Seven Digital Steps to Avoid Utter Hell

I n the July 2010 essay for this column's tenth anniversary, I explored how the computing profession might prosper institutionally, a topic central to this column and the IEEE Computer Society's planning. As a follow-up I wanted to look at where the profes-sion's technology might be made useful, reviewing some of the technical suggestions I've made here over the years. One idea was to echo my second anniversary essay, " Seven Great Blunders of the Computing World " (July 2002, pp. 110–112), which sought to counter the commonly held belief that the computing profession had brought about an ideal digital world. However, to take a more positive stance, I thought to call this essay " Seven Digital Steps Toward Earthly Paradise. " PARADISE LOST? The psychological problem thus created was to think there was any possibility of anything like paradise happening on this planet in the foreseeable future. The opposite seems certain. Five years ago I wrote " The Profession and the Big Picture " (Feb. 2005, pp. 102–105), an essay based on what seemed then to be the highly probable prospect of adverse climate change, which the world seemed to be waking up to and that governments seemed committed to tackle. The waking up and tackling hasn't happened. Climategate was one event that seemed to allow inaction, but climate change science has since been confirmed, not refuted (tinyurl. com/257lsvc). Even the allegedly baseless claim of Himalayan glacial retreat has been validated (tinyurl. com/323jykz). Here in Australia, one of the world's worst per capita polluters (and that's without counting massive coal exports as emissions), we are now in the midst of a federal election campaign in which " both major parties are missing in action on climate " (tinyurl.com/2ce496r). Things don't seem much better in other parts of the world. The emissions of our dark satanic mills, power stations, and cars and planes are greatly worsening our climate and living conditions, gradually but maybe irretrievably. The barriers to needed mitiga-tion and adaptation are much more generally social than merely political (tinyurl.com/2d5mcf5). The difficulty is that the barriers must be removed quickly, and this can only be done through focused education. Here digital technology could greatly help in a reformed and refocused education system through, for example, measures suggested in this column (Mar. 2008, pp. 102–104). But even this would be far too slow. Formal education is traditionally an institution for …