It seems reasonable to to say that if science and technology outpace political and cultural ability to understand and control risks, then humans aren’t safe. The same seems true when politics and culture outpace science and technology.
It also seems reasonable to contend that the arts and humanities act as a safety valve, releasing excess pressure in the dynamics and indicating where the pressure comes from.
If we start from the assumption that these reflect a real dynamic, then it is plausible that we can derive a system of equations describing the tension, and we can test that against historic events.
Should it be possible to produce a predictive model that has reasonable accuracy, then the question of how we would know when humans are safe has a definite answer: when the model shows that the system is no longer chaotic but is oscillating or fully stable.
If such a model cannot be derived, then we cannot know I any absolute sense if we are safe or not. If we can, then we possess a means of knowing not only if we’re in a safe zone but how far into that safety zone we are.
So although I do not know what it would take to be safe, or whether we can know if we are, I am comfortable suggesting we can find out.
It seems reasonable to to say that if science and technology outpace political and cultural ability to understand and control risks, then humans aren’t safe. The same seems true when politics and culture outpace science and technology.
It also seems reasonable to contend that the arts and humanities act as a safety valve, releasing excess pressure in the dynamics and indicating where the pressure comes from.
If we start from the assumption that these reflect a real dynamic, then it is plausible that we can derive a system of equations describing the tension, and we can test that against historic events.
Should it be possible to produce a predictive model that has reasonable accuracy, then the question of how we would know when humans are safe has a definite answer: when the model shows that the system is no longer chaotic but is oscillating or fully stable.
If such a model cannot be derived, then we cannot know I any absolute sense if we are safe or not. If we can, then we possess a means of knowing not only if we’re in a safe zone but how far into that safety zone we are.
So although I do not know what it would take to be safe, or whether we can know if we are, I am comfortable suggesting we can find out.