Network of Stoppages - Marcel Duchamp, 1914
"For a moment they saw the nations of the dead,
and, before they joined them, scraps of the untainted sky." - E.M.
Forster, 1909
In the current furore about artificial intelligence
(AI), there is a growing fear that machines will take on a life of their own
and behave in a malign and uncontrollable manner (e.g. Observer 2016). There
are many worrying aspects of AI, and some heartening ones, but there is a
remarkably simple answer to talk of machines taking over, namely, why not pull
out the plug? The insurgency of self-controlled machines is a staple of science
fiction, and much of the respect for that genre stems from the fact that it
often contains a metaphor for humanity's current mores and preoccupations. In this
case, it is an indication of the extent to which we all take electricity for
granted.
More than ever before in history, electricity is now
our life-blood, and every day that passes this becomes more and more true. If
anything threatens our survival, it is the absence of electrical current in the
distribution system of high- and low-tension cables and wires. In fact, when
NATO bombed Serbia in 1999 tacticians put a great deal of effort into bombing
power stations with graphite (which short-circuits them) in order to render
them inoperable and thus undermine the functioning of the enemy state.
Power failure is taken very seriously by utility
providers and hospitals, but not by the general public or many businesses. For
many decades we have been habituated to the idea that, if the power ever goes
off, it will come on again very soon, and interruptions of service will be
rare. They are a nuisance that forces us to suspend our activities, but that is
all. This is a testimony to the dogged work of the electricity providers in
ensuring supplies. It sets countries aside from those where, through lack of
energy resources, inability to maintain networks, shortage of investment and
growing demand, electricity distribution is not so stable. It sets us aside
from the forgotten corners of the world where power grids and distribution
networks have not yet arrived. They are either treated as romantic anachronisms
or marginal places of little consequence. But what if electricity distribution
did significantly fail? Both the causes and the consequences are likely to be
quite involved (Luke 2010).
Much work has been carried out to protect electricity
generation and distribution networks against progressive failures of the
'toppling dominoes' kind, characterised by a chain of protective isolations and
shut-downs of the system (Terzija et al. 2011, Nateghi et al. 2016). However,
with rising demand for electricity and diversifying supply, power distribution
has become progressively more sophisticated, pervasive and internationalised.
This has also created many more areas of potential vulnerability (Elizondo et
al. 2002). Hence, 'cascading failure' is a term that is now less applicable to
the physical relationships in a power network and more to the relationship
between overall failure and chains of consequences (Chang et al. 2007, Bompard
et al. 2009, Chiaradonna et al. 2011).
Despite all the work that has gone into making power
generation and distribution resilient processes, natural hazard impact cannot
be ruled out, and neither can technical failure (Maliszewski
and Perrings 2011). Moreover, cyber attack cannot be
regarded as a threat that is totally under control and will remain so (Stefanini
and Masera 2008m Piccinelli et al. 2017). In this
sense, the 2015-16 cyber attacks on the Ukrainian power grid have acted as a
wake-up call to the electricity industry (Lee et al. 2016). In the last
analysis, power supply will never be completely safe against widespread
failure.
Because water supply and sanitation, fuel supply, food
distribution and other services depend on the availability of electricity,
there are grounds for regarding it as the primary form of critical
infrastructure (Kröger 2008). It also provides some essential mechanisms
through which critical infrastructure failure is linked to cascading disasters.
In most places, the degree of dependency of society on electricity has not been
tested by a prolonged, widespread outage (although around the world major
events of this kind occur with a frequency of about once a year, and less
consequential events orders of magnitude more often - Atputharajah and Saha
2009).
At present, we have a poor understanding of the degree
to which we depend on electricity. Consider the impact of prolonged loss of
power on food conservation and distribution. If motor fuel supplies cannot be
pumped, food will rot in warehouses. If refrigeration fails, food will rot in
situ. This may lead to a proliferation of gastro-enteritic diseases, as
contaminated food is eaten, for example in the home environment, and it would
certainly lead to a problem of how to dispose of large quantities and varieties
of contaminated food. Hence, an extra burden on hospitals and a problem of
rectifying the food supply chain would be consequences.
