Philip Sheldrake
2 min readDec 7, 2020

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Love the horse metaphor! :-) ... and I am, first and foremost, a professional engineer. I embrace thinking and doing in equal measure; each is better off for the other. And when thinking alerts you to significantly negative consequences of one's actions, one pauses for reflection and entreats others similarly.

You are not the first to refuse the critique of SSI with the challenge to me to come up with a more fitting design (or worse ... some refer to a "solution"). This is illogical. The current lack of a design that does not suffer the same dangerous consequences does not relieve the current design of its flaws nor its champions of the ethical responsibility to pause and reflect.

I'm sorry that I haven't been able, yet, to articulate the malignant emergent consequences of SSI in a way that more people working in this space grasp readily. Blame the writer not the reader. Fortunately, the analyses is gaining traction here in Europe, slowly but surely, again not for the erudition of the critique but for the working of different social norms and corresponding perspectives I'm sure.

You write that I should be "merely looking at the architecture". I should make it very clear that I would never merely do that. I will come back to my two main themes in response to your comment here: emergence and sociotechnology ...

One can look at the architecture of SSI all one likes, just as one can study the architecture of the automobile. Such study is necessary but woefully insufficient, taking no account for example of traffic jams, pollution, or any other systemic consequences.

As I write: "Viewed atomistically, technologically, SSI looks quite sensible. At scale, as sociotechnology, the emergent consequences are malignant."

You write that your approach "requires principles, architecture, and ultimately code". I would retort that the current principles are unclear and must be revisited in inter-disciplinary fora and tested for their facility to operate at a layer beneath the society with which you are most familiar to enable very different operationalizations.

And when you write "code" you are thinking I suspect of technical code. I have no doubt in my mind that technical code alone will be woefully insufficient in heading off distressing outcomes per my references in the critiques to friction.

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Philip Sheldrake

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