Harnessing Fire (An Information Allegory)

I couldn’t sleep so I wrote an essay.

We need to learn how to recognize the dangers of fire before we burn our society to the ground.

Fire is an incredibly useful tool. We have used it throughout the ages to keep us warm, protect us from outside threats, make our food safe to eat, and power our civilization. I don’t think very many people today would argue that harnessing fire was a bad move for humanity. Fire is dangerous but we all understand the risks and how to mitigate them.

Let’s imagine an alternate reality for a moment. This world looks much like our own except for the fact that humanity has not yet wrapped its collective mind around how fire spreads.

Some people understand fire quite well and most people know it well enough to cook their food, but to the masses, the idea that fire needs fuel and oxygen to spread, that some materials burn and some don’t, that playing with fire should be avoided, these ideas are not well understood.

In this society, people keep finding new and exciting ways to use fire but when a village burns to the ground because someone poured gasoline into a bucket and then played with matches, most of the villagers watch in horror without understanding how things went so wrong or how the fire could have been prevented or combatted.

Even as some scientists start to develop nuanced and rigorous theories about fire and new tools that are ever more efficient at putting fire to work, most people go about their lives with a sense of disinterest or even hopeless resignation about the phenomena.

They enjoy the benefits of fire and are distressed by its destructive power but since they don’t really have a firm grasp on how or why it gets out of control, they continue to engage in risky behaviors. When they see a fire starting, some of them even go over and fan the flames in an attempt to put it out.

Despite the chaos and calamity that the fire is bringing about, they can’t imagine going back to a world without it. Nobody except for a few fringe outliers suggest that they should stop cooking their food or heating their houses in the winter. It’s unimaginable for most to go back to a world without fire.

And yet, as the tools for creating and spreading and using fire become more powerful, more and more of their world starts to burn.

Sometimes it burns because people are careless. Sometimes it burns because the machines they’ve created are too powerful and they were created without enough concern for safety or how people might actually use them.

And sometimes it burns because a few powerful and intelligent bad actors have truly started to understand how fire works and they’ve started to weaponize it. Often they weaponize it to seize resources or power, but occasionally people weaponize it just because they like watching the world burn.

Regardless of their motives, once they understand how fire works, weaponizing it is easy. Because of the general lack of understanding, they can often get away with doing it right in front of people’s faces.

Some of them even figure out that they can get the unwitting masses to participate in their own destruction. They convince large groups of people to walk around town with leaky gas cans. They teach people how to unscrew the gas lines in their homes without teaching them how to shut off the gas. They tell the people to cover their roofs in dry grass for “better insulation”, and then they simply light a match.

Even as the technology continues to advance and the bad actors and arsonists continue to refine their strategies, most of the world continues bumbling through their lives, watching in horror as the fires get bigger and more frequent.

Many of them even try to use fire to fight fire but without even a basic understanding of how it spreads, their efforts end up contributing to the problem rather than solving it.

Eventually one of two things will happen. Either society will start to understand the importance of teaching everyone about fire, or society will burn itself to the ground.

The ability for everyone to spread and consume information on a global scale is our fire. It is undeniably useful. It powers our civilization and lets us solve problems that we could never hope to solve without it. It’s difficult to imagine going back to a time without Twitter and smart phones and YouTube and email.

And yet, we live in a world where the overwhelming majority of people do not understand how information propagates, how it’s used and misused, how dangerous it is.

We are building machines that create society-scale feedback loops that amplify misinformation, crush nuance, and distort meaning. Without us noticing, bad actors are convincing us to run through our own streets with leaky gas cans and waiting to light a match.

Even as we use mass information to greater and greater effect, even as our scientists study it and understand it on a more and more granular level, most people remain ignorant to even the basics of how it gets used for good and for evil.

Our society is aware that it is burning but most people don’t understand why. Many, in their desperation, are even fanning the flames in a futile attempt to put them out.

We need to learn how information works. We need to understand both its uses and its dangers. And we need everyone to understand those things the same way that everyone understands fire.

We will always have bombs and arsonists and accidents but at least we all know what fire is, how and why it’s dangerous, how to protect ourselves from it, and how to go about putting it out when it starts to get out of control.

It will take time to get everyone up to speed and we will all need to pitch in to get it done.

And until then, the people who are building these tools of mass information and the scientists developing a rigorous understanding of how it works, need to get to work building society-scale fire suppression systems. Our tools like Twitter and Facebook and YouTube need to be able to actively combat misinformation. They need to automatically detect when something is getting out of hand and deprive it of oxygen.

There are some big ethical and philosophical and engineering challenges that we’ll need to face in order to build those fire suppression systems but we must do it anyway, because the alternative is to sit here and watch our civilization burn itself to the ground.