Thermostats all the way down

In a recent episode of EconTalk, with guest author Stewart Brand, Stewart had a throwaway line I loved. The exchange went like this:

Russ Roberts: Yeah, I said when I was running, I was paying attention. I think the better word might be 'vigilance.'

Stewart Brand: Good word.

Russ Roberts: And, when you're in danger, at risk, you're vigilant, and you have a natural incentive to be vigilant.

And I think when I think about AI — and I'm thinking now about self-repairing software programs — you're self-updating. You talk about the Tesla updating itself constantly through the cloud and the web. But, it'll be interesting to see the effect of the loss of our own normal habits of vigilance as so many uncertainties are: We delegate those to other agents, and they won't be human ones, probably.

Stewart Brand: Well, it's thermostats all the way down. And, governors on steam engines, and a lot of things which take care of keeping something in proper running mode, and alert to circumstances: the temperature goes down in the room, and the furnace turns on or whatever. So, we've been dealing with this kind of thing a long time. Part of being alive is being in communication with the systems we rely on. And, as time goes by and civilization gets ever more complex and rich and interesting and great, it has plenty of things to have to figure out how you deal with it.

It's thermostats all the way down.

When we perform the ritual of maintenance — regardless of the type or context — we're acting as a kind of thermostat.

No matter how many layers of abstraction we add for ourselves, we're always in the position of mediating some process. Even when we automate or program or streamline some work previously done manually, we still need to show up to monitor, judge, correct, adjust.