ASU Lincoln Center, sustainability

1. You Want the Future?
You Can’t Handle the Future!
Perspectives on Sustainability
Brad Allenby
Founding Director, Center for Earth Systems Engineering and Management
Lincoln Professor of Engineering and Ethics
Professor of Civil, Environmental, and Sustainable Engineering
USBCSD
October 18, 2011

2. Relevant Trends
• Welcome to the Anthropocene – the human earth.
• The world is becoming much more complex and
information dense.
• Natural systems become integrated with human and
built systems, and subject to their dynamics – examples:
genetic engineering and IP; carbon cycle.
• Professionals and firms are being charged by society
with responsibility not just for their actions, but for their
technology systems (cf: Monsanto and EU on GMOs).
• Sustainability is becoming important social myth.
• Technology is critical locus of accelerating evolutionary
pressures, and major framework for integrated
natural/built/human Earth systems in Anthropocene.

3. Straws in the Wind
• Students and Google: why are you still
teaching facts?
• Augcog and distributed cognition.
• ASU workshop with Sandia National
Laboratories on cognitive enhancement.
• Use of cognitive enhancement drugs to
enhance routine academic performance.

4. Straws in the Wind
• Ambient atmosphere carbon capture
technology: design your own world
• Grow your own Neanderthal, and AI on the
other side: the human as design space
• Radical life extension
• Privatization of governance: war and
private military contractors; EU using
NGOs to handleforeign aid; space
(DARPA and 100 Year Starship Study)

5. Sustainability
• A highly normative, egalitarian scenario.
– Note that many other scenarios are possible and, given current
trends, perhaps even more probable
• Has become increasingly ambiguous over time as different
institutions adopt different definitions to suit their
requirements.
• What is to be sustained? The Earth? Biodiversity? Human
life? Existing economic and power structures?
• Mismatch between degrees of freedom of managers and
technocrats, and global sustainability issues.
• Oversimplifies complexity of current and future environments,
especially given accelerating technological evolution
– Focus on resource use, versus information structures
– Fails to consider even very foreseeable trends such as radical life
extension

6. Sustainability and Basic Political Values
Libertarian: justice is equality of opportunity
U.S. polity
Communitarianisn: Corporatism: welfare
welfare is optimized by is optimized by free
individual being economic activity of
absorbed in community individuals
Sustainable
Development
Egalitarian: justice is equality of outcome

7. Problem Statement
• Power of emerging technologies poses huge
governance and social challenges
– Sustainability and radical life extension?
– Changing cognitive patterns among young?
– Geoengineering?
– Technological change as major unappreciated Earth
system (no discipline of technology studies)?
• Military and security needs major driver of
technological evolution, especially of Five Horsemen
(nano, bio, robotics, ICT, cogsci)
• Military and security competence heavily dependent
on society’s technological competence (US v. BRIC v.
EU)

8. Complex Issues at Many Scales
• Struggle for long term cultural dominance, with
technological competence a major factor (China versus
US)
• All assumptions become radically contingent
– Psychological and individual: are we redesigning the
human as an industrial-mil/sec strategy?
– Governance: are we redesigning society as an
industrial-mil/sec strategy?
– Institutional: roles of different institutions shifting
rapidly and unpredictably

9. Some Ways Forward
• Technology analysis: policy response
matrix
• Technical CSR: Industrial Ecology
• Take charge of sustainability dialog for
your firm
– Unlike activists, you can’t afford to ignore your
portfolio of obligations
– You need to manage technological change:
not just for firm, but for society as well

10. Technical CSR
• Themes:
– Must try to understand lifecycle (easy for material in specific use;
harder for complex product; harder for service – what is the
“lifecycle” of the Net?)
– Must include not just environmental, but social dimensions
– Serious normative issues: who gets to define what is to be
sustained, what social values to prioritize?
• Services much harder to design, evaluate implications,
than products
– Where is boundary between product, service, and earth system
(e.g., jet airplane, a product, enables tourism, a service, which is
part of broader system of global travel including impacts on
previously unreachable environments, airplane as disease
vector, etc.)

11. Information Infrastructure Boundary Issues
Level Method of Study Main Impact Typical IE Design Issues
(Physical v. Cultural)
Artifact manufacture Traditional Physical Energy consumption in manufacture; toxics in manufacturing
environment and processes; industrial hygiene issues
safety compliance
(end-of-pipe)
Artifact over lifecycle DfE, LCA Physical Understanding conditions of use; energy consumption in use;
end-of-life management; toxic in product
Construction and Systems Physical Evolution of technology (from telephony to internet protocol,
maintenance of engineering wireless); interactions of systems components; efficiency per
networks unit service; systems boundary
Services N/A Physical/Cultural Definition of “service”; relationship of service to physical
(e.g., broadband to network and social practices
home)
Social practices based N/A Cultural Both short and long term impacts important (and may not
on services align); difficult to predict because of cultural component; triple
(e.g., teleworking) bottom line implications, especially social (“digital divide”)
Knowledge economy/ N/A Cultural Impact on social constructs (“wilderness”, “environment”).
infosphere Enable postmodernist fragmenting of values?
Enable world as artifact (real time comprehensive monitoring
systems)?
Substitution of information for energy/materials?
End of “natural history” w/ human contingency built into
natural system?

12. Changing Dimensions of Work
Knowledge
Economy
Paradigm
Flexible, virtual
Dy time and space
co nam
ind m SK
i IL
d, ivid plex c, LS
un ua , TIME/SPACE
sta liz
ble e
cle S
ar tab
ly le Defined, clock time
de ,
fin
ed
Firm PLACE
Knowledge
Manufacturing Dedicated, Non-place based,
production, Facility-based,
Paradigm co-located individual choice
defined by physical
Ful
production l E
intranets
d em -time MPL
ixe plo
ym
OY
ME
, f ion ent NT
L le ut
E M tab tit Fixed, Se
l
D
O R S ins impermeable full f-emp
M FI rela spe loye
F
O LIFE tion ctrum d,
s to of
BOUNDRIES firm
ng ithin
olvi w n (e.g., family/work)
io
Ev ork zat s
tw al i rk
ne lob two Porous, constantly
g ne shifting

13. Policy Response Matrix: Cyborg Insects
Policy Goals and Effects Policy Response
Response
Technology
Level
Level I: Reduce collateral damage and Goals and technology align;
increase operational efficiency therefore adopt technology
Military effectiveness in counterinsurgency operations
Level II: Protect civilian populations from Implement technology, but
terrorists and, through mission technology alone may not lead
Security effectiveness creep, criminals to achievement of stated goal
Level III: Ensure orderly society; likely to Optimistic goals likely to be
reduce privacy and enable “soft” undercut as those in power
Social and cultural or “hard” totalitarian state; shift adopt cybersect technology to
effects of power to technologically rich their own ends; Level I and
organizations (e.g., private Level III implications potentially
firms). in fundamental conflict

14. “He, only, merits freedom and
existence
Who wins them every day
anew.”
(Goethe, 1833, Faust, lines 11,575-76)