by David Brin
THE DISASTER STACK
VERNOR VINGE
It has become a truism, abetted by the often apocalyptic visions of popular culture, that technological progress increases the likelihood of some mere disaster growing into catastrophe. In reality, our increasingly sophisticated technology of communication and interconnectivity could help us deal with threats, both natural and human-activated. For example, with sufficient cooperation, charitable organizations, thoughtful businesses, skilled hobbyists, and governments should be able to create a Disaster Stack, consisting of layers of technology, knowledge and skilled volunteers that could respond to emergencies and prevent them from becoming calamities.
Here I mean to expand on a presentation given at Sci Foo 12—or Science Foo Camp—a series of interdisciplinary scientific conferences which offer ideal settings to loft impudent yet practical notions. A good many Sci Foo participants proposed projects that were within tweaking distance of relevance to disaster planning and recovery—and most of the presentations were about real projects and prototypes. Between presentations, I had the opportunity to chat with other attendees about disaster issues.
Stewart Brand had personal experience with the 1989 Loma Prieta Earthquake and later wrote a report about the rescuers and rescued. As with David Brin’s comments on 9/11, ad hoc civilian response was very important and positive, helping to limit the tragedy and loss. Not surprisingly, according to Brand, police and other professional first responders arrived on scene after local civilians. Police permitted the civilians to continue to participate. Volunteers with access to institutional resources, such as fire boats and hoses, may have prevented far greater destruction. Civilians with prior experience—e.g., military, firefighting, even teaching—tended to do well, but almost all were maneuvering in perilous ignorance. Admittedly, some civilians were totally clueless, more an obstacle than anything else. (I suspect I would have been in this category!)
One participant at my Sci Foo session made a point that, however much we talk about these things, most people don’t know what to do in a disaster, not even how to protect themselves. The hobbies and effort associated with building the Disaster Stack might go partway to helping with this problem, but effective behavior in most disasters comes down to certain standard field skills—skills that are taught by the Red Cross, by local Community Emergency Response Teams (CERT*) and other organizations. Learning these skills remains as important as ever, and should be complementary to Disaster Stack planning. The beauty of crowdsourcing is that it permits our different talents to be used where they can be the most constructive. Even people who are dysfunctional at runtime could still help with the building of the Disaster Stack.
The folks attending my session raised a more ominous concern. The Disaster Stack depends on the good-heartedness and cooperation of the people involved. Worst case scenarios, from The Lord of the Flies to Mad Max, preach that large disasters can bring out the worst in us, with groups playing zero-sum and even negative-sum games. Is this so? Is it possible to rate this risk per disaster scenario?
In Rebecca Solnit’s A Paradise Built in Hell, it is shown that citizens often respond better than expected, in emergencies—certainly much better than portrayed in Hollywood films.
Civilization’s most precious infrastructure is the framework of trust and understanding that invisibly makes all the rest possible. In losing that infrastructure, we might face a long detour back into negative-sum games. On the scale of the Long Now, I think we’d come back fairly fast. Just knowing that something can be done is a powerful enabler. And positive-sum games are our stairway to greatness. So let me now propose a potential best-case scenario by outlining the layers of the Disaster Stack.
LAYER 1: THE COMMUNICATION NETWORK
Of the two most obvious disaster threats to communications, the first is the loss of electrical power. The power needed to run smartphones is orders of magnitude less than the needs of civilization as a whole. With a little bit of forethought and regulatory sympathy, car batteries could power such devices for some hours, and existing green sources could provide longer support. Base stations and backhaul technology have more concentrated power needs, but one interesting trend of the last few years has been use of smaller and smaller stations. Emergency backhaul may have its own power-supply surprises.
The second threat is congestion arising from the disaster-related demand surge. Falling back to lower bitrates and datagram-oriented transport can help with surge problems. If our phones have a backup, peer-to-peer text passing capability, then very basic comms might be maintained even when all cell and wireless towers are down, as each phone would pass texts along to finally escape the afflicted area.
