Discover magazine questions modern society's resiliency
11/6/2017 Julia Sullivan, ECE ILLINOIS
The article includes Professor David M. Nicol who speaks to the ramifications of modern reliance on large-scale infrastructure.
Written by Julia Sullivan, ECE ILLINOIS
David M. Nicol
Discover magazine recently examined the potential resiliency of modern society through a historical, archaeological lens. "How vulnerable are societies to collapse?" explores how cultural groups have responded when - not if - they face challenges and environmental changes.
The key to understanding future resiliency may focus on "how flexible a given culture is in dealing with change and at what point its people choose to act—or not," according to the article. As modern society is highly reliant on large-scale infrastructure, it is generally less flexible.
"We’d go back to the Stone Age if the electricity system went out," Franklin W. Woeltge Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering David Malcolm Nicol said in the article. Nicol is the director of the Information Trust Institute, which brings together university and industry researchers to study trustworthy and secure information systems. He is also an affiliate faculty member of CS @ ILLINOIS and affiliated with the Coordinated Science Lab.