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I type “collapse of pastoralist societies?” into Google search and get this AI-generated answer:

Pastoralist societies have been declining for a variety of reasons, including: 

• Loss of land: Pastoralists have lost access to land due to the development of large-scale cultivation and irrigation, the establishment of nature reserves and game parks, and the imposition of national boundaries. 
• Climate change: Climate change has threatened the availability of water and arable land, which are critical for pastoralism. 
• Government policies: Governments have expropriated land from pastoralists, and converted communal property systems to open access situations. 
• Migration: Some pastoralists have moved to populous areas to pursue education, abandoning traditional lifestyles. 
• Conflict: Conflict, disease, drought, and famine have particularly affected vulnerable pastoralist communities. 
• Arms proliferation: Arms proliferation has significantly altered the pastoralism landscape. 
• Lack of government support: Pastoral communities receive little support from their governments. 

No surprises here. This is the gist of the literature I read. But an obvious question remains: How many of the pastoralists affected see collapse in the same way or for the same reasons?

I don’t know their number, but I most certainly see how some herders might believe their pastoralist systems are collapsing but still adhere to a very different narrative of what is going on and being responded to.

To see how and why, let’s turn to a recent article that describes the opposite case: Urban people who see it inevitable that modern societies are collapsing and who respond differently.

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In his 2024 preprint, “The conviction of the inevitable: Collapsism and collective action in contemporary rural France,” Jérôme Tournadre, a political scientist and sociologist, wonders why some people who are absolutely convinced on the inevitability of collapse in modern (“thermo-industrial”) societies–for them, it’s self-evident the collapse is well underway–nonetheless respond by moving to the countryside and acting neither fatalistically nor apathetically but collectively and differently together.

You might think those different ways included “back to nature” and eschewing all things modern and technological. But no, and here is where it gets interesting for pastoralist comparison:

Sophie, for example, has no trouble using a thermal brush cutter when it comes to freeing agricultural commons from overly invasive vegetation. Alex earns a little money by occasionally installing photovoltaic panels for individuals. However, he does not see the need to use it at home insofar as his connection to the electricity grid satisfies him. Similarly, if the members of the neo-village [one of the research sites] have chosen to gradually do without cars, it is not to reduce their greenhouse gas emissions but, above all, to no longer depend on oil that is bound to become rare or to lose its usefulness in a collapsed world. This logic obviously leads them to use bicycles but also to learn how to handle and maintain tools such as the scythe, the lumberjack’s handsaw or the Japanese saw that is supposed to replace both the chainsaw and the jigsaw. The acquisition of new skills is in any case a central ambition within these collective actions, which endeavour to break away from the specialization found in industrial civilization and develop a versatility more in line with troubled times: knowing how to milk goats and process their milk, graft fruit trees, recognize wild plants and mushrooms, etc.

https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/14661381241266936

Now turn the quote inside out for pastoralists. I don’t think it is generalizable, but say you do find pastoralists who are convinced that their systems are collapsing. More and in their own terms, that collapse is inevitable.

So what?

So, yes you see them learning to use all manner of saws and acquiring new skills, while at the same time continuing to milk the goats and process milk and collect local herbs. Yes, you see them cutting firewood for burning but relying on electricity where available. Yes, you see them undertaking money-paying jobs off-site. Yes, you see them breaking away from the specializations of pastoralism and developing more versatility and options in their also troubled times.

Yes, there are also alarming turnabouts in contemporary pastoralist societies as well, but as Tournadre and other colleagues put it, this is an “alarmed reflexivity.” Some pastoralists, like some urbanites, are alarmed by events in their respective systems. But their response is a more nuanced voice than it is outright exit. They are like whistleblowers who still live amongst us: “Something’s wrong here and it has to change and here’s what I have to say and am doing.”

Hardly the negative narratives and critiques AI has been trained on.

