In general, the nineties were an optimistic decade. People could read Francis Fukayama’s The Last Man and the End of History and nod along, or watch Friends and Richard Curtis films without vomiting. Bill Clinton’s smug face was plastered across American TV screens and Tony Blair was beginning his rise to power.
Throughout the decade, however, the Canadian academic Thomas Homer-Dixon was working on what would become his great work The Ingenuity Gap. Published in 2000, the book warned that the human ingenuity which has allowed for complex mass societies and technological progress may at some point not be matched by the human ingenuity required to avert the crises that this change could conjure up.
I would like to call this book “curiously neglected” but to be honest I can understand why it slipped into obscurity. It is overlong, and a little rambling, and marred by the presence of some lumpy liberal shibboleths. Nonetheless, Homer-Dixon was formidably prescient.
At one point he noted that “violent insurgencies and terrorist groups are becoming more high-tech, transnational and powerful relative to the states they oppose,” meaning “rich countries will see more homegrown terrorism” and conflicts in third world nations will “become… generators of waves of outward migration, and havens for transnational terrorist and criminal networks.” One year later, planes smashed into the Twin Towers, and a decade aftewards Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi was announced as the leader of the Islamic State of Iraq.
Coronavirus would have provided an interesting case study for Homer-Dixon’s book. In The Ingenuity Gap, he used the example of the United Airlines Flight 232 air disaster to illustrate how crises can develop in complex systems.
“When the plane’s tail engine disintegrated, the flight crew immediately faced a staggeringly complex task,” he wrote: “Multiple, simultaneous, and interdependent emergencies converged in the cockpit. Some were recognized and understood, some were misunderstood, and some didn’t even cross the crew’s threshold of consciousness. As the crew members tried to make sense of their instruments and the data they received via their eyes and ears, problems cascaded into other problems with almost overwhelming speed.”
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