Shutdown Time

With evidence continuing to mount that our ability to survive on this planet depends on stopping the burning of fossil fuels as soon as possible, it's time to start holding all governments and corporations responsible for the planning and implementation of a swift and safe reduction of the global ecological footprint to no more than half what it was in 2013, beginning with the total elimination of operations involving the use of fossil fuels. In short, it is now time for what I referred to in an earlier blog post as a "graceful shutdown" and bringing safe alternatives online that provide the basic physical and social needs of everyone alive today.

Reducing our footprint involves both lowering our consumption of ecological resources and rendering harmless the pollution we've dumped into places that harm the world's ecosystems, including the atmosphere. We also need to secure or render harmless substances like nuclear fuel that could potentially become harmful pollution.

Individuals and communities can do some of this on their own, perhaps best by using the concepts and techniques collectively known as "permaculture" and explored in test cases by the international Transition movement. By changing what they buy, who they vote for, and who they work for, as well as advocating for shutdown by the organizations they are part of, people can have a considerable impact on the probability of success.

Much of my recent writing has been devoted to exploring how long it takes to perform tasks, as well as the complexity of events and activities. This may have seemed tangential to my main focus of studying our potential future and how to avoid its negative trajectories. In fact, I have been using this immediately practical knowledge to start laying groundwork for how to plan humanity's next moves (and personally determine how I can maximize my contribution to creating a healthier world). Understanding learning curves helps us as individuals to judge the honesty and competence of organizations who we support or might potentially support, as well as the quality of what we do and what we get from others based on complexity. More than this, we have a useful tool for deciding between alternative actions that could get us to a goal or set of goals. My discussions of values, competition, and cooperation were intended to explore another, critical dimension to making plans: that of amplifying collective effort to accelerate progress instead of reduce it – or worse.

I spent a lot of time determining the likely trajectories of population and consumption, largely to assess the large-scale context for making responsible decisions. I focused particularly on the timing of the crisis revealed by the variables I analyzed, which has closely followed the projections made by many real experts in the social and environmental sciences and therefore gives me more confidence in what they are saying. It seems that no matter what angle is used for examining our immediate future, the conclusions are the same, and they are at odds with the technologically and economically optimistic orientation of most businesses I have studied in my attempt to meet personal financial responsibilities in the short term. From within a socio-economic system fixated on eternal growth in physical consumption and consolidation of power, the very concept of voluntary shutdown is akin to the worst form of heresy in the most conservative of religions, and I understand the potential costs of even suggesting it; yet the costs of not doing so and going further are likely to be much, much higher.

In future writing, I intend to explore what shutdown plans might need to include, and what they may look like in some detail. I also expect to discuss what "holding responsible" means, especially as means of assessing the legitimacy of organizations and their operating principles.

Error and Complexity

The learning curve model that I developed based on observations of how fast tasks are performed has yielded another valuable insight. The difference between expected performance of a task and actual performance over time, will tend to spike and then fall off gradually, which is likely to confound typically linear (and often overly-optimistic) approaches to scheduling its completion. Furthermore, the timing and amount of the spike will vary with the complexity of the task, which may not even be explicitly factored into expectations. The math shows that the timing and amount of this spike in what could be considered "error" is theoretically predictable.

In "Units of Completion," I suggested that the complexity of a task could be assessed in terms of a number of units that are simultaneously performed during the task, and which define how closely we can measure its completion. I've taken this another step, by using the concept of a unit to identify the highest meaningful efficiency that could be used to establish ideal expectations.

For example, if my task is to edit a page with 500 words, then the highest completion I could reliably measure is 499 words (500 minus one), which is 499/500 or 99.8% of the total. That fraction is also the highest meaningful efficiency, which translates into an expectation of editing 499 words in the best-case time. With average editing ability, I would have an efficiency of 50% instead of 99.8%; so during the best-case time, I will have only edited 50% of the total, or 250 words. If I'm responsible for meeting a schedule based on 99.8% efficiency, at the end of the best-case time I will be behind by 249 words (499 minus 250), or 49.8%, which is my error at that time, and it will take nine times that long to reach zero error. A manager tracking my progress up to the best-case time would see an even worse picture, because my error would reach a peak of 67% when I was at just 40% of the best-case time. Ideally, of course, the manager should plan for the actual time to achieve zero error, and not care what happens until then.