Empirical research into the evolution of cloud platforms is a challenge, as computational ecosystems are not only rather complex and opaque, but are also subject to continuous change.

https://policyreview.info/articles/analysis/platform-power-ai-evolution-cloud-infrastructures

Contrast such a notion of, say, ChatGPT, to that of the more conventional “black box.” If humans can only know that which they create (and here too no assurances), then by definition we have a better chance of understanding those black boxes of algorithms we created (as with much of geometry) than those opaque ecosystems, important parts of which we did not create.

Now, of course, modelers think nothing unique about representing ecosystems, but that is more akin to landscaping or remolding than they admit.

Odd that when demographic decline in China is leading to the prospect of higher wages there, we witness the counter-prospect of massive unemployment via AI-automation everywhere.

Odd that when the North’s techno-solutionism is called into question, pressures mount that the North, as a matter of climate justice, fund massive climate adaptation in the South.

Odd that when just as we better understand that economic growth was and is an engine of global environmental destruction, economic growth has slowed down anyway over the last half century because of real declines in real production and productivity.

Odd that when generative AI threatens human creativity, it’s precisely at the moment online cultures are “far more inventive and daring than the arts, both formally and in terms of the ideas it presents.” (Dean Kissick in The Drift).

Odd that the calls for breaking up Amazon Inc. because of its monopoly power and anti-competitive practices are made by those whose goal is nothing like a competitive market society. Odd that current capitalist pathologies are said to arise because the capitalism of market productivity has disappeared.

Odder that it’s all about odds.

Source

https://www.thedriftmag.com/senseless-babble/

Answer: Have known errors in emergency response and initial service restoration been corrected before the next emergency?

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It seems odd to talk about known errors when uncertainties and surprises pervade and permeate earthquakes, river flooding, forest wildfires, and grid failures in electricity and water.

But there can be and often are an urgency, clarity and logic about what to do by way of just-in-time or just-for-now emergency response. What needs to be done is evident to front-line infrastructure staff and emergency management professionals in ways not so for those in incident command centers or higher-level management or official positions. For experienced front-line staff, not doing what needs to be done in these circumstances constitute errors to be avoided in real-time. They are avoidable errors because they can be corrected beforehand.

II

In particular, our research on interconnected critical infrastructures found:

–Under conditions of shifting or shifted interconnectivity, it would be an error for infrastructure operators and emergency managers not to establish lateral communications with one another and undertake improvisational and shared restoration activities where needed, even if no official arrangement exists to do so.

–In related fashion, it would be a management error in anticipation and planning not to provide robust and contingent interinfrastructure communication capabilities, including communication connections between the control rooms of interconnected infrastructures. This communication, it has been demonstrated, is also greatly facilitated by establishing lateral interinfrastructure personnel contacts prior to emergencies

–Further, it would be an error not to have some contingent resources for restoration and recovery activities such as vehicles, portable generators and movable cell towers in differing locations available across infrastructures if needed, particularly where chokepoints of interconnected infrastructures are adjacent to each other.

Here, errors are not to be managed, more or less like risks, but rather managed categorically as: Yes or no, have they been avoided?

III

A number of policy and management implications follow. One deserves underscoring here: It may well be some activities presently funded under state and federal “emergency risk management” aren’t as important as enabling dedicated support and staffing for such error correction, now and ahead.

I once reviewed a book that argued hunter-and-gatherer societies were the most sustainable. There was and is no better model for sustainability, I read. Yet, there is sustainable, and then there’s sustainable. I also read that irrigated agriculture was touted precisely because it sustained year-around production.

I want us to entertain a thought experiment. Assume current levels of above-average consumption, production and pollution are halved and then halved again. High population levels are halved and then halved again. The mass extinction of biodiversity stops, fossil fuel extraction stops; industrial fishing, farming and forestry stop; and all manner of government stupidity in the form of harmful subsidies, incentives and distortions stop.

Now ask yourself: What if these interventions also prove unsustainable? What we thought was true or truer sustainability proves to be unsustainable as things change, we are told, for the better.

