Welcome to The Autonomyst

Thank you for visiting!

I created this website as a place to exchange ideas, in an informal setting, on everything related to four properties of space systems and the space ecosystem as a whole: resiliency, agility, the novel notion of antifragility, and the degree of a system’s autonomy, and how these concepts interplay and influence sustainability of the space ecosystem.

Here, I use resiliency in the broadest sense possible: the ability of a system to sustain and recover from failure. Agility relates to time: the ability of a system to change quickly (enough).

Another motivating concept central to this project is Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s notion of antifragility. An antifragile system is one that benefits from and thrives on stressors, shocks, volatility, attacks and failures. A resilient system, as a future post will discuss, is not necessarily antifragile in that it can heal itself in the face of adversity but does not thrive on it. For a system to benefit from adversity, autonomy, enabled by artificial intelligence, is almost necessarily needed to make a resilient system antifragile.

These are the kinds of ideas that will be the subject of this page. We will cover how technology, innovative concepts (e.g., fractionation and disaggregation), economics, politics and government, the market process and its mechanisms, among others, influence space systems resiliency and, ultimately, sustainability.

I very much look forward to our conversations!

Islam Hussein, February 3, 2020