All around the world we find systems that warn of existential threats, such as inscriptions on stones at the sides of pathways that mark and remember floods that resulted from tsunamis.11cf. Martin Fackler, “Tsunami Warnings, Written in Stone,” The New York Times (posted April 20, 2011),online Further, nature and living beings provide us with signs in case of danger, such as the nervous singing of birds.22See two examples athttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ekYnPlvtr28 andhttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wH9kYTl-Xpw Nowadays, in the time of the technosphere, alarm systems are being handed over to digital automata.

However, there seems to be an essential difference between the interactions of living beings, and those between man and machine. How are the new electronic assistants interacting with us? What is their nature and role in times of existential danger and matters of sheer survival? Can their advanced but uncertain knowledge finally be described as an essential quality, as proof of superiority, intelligence and virtue justified through their pure mathematical structure? Or does this technology remain a mathematical axiom?33cf. the philosophical battle of Erich Hörl and Dieter Mersch concerning inter alia the essence of digital technologies and its mathematical foundation. “Wie die technische Gegenwart verstehen. Erich Hörl und Dieter Mersch im Gespräch ”. Akademie der Künste, Schwindel der Wirklilchkeit. 6.11.2014, Youtube (posted February 20 2015), online Is it simply illustrating an elegant compensation for an all so apparent shortage caused by the disregard of the region’s fragile topography and disastrous environmental history, by building, and overall building poorly on earthquake prone land, a land in which future urban catastrophes inevitably accumulate? A deficiency that also results from the psychological bias towards uncertainty and the disproportionate role of unpredictable events of low probability with high impact, that are far beyond the realm of normal expectations.44cf. Mike Davis, Ecology of fear: Los Angeles and the Imagination of Disaster, New York: Vintage Books, 1999

Furthermore we need to speak of sovereign action; a trade regarded as highly characteristic of human beings; but what does this notion mean in a time where digital devices are taking more and more control of our lives, and taking over parts of human decision-making processes?

Lastly, we need to ask if it is possible to detect and sense the dangers and unanticipated consequences that stem from the mere participation in these technologically regulated practices and primal demands of the application.

To issue an instruction

A countdown is a time sequence of backward counting, to indicate and speak aloud the critical time remaining before an anxiously anticipated event occurs. The temporal demands and necessities of the situation enable a rhetoric that defers any discussion, detail, or story,55cf. Thomas O. Sloane, Encyclopedia of Rhetoric, vol. 1. New York: Oxford University Press, 2001, p. 415 and thus only functions as an instruction and a strategy to turn the argument in favor of decisive action just in the nick of time.

It’s one thing to have an application that is able to understand your commands and instructions. However, it’s something entirely different to have your application actually give you spoken instructions as a speaker, placing as much emphasis on understanding and recognizing you as a person as on what it says about the situation, in the face of the danger.

In the nick of time, the truth and impact of the argument to be enunciated are situated not only in what is said but also in how it sounds. Just as the voice was once divided into the words we say and the way we say them, issuing the appropriate instruction means recognizing and mimicking the two different testimonies that come from one person’s speech.66cf. Lawrence Abu Hamdan, “Contra Diction: Speech against itself,” Technosphere x Knowledge, Haus der Kulturen der Welt (audio essay), 2016, online “The one testimony on behalf of language [which chooses the words], and the other testimony that speaks on behalf of the body,”77Abu Hamdan, “Contra Diction.” which conveys an intention that is audible through the nonverbal emphasis in the voice brought out in the spoken words.88c. f. Abu Hamdan, “Contra Diction.” Attentive to the countdown is an application that delivers and embodies the perfect timing and that speaks the proper words, issued, essentially, with the ideal tone, where one appeal needs to be prioritized over another. A compelling voice that retains expression, emphasis, and emotion with the exact quantum of sweetness and softness that is appropriate to your mental state and your physiological condition of stress. Or another voice, resolute and harsh, that might build up a certain kind of tension that is able to push you into action.

Before our algorithms get to know your testimonies in more detail, which is necessary to mimic and embody your ideal guide, we will provide you with our axioms. A preset text, or a text-to-speech choice, that guides you through the argument. To prepare you. It transmits our technological systems and codes, our facts and fictions operating and anticipating in the background, to capture and properly instruct the countdown to the earthquake to which you are exposed.