Editing ten pages instead of one could be treated as a single task, and the same fractions would simply apply to the larger number of words, with the minimum allowable error at the end now being ten words instead of one. If, however, this error was still kept at one word, then the highest completion (and the highest meaningful efficiency) would increase to 99.98% (or 4999/5000 words) and have significant side-effects which might together be considered a major degradation in performance. For one, the manager would now need to allow more than 12 times the new best-case time (which accounts for all ten pages) for me to reach zero error. My maximum error would increase to nearly 74%, occurring at 32% of the best-case time; and at the best-case time, my error would be slightly higher, at 50.0%.

My actual efficiency in editing pages is higher than the average, more like 70% than 50%, which would decrease the time and value of the maximum error, as well as the amount of time to reach zero error in each case. There would still appear to be a degrading effect on performance as the complexity increased (for example, the maximum error would have increased from 54% to 62%), and that could still raise an unnecessary "red flag" by a manager who was looking too closely and didn't expect it.

The real world is certainly messier than this theoretical discussion might imply. As I described in "Units of Completion," a lot depends on whether the task you think you're evaluating is one of these idealized pure tasks, a parallel combination of pure tasks, or a sequence of pure tasks. Since my analysis is based on actual observations (as are the other models I've developed), the behaviors I've identified are potentially observable in actual situations, and are therefore subject to test. They suggest a reasonable set of explanations for what may be unresolved or even unrecognized issues in actual applications, which is why I've brought them up.

One such issue, which I alluded to and can foresee, is an increase in waste: wasted time, wasted effort, and wasted physical resources. For example, a coordinated "task" such as a major industrial or government project might be terminated because of commitment to unrealistic planning goals that could not be met, and the waste of discontinuing it would be added to the loss of opportunity for meeting the needs it was intended to address. Spikes in what I've called "error" might result in the waste of resources to correct problems that don't exist, which rings true as a consequence of too much complexity. If more realistic schedules are impractical, either because they demand resources that aren't available, or because of competition with others who do not acknowledge their necessity, then the gains of previous effort should be preserved as much as possible until a new and more effective task -- or set of tasks -- can be devised. If preservation cannot be done, waste seems inevitable, and the ultimate objectives of the task are too important to abandon, then cooperation (rather than competition) may be needed between multiple entities who can together address the impediments to success.

Complexity, Happiness, and Responsibility

Tying the insights discussed in "Communicating Complexity" back to the work I've done on understanding population and consumption, I found some tantalizing clues about how complexity relates to happiness and our ability to meet our personal and global responsibilities.

One clue involves how the complexity we each experience (complexity per person) tracks with happiness on a global scale. Since it is closely proportional to population size, it relates to happiness pretty much the same way. Until very recently, we could count on happiness increasing along with complexity, which is so intuitively obvious that many of us don't even think to question it: more people can provide more labor and creativity about how to both acquire new resources and use those resources to create environments suited to individual needs and wants.

As we were building environments, we were taking away or fouling the resources needed by other species to survive, including members of those species themselves, and since they were providing services and resources we depend on, it was inevitable that we would get to a point where there weren't enough of them left to replenish what we were using. We seem to have reached that point around 1970, and since then we have been struggling to provide enough environments for the people we've been adding to the world while using up more resources and killing more creatures. World happiness responded accordingly, reaching a peak level as Nature was unable to provide any more that we could dominate without increasingly severe consequences. We started focusing more on creatively using what we already had, which turned what might have been a smooth mountain-like peak into a very bumpy plateau, but we were still forced to deal with the need for some waste, especially of energy, the bulk of which we continued extracting from sources that could not be replaced in anything close to a human lifetime.

