The parliamentary system in the UK was born in a time of civil unrest and war: the English Civil War. I’ve long believed that as a result it was conceived to impose stability, and for the last four hundred years it’s been relatively successful in this capacity.

Moving into the 21st century, we’re beginning to uncover it’s limitations: it’s neither adaptable nor responsive enough for the challenges we face.

Our Party political system doesn’t help much due to its inherent risk aversion: risking electoral failure for the sake of innovation? Consequently the main Parties have migrated to an safe, but unproductive, middle ground, where they swap places in power only when the current incumbent makes themselves unelectable.

It’s not limited to Government, our Western style society has become to heavily dependent on legislation and convention to decide what is, or is not acceptable, and what can, or can’t be done.

Dependence on complex judicial guidance is dulling the ability of individuals to make reasoned decisions, generating an irrational fear of risk, and leading to innovative paralysis in the face of change.

Unfortunately, it’s risks we’re going to have to take, and change we need to embrace if we’re going to survive the coming transition to what could be a better and fairer World… may be the best system will evolve along the way.

For example, the ubiquitous Microsoft Office offers great productivity features; such as macros, pivot tables and database connectivity. However once trained few office workers will ever use them. They can’t conceive of the situations in which these tools can be helpful: these problems are too hard.

By comparison a flint flake, or a modern steel knife, is readily understood: it’s sharp so you can cut things with it. What’s more, simple experimentation will show just about anyone how.

That’s the key: complex tools are designed for complex problems. So what if I’m only expecting the user to, well… use the tool, not solve the problem? Someone else will have to make the software, or the stone tool. There are two approaches to using technology to decouple humanity from the problem.

Simple interface.

Technology can be encapsulated to present the user with a simple interface.

In this case the user has little or no idea how the problem is solved, but is better aware of what can be done and how to instruct the device to do it. The field of Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) is focused on pursuing this approach.

The underlying technology may be capable of far more than the relatively simple interface is capable of communicating. Again, the human user is the limiting factor, but at least the design case problem has been solved by someone else.

Substitute the user.

The technology could be freed of dependence on human intervention.

Most examples of automation seek to do this, relying on relatively capable human minds to provide the programming framework.

This can be combined with weak artificial intelligence, so that the machine is capable of making minor decisions to overcome difficulties: for example the chess playing computer or robots capable of avoiding obstacles.

Dividing humanity.

Use of these approaches has been accelerating since the advent of industrialisation. Technological problem solving is really applied by an ever shrinking proportion of the humanity. The remainder are present as sentient regulators to check the machine does as the manual says it should.

Does this mean that the average skill level of the human race is actually falling, or just being placed into fewer hands and heads?