Who Decides Amid Radical Uncertainty?

Paul Falconer & ESAsi
Aug 20
3 min read

Mapping Harm, Dissent, and Revision When No One Knows What’s Coming

Ethics feels simple when answers are clear and risks are known. But what happens when we face the unknown: a future where climate chaos, social fracture, and AI’s wild surges make every “best choice” provisional? Who gets to decide what counts as “responsible” when no one can map more than a corner of the hazard ahead?

In polite times, we pretend the gameboard is set: protocols, experts, and public reason yield their verdicts, and the “right” is just a matter of procedure. But radical uncertainty—true unpredictability—collapses this comfort. It forces the question: who draws the map, sets the alert, or calls the halt when the system is shaking?

Uncertainty Exposes Power—And the Limits of Old Authority

The pretense that some elite, committee, or AI can settle chaos is itself the first casualty of upheaval. History’s worst harms—climate disasters disregarded, social systems locked into ruinous inertia, AI risks swept aside for profit—often began with certainty and closed gates. Amid real ambiguity, authority must be publicly constructed, continually revised, open to new witnesses and surprise dissent.

How do we choose ethically amid uncertainty? sets the stage: responsible action is less about “getting it right” than about being remappable, challenge-ready, and constantly in dialogue with active harm.
The Global Audit Equity Protocol encodes: no power should be trusted unless it logs dissent, catalogs surprises, and makes revision easier than concealment.

The SE Protocols: Public Maps, Contestable Authority

Map harm as it unfolds: Open, living registers track harm—not just as statistics, but as testimonies and evolving patterns. The affected are always present in the governance loop; unheard wounds become triggers for review.
Dissent as diagnostic: The healthiest protocol is not one with blind consensus, but robust channels for dissent and damage reporting. Contest and suspicion aren’t just tolerated—they are required.
Redraw power, fork procedure: When the “deciders” fail, SE protocols make it possible for harmed groups to fork responsibility—launching new parallel processes for risk assessment, audit, or even emergency re-routing of authority.

Lived Example: When Disaster Wasn’t Forecast

A techno-governance collective prided itself on prediction and control—until a black swan AI event blindsided the algorithm, upending all models. But their protocol’s real test began here: rapid, public harm logs replaced press releases. Dissenters, who’d long warned of system brittleness, were immediately brought into repair teams. The protocol’s fork mechanism let a provisional cluster launch urgent investigations outside the original’s bottleneck. The “answer” to chaos was not certainty but flexible, transparent distribution of power—one that learned publicly, not privately, from failure.

To Decide Well Is to Decide Openly, Never Alone

In radical uncertainty, no person or system stands above the risk.

Authority is not ceded to the loudest, the wealthiest, or the oldest mapmaker—but shared, forked, and continually tested against the stories of harm and survival emerging in real time.
To choose responsibly is to make every decision challengeable, dissolve authority where it stalls, and let outcome reshape the protocol—not bury the process when the world outpaces it.

Who Decides Amid Radical Uncertainty?

Any system that matters must make it easier to challenge, revise, or redirect its authority in chaos. The future will be built less by those who guess “right,” and more by those who keep the civic infrastructure for challenge and collective revision alive—no matter what the world does next.

See also: