#Forbes technology council figleaf drivers
The risks to late-night drunk drivers are much higher than those for professionals driving to Washington, D.C., because the airport is closed. Even using historical traffic statistics requires some caution. Indeed, the flight restrictions imposed at the time reflected official uncertainty about that very question. However, at that time, reasonable people could believe that aviation had entered a whole new era, in which historical statistics had lost their relevance. Arguably, the events of September 11 had little effect on theories of driving safety. Adding injuries makes driving look worse still. From the perspective of historical per-mile fatality statistics, driving is much riskier. As a result, even a wholly rational and informed observer would hardly know what gambles we are taking with our world.Īs an example of these difficulties, consider the decision made by many travelers to drive rather than fly in the days after the September 11 terrorist attacks. However, as Posner shows, those models often involve making judgments about unprecedented interactions among processes that are poorly understood even in isolation. In the absence of a historical record, we need to develop models to estimate risks. general tendency to ignore the catastrophic risks, both individually and in the aggregate.” Posner notes that especially when there is no historical record on which to base estimates of frequency, “it is difficult for people to take seriously. Rather, it is the probabilities of these events that bedevil us. Many have been portrayed in “disaster” films, creating vivid pictures in the public mind. It is not that the possibilities are hard to envision.
Posner traces this failure to people’s inability to get their minds around these threats. In his account, we are ignoring some threats, such as asteroids, while dithering over inadequate responses to others, such as international regulatory controls on carbon emissions. Not satisfied with simply musing about these possibilities, Posner wants action, arguing that “the risks of global catastrophe are greater and more numerous than commonly supposed, and they are growing, probably rapidly.” His gloomy projection reflects the specter of ever more people able to exploit ever more powerful science and technology, without an equivalent growth in societal controls. Some of these stories smack of the moral tales told by science fiction writers: What is the acceptable risk of sacrificing civilization in return for an indeterminate chance of saving it from tyranny? What is fundamental understanding of the universe worth, in terms of fundamental threats to our corner of it? These are events that we know could result through the unlikely conjunction of identifiable processes, but we do not know enough about the strengths and interactions of these processes to estimate the events’ likelihood of occurring.
Posner begins by engagingly describing some of these nightmarish prospects. In Catastrophe, Posner has partially satisfied my curiosity by turning his attention to how society should prepare for events with extreme consequences and indeterminate probabilities, including large asteroid strikes, abrupt climate change, bioterror-induced pandemics, and runaway reactions from particle physics experiments. I have wondered what insights he could provide regarding my area of expertise: risk and uncertainty. He seems to write thoughtfully faster than I can read thoughtfully, in prose that transmits the gleanings of a great breadth of reading. Judge Richard Posner, a prominent legal scholar and a leading intellectual of our time, has explored a dazzlingly diverse array of subjects.