Another clue about complexity sheds some light on why we haven't done more to stop this suicidal behavior. One of the most obvious negative consequences of rising complexity is that people have less time to perform the same tasks, which risks (to put it lightly) sacrificing the quality of the results of those tasks. That decrease in time can be easily estimated for the world's population since the beginning of civilization based on population growth, and with reasonable assumptions about the time we are awake and the number of people and environments that would realistically be in our local communities which we could mostly interact with (interactions with the rest of the world's population would be negligible by comparison). One such estimate shows that 12,000 years ago people could have spent an average of about two weeks a year, at 16 hours a day, with each person in their community, along with their associated environments and worldviews, interacting to experience and shape their lives. Today, that time is down to two minutes. Put another way: we went from the time it would take to read a 7,300 page book to just a single page. Multiply these times by 24-millionths, and you'll get the time available for each person (and the rest) in the world.

Arguably, the sum of all of our interactions, directly and consciously with our local communities, and indirectly and unconsciously with the rest of the world, results in our net impact on human experience. Before civilization, when people lived in small groups that were effectively isolated from each other, each community was effectively a world. For the most part, personal responsibility, for oneself and family, was the same as global responsibility. But, on average, there were still impacts that could potentially or eventually affect others, mainly in the form of environmental change, but also in genetic changes that might be transmitted to other populations during chance encounters. Merging communities, as civilization did, enabled a critical divergence of these two kinds of responsibility, and complexity amplified it as people were torn between focusing on their immediate needs and those of people in a growing community. Competition for resources in the form of war simplified life for a while, by reducing population but leaving tools in place that helped the survivors support more offspring. On average, more people lived than died, with the tools, collective knowledge, and already-modified environments providing the means for further growth by dealing with more of the complexity with less direct human intervention. People were having more impact, but were feeling like they were still in small, manageable communities that happened to provide more of what they wanted and needed.

Now our numbers and our tools have created a global community where direct action is required to avoid catastrophic results of our collective impact that include increasing restriction of resources, both from overuse and fouling like that which has doomed too many other animals. Clearly, we don't have the time (and, for many, the inclination) to manage the complexity we already have, never mind adding some new variables to our internal constructs that will temporarily add to the complexity of our lives. Our tools may be able to pick up much of the slack; but by giving them more intelligence to do so, we risk them becoming our first serious competitors in millennia. This adds to the time-sensitivity of taking action, while avoiding the real temptation to accept the new capabilities as an excuse for increasing complexity further.

If we did take direct action, then, based upon my definition of complexity, we might try reducing the number of environments, roughly equivalent to creating less choice in products we can buy and sharing as much as possible. Unfortunately, even if we reduced that number to one for everybody, the complexity could only be cut by one-third, which wouldn't be enough (even if it didn't have the potential for much worse consequences) since we have nearly twice the complexity associated with safe consumption – and I'm not counting the possibly unstoppable and overwhelming effects of global warming.

In the past, we might have bought some time by reducing our population in a non-violent way: sending a large fraction to other, relatively isolated locations. Today our best option for doing so is a mass migration to other planets, beginning with Mars, but those worlds would need to be quickly made habitable, and the technology for transport would need to be created, tested, and put into mass production in even less time. The feasibility of doing so in the short time (less than a decade) we likely have before deadly competition becomes unavoidable is something I continue to reexamine and reject as too small to consider, but so are pretty much all of the other options, including the one I suggested at the end of "Communicating Complexity": cutting birth rates to zero and letting the population decline to a lower, sustainable level while regrowing ecosystems.

I remain committed to the belief that more understanding can lead to solutions that have a chance of working. While my recent research has added to that understanding (and hopefully the reader's), a viable path to solving this most critical of problems remains illusive. But it's good to remember that illusive does not necessarily mean nonexistent, and I plan to keep using some of my precious time to keep looking.

Communicating Complexity

We each interact with people, our physical environment, and abstract constructs that help us understand and deal with ourselves and our world, and that give it all meaning. Also, the physical environments interact with each other. Descriptions of these interactions and those that participate in them together comprise a basic collection of information relevant to a given population of people over a limited range of time when the information doesn't change appreciably.

If we could write a book of these descriptions, its size would be a measure of the complexity of the system that includes the people and their environment that is comprehensible in terms of human experience. It could therefore be potentially usable for directing activities toward goals on a human scale, by projecting how future "books" might appear. If it was too big and unwieldy to be used by the majority of people, that fact could itself be used to identify how out of control our lives have become.

