from Part IV - Energy futurism
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 June 2015
Resilience is the capacity of individuals, communities, companies, and the government to withstand, respond to, recover from, and adapt to disruptive events.
Steve Flynn (2012)Our society has steadily created more complex and co-dependent or interdependent critical infrastructure systems. We have become especially dependent on the availability of reliable electricity. As a result of this complexity and dependence, we have become subject to new risks that are often misunderstood or ignored entirely. Today's sudden fixation with big data—which really is a euphemism for the utilization of heuristics and inferential statistical models to aid in decision-making—is more dangerous as a result of our inability to view these dependencies and our increased levels of comfort with the increasingly stable services that technology has enabled, especially when compared to most of human history. As the mean time between failures of all types increases, so does the perception of safety; thus, the allocation of capital to develop technologies or invest in infrastructure which prioritizes resilience over efficiency lags ever farther behind the actual level of risk.
Big data tools—which are often misunderstood as being capable of determining causality, despite their absolute limitation of determining degree of correlation as a black box—are further accelerating the optimization of our businesses, processes, investment strategies, etc. for an increasingly narrow operational band. Put differently, big data is only capable of utilizing the information made available to it to determine strategies that are highly correlated with a positive outcome based on its training data set. The training data is empirical: making decisions in this manner is akin to driving using only a rearview mirror. Empirical data, by definition, represents system states which have already been experienced, and extrapolation is often fraught with challenges.
New events, real-world occurrences which occur outside the band, and especially sustained system changes outside the expectations of the trained data set, are often inimical to such an approach.
To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure [email protected] is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.
Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.
Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.
To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.
To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.