Seismic city

In the deep subsurface, the earthquake’s forces travel through the tectonic plates until they tear into the bedrock underneath your city, where they will pass over into the structural foundations and domestic walls of your building; and where the resisting forces of constructed matter are at their very weakest, the earthquake might crack the columns and concrete slabs99Eyal Weizman: “Introduction: Forensis”. Forensis. The Architecture of Public Truth, 2013, p.6 —suddenly turning what should protect you into a violent object, revealing the weak spots of weak choices made during construction.

The fast-growing megacities, created in recent decades by humankind, have increased the threat of an urban earthquake. These cities are located all over the world, with an unexpected preference for plate boundaries. As we are living in the age of construction on our planet, earthquakes that did not have very much impact before will shake urban agglomerations with millions of people in the future. Large parts of these settlements have no earthquake resistance and no strict building codes have been applied. They are rubble in waiting. In fact, for many there is no plan and no hope of fixing them before they collapse. These cities have become a neglected weapon of mass destruction, and an epicentral hit on such a megacity has the potential to kill a million people. Actually, it is not the earthquakes that kill, the buildings do.1010cf. Nicholas Ambraseys and Roger Bilham, “Corruption Kills,” Nature, vol. 469 (2011), online.1111Democracy Now, “Seismologist Roger Bilham: ‘In Recent Earthquakes Buildings Have Acted as Weapons of Mass Destruction’,” Democracy Now (posted 1 March 2010), online.

The supreme moment

However, there are moments in which your survival could be future-proofed. Moments which are signified by having the right knowledge; a knowledge that incorporates the very environment, deep inside where the actual situation is taking place. Presented at the right moment, voiced at the right time.1212“Kairos,” Wikipedia When the earthquake starts to transmit two kinds of waves of different speeds and strengths, a favorable time difference is created for city-dwellers. This is the moment of the theoretical alert. This alert is based on the efficient early-onset registering and de-noising of the primary p-wave signals and fully automated analysis of the information they carry. This is the first evidence of a quake that seismometers can detect. Automatic phase-picker algorithms are trimmed on identifying the changes in some of the characteristics of incoming p-wave signals, such as the energy, wavelet coefficient, frequency content, and signal amplitude.1313E. Buforn et al., “The ALERT-ES Project: An earthquake early warning system for S. Iberia,” Fifteenth World Conference on Earthquake Engineering (15 WCEE), Lisbon (2012): p. 5, online.

The fast-traveling p-waves that the earthquake produces generally do little damage. They make it to the surface before the arrival of the slower but more damaging s-waves, the low-frequency waves that bring the destructive forces; when the shaking gets serious. The latter are the gut-wrenching movements that crush buildings and create landslides. The p-wave-based alert of the theoretical arrival of the s-waves anticipates the strength and location of the ground shaking and its onset time, and offers a few seconds for rescue. A few seconds that vary depending on the underground liquid and solid structures, and your distance from the source of the earthquake.1414M. Picozzi et al., “Applications of Low-cost, Wireless, Self-organising System (SOESEWIN) to Earthquake Early Warning and Structural Health Monitoring,” in: Friedemann Wenzel and Jochen Zschau (eds.), Early Warning for Geological Disasters: Scientific methods and current practice. Berlin: Springer Verlag (2014): pp. 263–88; also online.

In this special moment of warning, KAIROS will mediate a vision beyond your experience and cognition; in advance, it will know and tell you what is the right way to act and navigate through the time and space left to you. An instruction that is closely aligned to your character and constitution, ensuring that KAIROS takes full advantage in this supreme moment.

Inside the future

In the past decades, the main forms of the city on Earth have become the super-city and megacity. These growing cities are challenged by the fact that, in the future, the performance of megacities will interface with the performance of mega-earthquakes; the space and the city itself have transformed and become spaces capable of sensing. Now, the city is embedded with innumerable sensory devices and objects underground and on the surface; equipped with MEMS accelerometers, cameras, RFIDs, and GPS that carry the signals of an accelerating ground. Boreholes, civil structures, building walls, furnishings, commodities, mobile phones, contact lenses, implants, and an infinitely expanding number of consumer and communication devices contribute to the composition of an advanced, real-time structural and spatial monitoring of an increasingly refined grid. This cyber-physical system is incorporating “off the shelf sensor, processing, and communication components into low cost sensing units.”1515Picozzi et al., “Applications of Low-cost, Wireless, Self-organising System (SOESEWIN).” All sensing units communicate with each other via wireless links, and the seismic data are streamed in real time to huge data centers worldwide using the network of the Internet, the Internet of a billion things.1616cf. Dino Bindi et al., “On-site Early Warning System for Bishkek (Kyrgyzstan),” Annals of Geophysics, vol. 58, no. 1 (2015): p. 1, online. “Since each single sensing unit has computing capabilities, software for data processing is installed to perform decentralized (self-organized) actions. In particular, each sensing unit can perform event detection task and run software for on-site early warning.”1717Bindi et al., “On-site Early Warning System.” This information is then used in appropriate ground motion prediction equations to estimate the amount of shaking at your specific target location.

