In Search of Certainty

Chapter 10. The Concept Of Promises: Or why behaviour comes from within

“A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it.”

Max Planck

In the foregoing sections, we’ve seen how science has tried to come to grips with the three main challenges facing our mastery over the world: scale, complexity, and reason, and how the resilience of anything we care to build—not least infrastructure—depends on how well we maintain its state. We’ve seen how the expense of brute force methods, along with the uncertainties of reasoning about the state of things, causes fundamental problems for reliability in information systems. All this ushers the critical mind to pursue a different approach altogether to the brute force methods of the past: an approach based more on what is knowable rather than what is desired, based on approximate reasoning, less sensitive to errors of input and intent. We want to base system outcomes, as far as possible, on intrinsic stability, because we surrender to the inevitable: scale, complexity, and reasoning are all subject to uncertainties, and the inconsistencies of multiple observational ‘worlds’.

In this final part of the book, I want to suggest how to adopt a different way of thinking about human-computer infrastructure, more ambitious in scope and more practical in nature, that has the potential to go beyond today’s ...