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As we grow up, the lucky ones are surrounded by critical infrastructures in the nicest sense. I mean that their parents and family are there to let them know right from wrong, bring them back into line when juvenile behaviour got a bit out of control and generally provide good societal membership guidance. Grandparents are probably the best for giving constructive criticism, sometimes quite direct, without getting involved in the ongoing parent-child power struggle.
Generally, you can add to your values as you grow and develop through education, life experience and surviving the rough parts of life, to become a good balanced member of society. At this point you should be providing the constructive critical support infrastructure to your friends, junior colleagues and offspring and so it goes on.
New Need for “Critical” Infrastructures
Part of the societal problem today is that the information age has enabled us to have access to so much news, entertainment, & live events from all around the world that we are having a hard time contextualizing it and keeping it all in perspective. When you see headlines about kidnappings and shootings every day it is easy to think that they are normal occurrences.
When your news sources deliberately exaggerate negative news to get “clicks”, they are feeding our fears and contributing to a model where we think the world is a dangerous place. I saw headlines recently that car theft was 20% up in Germany. On checking there were about 15,000 cars stolen from a national fleet of 49 million cars. So statistically, your chances of getting your car stolen is not much greater than 1:3200. The point being that the headline made me worry a lot more than the actual figures.
The example is trivial, but recent global politics has shown it is now possible to fool some of the people for all of the time, and more dangerously to fool all of the people for some of the time. A lot of damage can be done in the that time. This is why we need help from our infrastructures to stop the flow of misinformation and teach people how to critically evaluate the data they receive.
My idea for Critical infrastructures?
My idea of Critical infrastructure is to use our future information highways to educate and support. Mark Twain wrote, “Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness, and many of our people need it sorely on these accounts. Broad, wholesome, charitable views of men and things cannot be acquired by vegetating in one little corner of the earth all one’s lifetime.”
I believe that our information network has the capability to allow people to learn, to experience new cultures, and to entertain themselves virtually. But it has to be secure and safe too. For this we need to ensure the information highway is kept safe by good people, with an altruistic interest in really helping the world. We somehow are repeating the history of the highways – first cars were not understood, then they had lots of freedom, then they got regulated for the common good.
Now we need to understand if we can teach AI to be the good policeman in the infrastructure.