Moshe Y. Vardi, a George Distinguished Service Professor in Computational Engineering and Director of the Ken Kennedy Institute for Information Technology at Rice University based in the United States, participates in Risk Roundup to discuss the Lessons from COVID-19 Pandemic: Efficiency Versus Resilience.
Lessons From COVID-19: Efficiency Versus Resilience
The COVID-19 outbreak reminds us of the fragility of some of our most basic human-made systems. Since we witnessed the cascading collapse of entire food, manufacturing, production, and transportation systems, it forces us to evaluate the fundamentals on which we build systems—and to further understand where the vulnerabilities are and what needs to be tackled.
Understanding Human Ecosystem
While systems at all levels are struggling to absorb the shock generated by the ongoing pandemic, it is essential to evaluate the core concept on which we have built the systems and how they operate.
It is important to understand that we are a part of a complex natural human ecosystem. In this ecosystem, we are continually reconfiguring human-made systems that in turn reconfigures natural systems and vice versa. The human-made systems range from technological, environmental, socio-political, and economic systems– and individually and collectively, they are always affecting us and our natural ecosystem.
In such a complex integrated world, a world in which cyberspace has connected aquaspace, geospace, and space and individuals and entities across NGIOA, a small change in the natural or human-made ecosystem can be transmitted to the humans –and further amplified by the interconnectedness of the entire human ecosystem. This has enormous consequences beyond the time, place, and scale of the initial distress. As a result, there is a need to evaluate not only the natural ecosystem but also the human-made ecosystem and systems across nations to understand where the vulnerabilities are and what needs to be addressed.
Understanding System Efficiency
On the surface, being efficient makes us more in tune with our environment by not being unnecessarily wasteful. That is a strong appeal for many. However, there is a growing concern that focusing on efficiency alone leads to a reduction in resilience as risks are not understood and efforts are not made to resolve them. As seen over the years, in many cases, it has led to a decrease in resilience, the ability to deal with change and crisis—as we just witnessed in the COVID 19 outbreak.
To evaluate this further, we need to think from a systems perspective—or preferably a species perspective. Because without understanding the overall system resilience, without considering a variety of complex, interconnected variables, it will not be possible to understand the connected, integrated system. According to Moshe, “first, we have to think about survival.” And in line with Moshe’s thinking, to move towards our collective path forward, we even need to move beyond system thinking to species thinking.
Reactive Response
Because jumping into action after every disaster, every crisis is costly and an inferior substitute for being prepared. As seen from pandemics to wildfires, from natural disasters to human-made disasters, the advances in technology have given us hope of developing early alert systems. However, in our society, nothing works without incentives. Therefore, it is crucial to evaluate whether we have the right incentives for technology development. This is especially when the market will not do it—for instance, in developing technology to identify outbreaks or develop vaccines!
Covid-19 has shown us how subjective and reactive is our approach to the pandemic and its implications across nations, how the cultural factors such as trust in institutions are declining, and how our willingness to follow their advice and instructions is shaking. Since the sentiment of belonging to a community or the type of nation can influence how any disaster unfolds, it highly concerns as to how COVID-19 has evolved.
We must evaluate:
- What are the most critical lessons that health care systems around the world can take away from this crisis?
- What did the shock of COVID 19 teach us so far in how we have built the systems over the years?
- Has focusing on efficiency sideline the much-needed resilience effort?
- Is nature telling us to focus on resiliency?
- How do natural systems build resilience?
- How can humans harness the lessons from the natural systems to pandemics?
- Has the relentless pursuit of efficiency made the global economic system more vulnerable to shocks?
- How do we define a system resilience approach?
We approach systems and organizations to operate through a mindset of anticipation and prevention and resilience. Resilience is the capacity of a system to absorb any disturbance. It is a need of time as it can reorganize while changing to retain practically still the same function, structure, identity, and feedbacks. The time is now to have resilience thinking in our systems and species. The time is now to understand the “Lessons of the COVID 19 Pandemic”.
For more, please watch the Risk Roundup Webcast or hear the Risk Roundup Podcast
About the Guest
Moshe Y. Vardi, a University Professor and the George Distinguished Service Professor in Computational Engineering and Director of the Ken Kennedy Institute for Information Technology at Rice University based in the United States.
He is the author and co-author of over 650 papers, as well as two books. He is the recipient of several scientific awards, is a fellow of several societies, and a member of several honorary academies. He holds seven honorary doctorates. He is a Senior Editor of Communications of the ACM, the premier publication in computing, focusing on the societal impact of information technology.
About the Host of Risk Roundup
Jayshree Pandya (née Bhatt), Ph.D., a leading expert at the intersection of science, technology, and security, is the Founder and Chief Executive Officer of Risk Group LLC, host of influential Risk Roundup Podcast/Vodcast, an award-winning Scientist, and a Futurist passionate about protecting the Future of Humanity.
It is this passion and dedication to protecting the collective future that has taken Dr. Pandya on a journey to understand the security language of the universe. Her quest for a security algorithm is driving her involvement in a wide range of research to understand not only the core mechanisms by which the cosmos operates but also where the existential risks emerge for the human species. Her research across many domains has contributed to more than 100 publications and is pursued to provide security solutions for the future of humanity. She is the author of the books, Geopolitics of Cybersecurity and The Global Age. Her upcoming books are on Pandemics and Artificial Intelligence.
About Risk Roundup
Through the Risk Roundup initiative, Risk Group is on a mission to talk with a billion people: innovators, scientists, entrepreneurs, futurists, technologists, policymakers, to decision-makers. The reason behind this effort is to research, review, rate, and report strategic security risks facing humanity. This collective intelligence effort is essential to understand where we need to focus on our collective security–and what destructive forces we need to be mindful about.
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