Engineered Societies

<p>Humans have been attempting to engineer social outcomes presumably since language evolved and made feasible the coordination of many individuals. It began when groups of hunter-gatherers decreed the first rules of social interaction, was advanced when the first agricultural societies set down regulations for water use and distribution, and has now expanded in contemporary society to our online behavior.</p>

<p><strong>Reactive social engineering</strong></p>

<p>A trained mechanical or electrical engineer might balk at using the term &ldquo;engineering&rdquo; to describe attempts to orchestrate social outcomes. Social engineering has never been a precise endeavor &ndash; nothing like designing a cell phone tower or constructing a water wheel for milling grain.
There are no meticulously drawn blueprints for social systems, and no objective tests that would allow us to predict the success of interventions. In fact, the history of human social engineering, right up until the present, is based largely on human intuition about the few directly attributable causes of a problem and how to adjust them.
As a result, attempts at social control have been mostly reactive responses to the consequences of previous actions and decisions. If we think crime rates are too high, we invest in police and prisons. Unfortunately, as the US incarceration rate attests, such ham-handed social solutions often backfire.
Is proactive social engineering desirable? Is it even possible to affect the outcomes we want in a medium as complex and uncertain as human social behavior?</p>