Information processing and the sustainability conundrum: a review
Non-technical summary
This open access paper from Grumbach, S., & Van der Leeuw, S. (2021) is the most persuasive analysis in favour of the digital revolution that I have come across. It is a very innovative contribution in realising the central importance of information processing in resolving our global challenges. It has some loose ends in its conclusions that this commentary tries to complement to contribute to a wider scholarship on the transformations towards sustainability.
Review
Paper from Grumbach, S., & Van der Leeuw, S. (2021) addresses “a gap between our capacity to know and our capacity to act” and provides possible orientation for further navigation in the Anthropocene through an innovative lens of information processing. It begins with a discussion of how sustainability interventions target “essentially weak leverage points’ as cited in Abson et. al. (2017), which argues for broader paradigm shifts. Furthermore, the authors identify this dissonance as a deeper root of the distrust in science and politics (rather than it being a matter of cleaning up the information ecology amplified by technological transformation).
Building upon Van der Leeuw’s (one of the authors) thesis from his seminal work (see Social Sustainability, (van der Leeuw, 2020)), human societies are conceived as ‘dissipative structures’, which are “dependent for their existence on flows of energy, matter, and information”. Authors state, “The long-term co-evolution of human knowledge, language, technology, social institutions, and the environments in which societies develop” is a function of information processing that “developed historically in conjunction with the complexity of human societies”. They argue that to deal with the sustainability conundrum we need to focus on the nature of information processing and “in contemporary societies, the co-evolution of knowledge generation and problem-solving seems to be dysfunctional”.
Authors identify a growing mismatch between the limited nature of human cognition and the unlimited dimensionality of our actions (‘unintended consequences’, including known unknowns and unknown unknowns). This predicament is exacerbated by a reductionist nature of modern (particularly ‘western’) knowledge systems (and institutions) that tend to beget a false sense of control by ignoring (so-called) externalities. “The evolution of a society’s knowledge structure thus drives the trajectory of human-environmental interaction”. They further clarify this point by citing Keynes: “the ideas of economists and political philosophers, both when they are right and when they are wrong are more powerful than is commonly understood’. Hence, they conclude that evolution in knowledge systems, particularly, “adding relevant dimensions to the society’s information-processing apparatus” is a pre-condition for navigating the sustainability conundrum. They frame this evolution as a matter of incorporating the “unprocessed information”: “we claim that information that is currently not processed, either by omission or by inaccessibility, is absolutely central to remedy this policy deficiency”.
While acknowledging its achievements, they critique (so-called) ‘Western’ science for its reductionist tendencies that seek to reduce and mould information in the ‘closed categories’. “In that process, many part-understood dimensions of the ‘real’ world have been ignored, and its complexity over-simplified. One of these is the relationship between sustainability and societal equity (Leach et al., 2018); another relationship between sustainability and the impact of colonialism. These are both examples where the replacement of open, multidimensional, and polythetic categories by closed ones has relegated important aspects of sustainability to ‘noise’”.
Noting the simultaneous evolution of digital technologies (marked by the operationalisation of Moore’s law) and “the great acceleration” (Steffen et al., 2015), authors contend “digital disruption” has both qualitative and quantitative potential to manage the sustainability crises at the (necessary?) expense of anthropic control. I am afraid this provocative contention is substantiated only partially in their further analysis.
Noting advances in data processing, ubiquitous surveillance of previously unobservable domains, and their applications in the multiple domains (e.g., evolution from weather measurements to climate modelling; tracking of individuals and unprecedented access to their behaviours, platform capitalism, algorithmic financial trading) authors conclude, “Humans no longer determine what is signal, and what is noise, and this fundamentally changes the means at societies’ disposal to deal with environmental or societal challenges”. Without delving into the problematic aspects of these trends (e.g., profit motive, state surveillance at the expense of human freedom) authors argue this ongoing transformation is both: unstoppable (“regulation has had marginal effects. The digital revolution is driven by very powerful feedback loops”) and effective: “machines evolve into dealing with the known unknown and potentially the unknown unknowns without a human grasp of the categories involved”.