The required size of such a book can be estimated fairly easily when we consider that each of us has our own experience of the world. The environment can be split up into a number of pieces equal to the size of the population, each with a known and unknown component; and the number of interactions between people and those pieces, as well as descriptions of the interacting parts of it and us, is simply the square of the population size. The number of interactions between people, and descriptions of the people themselves, is also equal to the square of the population size, as is the number of interactions between people and their internalized abstract constructs. If we aren't concerned with the interactions between parts of the environment and each other, then the number of descriptions we need is three times the square of the population size; if we are concerned, then the number of descriptions is four times the square of the population size.

We typically only interact with one other person at a time, and we're only aware of our part of what's happening. For a population of two people, the minimum number of required descriptions is twelve (two-squared times three); and the number of descriptions per person is twelve (the descriptions) divided by two (the population size), or six. Six is therefore a good number to use as a natural number of descriptions from an individual's point of view, which I'll call a "chapter" (note that a book that includes only the number of descriptions per person would be purely from a single perspective, like a novel with a single main character, and would omit other perspectives). A fully-descriptive book will therefore have a number of chapters between one-half and two-thirds the square of the population size.

Books have words, of course, and one way to estimate the number of words is to use the best known book of all: the Bible. The popular King James Bible has an average close to 24 words per verse, 24 verses per chapter, and 24 chapters per book. The number 24, besides also being the number of hours per day, is also close to the square of the number of commonly used personality dimensions (the "Big Five"), and a commonly used minimum population size for getting good statistics during measurements. If one of our "descriptions" has the same number of words as an idealized chapter of the Bible (24-squared, or 576), and a person can read at a speed of at least 250 words per minute, then a chapter will take about one-quarter hour to read. If a description is only 24 words (equivalent to a verse), then a chapter will take only about one-half minute. Ultimately, though, the number of words defines how detailed our descriptions will be, and it should be chosen to match the level of detail that's meaningful.

The Bible's significance, of course, far transcends its popularity. For one thing, it has functioned as a universal guidebook for living and meaning for much of the world's people, despite the fact that the kinds of environments and social interactions it describes have become less common in the millennia since it was written. As such, it may be a useful benchmark for the amount of complexity that is useful in performing such a function, though the proliferation of clergy and scholars enlisted over history to interpret its guidance indicates that its complexity may be too much for common use.

If we ignore the fact that the Bible describes many events (more than one period of time) on the basis that people could "interact" through the record of their lives, and that God acted as a medium for environmental interaction with people, then we can use the model to estimate its complexity. The model shows that 24-word descriptions correspond to a population size of 100 (to match verses and minimum number of descriptions); and 576-word descriptions correspond to a population size of 20, which is less likely based on the number of people discussed in the Bible. A population size of 100 requires a minimum of 30,000 descriptions. For comparison, a population of 10,000 in a small town today requires 300 million (10,000 times as many descriptions); and a population of 24 people, typical of a group of hunter-gatherers, would require only 1,728 descriptions.

More research needs to be done, especially around the constructs that embody values, meaning, and rules of conduct that ideally enable people to maintain the integrity, survival, and basic thriving of their society. The Bible appears to have started from a set of initial conditions that include the constructs, and then progressed through at least two iterations of experience, learning from the experience, and updating the constructs based on what was learned. If its particular template is to be followed, then our new world community is in the lessons-learned phase of an iteration where millennia of new experience is being processed as much more experience continues to be added.

We can now quantify the magnitude of this task by equating experience with complexity. Based on population size, world complexity is now 1,260 times what it was when Christianity started (50 million times what it was at the beginning of civilization), and is rising rapidly, having multiplied by a factor of ten in just the last 70 years.

In light of this, it would not be surprising if people are concerned that their lives are losing meaning and losing control. If governments and their laws, as well as science and technology, are civilization's primary means for enabling more complexity as well as keeping up with it, as history seems to indicate, then they could rationally be blamed when that complexity becomes personally unmanageable, especially as it is coupled with experiences of negative effects of environmental degradation stemming from the consumption that they also enable.