Degrowth leads to now stronger states invading now less resourceful ones; changing diets leads to new infirmities or recurrence of older diseases; reducing fossil fuel doesn’t reduce demand for plastics and other petroleum based products; the growing middle classes, once considered essential to the advancement of democracy and states, are now killing the global biosphere; . . . yet all the while the demand that whatever critical infrastructures are in place–even ecologically sensitive–be highly reliable, that is: at least more reliable and safe than the hunter-gatherer societies of the early 1960s and 70s!

What if we the future don’t want any sustainability–be it irrigated agriculture then or regenerative agriculture ahead–that is unreliable and that is unsafe? It’s been said that the relative absence of scenario planning in old Soviet bloc countries was largely because there were no alternative scenarios to compare there. The more strident the calls for this-way-only sustainability, so too the more visible the absence of scenarios for “what do we do now that too is unsustainable?”

If average global temperature rises are to be limited in line with the 2015 Paris agreement, climate finance globally will need to increase to about $9tn a year globally by 2030, up from just under $1.3tn in 2021-22, according to a report last year from the Climate Policy Initiative.

https://www.ft.com/content/6873d96e-3e40-45c6-9d84-8ce27b7b23e1

The above quote is extracted from an article written as if it were a quest story with beginning, middle and end by way of such funding. In reality, it is a conversion story of before and after a revelation.

For my part, I like my conversion stories upfront: “Any socialist effort to navigate the very real state shift in the climate will require a massive reconstruction and deployment of productive forces. For example, all the major cities that are on a coastline on this planet will have to be moved inland. That means the electrical grids and sewer systems need to be rebuilt. We will need to reimagine urban life on a massive scale. It’s not wrong to point that out.” (https://www.the-syllabus.com/ts-spotlight/the-right-climate/conversation/jason-moore)

If correct, it is to be as in: Saul the Jew before; Paul the Apostle after.

The one great virtue of their being blunt is patent, though: It’s clear all manner of blunders, contingencies, not-knowing, and inexperience will be incurred in this forced march from the sea. Where in the Financial Times article are the parallel mistakes, accidents and failures in wait for the $9tn per annum?

Source

For more on conversion narratives, see Adam Phillips (2022). On Wanting to Change. Picador Paper

Bence Nanay, a philosopher, argues that: “Global aesthetics must be able to have a conceptual framework that can talk about any artefact, no matter where and when it was made. This amounts to identifying features that every artefact must needs to have and that are aesthetically relevant” (Nanay 2019, 93).

For present purposes, think of a policy statement or management task as just such an artefact. Does viewing it aesthetically have any relevance for that policy or management? By aesthetically, does the structure of a policy statement or management task tell us anything of relevance above and beyond what the substance of the policy or task tell us? I believe the answer is Yes, if we take Nanay’s point of departure.

For Nanay whose examples are pictorial, the first order distinction is between surface organization and scene organization:

On a very abstract level, there are two different and distinctive modes of pictorial organization, which I call ‘surface organization’ and ‘scene organization’. . . .Surface organization aims to draw attention to how the two-dimensional outline shapes of the depicted objects are placed within the two-dimensional frame. Scene organization, in contrast, aims to draw attention to how the three-dimensional depicted objects are placed in the depicted space. (Ibid 94)

For instance, there is the global aesthetic feature Nanay calls, “occlusion.” To quote again:

In everyday perception, we get a lot of occlusion: we see some objects behind or in front of others. The question is whether occlusion shows up in pictures. Surface organization implies that the picture maker pays attention to whether there is occlusion or not: occlusion in a picture is a feature of how two-dimensional outline shapes of the depicted objects are related to each other on the two-dimensional surface. Some pictures go out of their way to avoid occlusion. Some others pile on occlusions. Both are good indications of surface organization. And we can place pictures on a spectrum between extreme lack of occlusion and extreme seeking out of occlusion. (Ibid 95)

I submit that the printed and digital literature on polycrisis and wicked problems picture a massively occluded two-dimensional space for a three-dimensional scene we call global reality. All the problems are piled on within a frame of depiction that allows no empty spaces and no outside to it. Policy advocates, in contrast, depict a very non-occluded two-dimensional space that they take for reality. Here the true singular problems that matter are clearly limned and set apart. The last thing you would call either depiction is sublime.