Again, there are tech trends that may make this problem more easily solvable: in principle, wireless comms can maintain high-quality peer-to-peer contact at very great station densities.
LAYER 2: THE KNOWLEDGE AND PROGRAM BASE THAT RUNS ATOP LAYER 1
A cliché of catastrophe science fiction is the notion of a cache of reference books that explain technology from before the “fall of civilization.” The cache might be as simple as an engineering manual or a survivalist’s recipe list, all the way to Asimov’s famed Encyclopedia Galactica. Old-time science-fiction fans debated which twenty pounds of reference books would have the greatest payoff. Of course, nowadays we can do much better: our smartphones have enough storage to hold entire libraries. Besides storing knowledge, we can cache plans and programs, customized for each of the disaster scenarios we consider.
Building Layer 2 would be a crowdsourced version of scenario-based planning. It would be a vast project, though in the beginning not a great deal more ambitious than Wikipedia. Even more than Wikipedia, it would be an ongoing effort: a growing hierarchy, its roots being grand categories of disaster, its leaves being discussions of particular possibilities and responses as well as pointers to common response libraries.
One of the virtues of scenario-based disaster planning is that it allows the independent study of completely contradictory policies. For instance, the recommended response to aircraft hijacking before 9/11 changed substantially after 9/11. In some cases, these contradictory policies can’t be resolved before the event. Having both represented in Layer 2 would give responders insights and options—and even diagnostics—that could be applied immediately in the presence of unforeseen situations.
Building the Disaster Stack involves doing things long before any particular disaster occurs. Unfortunately, the number of possible disaster scenarios collides with the bounded resources of the planners, be they individuals or nation states. The structure of Layer 2 would provide insight to those with access to money—both to inspire them to re-estimate risks and to survey the hierarchy for feasible projects that would have leverage across a range of possible disasters. So, for instance, introducing a small change in smart-phone sensors and protocols might have a large positive effect for many different scenarios.
Considering the size and contentious nature of the possibilities, certification and assessment should not be the monopoly of any single entity; I would prefer to have choices about whom to trust be left to users, depending on scenario and context. Disasters will happen, with smaller ones likely more common than the larger, allowing them to tutor us all how to better prepare for the inevitable Hard Hits. In principle, the Disaster Stack scheme scales from “disasters” as small as losing one’s car keys all the way up to a giant meteor strike.
Building Layer 2 is a process that might be best done open-source and by masses of amateurs—a neverending hobby—though perhaps best if greased with some philanthropic or agency funding. The primary driver will be civic-minded citizens, partly because we’ll always be imagining new disasters—but also because each disaster that really happens will give us an opportunity to revise and extend Layer 2.
LAYER 3: PEOPLE HELPING DURING DISASTERS, SUPPORTED BY LAYER 2
David Brin has written much about the importance of citizen involvement in disaster training and response. H
e has noted that while great courage and sacrifice was shown by rescue workers in the 9/11 disaster, the most effective interventions were done on the spur of the moment by civilians; furthermore, the only people to recognize and defend against the attack in real time were the civilians aboard United Flight 93, reacting spontaneously and with admirable speed, aided by cell-phone communications.
Such is the inspiration for Layer 3 of the Disaster Stack. At “run time”—that is, when a disaster strikes—the people can turn to Layer 2 services. Layer 2 will be running on top of the best available communication network (Layer 1). The Layer 2 computation and data can be used to run programs using smart-phone sensors to determine the nature of the disaster. Then people who are close to the action (Layer 3) can use that information to progress down the Layer 2 hierarchy to nodes that best fit the information available. In and among those scenario nodes, that is where they should find advice about possible actions to take—for instance, in the case of a train wreck, the location of fire-fighting equipment, medical gear, current whereabouts of medically knowledgeable persons, and so on.
