An element of this story and challenge is the nature of technology. I've spent a few years on the problem of what technology is, or more specifically, what technolgical mechanisms are. There several obvious ones: new fuel sources, materials, better understandings of processes, and information flows -- acquisition, processing, storage and retrieval, transmission, and controls. I've come up with a list of eight.

It wasn't until some time that I hit on a ninth element, what I've called "hygiene factors", in that the address the overall health of a system or the human technosphere and environent. They're based on unintended consequences, a term introduced in 1936 by the sociologist Robert K. Merckton, which he describes (I'm just realising) using the same term I'd landed on: manifest and latent functions and dysfunctions.[1][2][3]

Hygiene factors tend to be saturation of sinks, exhaustion of sources, or disruptions of endogenous or exogenous systems on which we rely -- say, urban filth and public health (endogenous) or ecosystem disruption affecting resources, food supply, or disease reservoirs (external).

A specific technology might be thought of as some cluster of effects, both positive (or intended) and negative (or unintended), both manifest and latent. A specific technology -- a device, technique, management method, practice, convention -- approaches some theoretical physical limit of efficiency, also introducing unintended consequences.

We're pretty good at choosing technologies which have manifest positive effects, and at rejecting those with manifest negative effects. We're less good about adopting technologies with latent positive effects or rejecting those with latent negative effects.[4]

We can think of an entire technosphere as the set of interactions between all technologies and the environment.

As both our technology and role within the environment extend, we find ourselves running up against inherent limits. That is, the capacities of either fixed-capacity or rate-based sinks to absorb effluents, of fixed-stock or flow-based sources to provide resources, or disruptions of either our own endogenous or exogenous systems on which healthy function rely.

The problem is that as we start hitting one set of limits, we tend to spill over to others. In agricultural science, there's the notion of Leibig's Law of the Minimum: "growth is dictated not by total resources available, but by the scarcest resource (limiting factor)." It seems that this should have some reciprocal principle, that health is dictated not by the total sinks available, but of the most currently binding one. As the first contraint(s) are lifted -- low-hanging fruit -- subsequent constraints of greater effect, or more difficult mitigation or management, emerge. (I'm not aware of any named principle matching this, though I strongly suspect it exists.)

We also end up with interactions between the consequences -- one system interacts with another, producing their own sets of effects.

It's the latent negative consequences which catch up with you. Since they're not apparent, they're not evident and available for planning or modeling when looking at future direction. As systems generally become more optimised, the odds of any further change tends to fall -- you've exhausted most of the good interactions, the remaining ones are bad.

And the worst of all is a set of compounding, latent, negative 2nd and higher-order interactions. These are conceptually, and probably statistically, inevitable. We can't point to them specifically, as we don't know what they are. There's a tremendous tendency in human nature to dismiss and minimise future and latent risks (though yes, also benefits), especially where personal or private interests are served by optimism bias.

The result then would be that increasingly complex circumstances in which the tolerances of multiple systems are stressed to their limits, an apparent zone of stability is actually an illusion as still-fermenting latent negative interactions are developing, beyond the realm of detection.

Which seems to be exemplified in the global warming case.

I struggle with whether this is tremendously insightful or blindingly obvious, or possibly a case of overfitting to available information. Responses have been rather all over the map, though the "blindingly obvious" criticisms frequently seem to come from those afflicted with blindness to latent benefits and risks.

But I'm fearful.

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Notes:

1. Bio: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_K._Merton

2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manifest_and_latent_functions_...

3. I'd been working with the notion of "manifestation", though I'd not settled on a good term for its opposite. "Covert", "emergent", and "latent" were optons. And this is a reason why I research and footnote my HN (and other) comments and posts. I'm learning.

4. For concreteness, some possible examples:

- Manifest positive: Movable type, water wheel, medical anaesthesia.

- Manifest negative: Hydrochloric acid skin treatment. Taunting lions.

- Latent positive: Medical hygiene, handwashing. Seismic building standards. Limiting building to above the Tsunami line.

- Latent negative: Lead plumbing, asbestos insulation, CFC refrigerants and aerosol propellants, residential laundry chutes.

5. See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liebig%27s_law_of_the_minimum