Authors note that “the question of the societal acceptance of decisions taken by machines that are beyond human explanation” presents a huge cultural barrier (at least in the ‘Western context’). They suggest that the “East Asian” norms may pave a way forward by fostering “harmony and co-existence between humans, nature, and autonomous machines, while the Western perspective adheres to the notion of progress for human society and control by technological means”.
While I think their diagnosis and emphasis on the importance of the evolution of knowledge and information processing is remarkable, I am puzzled by their relatively uncritical endorsement of the algorithmic governance potential. Humankind needs to let go of the control and progress narrative (championed by modernity) but that does not imply AI may be capable of assuming control for safer navigation through Anthropocene. Authors note a potential of “biopolitics” marked by “new forms of governance, relations between governments and people, based on dimensions continuously monitored” but unfortunately, they do not make it their primary recommendation. This is where digital technologies may enable and supplement social transformations (e.g., cybernetic allocation of resources underpinned by social transformations that contain consumerism).
Their excellent analysis may be better concluded by invoking Jürgen Renn’s (2020) framework of unanticipated, underexplored, and unimplemented ‘missing knowledge’ as an existential condition for navigation in Anthropocene:
· “System knowledge: required to understand the Earth system with its human components”. This is where the digital revolution is already playing a significant role as emphasised by Grumbach and Leeuw (2021).
· “Transformation knowledge: the role of human societies as part of the Earth system”. In this domain, the digital revolution may play a role as an enabler to implementing social transformation.
· Orientation knowledge: a reflective dimension of the other forms of knowledge, connecting them to ethics, politics, and belief systems”. (Renn, 2020)
As identified by Chabay et al. (2021)[1], scholarship (rather than technocratic digital revolution) needs to take a catalytic role in the exigent evolution of knowledge processing.
Acknowledgement
This commentary emerged as a part of the author’s literature review in their ongoing project at the International Institute of Applied Systems Analysis (IIASA).
Author contributions
This is a single-author publication.
Financial support
None except the author’s employment at the IIASA
Conflict of interest
None
[1] Also co-authored by Sander van der Leeuw
References
Abson, D. J., Fischer, J., Leventon, J., Newig, J., Schomerus, T., Vilsmaier, U., von Wehrden, H., Abernethy, P., Ives, C. D., Jager, N. W., & Lang, D. J. (2017). Leverage points for sustainability transformation. Ambio, 46(1), 30–39. https://doi.org/10.1007/s13280-016-0800-y
Chabay, I., Renn, O., Leeuw, S. van der, & Droy, S. (2021). Transforming scholarship to co-create sustainable futures. Global Sustainability, 4. https://doi.org/10.1017/sus.2021.18
Grumbach, S., & Leeuw, S. van der. (2021). The evolution of knowledge processing and the sustainability conundrum. Global Sustainability, 4. https://doi.org/10.1017/sus.2021.29
Leach, M., Reyers, B., Bai, X., Brondizio, E. S., Cook, C., Díaz, S., Espindola, G., Scobie, M., Stafford-Smith, M., & Subramanian, S. M. (2018). Equity and sustainability in the Anthropocene: A social–ecological systems perspective on their intertwined futures. Global Sustainability, 1. https://doi.org/10.1017/sus.2018.12
Renn, J. (2020). The evolution of knowledge: Rethinking science for the Anthropocene. Princeton University Press.
Steffen, W., Richardson, K., Rockström, J., Cornell, S. E., Fetzer, I., Bennett, E. M., Biggs, R., Carpenter, S. R., Vries, W. de, Wit, C. A. de, Folke, C., Gerten, D., Heinke, J., Mace, G. M., Persson, L. M., Ramanathan, V., Reyers, B., & Sörlin, S. (2015). Planetary boundaries: Guiding human development on a changing planet. Science, 347(6223). https://doi.org/10.1126/science.1259855
van der Leeuw, S. (2020). Social Sustainability, Past and Future: Undoing Unintended Consequences for the Earth’s Survival. Cambridge University Press. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108595247
[i] Also co-authored by Sander van der Leeuw