If this analysis is correct (as a contribution to the "lessons learned"), along with predictions of disastrous consequences of not reducing our depletion of species and resources that maintain the habitability of our planet, then an appropriate course to ensure our survival as a species is to first focus on stopping the growth in complexity and better managing what we have. This would involve an overhaul of our values and means of determining how to meet them (our common, internalized constructs), along with promoting the social and environmental interactions that support those goals, which will likely include restructuring our institutions rather than crippling or destroying them as a knee-jerk response to our frustration with the complexity they represent. Next, we might let our population naturally decrease to a sustainable level while simultaneously changing our physical and social infrastructure to reduce our ecological impact to a safe level and ultimately accommodate a simpler, healthier, and more meaningful life for individual people and other species that can help support them.

Complexity and Global Warming

Global warming continues to generate bad news for the present and the future:

• El Niño has finally arrived, promising that temperatures over land will soon rise to compensate for the statistical lag between observed and predicted values
• Oceans and land are becoming less efficient at keeping carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere (the latter no-doubt aided by our rapid erosion of soil), and temperature rise will likely accelerate to a new rate not seen in over a millennium
• As California, already suffering from historic drought, is coming within a year of exhausting its stored water, and the largest South American city is much closer to running out of water, new research projects that multi-decade "mega-droughts" are likely to become normal by 2050
• A huge Pacific cyclone has just decimated the island nation of Vanuatu

Meanwhile, the legislative branch and the governments of several states in the nation most responsible for the problem (mine) are actively trying to convince its citizens that the problem doesn't exist, and that it is acceptable to continue the actions that precipitated it. These actions benefit individuals and corporations who stand to lose large future profits if the actions don't continue, and who bankroll the campaigns of politicians who spend more time pandering for money than developing the legal framework for maintaining our increasingly complex society, which is arguably much more than a full-time job by itself. That complexity, and the inherent limitations of our minds and bodies in dealing with it, along with arbitrary values and knowledge unshared and untied to the realities of community survival in this new world, is fundamentally inhibiting the responsible application of the power granted humanity by its numbers and its technology, power which has enabled our present, existential crisis.

Ironically, reducing the complexity and the power likely have the best chance of reducing our risk, but it will also reduce our domination of the natural environment that is the measure of happiness that we are most tuned to. Some of those who resist such a reduction seem to have put their hopes in advanced technology, effectively outsourcing mental effort to computers now on the verge of artificial intelligence, and attempting to reduce our dependence on wild species for maintaining Earth's habitability by tinkering with their biology and ours. The resisters may however be trading one set of problems for a potentially more dangerous set, as some of the smartest (human) minds have warned regarding artificial intelligence.

Luckily for most of us, complexity is built upon simple building blocks and relationships; and with some training and freedom to explore and think about what's around us (instead of being slaves to our jobs, our tools, and distractions), we can use that fact to make a dent in creating a more healthy part of the world for ourselves and those we come in contact with. Global warming, for example, is a special case of too much waste in an effectively closed system like the Earth, a consequence of our physical relationship with Nature that people throughout the lifetime of our species have understood, or learned the hard way (as many of us are doing now).

When we acted as part of Nature (ecosystems) instead of apart from it, energy and materials cycled through us with negligible waste, where "waste" is the result of an activity that is unused or unusable by life for a period of time. Now we generate much more waste, and those materials (including gases) that do enter ecosystems can either be used by life, harm it, or kill it, at least until something evolves that can use (consume) it. One way to judge whether we are creating too much waste is to observe whether the amount of animals and their variety is decreasing around us, which is a basic sense built into our own biology. Clearly we are failing that test, and are on the way to failing the ultimate test while we keep doing so, as the growing list of hazards and catastrophic events stemming from global warming clearly indicates.

Quality of Understanding

The world is a complex place. Our ability to survive and thrive depends on our understanding of the parts of it we experience, as well as the power we have to change it, because our understanding determines how accurately we can predict the results of the actions we take. The better our understanding, the more likely our actions will have the desired results.

Understanding is an interpretation of observations that identifies what the parts of the world are, how those parts are related to each other, and how they and their relationships tend to change or stay the same. Its quality and usefulness is therefore highly dependent on the quality and amount of our observations, and our ability to correctly interpret those observations. Science is society's most successful means of building quality understanding, in large part because it uses strict rules of evidence which filter out observations that cannot be verified.

