Paper short abstract:

Cascading risks threaten to escalate throughout the 21st century. Both the costs and risks of mitigating innovation at gigascale are tremendous. Could incremental changes, either build-ups or scale downs of existing facilities, tools, technologies, and infrastructures, provide an alternative path?

Paper long abstract:

Cascading risks across nature, technology, the economy, and society threaten to escalate throughout the 21st century, unleashing unprecedented risk chains with tremendous unforeseen consequences. Damages from already regularly occurring hazards such as the January 2024 Californian floods are already in the trillions of dollars. With generative AI, digital technologies have, arguably, leapfrogged any conceivable previous expectations, causing both tremendous worry and excitement at the possibilities. Given the high stakes for investors, capitalizing on innovations in a socially responsible manner seems difficult. Mitigating cascading risks, or plausible hazards before or if they occur is assumed to be costly and difficult, but responding to them post factum carries the additional rush factor and therefore increased sustainability risks. Many gigascale–e.g. $10bn or larger-projects are currently underway or proposed–from carbon capture to ice cap blankets, to a Mars colony, to a ban on AI. But both the costs and risks of innovation at gigascale are tremendous. Against this backdrop, could incremental changes, either build-ups or scale downs of existing facilities, tools, technologies, and infrastructures, provide an alternative path? Is there a middle ground where modular planning and construction can bring the best of both worlds? Building on case study sketches of a selection of either type of projects, ongoing, emerging, and imagined, this discussion paper asks whether a sociotechnical perspective offers guidance to this conundrum of how to domesticate the future, either from a democratic or a practical perspective. The implications are drawn for innovation, growth, and societal risk management.