And then the men with guns tell you to do it anyway

Civil society only exists when there is a collective general trust that most people are trying to do the right thing. Said society also finds it incredibly important to remove or nullify those who aren't trustworthy because "a rotten apple spoils the whole bunch". Trust is hard to earn, and easy to lose, and it only takes one person exploiting the trustworthy without consequence to ruin a good thing.

So no you can't build a system that's meets all of the article's criteria because almost all of them rely on the unspoken rule of trust in civil society. Everything built for good can be abused for evil.

If you're in South Korea, you can expect to get around half a dozen emergency notifications every day. Typical contents include "it's cold, so dress warmly", "roads are icy, so drive carefully", and "Mrs Kim, 79, suffers from dementia and was last seen in Seoul wearing a black coat".

You can set your phone to filter these out, but then you'll also miss the notification about North Korea commencing artillery bombardment.

In the end of the day, we need proper education, not only in technical excellence, but also societal awareness, what it means to be good and how to uphold oneself to such a standard even if everyone around them does not. This is how you defend against the men with guns.

> Rapid sending of messages

> Careful checking of the content of messages

> Ability to quickly target a specific geographic area

> Inability to mistakenly send a test message

> Requiring strong proof that the message is authentic before sending

> Resilient enough to work after significant damage to infrastructure

> That networks have the ability to vet and ignore

> That networks are compelled to send

> Which can only be used for good

> And cannot be used for evil.

Considering the last two, I'm assuming this must be tongue-in-cheek.

I think that the best approach for public utilities is to design them in such a way as to minimize, or preclude if possible, their ability to choose their customers or level of service. We want them to have a set of rules/instructions, written beforehand and publicly available, that everyone can point to after an event that says, "well, those were the things they were supposed to do, so they did them." The entities that write the set of rules are separate from the utility: the utility solely exists to implement the rules/instructions as efficiently as possible.

There's obviously a reasonableness factor here: it's impossible to foresee all situations. The effort spent on specifying exactly what should be done should be proportional to the potential impact of that possible decision.

Staged rollout with engagement metrics that cancel the alert if it’s not alerty enough.

Stages: one town, then a city, then one county, then everyone. Can be complemented by picking a percentage nationally as well, or picking two different towns (Croydon vs Barnstaple.)

Engagement: Poll at each stage as to whether the message was useful, or counted as an emergency, or was read for more than X seconds, or opened more than once.

The alert system also has four levels:

(1) National and (2) Imminent Threat (think “we interrupt this programme to bring you breaking news…”);

(3) Public Safety (“Charlie says” but more specific); and

(4) missing persons / Amber alerts.

The use of the we’d-rather-you-crash-your-car-than-not-get-your-attention klaxon should be reserved for the first two, and its use for the “no barbecues plz” warning should probably have been avoided.

Legally, to the rules of the country. That is not even a question.

But if we talk about morality, the answer is to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and what it implies.

There is no moral nor legal reason to follow the parent company when it in conflict with the rule of law. People are starting to attribute to corporations a power that they do not have, and that is very dangerous.

(The article is good, thou, and opens a lot of interesting questions)

Certainly, if you give up so easily because of a fantasy that some generic PSA becomes the sign to not burn your toast where all the other signs fail, no wonder you need the whole 10 steps to indicate "the impossible"

Isn't the obvious answer decentralization? Have persons necessary to send that message in different places across the country/outside the country needing to sign it for it to be sent. All taking the responsibility of following protocol in these cases.

This is the wrong prism through which to confront the problem. Technology is neither good nor evil nor neutral - it is a tool lacking agency, to be manipulated by people.

You might as well ask if it's possible to design a gun that can only be used in self-defense, or a knife that can only be used for cutting vegetables and cannot hurt people, or a car that will solve all traffic fatalities. That's impossible. There are certainly designs which improve outcomes, but not designs that definitively solve those problems (i.e. addressing author's use of the word "cannot").

So take your pick: the easier problem of settling for improving outcomes, or the harder problem of building an inclusive and equitable society, where people have a position they can take pride in, a community that they support and which supports them, and where violence (of both physical and other kinds, like aggressive alerting) is a last resort. The solutions for the hard problem aren't found in technology, but in the humanities.

i don't leave my home without earplugs anymore. if there's no opportunity for you as a recipient to put back pressure onto whoever's making the announcements, it seems any broadcast system will just inevitably degrade. they work in smaller situations, like individual buildings and such, but if you really want a message to reach everyone in society, then tell your neighbors: person-to-person remains the only workable structure for that "last mile", so to speak.

Comments on these subjects are far less enlightening than when I want to know how to operate the latest LLM.

Tech has gone some distance from when jobs put the early Apple teams together and stated that he thought everyone would be exceptional in their field without computers, it just so happens that computers help them achieve results in their field.

It feels like computers became a field so vast, powerful, that it can sustain itself economically whilst alienating the very people that connect it to societies and the issues faced by them

That is to say, I wish we had expert sociologists on this forum who can add value just as we have people who can with their slice of technology

So: microphones, tape recorders, radios, television, and even the printing press are all bad civic hygiene? They have all been used to facilitate police states...