Technology has enabled a vast increase in the number and verifiability of observations, while logic and mathematics have enabled us to create and test interpretations of those observations that will have maximum accuracy and reliability. It has also, as a byproduct, enabled people to have more power, unfortunately without an associated requirement for understanding its full impact beyond its intended and very specific applications.

Alternative approaches to science for building understanding, such as religions, tend to depend heavily on hearsay, reported observations that cannot be independently verified; and their interpretations cannot be rigorously tested, if at all. That many people use the interpretations that result from them is evidence that the interpretations have enough quality to be useful in various situations, typically ones where success in surviving and thriving is not increased by having more quality.

Humanity is now at a point where our impacts on the world require a high quality of understanding to manage without extreme harm to us and other species. Those with the most influence (power) must either acquire that understanding, or reduce their power to a level they can manage safely. To do so voluntarily, they must also value the others they influence, and values are in large part a function of culture – especially religion. If our values do not motivate us to mitigate the harm we cause, and if we insist on holding onto power without adequately understanding the complex interrelationships and interactions that it can disrupt, then we will be entirely responsible for our doom as a species.

Complexity

There is a fixed amount of time any of us can do something. We also have a limited range of abilities, partly innate and partly determined by experience. Knowledge is often incomplete, and not always accurate. Even if we have the knowledge and abilities, we may not have the opportunity to do it, depending upon conditions that aren’t under our control. If we are successful in doing that “something,” it will almost certainly cause other things to happen, which we may or may not be able to anticipate, fully understand, or control: things that could either support or get in the way of meeting the goals that govern what we’re doing in the first place. In short, we’re pretty much stuck with the fact that our decisions will be imperfectly conceived and executed, and have unintended consequences.

In a complex system like a business, a government, a society, or a natural ecological community (“ecosystem”), there is a lot of activity with a lot of consequences, intended and unintended. The system survives if, on average, the healthy consequences are greater than the harmful ones; and it dies if the reverse is true.

Nature deals with the problem of survival by spreading out risk. In a healthy ecosystem, no individual or species has too much power over the others; so that if something happens to it, something else can pick up the slack. There are also many interactions, but none that will have such a large impact on the entire community that everyone will suffer if its consequences are unhealthy. Because each individual is both a consumer and a resource, the amount of life in the system increases to a maximum; and because there are many types of resources (species), the longevity of the system is also increased.

For most of humanity’s existence, hunter-gatherers lived in small groups that used what they found, and limited their populations accordingly, resulting in a trade of population for longevity. Since the beginning of civilization, perhaps out of necessity stemming from changing conditions, and aided by improvements in technology, we reversed that trade by enlisting more people to find resources and then used them to create artificial environments increasingly tailored to the wants and needs of individuals. Today’s organizations (such as governments and business) are the latest innovation in “cultural technology,” systems that have enabled this dynamic to proceed exponentially.

The complexity of our organizations (indeed, civilization as a whole), is exactly what we need it to be, as long as we can count on getting more people and more resources to help make up the difference between what we’ve actually got and what we want to get. What’s causing pain now, is that we’ve hit a limit in resources and people, and the unhealthy consequences of our actions (especially those of a few people who have a large amount of power) are not being entirely offset by healthy ones.

Complexity and Hubris

In the book "Immoderate Greatness," author William Ophuls describes how an organization like a civilization grows complex by creating chaos and degradation in its environment, eventually using up or rendering useless one or more resources that is critical to its survival. Ironically, the complexity works against it, because the people in the civilization are inherently unable to understand it well enough to predict its effects, and can't recognize the symptoms of impending decline. When the decline starts, chaos grows and overwhelms them. They then react inappropriately, and the civilization rapidly collapses. This concurs with other things I've read, along with observations of how governments and businesses tend to develop.

There are, of course, some people who recognize the symptoms and what they mean. Unfortunately, they're not in the majority, and certainly not in the majority of leadership positions. As our worldwide civilization rapidly approaches the threshold where nothing can save it, in part due to the consequences of global warming, the majority of those who know what's coming hold out hope that somehow enlightenment will spread or technology will triumph, just in time. The rest have already given up, and are focused on explaining what's happening while salvaging what will be left by developing alternative values and ways of living like what I suggested in Beyond Hope.

