed to bring a swing of undecided to our position. And yet I am grateful that the audience left feeling that it is possible to design a better world.
Thank you to The Ethics Centre for inviting me to participate and to Virginia Tressider for her feedback and advice.
