As self-driving cars inch closer to a daily reality, the Trolley Problem seems to have entered our lexicon. In short, should a self-driving computer choose to avoid hitting a bunch of people and kill its single occupant as a result? Turns out people expect the car to protect the greater good second and their own skin first.
Maybe out our current political environment of unfettered gun violence, climate change, Trump-lead racism, Brexit-fueled xenophobia, and general apprehension about losing what we thought we’d earned are a kind of longer-term but still serious Trolley Problem. Would you vote to improve society at large even if it meant taking yourself down a ego/prestige/money notch?
Well when I put it that way, things seem pretty bleak!
I happened across an Alan Kay essay, Enlightened Imagination for Citizens, and it kinda helped me get through that bleakness. Some highlights:
In a raging flood, a man risks his life to save a swept away child, but two years earlier he voted against strengthening the levee whose breaching caused the flood. During an epidemic people work tirelessly to help the stricken, but ignored elementary sanitation processes that could have prevented the outbreak. More astoundingly, as many as 200,000 Americans die each year from diseases spread by their own doctors who have been ignoring elementary sanitation (including simply washing their hands when needed), but who then work diligently to try to save the patients they have infected. Studies show that about 80% of Americans are “highly concerned” about climate change, yet this percentage drops to less than 20% when the issue is combined with what it will cost to actually deal with these changes.
Regarding our inability to reason about dynamic systems:
One of the reasons the consequences were not imagined is that our human commonsense tends to think of “stability” as something static, whereas in systems it is a dynamic process that can be fragile to modest changes. One way to imagine “stability” is to take a bottle and turn it upside down. If it is gently poked, it will return to its “stable position”. But a slightly more forceful poke will topple it. It is still a system, but has moved into a new dynamic stability, one which will take much more work to restore than required to topple it.
On acting now instead of acquiring a perfect answer or solution:
When the costs of an imperfectly understood event are high or essentially irreversible, measures have to be taken even when perfect proofs are lacking. This idea is understood by most developed societies—and carried out in the form of levees and pumps, food and water stocks, etc.—but is nonetheless resisted by many of the voting public.
Perhaps the solution is to get ourselves representatives that excel at reasoning and legislation instead of politics and fundraising?
One of the reasons we are a republic with a democratic base is that the representatives can be selected to be “the best and the brightest” from the population as a whole (this was another early ideal for the great American experiment). We could argue that the current representatives are “all too representative”, but this is part of a slide in our political and social systems that needs to be shored up and improved. The idea of “national service” is now just a whisper, but it is what needs to be brought back into the forefront of what it means to be a citizen.
