We are building extraordinarily intelligent machines to solve a problem whose governing assumptions remain remarkably primitive.
Tag: systems thinking
How lawfare converts institutional status and financial power into pressure that silences criticism and makes public disagreement prohibitively expensive.
A force built to exploit asymmetry now operates inside legal and informational systems capable of generating asymmetric effects upon it.
We built machines to finish our sentences. Now they are helping us finish the world.
Categories
Holism and Climate Change
Climate change is not occurring inside a stable planetary system. It is altering the persistent structure of relations among climatic states, variables and phases, changing the conditions under which subsequent states become possible and probable.
Communication systems can make an interpretation familiar before it has been examined, significant before it has been understood, and consequential before anyone establishes whether it is true.
An institution’s measure is not how successfully it preserves itself or claims success, but whether it continues to serve its human purpose.
The climate is not obliged to change at a pace convenient to those living within it.
Peace is not merely difficult. We have built institutions, identities, economies and languages whose coherence depends upon the persistence of conflict.
A civilisation builds systems to solve its problems, then discovers that the systems have become the problems, while its dependence upon them has made their continuity deeply problematic.
Institutions study the world remarkably well. The harder problem is that the world they are studying is also inside the building, and there is no position outside the system from which that entanglement simply disappears.
A nation cannot be unified by dividing a people against themselves. The danger begins when that contradiction becomes a political method.