From advertising to sales and dispatch, commerce is
now heavily, almost universally, dependent on electronic systems. Hence,
interruption of electricity supply inevitably means interruption of business:
the supplier cannot sell and the customer cannot buy. In such a situation, it will
be interesting to see what degree of cushioning there is between interruption
of service and bankruptcy. This came close to being tested in both
"9-11" and the eruption of Eyjafjallajökull in 2010, each of which
put a groundstop of about a week upon the airlines, leading to massive losses
of revenue (Alexander 2013a).
How would a "cashless society" manage in the
absence of electronic banking and electrically driven transactions? This
problem covers a wide spectrum because it stretches from simple issues about
paying for essential goods, such as food, to complex ones about major
time-dependent electronic transactions, such as house purchase conveyancing.
One of the most significant and least explored
elements of dependency upon electricity is the psychological side. For people
who are completely habituated to communicating via social media and telephone,
what would it mean to have to do without these devices (Wang et al. 2015)? This
brings us to Barton's post-disaster 'therapeutic community' (Barton 1970). It
is probable that a prolonged black-out would lead to more cooperation, social
identification and self-sacrifice. It would tend to bring outcasts into the
social circle rather than reinforce their exclusion. However, the other side of
the coin is crime and social deviance. Despite the prevalence of the
'therapeutic community' and its reinforced consensus on what is right and
proper, for criminals disaster is an opportunity (Zahran et al. 2009). Looting
(Alexander 2013b) is not an inevitable consequence, but where appropriate
preconditions exist (for example in deprivation, lawlessness or lack of social
justice), it may be a significant outcome. The connection between electricity
supply failure and looting has been well researched in its North American context
(Muhlin et al. 1981, Wohlenberg 1982). However, before plans are laid to cope
with a massive onset of looting as the lights go out, perhaps attention should
be devoted to the presence or absence of preconditions and what they signify in
terms of propensity or its absence.
If we became completely habituated to using digital
technology, would we be able to think and act effectively in its absence?
Information technology has caused people to retreat from reality, and at the
same time it has made itself indispensable. If this seems to be too extreme an
interpretation, an alternative view is that information technology has
redefined reality. However, technological failure could redefine it again.
The Internet age has given a special sort of
prescience to the renowned science fiction story that E.M. Forster wrote in
1909, The Machine Stops (Forster
1928). This is an apocalyptic tale of how universal dependency on technology
leads to the breakdown of civilisation and the annihilation of all those who
depend on it, except for a small group of people who have managed to break away
and revert to a more natural form of living. Forster and his contemporaries
faced the incubus of the First World War, in which the machine gun and poison
gas did so much to show the prowess of technology on the killing fields. Yet it
was not until the beginning of the nuclear age that people and their prophets
began to see technology as genuinely capable of making an end to civilisation.
Nonetheless, Forster's magisterial tale at least offers his readers a glimpse
of future regeneration. Whether or not Forster was foreseeing something in the
future, Domesday scenarios and the means of coping with them remain extremely
difficult to think through (Bostrom and Cirkovic 2011, Denkenberger et al.
2017).
Forster's story relies much on automation, which is in
turn dependent on the algorithms that make it function. The proliferation of
algorithms is becoming a major influence upon modern life. All algorithms are
models, and all models simplify reality. Good models are elegant
simplifications and successfully extract the 'signal' from the 'noise' that
surrounds it. However, the simplification process involves making assumptions,
which in the end may be valid or false. By their very nature, as part of the
modelling process, assumptions exclude information, observations and elements
of reality. When algorithms fail, reality surges back, with all of its awkward
complications and chaotic implications.
At present, we are not devoting enough attention to
the question of how digital development creates vulnerability and dependency.
Dependency, in fact, is the motor of vulnerability. All technology is
ultimately fallible, but how vulnerable are we to its failure? The present
tendency is to counter this fallibility with the application of yet more
technology. Nothing could be more conducive to breeding the conditions for
cascading failure. Will artificial intelligence and information technology
failure create tragedy? If not, will it contribute to, exacerbate or multiply
tragedies?
Technology has reorientated person-to-person
communication. It has opened up new avenues, both good and bad, for leadership
and for the management of public opinion. The spontaneous loss of the
technology, for example in any form of prolonged failure of the equipment, will
inevitably lead to resocialisation, but largely through a highly inefficient
process of improvisation, of trial and error. Paradoxically, by creating
massive redundancy, its very inefficiency may be the source of its richness and
success. In the end if failure occurs on a grand scale (Pescaroli et al. 2018), afterwards, the
attitude to technology will never be the same again.
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