Black-Swan Type Catastrophes and Antifragility/Supra-resilience of Urban Socio-Technical Infrastructures

S A Timashev

doi:10.1088/1757-899x/972/1/012001

Abstract

This paper may be one of the first attempts dealing with the problem of creating, providing and maintaining antifragility of systems of interdependent urban critical infrastructures (CI) in the wake of black-swan type technological, ecological, economic or social catastrophes occurring in a municipality. A synonym is offered to describe antifragility from a positive psychology perspective, formulating the problem as the supraresilience problem. A brief description is given of the developed innovative approach for creating a supraresilient city/region using black-swan catastrophe and the antifragility concepts. Resilience metrics are formulated as well as methods of assessing damage, interdependence of infrastructures and convergent technologies and sciences needed for practical regional resilience and risk management of the system of systems (SoS) of interdependent urban critical infrastructures).

Highlights

This paper may be one of the first attempts dealing with the problem of creating, providing and maintaining antifragility of systems of interdependent urban critical infrastructures (CI) in the wake of black-swan type technological, ecological, economic or social catastrophes occurring in a municipality
Resilience metrics are formulated as well as methods of assessing damage, interdependence of infrastructures and convergent technologies and sciences needed for practical regional resilience and risk management of the system of systems (SoS) of interdependent urban critical infrastructures)
These concepts are based on three whales: (1) profound nonlinearity of mysterious unknown random processes of time and financial transactions that rule the financial world of NYSE, NASDAQ and the like; (2) extremely rare events that and shock World macroeconomics, create and bring super expensive chaos into lives of millions if not billions of people; (3) ability to see and use the intrinsic asymmetry of the optionality principle to one’s benefit

Summary

Introduction

The black swan and antifragility concepts and their mostly phenomenological theories and empirics introduced to the broad public by Nassim Nicolas Taleb (N.N.T.) [1,2] are based on in-depth and convincing analysis of modern finances and macroeconomics, seamlessly coupled with the wisdom of a plethora of Ancient and modern philosophers and leavened by anecdotal and apocryphal cases, mostly from the Levant, Ancient Greece, Ancient Rome and other Near Mediterranean countries. The current level of computer science and AI already permits adding some elements of (quasi-) antifragility to cloud computing [19] and creating emotional robots, that are able, at least partially, to have a semblance of human emotions (quasi-emotions) and, to some extent understand human psyche It seems that with the advent of time some 21-st century robotic systems may be able to maintain and repair themselves to continue to operate «as new» or «as before the stressor was applied» (this is resilience in its classical meaning [20]), and if need be, to reconstruct themselves to become more smart and durable (for instance, during an unmanned expedition on the Moon or Mars), by adding to themselves new modules with new functionalities and higher resistance to unforeseen stressors.

Design

Findings

11. Conclusion