Especially in early stages of the disaster, different scenarios may fit the known facts. The on-the-scene people of Layer 3 may have to conduct further observations to distinguish among possibilities or invent new explanations for the event: is the train crash caused by an earthquake, or terrorist action, or poor scheduling, or a gas leak explosion, or…? These results are communicated and acted upon. In this way, local citizens can mesh with faraway experts and expert-systems to form what Howard Rheingold once presciently called a “smart mob,” a makeshift, ad-hoc “posse” that is smarter and more effective than the mere sum of its parts.
For small disasters, the actions of Layer 3 merge seamlessly back into the everyday activities of society, including appropriate plan-time changes to all three layers. For mid-to-large calamities, the Disaster Stack eventually hands off to conventional recovery institutions. For the worst disasters, a Disaster Stack might best be regarded in the spirit of the Long Now Foundation, the organization established in 1996 to promote long-term thinking and planning as a counterpoint to today’s short attention spans. In other words, the stack can be helpful to those striving to “save what we can and preserve hope for survivors.”
The Disaster Stack is itself a contingent plan. An EMP attack would force drastic changes in the nature of Layer 1. At a different extreme, if the network clouds remain available during a disaster, they would be enormously useful. The sheer variety of failure modes means that Disaster Stack planners should aim for heterogeneity, diversity, adaptability and resilience. For example, distributing logic and data in hobbyists’ smart phones should be a concurrent project alongside schemes for using clouds. Such variety and flexibility is only possible if the individual preparation measures are very inexpensive and there are lots of hobbyists at plan time. Above all, it would be helpful if both philanthropists and agencies applied seed money that would enable amateurs to do most of the work.
CONCLUSION
In sum, the dual-use nature of technology is one of the most dread facts of our time. Civilization seems to be in a race between tech that could empower and protect us, and tech that would give anybody having a bad hair day the ability to blow up civilization. The Breakers of the world have a great advantage, since it is so much easier to break things than it is to make things.
It is vital to remember that Makers include the great and famous, but also the rest of us: people who simply have our own families, our own interests, and a vast range of specialized expertise. Breakers may—indeed, inevitably will—do considerable damage, but the rise of cell phones, smart phones, social media and information services such as Wikipedia have convinced me that the Makers of the world have their own advantages, too, starting with the fact that a vast majority of capable people want to make, and not break. There are billions of Makers, and information technology has transformed those billions into an intellectual force that trumps all past human institutions.
It’s not a coincidence that much of the preparation for the Disaster Stack looks like the activities of Bad Guys. This fact creates a temptation for otherwise reasonable governments to smother disaster planning/recovery hobbyists. But considering that the Makers are our best hope against the Breakers, let’s make sure that the urge to suppress is resisted and countered with calm reason. There is no reason why the great big hierarchical powers of money and government should not wake up to their own clear self-interest, by learning to value and collaborate with the vast population of Makers, who are the greatest source of wisdom and strength any society can have.
LIES AND PRIVATE LIVES
A future of light
Burning? Or liberating?
Decide, there’s still time
In the farther future, people will have their own solutions …
… and those solutions will bring problems.
FIRST PRESENTATION
ALIETTE DE BODARD
Thanh arrived late at the First Presentation party; deliberately, because it would enable her to mingle more easily into the crowd; and because she couldn’t deal with the thought of making small, inane talk with Anh Ngoc and her new husband for what would seem like hours, while they waited for other guests.
It had been years, and she wasn’t sure, altogether, if she would know anyone; if she would even have the proper authorizations to see anyone. But, once she cleared the entry hall and entered Anh Ngoc’s room—and the overlay of a vast courtyard shimmered into existence to replace the narrow space—Thanh saw people clustered by a buffet instead of a beautiful, empty landscape, and let out a breath she hadn’t even been aware of holding.
