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Tuesday, December 28, 2004The Belmont Club has an interesting post on the need for better warning systems. In it, Wretchard notes:The real challenge is not so much to create a new dedicated network of staring systems against known threats but to tie current sensors to systems which are capable of cognition. The most valuable survival asset is situational awareness -- the ability to recognize threats you have never seen before and respond in an evolving manner -- and that capability has not yet come to the world as a whole.The first sentence is problematic. The second is genius. The problem with Wretchard's idea is that cognition is quite a tricky mess and figuring out what's a problem and what isn't requires a peculiar sort of judgment that I'm not sure can be programmed. Consider: You're in a large public building. All of a sudden, 30 people leap up and start running through the crowd, indifferent to who they bump or jostle. A riot? A terrorist act? Nope, the flight to Minneapolis just got moved from gate A6 to gate B4. Across town, a crowd is gathered around a black man screaming at them to go away. The closer they come, the more he kicks and punches. A lynch mob? A racist attack? Or a schizophrenic having a seizure? The only way to know is "situational awareness." Wretchard is right on one count, and it's a big one. Situational awareness is key, but it is unevenly distributed. As I wrote yesterday, I've lived in California for about two years and am under the impression that we might have a tsunami warning system. I have no idea, however, how that system works, how the warning is issued, or what I am supposed to do according to the civil planners. However, having seen the news this week, I have a much better idea how to respond, what to watch for and what to worry about. Intellectually, I know that even tidal waves take time to move across large masses of water, but until I read the news this week, I'd never considered the idea that you could have up to two hours to take cover from an imminent tidal wave. Worldwide, situational awareness about tidal waves has increased a great deal. As a consequence, human beings know more not just about tidal waves, but about sudden floods, potential repercussions of earthquakes and more. The news is reporting that on top of the 55,000 killed in the actual event, many more will die in resultant epidemics. As the gruesome details roll in, I trust that our situational awareness of dealing with corpses, backed up sanitation systems and more will increase too. And as with the folks who took down Flight 93, the result will be populations that can deal not only with old situations but who can evaluate and respond to completely new ones. Still, there is a fundamental problem with setting up warning systems with built in cognition, and it is this: There's only one model, and it's not as good as we'd like to think. The model is, of course, us. And it did a helluva job with the folks on Flight 93, for example. But, how many hours a week are spent evaluating slight moves in the stock market that turn out to be so much white noise? How many hours a week are spent worrying that the clipped tone in which the boss said good morning indicated that you're on his sh-t list - when in fact he was distracted because his wife was mad that he missed his daughter's ballet recital last night...? How many hours are spent waiting for that parking spot near the door that wasn't opening up after all? Wretchard would have it right if he indicated it would be really cool if we could come up with a warning system with cognition that could get these things right. I think it would be neat if when I hung up the phone from a cranky customer, the other line would ring and a little computer voice would say, don't worry about him, he couldn't "perform" last night and needed to make a fuss to feel manly. But, it ain't gonna happen, and when we go from talking about what would be nice and seeing what we stumble across to talking about "needing" the stuff of a fail-safe world, we're in twilight zone territory. Life is supposed to have risk, or we'd all live forever and do some very bad stuff as we lived it. And wake up calls about the precariousness of our existence, whether from the dark side of our own race or the vicissitudes of life as directed by Mother Nature are a thing with which we will have to deal from time to time. We are getting better and better at screening for them, which makes us all the more shocked when things go wrong, but things will go wrong and the best thing we can do in response is to cultivate that most useful situational awareness of all: the realization that we are, after all, individual and mortal, and that the preservation of life and soul alike rests finally not with government planners making life foolproof, but with our own willingness to keep our eyes and ears open to what has happened and to contemplate how we, individually, would choose to act in similar situations. 
posted by gbarto at 11:59 PM |
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