This article has been adapted from one that appeared in Aeon, aeon.co.
Our society is a complex system, “a system with many interacting agents, whose collective behavior is usually hard to predict.“ This makes things challenging. When the pandemic hit last March, for example, no one would have guessed that toilet paper would have been the most coveted item. As a computer scientist when you are designing a system, knowing the population you are designing for is critical. That is why systems that are cognizant of complex systems and encourage robustness and adaptability are key.
Recently, Computing Community Consortium (CCC) council member Melanie Mitchell (Santa Fe Institute and Portland State University) and Jessica Flack (Santa Fe Institute) wrote an article for Aeon titled Uncertain times.
“In complex systems, the last thing that happened is almost never informative about what’s coming next, because of how individual behavior and the system interact. Designing systems that encourage robustness and adaptability, rather than attempting to predict the future, can make systems more quickly responsive to disruptions.”
The COVID-19 pandemic provides an unprecedented opportunity to begin to think through how scientists might harness collective behavior and uncertainty to shape a better future for us all.
“Instead of prioritizing outcomes based on the last bad thing that happened—applying laser focus to terrorism, or putting vast resources into health care—we might take inspiration from complex systems in nature and design processes that foster adaptability and robustness for a range of scenarios that could come to pass.”
So as a computer scientist designing a system that could be used in the next pandemic, try not to think of designing a system to “predict” human society since, as we have learned, predicting is not possible. Instead design a system with flexibility. Keeping in mind that all scenarios are technically possible, but a good system will be able to identify and then react. Perhaps then we will be better off in the next pandemic or at least we will hopefully not run out of critical items such as toilet paper.