Let me repeat that: If one thinks semiotically (a thing is defined by what it is not), then the most compelling feature of polycrisis and wicked problems is just how diametrically orthogonal they are to anything like “sublime.” Which to me is precisely why such terms register aesthetically, whether before or after addressing considerations of representation.

Source:

Nanay, B. (2019). Aesthetics: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford University Press: UK.

see also https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OYUYNPcaX0I

Start with a 1977 conversation between Nicholas Kaldor, the Cambridge economist, and his Colombian counterpart, Diego Pizano.

Kaldor asserts: “There is never a Pareto-optimal allocation of resources. There can never be one because the world is in a state of disequilibrium; new technologies keep appearing and it is not sensible to assume a timeless steady-state” (Pizano 2009, 51). Pizano counters by saying the concept of opportunity costs still made sense, even when market conditions are dynamic and unstable. But Kaldor insists,

Well, I would accept that there are some legitimate uses of the concept of opportunity cost and it is natural that in my battle against [General Equilibrium Systems] I have concentrated on the illegitimate ones. Economics can only be seen as a medium for the “allocation of scarce means between alternative uses” in the consideration of short run problems where the framework of social organization and the distribution of available resources can be treated as given as heritage of the past, and current decisions on future developments have no impact whatsoever. (Ibid, 52)

Consider the scorpion’s sting in the last clause. Even if one admitted uncertainty into the present as a function of the past, a dollar spent now on this option in light of that current alternative could still have no impact on the allocation of resources for a future that is ahead of us.

Why? Because markets generate resources and options, not just allocate pre-existing resources over pre-existing alternatives. “Economic theory went astray,” Kaldor added, “when theoreticians focused their attention on the allocative functions of markets to the exclusive of their creative functions, which are far more important since they serve as a instrument for transmitting economic changes” (Ibid, 52).

Source

Pizano, D. 2009. Conversations with Great Economists. New York: Jorge Pinto.

1. Risk and safety are causally connected?

Risk and safety overlap as terms in ordinary language. Some seek to formalize the said relationships—e.g., increasing safety barriers reduces risk of component or system failure. In contrast, I come from a field, policy analysis and management, that treats safety and risk to be very different. Indeed, one of the founders of my profession (Aaron Wildavsky) made a special point to distinguish the two.

The reasons are many for not assuming that “reduce risks and you increase safety” or vice-versa:

However it is estimated, risk is generally about a specified harm and its likelihood of occurrence. But safety is increasingly recognized, as it was by an international group of aviation regulators, to be about “more than the absence of risk; it requires specific systemic enablers of safety to be maintained at all times to cope with the known risks, [and] to be well prepared to cope with those risks that are not yet known.”. . .In this sense, risk analysis and risk mitigation do not actually define safety, and even the best and most modern efforts at risk assessment and risk management cannot deliver safety on their own. Psychologically and politically, risk and safety are also different concepts, and this distinction is important to regulatory agencies and the publics they serve. . . .Risk is about loss while safety is about assurance. These are two different states of mind.“

(Danner and Schulman, 2018)

The differences for me come with the failure scenarios—risks with respect to this set of granularities as distinct from safety with respect to that set.

2. Interdisciplinary focus?

It’s de rigueur to call for more interdisciplinary research on risk and safety management in large critical infrastructures.

Yet such calls not only must surmount the standard-normal qualitative v. quantitative, reductionist v. holistic, and positivist v. post-positivist methodological divides. They must also address not only regulatory, political, and psychological differences (as in the above quote), but also societal, economic, historical, sociological, and cultural differences. And why stop there, case by case?

I’ve never read a call, routine as they are, for an interdisciplinarity granular enough to tell how to answer the preceding.

3. Control risk? Control safety?

In ordinary language, it is common enough to conflate “manage” and “control.” That will not do for policy and management complexity.