KAIROS earthquake early warning system, however, does not stop with the estimation of the amount of ground shaking that the target location may expect in the seconds or tens of seconds to come. Considering the interior composition and equipment of the building, special sensor-equipped devices stamp critical paths or positions on the site, to indicate escape routes. When this knowledge is uploaded to the sensing units, together with monitoring data and descriptions of the vulnerability of building structures, these pieces of information can be exploited to calculate the expected probability of damage using the early-warning protocol, customized for your structure and location. A manifest of the powerful science behind quakes. The early-warning alert that is issued and its subsequent instructions are then sent by modern communication means, thereby exploiting the much greater speed of electromagnetic signals over seismic waves.1818Bindi et al., “On-site Early Warning System.”

Enclosures and openings

Once the anticipated disaster shifts from a permanent state of possibility and virtuality into reality, then there is no longer any time left for communications about risk (uncertainties). What is required now is immediate decision-making and reaction to confront the already approaching danger. As you are not able to discern the earthquake’s time signals, KAIROS’s first task is to prompt you with an early alarm-warning of the seconds left to decide and act.

And now you might suddenly become aware that you find yourself in an unfamiliar location, in a site entered for the first time, a facility of unknown vulnerability and history. Suddenly surrounded by intense objects, powerful materials of unprecedented dynamics that might tear into you, enclosing any further access to life. What if concrete slabs get weaponized and pancake? No matter if their collapse occurs partially or fully, they will transform the space into a matter of survival.

In an earthquake that hits you without any early warning, your first impulse may be to run outside. “But, counterintuitive as it may sound, experts warn against that since people are too often killed by falling debris as they try to escape.”1919Tim Padgett, “How to Survive an Earthquake: Two schools of thought,”Time Magazine (posted February 1, 2010), online. “Most people injured (or killed) in earthquakes have moved more than 5 feet (1.5 meters) during the shaking.”2020cf. Damon P. Coppola, Introduction to International Disaster Management.Burlington, MA: Elsevier, 2007, p. 244.

To immediately shield yourself from falling chandeliers, the “Drop and Cover” approach—a recommendation from, for example, the American Red Cross—may not be incorrect when applied in the United States, Santiago de Chile, or Tokyo, where improved construction has greatly reduced the likelihood of structures imploding.2121Rocky Lopes, “American Red Cross Response to ‘Triangle of Life’ by Doug Copp,” American Red Cross National Headquarters (posted September 11, 2004), online. But “the American Red Cross, being a US-based organization, does not extend its recommendations to apply in other countries.”2222Lopes, “American Red Cross Response.”

What works there may not work elsewhere, so there is no dispute that the “Survivable Void Identification Method” or the “Triangle of Life,” which refer to pockets of survivability inside collapsed structures, may indeed be the best things to aim for in other countries where the risk of building collapse, even in moderate earthquakes, is great.2323Lopes, “American Red Cross Response.”

Given that people have only seconds to react to an earthquake following an early-warning alert, the navigation system of KAIROS constitutes an ideal area of application with an immense opportunity for rescue in locations with heavy risk of buildings collapsing.

Residents or visitors in cities such as Karachi, Tehran, Bogotá, or Istanbul may sometimes forget about the cities’ long history of informal construction and high local corruption index, both of which create a major seismic risk.2424cf. Ambraseys and Bilham, “Corruption Kills.” Fatalism kills. Short-term thinking kills. But, above all, corruption kills. Most people may not even be aware that, according to Transparency International,2525See transparency.org. the most corrupt sector worldwide is the construction industry.2626Danny Myers, Construction Economics: A new approach. Abingdon: Routledge, 2013, p. 237; Out-Law.com, “Construction Sector Worst for Corruption, Report Says,” Out-Law.com (posted November 4, 2011).

So where will the openings be, the life-saving triangles, the safe voids to be reached before you are crushed to death? How does one develop a coordinate system and decide in the twinkling of an eye which is the right way to turn and the right location? To adapt your attitude and thinking to an environment that will transform spatially and temporally at an accelerated rate, causing a variety of different kinds of damage? How do you navigate through an n-dimensional field of danger?

