ELSI: Cross-Domain Effects Part 1 (continued)

Where This Fits

This unit continues the cross-domain analysis from Part 1, examining how Autonomy and Harmony dynamics play out across ELSI domains, with examples from circular economy, political movements, and media systems.

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Cascading Effects

For example, it may invest in better living environments, education, and closed loop resource flows rather than entering new markets or on saving labor costs. When a company becomes unmissable for society it has a healthier long term position, and a greater human capital base to carry it forward in rough times.

This is something akin to the saying “If you focus on cost, quality goes down, but if you focus on quality, the costs go down.”. example: resilience in cities example: resilience in organizations System Level: Autonomy Autonomy, or self-reliance, is the level of independence of the system from other systems on any level, including material resources, decision making, trade balances, etc.

Autonomous systems are less influenced by what happens around them than dependent systems are, freer to follow their own decision trajectory, and can tune their mechanics to suit their own needs more accurately. All systems are dependent on others to some level, which is not necessarily a bad thing, and it’s rarely worthwhile to maximize Autonomy.

After all, we’re all living on this planet, and we’re all dependent on the sun and the earth to supply us with the basic platform of life (suggestions for living off-planet notwithstanding). To increase the sustainability of a system it’s usually an effective strategy to increase the autonomy of vital resource flows, network functions and system relations.

For this, it then becomes necessary to focus on what these vital resources are, which is a worthwhile exercises in and of itself. Lessons from Autonomy The Autonomy indicator is largely reliant on the physical world around us, affected mostly by the EL part of the ELSI stack.

It’s greatly affected by resource availability and the unequal distribution of resources on our planet. By investigating autonomy, we automatically discover local strengths and context-specific solutions to universal demands. This leads us to closed resource loops and cycles, reducing waste and increasing the recognition of value that lies within everything around us.

This ties into themes such as the circular economy, blue economy, and bio-based economy. What we learn from Autonomy is the necessity to discern between critical resources and those of luxury.

Critical resources of a city, such as food, shelter, clean water, and power, are best to locally provided for, decentralized, adapted to local conditions, and closed loop. Doing so increases resilience and the ability for these needs to be provided in a context sensitive manner, minimizing externalizations such as pollution and injustice.

Behavior Autonomy is the system parameter most directly influenced by the lower object parameters of ELSI. Resource cycles heavily affect systems in their ability to be autonomous. In addition, decision making structures are an important factor in autonomy, as well as the balance of interchange between neighboring systems.

Per resource, the scale of its optimal autonomy is different. For instance, it’s feasible for small villages to capture and clean their own water, and valuable to do so. However, the same does not apply to building cars. Not every village needs its own factory, even though they may need cars (and then could use a garage). Autonomy needs to be balanced.

This can be done by prioritizing essential resources as well as their frequency of use, and their cost of provision. It is similar for policy decisions. Some decision types that are universal and slow to change, are best taken on a centralized level such as the European Union or the United Nations. These are likely to be few, but critical, such as the universal declaration of human rights.

Local laws and conditions are usually best to decentralize as much as possible, to increase speed, decrease overhead, and to retain autonomy. System Level: harmony Harmony, or social justice, is all about fairness: to each other, to future generations as well as to all other living things.

Harmony is a measure of tension inside of the system, when it is low, there’s a chance for internal collapse through revolution or strife. Harmony touches on the fundamentals of human interaction, and provides the base motivation and conditions for people to want to be part of a system, to make it successful, and thrive in it.

In evaluating Harmony, basic human rights come first, which is still a challenge in any global supply chain in the world today. For more complex social and interpersonal evaluations of Harmony, we can use areas of study such as ethics to help, including deontology and consequentialism.

Lessons from Harmony History shows us that humanity has the capacity to be unimaginably cruel, both to itself and to other living creatures. We need to protect ourselves from our own dark side. This is what many governmental systems aim to do, to optimize our best behavior, while preventing our worst.

Just as with Autonomy, Harmony seeks a state where there’s a healthy playing field to achieve this. We’re far from reaching that state. While we’re protecting ourselves from our worst, we’re also damaging fundamental freedoms that allow the best to surface. We can only go so far in protecting a group at the cost of the individual.

At the same time, many structures within our society currently lead to a growing imbalance in power division. Balancing power, and finding equitable mechanisms to steer clear of the atrocities that continue to plague our collective actions is a primary cause for any system hoping to be sustainable.

After all, one can have a resilient, autonomous system built on the back of slaves, only serving to propagate the suffering of many, to benefit few. What we see in western society today is a deep layering of hidden social injustice. While not apparent for most consumers, slavery and other gross social injustice is still very much part of this world.

It is directly, but invisibly, fed through our consumer supply chains. Many products consumed in the western world are produced elsewhere, and harbor these social wrongdoings. However, they do not even need to injustices from far away. New rings of socially unjust working practices are discovered in the west on a regular basis as well.

Efforts such as fair trade improve these, but it is a voluntary practice still in the minority, and for many types of work such a system does not yet exist. Therefore, tracking Harmony through the cause and effect chain is a critical component of working on sustainable systems.

Using the SiD framework by creating system maps of these influences can be a great help in tracking down dark spots, to shed light on them. In this way, you can help create increased social justice for whole sectors and product life cycles. Behavior In a world that is increasingly trying to be transparent, we may hope to move towards a world with greater social justice and harmony.

Yet, some of this transparency also exposes much wrongdoing not seen before. At the same time, global wealth (and thus power) is becoming more concentrated in ever fewer agents, which obstructs Harmony, and leads to rising tension. These rising tensions are palpable, and result in various systemic effects we can see on a daily basis.

These include the Brexit process in the UK, the rise of the extreme right and populism in many western political systems, mass migration and at the same time reduced empathy for immigrants, and terrorism. Harmony is primarily fed by the top layers of ELSI, such as cultural rules, laws, economic balances, and the health and happiness of those that are inhabiting the system.

These object level aspects connect to Harmony network parameters, such as Balance of Power, and Equity. Besides Harmony’s own network parameters, Harmony can also be affected by the resilience network parameters, such as awareness, transparency, and validity.