Control is when the system’s input variance, process variance and output variance are rendered low and stable. Think of the nuclear reactor plant. Guns, guards and gates are used to ensure outside inputs are controlled; processes within the nuclear station are highly regulated by government to ensure few or no mistakes are made (operations and procedures that have not been analyzed beforehand are not permissible); and the output of the plant – its electricity – is kept constant, with regulated low variance (nuclear power is often considered “baseload,” on top of which are added other types of electricity generation).

One defining feature of the Anthropocene is that critical systems having low input variance/low process variance/low output variance are fewer and fewer because of increasing political, economic, social and etcetera unpredictabilities.

For example, electricity generation sources—and very important ones—now face high and higher input variability. Think of climate change, citizen and consumer unrest, regulatory failures and other external impacts on the inputs to energy production. Such have posed the challenge of managing what can no longer be controlled (if ever controllable).

In response, operational processes inside a good number of power plants have had to become more varied (this reflecting the so-called law of requisite variety), with more options and strategies to process and produce what still must be a low-variance output: namely, electricity at a regulated frequency and voltage.

So what?

When it comes to underwater petroleum exploration and production, by way of another example, alarms produced by autonomous systems can and do often turn out to be false alarms occurring under already turbulent task conditions at sea. Indeed, operating at a higher level of autonomy and having to cope with indiscriminate false alarms may no longer permit the real-time operators to revert, just-in-time, to lower levels of autonomy, e.g., managing via more manual operations, as and when nothing else works. Changes in safety have risk implications, but not necessarily symmetrically the other way round.

4. Building to macro systems from micro data or micro foundations?

Discussions of macro-safety and macro-risk have long been rooted in appeals to micro-foundations for both. Yet such systems approaches have been called into question across a variety of academic fields.

Consider the repeatedly disappointing efforts in building up macroeconomic models from separate subsystem models or in grounding macroeconomics in microeconomics. It’s been said that no economist in his or her right mind would ever rely on the microfoundational Dynamic Stochastic General Equilibrium (DSGE) models of the economy developed and tinkered with over decades. (See also the disappointing history of “lifecycle modeling” for endangered and at-risk species.)

But is there an integrating mechanism at work between micro and macro? I’m not sure that even those detailed analyses revolving around the labor-augmenting rather than -substituting nature of AI software recognize that humans are the only “integrated comprehensive model” we have for some time to come. Especially when it comes to both the safety management and the risk management of such systems.

          5. Are risk and safety even distinguished with sufficient granularity?

More than a year ago a joint statement was issued by the Center for AI Safety: “Mitigating the risk of extinction from AI should be a global priority alongside other societal-scale risks such as pandemics and nuclear war.” Famously, it was signed by more than 350 AI experts and public figures.

Now, of course, we cannot dismiss the actual and potential harms of new and morphing artificial intelligence.

But, just as clearly, these 350 people must be among the last people on Earth you’d turn to for pandemic and nuclear war scenarios of sufficient granularity with respect to risks, safety and their differences against which to appraise their AI crisis scenarios.

Sources.

Danner, C., and P. Schulman (2019). “Rethinking risk assessment for public utility safety regulation.” Risk Analysis 39(5): 1044-1059.

Roe, E. (2020). “Control, Manage or Cope? A Politics for Risks, Uncertainties and Unknown-Unknowns.” Chapter 5 in The Politics of Uncertainty: Changes of Transformation (eds. Ian Scoones and Andy Stirling). Routledge, UK.

Schor, J.B. (2021). “Dependence and heterogeneity in the platform labor force.” A policy brief for the Governing Work in the Digital Age. Hertie School, Berlin.

Storm, S. (2021) “Cordon of Conformity: Why DSGE models are not the future of macroeconomics.” International Journal of Political Economy 50(2): 77-98 (DOI: 10.1080/08911916.2021.1929582).

Utne, I.B., I. Schjølberg, and E. Roe (2019). “High reliability management and control operator risks in autonomous marine systems and operations.” Ocean Engineering 171(1): 399-416.

I know of few other tv series I’d recommend as highly. It can be found on viki.com and it is equivalent in quality to the fine European art house film. Its two leads are a center of gravity that draws you in beginning to end.