Your KAIROS application is the fundamental niche. It is the hypervolume that senses the multidimensional space for dangers, and for resources available for survival.2727“Ecological Niche,” Wikipedia,online KAIROS’s setup of algorithmic sensibility and its capability to instantly anticipate dangerous dynamics modify your perception of the environment.2828Stephane Grumbach and Olivier Hamant, “Digital Revolution or Anthropocenic Feedback?,” <hal-01227303>, 2015, p. 8, online. Curious learning algorithms manage the always remaining uncertainty of knowledge through constant inductive adaptation and feedback from your behavior and the behavior of your environment.2929Orit Halpern et al., “Test-bed Urbanism,” Public Culture, vol. 25, no. 2 (2013): p. 294, online.

An independent decision-making and implementation system centralizes all resources: the knowledge gained from the estimated shaking, the theoretical s-wave onset, the monitoring fabric, and the descriptions of the structural vulnerability and interior composition. It revolves around a basic risk assessment, a classification setup that mainly evaluates the possible types of adverse effects and intensities that are performed by all entities—structures, objects, and people—and the probability of damage at your target location in the upcoming shaking.

Your danger

An earthquake will transfer and spread its energy and intensity over the entire surface layer. However, depending on where you reside, your individual exposure to an earthquake will generate a highly specific and individual scenario of danger; and ultimately, the person you are will essentially affect your survivability and the consequences of the danger you are in. Therefore, on top of everything described so far, the decision making process of KAIROS incorporates an overarching individual footprint. A first set up will establish personalized mean thresholds for the decision making implementation system. The set up includes accessing your medical records according to a detailed assessment of your physical and mental condition, executed by our medical experts.

As a result, your navigation instructions will also vary depending on your physical and mental conditions, and skills. A mobility impairment, advanced age, a physical disability, a wheelchair, a lower level of fitness, an infant, or a tendency to panic would prompt an instruction that is distinct from that received by a practitioner of extreme sports.

Extraordinary accuracy is necessary when making decisions over risky passages, where you absolutely should not get stuck when the shaking starts. For example, stairs are a part of the building likely to cause or suffer a lot of damage. People who get onto the stairs are often chopped up by the stair treads and are horribly mutilated.3030David Mikkelson, “Triangle of Life: Does a ‘Triangle of Life’ article provide good advice about earthquake safety?,” Snopes.com (posted March 31, 2014), online.

Now, in the final decision-making process, special evolutionary algorithms are entering the stage of the test—bed stage. They are trained precisely, using the monitored data of your daily routines and your smartphone-based activities, tracking routes and mental states. Enriched by your personalized data histories, the algorithms are now assigned to calculate and decide about reasonable deviations from the critical mean thresholds. In addition to the personal data histories, they will incorporate into their decision-making the anticipated shaking and the theoretical arrival time of the s-waves, the whole damage risk-assessment, your GPS position, and the real-time monitoring of your physical and mental conditions in the countdown to the earthquake.

We use eye-implanted sensors, eye projectors, and eye cameras—RFIDs, which are the required implants—to provide our algorithms with significant information by measuring GPS, sight direction, gestures, camera view (mimicking your own view), and significant body variables and variations such as blood pressure and temperature. This kind of monitoring and calculation is required to optimize and control your route, condition, and velocity at any given step in the countdown.

KAIROS: this relational device crucially opens up new perspectives and alters the range of resources for your survival.

Into the blue

Actually navigating people using data algorithms in dangerous territories becomes a brilliant but also a risky undertaking. In the age of digital navigation, one complex and crucial element in avoiding catastrophe is putting the right color in the right place. Selecting the appropriate color space to capture the dimensions of optimal human visual perception. Here, extraordinary effects can be achieved by building on the cutting-edge solutions of KAIROS’s color choice and conversion algorithms, although adding colors and tones slightly inaccurately or even indiscriminately to the graphics could spoil the communicative aim completely.3131Birgit Schneider, “Red Futures: The colour red in scientific imagery of climate change,” in: Monica Juneja and Gerrit Jasper Schenk (eds.),Disaster as Image: Iconographies and media strategies across Europe and Asia. Regensburg: Schnell and Stiner, 2014, p. 192. And that could have catastrophic consequences.

The app comes up with a mimetic base map of your on-site territory, provided by the real-time camera view from your mobile device or your implanted eye camera. This interface is then overlaid with a four-dimensional navigation diagram in the form of a heat(color)map, which responds interactively to your status. The heat(color)map is used to associate statistical values of adversity with positions or regions in space. This digital navigation system will pop up on your mobile or implanted eye display at the moment the first early-warning alarm arrives. What has to be emphasized here is that, when color-coding data, we are not dealing with the myth of pure objective scientific tools to convey neutral knowledge anymore.