Protocol dictated that, at some point, she would have to meet the host and hostess—before the Master of the Inmost Layer arrived for the ceremony. But she had time. As a Master of the Inmost Layer herself—though not one Anh Ngoc would have asked to officiate, of course—Thanh knew that her order-sibling would arrive just in time for the ceremony and leave soon afterward, their time too rare and too valuable for them to justify socializing while on duty.
How is it going? The line of text crawled across her field of vision, a reminder that Hoang Cuc had made it her mission to check in on her. Her spouse and order-sibling might be on call at the office—two entire rings away from Anh Ngoc’s room—but she still had authorizations for everything she needed to follow Thanh.
Shut up, Thanh sent back. I haven’t even entered the party.
Hoang Cuc’s next message was amused. Your vitals are having a race with a spaceship.
Thanh was too jittery to send anything but the truth. Why wouldn’t they?
Why wouldn’t they, indeed?
Thanh descended toward the party, keeping a wary eye on the guests; she had a feeling of having walked measures and measures, but of course that was just the station’s Mind helping her, providing dimensional compression to make the overlay’s ghostly presence absolute—the small room that was Anh Ngoc’s living quarters expanding into a vast space, every small step Thanh took decoupled to give her the feeling of having covered a great distance. Even the elevation was simulated, the Mind tinkering with her perceptions and her inner ear to give her the impression of walking downhill.
The people who were part of Thanh’s most inward authorizations lit up in the overlay. She hadn’t talked to most of them since breaking up with Anh Ngoc; and two years had passed, enough for them to have changed, for new posts to have been taken up, health to have evolved either for the better or for worse; for births and deaths and the everyday flow of life aboard Seven Clouds Station.
Anh Ngoc was there, at the other end of the courtyard—standing, for a moment, unencumbered by any guests, her gaze meeting Thanh’s—and Thanh couldn’t really ignore her, not decently. She nodded at Anh Ngoc, sent a message through the overlay, offering the usual congratulations and wishes for good fortune to her former lover, even though this didn’t encompass any of what she wanted or needed to say—and waite
d, a fist of ice clenched around her innards, for an answer.
Anh Ngoc hadn’t changed, still plump and small, with a hardened, thin face more suitable for an asteroid miner or an ascetic than a designer, though of course this was just the avatar she chose to show to Thanh; and for all Thanh knew she now had gray in her hair, or the first wrinkles showing at the corner of her eyes. She stood a little hunched, and moved a little slower than usual. She probably had her baby strapped to her chest, though of course they wouldn’t appear in the avatar—wouldn’t exist, in fact, until the First Presentation ceremony had been properly performed, and their parents’ authorizations had been passed on to them, enabling them both to interact with others and to be seen by others. A newborn’s privacy was absolute and any breach automatically major, punished by long-term losses of authorizations.
Anh Ngoc’s answer, when it did come—after a heartbeat, after an eternity—was equally formal: a string of red-inked words across her field of vision, congratulating Thanh on her own promotion within the Ministry of Transparency, and on her own wedding to Hoang Cuc. And a signature, strong and forceful, which set Thanh’s heart racing: The Maiden of Cloud Lake. It was how Anh Ngoc had used to sign their correspondence—in the days before the fight, before everything boiled over.
Thanh looked up. Anh Ngoc was still where she’d seen her last, standing in the midst of a crowd awaiting her attention. For a moment more she held Thanh’s gaze, then she nodded and turned away, pulled in by a guest Thanh could barely see—someone who had given her the lowest settings of authorization and would no doubt be glad to see the back of her.
The Maiden of Cloud Lake. The Maiden.
Anh Ngoc was no longer a maiden, and Cloud Lake was years in the past; and yet …
Thanh. Breathe, Hoang Cuc sent. Want me to input some drugs?
You can’t, Thanh pointed out. It was close to a breach, a role slightly exceeding the authorizations she’d been given as Thanh’s spouse, and probably requiring her to pass the order onto the station’s Mind as a Master of the Inmost Layer.