Uncertainty, Lags and Nonlinearity: Challenges to governance in a turbulent world
Date: 7 May 2009
Special Event co-hosted by the Future of Humanity Institute and the Oxford Institute for Ethics, Law and Armed Conflict (ELAC), talk by Tad Homer-Dixon (University of Waterloo, Canada). Professor Homer-Dixon holds the Centre for International Governance Innovation Chair of Global Systems at the Balsillie School of International Affairs in Waterloo, Canada, and is a Professor in the Centre for Environment and Business in the Faculty of Environment, University of Waterloo. Recently, his research has focused on threats to global security in the 21st century and on how societies adapt to complex economic, ecological, and technological change. His work is highly interdisciplinary, drawing on political science, economics, environmental studies, geography, cognitive science, social psychology, and complex systems theory.
Speaker(s): Professor Tad Homer-Dixon, Professor Nick Bostrom
Venue: Manor Road Building, University of Oxford
Global financial, climate, energy, and food challenges exhibit similar characteristics - all emerge from systems exhibiting high levels of uncertainty, countless unknown unknowns, time lags, threshold effects, occasional chaotic behavior, and sometimes synchronized systemic failure (as we're now seeing in the financial system). In such systemic environments, standard "management" approaches to public policy and governance are severely handicapped. Specifically, systems with lots of uncertainty and inertia are notoriously hard to control: manager cannot effectively predict the system's future behavior, and they cannot quickly correct behavior they do not like. In the case of climate change, by the time policymakers find out that the climate dice have rolled against humankind, inertia could make conventional responses like carbon taxes and wind power inadequate. Planning humankind's response around what scientists currently think is the most likely outcome is therefore reckless. While we can hope for the best, we must lay plans to navigate the worst.
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