- Human beings are capable of building and planning within certain parameters. We’re good at isolated feats of engineering. We can build things in laboratories and workshops. In certain ways, the human capacity to create tools borders on the miraculous. What we can’t do very well is predict or control complex systems, like biological systems or social systems (and this is probably a good thing). Our Covid response, however, the kinds of responses employed by the governments of almost all wealthy nations, falsely infer that our capacity to build fabulously complex tools translates into an ability to manage fabulously complex…