In Efficiency and Completion Time, I described how progress on "tasks" evolves over time and depends upon preparation, action, and luck. As a test engineer, it's been my job to help designers and manufacturers to determine how much of a task remains, where the task is the creation and deployment of a technological system that meets a set of expectations called "requirements." This part of the preparation phase can only be done after the first attempt at completing the task, and real-world conditions (including how people will use the system) can be applied to demonstrate what the system will actually do, along with what affects it. Requirements, more often than not, are very simplistic guesses which should be modified or supplemented based on experience that checks assumptions they were based on and reveals unintended consequences of their application. I say "should be," because my specialty is finding these oversights, which tend to comprise most of problems discovered after the second attempt at completing the task, which can be up to 25% of the total task. Unfortunately, managers and those who pay them typically only plan for no more than two attempts, using their best guess as to how much time and resources are needed, and compensating for luck by hiring the most experienced and capable people they can find.

This a good example from my experience of the linear thinking that Ophuls attributes to system failure. I've heard it explained away as "realistic," and "pragmatic" by people who swear they would do more "in a perfect world." Yet they are also typically people who don't have the "bandwidth" (read "limit to the rate they can process information") to handle explanations that can't be captured in single pages of bullet points. To be fair, all of us can keep only a handful of ideas in our head at a time (I've heard between 3 and 7); and the people who have the power to decide what others should do often have more than a handful of complex tasks of their own that they are expected to work on simultaneously. The more power they have, the less time they have to do any part of it, even if they're highly efficient and work every waking hour, so it's no wonder that more than two attempts at a task is considered a luxury, and that 80% completion is considered acceptable, with the rest – hopefully – undetected, explained away, or blamed on someone else (such as bad luck as "acts of God").

Given enough time, we will experience the consequences of ignoring details that we missed. These consequences pile up, especially since we're driven to accomplish more and more, and the consequences interact to create amplifying feedback loops. Eventually they can't be ignored; but as Ophuls points out, by that point it may be too late to fix the underlying problems before we're overwhelmed. To the extent that people recognize this as a valid threat, they might be inclined to limit what they do to the consequences they can adequately foresee (matching power to acceptable responsibility), but our culture – and arguably human nature – makes their taking action on it highly unlikely. Most likely, people like me who are good at identifying the problems that aren't obvious, and yet potentially the most destructive in the long term, will be vilified, shunned, or merely tolerated, especially if we're vocal about what we find and what needs to be done to fix it.

Ophuls considers what I call "graceful shutdown" all but impossible without an extremely unlikely shift in values to ones like those I've promoted. I'm obviously inclined to agree; but I've grown even less optimistic than he is that it will happen, given the forces we have collectively unleashed with the prime focus of accelerating global extinction rates. In short, having already lost hope for civilization, I'm now a hair's-breadth away from searching for the planetary equivalent of hospice.

Control and Maturity

It's safe to say that most of us hate when someone or something controls our lives without our consent. Such people include dictators, intrusive or over-regulating governments, and business monopolies. From the time we are born, we try to meet our needs and wants by reducing our dependence on other people and everything else, and we learn to resist anyone or anything that takes away what control we have won.

As we mature – if we mature – we learn to share our identity with a growing number of people, then species, and voluntarily limit how much of the world we will occupy. If maturity doesn't come, we don't stop seeking more control until someone or something stops us because we're too much of a threat: we've become what we hate.

Where we are able to overwhelm those who try to stop us, the mismatch between the complexity of our own biology and the systems we're trying to control will lead to the demise of the systems, ourselves, or both. For full control, we would likely have to become who or what we were controlling, which is physically impossible.

A common model of control is the computer, but even with that marvel of technology, only a very limited number of variables in anything close to a natural system can be controlled. If, as some people hope, we are one day able to achieve immortality by encoding our consciousness in something like a computer, and then grow its complexity and capabilities to take over more of the Universe, we would still be competing with other such entities, and we would still be subject to unbreakable natural laws.

Organizations, like people, are subject to the same constraints. History is full of examples of groups invading others, and over time adapting, losing their identity, and becoming more like those they vanquished.

Recognizing these facts is part of the process of maturity, and a lot of unnecessary grief, death, and destruction could be avoided if more us could achieve it. With the great amount of power available to many of us, the survival of the planet depends on it.