I want everyone to move up closer to the front. If you can, please move as close as you can to the front. Don’t be afraid of sitting next to someone you don’t know, everyone here passes a general sanity check and probably won’t bite you.
waits
Throughout all of human history, families and communities of people would gather around campfires, in tents, or in churches, and discuss the world around them and try to make sense of the chaos. They would pray to their gods, celebrate and meditate on the hardships of the past, and try to orient themselves on how they should act in the future. But there is an additional function to these services that is sometimes forgotten during times of peace. These meeting places have always acted as the primary place to notify us of dangers, to alert us to upcoming threats. Whether it be a hunter warning his tribe of a nearby population of bears, or a priest organizing food rations during a siege. Church bells are rung for a variety of reasons in different cultures, but during WW2 in Great Britain, there was a ban on the ringing of the bells, and it was deemed that they were only to be rung as a signal of an invasion by Axis troops.
We don’t have a unified place for such things anymore. If someone tries to call attention to something on social media, the comments and replies will include arguments and noise. Not to mention that social media platforms only engage those who use it, not all of the people in a community. We get lucky when an alarm successfully propagates through that method, but there are many examples of the signal dying out. Any alarms signaled on legacy media also often fail because of a “boy who cried wolf” effect. When a News station gives as much attention to “something something immigrants, something something gender” as it does to 9/11, people stop paying attention.
Fears are hard enough when we have distance. When they are perceived as something far away that we can fight against. But harder yet is when the monsters are close. When we make progress, we are walking alongside the danger. Instead of trying to contain a dragon in a cage, it is as if each day, we are taking that dragon out and trying to tame it.
This year I would like to make this space a small bell, where we as a community can share the areas of progress that if fail, could have a negative impact on society. Areas we see that are dangerous, that others might not realize are there. Ideally an area where research or work is currently taking place, and you think the dangers are not being fully recognized. I’m going to share a few examples, then I’d like it if people could think of something and share their own fears.
One area I personally see as having a long history of danger that is ignored is transportation. When trains started to be developed, they were initially fairly safe. However, as the demand for such transportation was high, rail companies developed tracks across America cheaply and quickly for financial gain. The incentives were there, and they legally had little reason not to. In the early 1800s there were not many rail accidents, but in the second half of the century there was a dramatic increase in accidents. Hundreds of train accidents that each often resulted in many deaths.
Then we wanted to fly, and that ended about as well as anyone would expect. Eventually we figured it out, and now flying is the safest means of transportation, largely because the regulation standards for planes are very high, and pilots don’t have to negotiate with each other via honking for airspace. Instead we have Air Traffic Control, which does a remarkable job at keeping people safe. However, before all of this people had to figure out how to fly. Some were not so cautious, like Franz Reichelt, who tested his original design for a parachute by jumping off the Eiffel Tower. The parachute didn’t deploy, and Reichelt fell to his death. Some people were much more cautious, like Howard Hughes and the Spruce Goose. The Spruce Goose took years of research, cost 23 million dollars, flew 21 meters off the ground above a lake for about a mile, and then never flew again. People mocked the project for its length, yet, they would have mocked differently if it had the same outcome as Reichelt’s test.
Most dangerous to each of us here is our cars. Our cars have benefitted from over 100 years of engineering, and our roads are developed by civil engineers that deeply understand the human psychology behind driving. Raise your hand if you have not been in a car accident at some point in your life, whether you were the driver or not. waits
I think most of us know this, but we still choose to get in our cars and drive all the time. That’s completely okay, I doubt cars will be an existential threat unless it turns out that Transformers are real. In the US around 100 people a day die of car accidents, and the average person will be in 4 accidents in their life, but we still accept this risk. What I am pointing to as an upcoming danger is the automation of vehicles. We don’t know what the potential consequences of automating vehicles could be, particularly from a security standpoint. I’ve noticed a dismissal of the potential dangers of automated vehicles because the primary group doing the complaining are older people who don’t understand the technology and don’t trust it, and as a reaction a lot of people in tech respond to any criticism of automated transport as being poorly informed. However, there are very reasonable concerns about the security of these vehicles. The greater the size of the group that’s able to control the vehicles autonomously, the greater the risk. If companies like Tesla begin to allow creditors to repossess a car autonomously, which it seems likely will become standard practice, then that creates an additional attack vector for criminals. Additionally, I think there are many possible issues that could arise further in the future when most of the vehicles on the road are self-driving that we aren’t able to fully grasp today.
Speaking of Tesla, its sister company, SpaceX, is attempting to make strides in our most ambitious form of transportation; space travel. It seems so grand, and yet from the perspective of the Universe, it’s barely anything. We sacrificed animals during the original space race to discover what were the necessary conditions for a mammal to survive going outside our atmosphere. There was extensive testing and funding both in the states and in the USSR, and yet we still had horrific accidents like the Challenger. This also brings to mind the recent events of the Oceangate Titan implosion. If we take more than a step or two away from where we can live on Earth, we put our lives at serious risk.
If we think about the theoretical size of the Universe, and how many people have died so far just traveling around our pale blue dot. How many more need to die in a perfect world where we can actually explore the universe, and want to seek its bounds? Is it more than the population of our planet now? Is that worth it?
Now take a minute. Think of the alarm bells you would like to ring tonight. And when you are ready, there are post it notes and pens in the back (Change to wherever the poster board is). Write that danger down and hang it on the poster board.
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