Alex Tolley on Dan Davies - "Back of Mind"

When I played Sim City (way back when) it was clear that the larger the city, the more maintenance and bad events happening increased faster than growth generated income. The same happens with GAAP accounts where businesses need higher profitability to grow to overcome cash flow demands on costs. Some things scale well - factory production, farms acquiring more land. Infrastructure doesn't, even "easy things" like computer and phone networks as they become more complex. AI and software can reduce the complexity for human managers. However, as we see with such systems, the algorithms become opaque and difficult to subject to analysis, especially when bad outcomes result. [As your book indicates]. My sense is that control needs to be pushed down as far as possible, and ideally, most managers should be more like "One Minute Managers" relinquishing management decisions to as low a level as possible. The other problem with "abundance" is that our accounting rarely deals with externality costs. We can easily increase the production of plastic containers, but the costs of pollution from production and [lack of] disposal are not fully costed. While I do not support "degrowth", I do think we need to reduce the consumption of non-recyclable items as far as possible to emulate biology as much as possible. Will AI be able to help with this?