The Cassandra Effect: 'Why visionaries who can accurately predict looming disasters are often ignored’.

I just read an interesting article written by Richard A. Clarke and R.P. Eddy called; 'Why visionaries who can accurately predict looming disasters are often ignored’.

I could not help feeling touched by this article as it exactly confirmed what I am experiencing myself. I have been writing this column and my blog for some years now, but despite the truthfulness and predictions based on logic and empirical research, most of what I write seems to be ignored.

The column I write for Hazardous Cargo Bulletin and my publications on LinkedIn are well researched. I trained myself as a cybernetician and a systems and information theorist, because by combining these scientifically sound insights, I can predict looming disasters. I developed an early warning system and a mapping tool to do this. It measures the so-called limitations of reality by calculating the quantity of information present in an organisation, government, goal or a product which I coined; Realimiteit. A scientific fact is that the functionality of any man-made system depends on the quantity and quality of the information.

The authors wrote: Cassandra was a beautiful princess of Troy cursed by the god Apollo. He gave her the ability to foresee impending doom but the inability to persuade anyone to believe her. Her ability to pierce the barriers of space and time to see the future showed her the fiery fall of her beloved city, but the people of Troy ridiculed and disregarded her. She descended into madness and ultimately became one of the victims of the tragedy she foretold.

Are there Cassandras among us today warning of ticking disasters, whose predictions fall on deaf ears? Is it possible to figure out who these seers are? Can we cut through the false warnings to tune into the correct visions, saving millions of lives and billions of dollars? This question is not about Greek mythology. It is about our ability today, as a nation, as an international community, a company, to detect impending disaster and act in time to avoid it or at least to mitigate the damage.

Buried in billions of pages of blog posts and tweets, academic research, and government reports, Cassandra figuratively calls to us, warning of calamity. 

So, there you have it.  Information, even perhaps of negligible value, still has to be used when decisions are made. Not allowing parts of it, will alter outcome beyond control. (Butterfly Effect). Ulteriorly motivated suppression of information, i.e. predictions based on science, but also by those who are able to foresee things, directly destabilises intended results and make them 'uncontrollable'.  Cassandra knew this as do many philosophers who  ask 'ALL' questions and can reliably synthesise what is going to happen next. We now observe a global elite, politically and financially interdependent that tries to ignore information and hunts down or even stifles or jails Cassandras who do perhaps contradict centrally planned stealth goals. I foresee and you may quote me: 'This will end in disaster, because we can predict catastrophe by epistemological knowledge using systems science and cybernetics.' Same applies for Hazardous Cargo Industries. HSE and Risk can only be prevented by using all information and by listening to Cassandras. Perhaps Cassandra was an early cybernetician? I feel she certainly was a ‘systems thinker’. If you know Cassandra, please listen to her?

CYBER ATTACKS, CYBER ETHICS

A crippling ransomware attack on one of the largest fuel distribution networks in the US has brought into sharp focus the cyber threats facing infrastructure of national importance. The taking of the Colonial Pipeline brought the authorities’ worst fears to life. The ransomware attack disabled the 5,500-mile network, causing fuel shortages in the south-eastern states of the US and prompting the Biden administration to declare a state of emergency. Although the Colonial Pipeline Company’s CEO, Joseph Blount, controversially paid the $4.4m (£3.2m) ransom, the network was out of action for a week.

Let’s talk about automation. We can observe that more ‘crucial systems of strategic importance’ in our industry such as marine storage terminals, refineries, chemical production and distribution sectors are being maximally automated. This increases the risk of cyber-attacks. Therefore, our course on Cyberethics is valuable for those who are perhaps not fully aware of human actions in Artificial Intelligence, Robots, Algorithms, Cyber Crime & Security.

Learning about how those technologies impact our business and lives, individually and globally, is essential for all those managing and operating our local and global energy and transport infrastructure. What are the risks we need to be vigilant about? It implies both many positive impacts and outputs from new technologies but also specific and global risks that we need to anticipate. Not all automation is moral and ethical. Decision making based on the artificially produced conclusions needs human contemplation, because inevitably dilemmas will occur.

The cyberspace permeates all dimensions of our contemporary life. It influences the way we travel, the way we remain in connection with others, communicate and harvest information, and ultimately how we organise and run our business. Who are we as humans amidst the cyberspace?

Our online course addresses the salient ethical questions in relation to security, technologies and artificial intelligence, freedom and responsible citizenship in economics and day-to-day business. The units include reading and study material of high actuality. Participants will benefit from full and free access to the Globethics.net online library with a plethora of publications in several collection areas of applied ethics. The course is based on the publication Cyber Ethics 4.0: Serving Humanity with Values written by Christoph Stückelberger and Pavan Duggal, and will be lectured by two high profiled and experienced course instructors. It will help our participants to:

• Recognise the main ethical aspects in cyber environment

• Apply ethics, core values to all decisions that are made within cyber space

• Analyse cyber space management approaches and models from the ethical perspective

• Create new principles of behaviour in cyber space that meet global ethical  principles and rules.

Our industries are ‘complex’ systems of business. Automating them may be attractive, because many believe that if an algorithm is handling things, no human error can be expected. However, it is wise to understand that human beings write code and AI copies human behaviour. AI can’t be programmed to self-reflect and does not automatically ask this simple question: is it right or wrong? Without cyber ethics our industry remains vulnerable.

 

Those interested in learning more about this training course should contact Arend van Campen, founder of TankTerminalTraining, at arendvc@tankterminaltraining.com. More information on the company’s activities can be found at www.tankterminaltraining.com.