Putting the right color in the right place means being aware of and having the capability to control the ambiguous character of data visualizations and their potential to simultaneously combine evidence and speculation with emotional factors; this could leave the door open to deception and illusion. A precarious status—and one, by the way, that applies to every scientific representation—especially when dealing with danger and risk.3232Schneider, “Red Futures,” cf. p. 185.

The color red plays an extraordinary role here. Conventionally seen as the key color for highlighting and affirming, red awakens a heightened degree of attention and meaning that triggers various interpretations.3333Schneider, “Red Futures,” cf. p. 192. Intense red could signal warning, deviations from a norm, or the delivery of disastrous news, provoking visions of the apocalypse.3434Schneider, “Red Futures,” cf. p. 186. It is the color with the most obviously alarming character, as opposed to blue. And, therefore, it can simply be seen as the only intuitive way to code danger symbolically, and “as a modern way of depicting disaster.” 3535Schneider, “Red Futures,” p. 185. Here, “the relation of colour and meaning is not arbitrary or metaphorical, but directly follows a perception common in nature,”3636Schneider, “Red Futures,” p. 191. such as the red hot of the burning fire. To summarize, red conveys the perception of danger and action at the same time. Here also lies the problem.

When strongly directing attention to the notion of destruction, the coding of red could evoke a feeling of sheer powerlessness and fear; instead of prompting a straightforward reaction, it might simply paralyze.3737Schneider, “Red Futures,” cf. p. 192. Because of the potential problem of misdirecting attention and creating a sense of confusion, panic, or paralysis, the different meanings of the color red have to be weighed up and implemented carefully.3838Schneider, “Red Futures,” cf. p. 192.

In the navigation process, KAIROS’s visualization algorithms will govern the correct reaction by promoting the color red as either the intuitively perceived route to avoid, or the route to aim for. Respecting and exploiting the ambiguity of red as a sign of danger that attracts and repels at the same time.

The KAIROS visualization algorithms calculate the color ramps and shadings in real time according to the statistical values of anticipated damage along the escape route, in balance with your color presets and the on-site time delays during the countdown, always monitoring the quality of color adjustment. So, the color mapping of your territory is a process of constant versioning, and, while constantly adapting in real time, the procedure has to decide between the two main mapping and perception styles.

The first mapping style pops up if red is your color of immediacy, emphasis, and highlight. This is put into practice by favoring a color palette characterized by small, enclosed areas of an extreme red color. It creates expressive and clear visual patterns on a plan, patterns that attract your attention immediately by using your color for messages and affirmation. It is the color you will follow intuitively.

However, if your heightened sensibility to red equates the color with danger and evasion, a second navigation display is provided that provokes the opposite effect, by drawing a map shaded with unrelieved red over large areas adjacent to each other. These are the key danger zones that you will avoid and repel instinctively. Pushing you away, where the path to be followed now tilts into the blue.3939Schneider, “Red Futures,” cf. p. 192.

Your sweet and creepy countdown

In the following list of links you will find current examples for the dissemination of alerts by earthquake early warning systems in operation (recorded and live) as well as in testing for Japan and the USA

• Japan: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IOZacSjCWCc
• Japan: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fpv6FOqCgwE
• Japan: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PQf3aQevGXs
• Japan: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PQf3aQevGXs
• Japan: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cSmCfqrd_M8
• Japan: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LuDonZJCiXQ
• Japan: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iIlXZYJQ-24
• Japan: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZD9KGxxJgew
• Japan: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-KUHLmREkxs
• Japan (live): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MpV7epyOAGo[41]
• USA: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U-oqteTe-O4 [42]

The bringing to life of these nontrivial tasks requires intense collaboration between seismologists, structural engineers, media ecologists, programmers, medical professionals, designers, lawyers, cognitive scientists, and earthquake safety experts who design and update the monitoring material, the decision-making and implementation systems, the risk assessments, the multidimensional displays, and all of the sophisticated algorithms, at different timescales, and thus is addressed at the interface of these communities.4040ECGS and ESC/EAEE, “Joint Workshop: Earthquake and induced multi-risk early warning and rapid response,” European Center for Geodynamics and Seismology (ECGS) workshop, in collaboration with the European Seismological Commission (ESC) and European Association for Earthquake Engineering (EAEE), Luxembourg, November 18–20, 2015,online.