THE END ISNT NEAR Technologies explode and conjoin like never before. Our brains cannot easily anticipate such rapid transformation. Neither are our current means of governance and its supporting regulatory structures designed for this pace. Abundance is a global vision built on the backbone of ‘exponential change’, but our local and linear brains are blind to the possibility, the opportunities it may present and the speed at which it’ll arrive. Instead we fall prey to what has become known as the ‘hype-cycle’. THE END ISNT NEAR Avalanched by the menacing ‘prophets-of-doom’ (courtesy amygdala function and media competition), and our blind trust on ‘authority figures’ (courtesy our local and linear brains) we treat ‘authority figures’ as friends. They trigger the in-group bias and make us trust them even more. Whatever information the amygdala doesnt catch, our ‘confirmation-bias’ certainly does once we start believing the apocalypse that says otherwise. The result is a population is convinced that the ‘end is near’ and there isnt a damn thing to do about it. ‘Scarcity model’ dates to 18th century when Malthus realized that while food production expands ‘linearly’, population grows ‘exponentially’. Because of this Malthus was certain there’s going to come a point in time when we’d exceed our capacity to feed ourselves. Jay Forrester wrote ‘The limits to growth’. He’s scary about the world wide population growth rate vis-à-vis the global consumption rate. It’s been over 4 decades since the report came out. While many of the dire predictions failed to materialize but on certain fronts we find proof of its veracity. One in four mammals now faces extinction, while 90 percent fish have gone. Our aquifers are facing extinction, while our soil is growing too salty for crop production. We’re running out of oil, running low on uranium. Even phosphorous, our principal ingredient in fertilizers is in short supply. Children keep dying of hunger, so are they dying from thirst or drinking dirty water. Is this then the warm-up time? In terms of present population growth the more-than-7-billion-people will go to 10-billion by 2050. The very poorest of the poor, the so-called bottom-billion, are finally plugging into the global economy and are poised to become kind of the rising-billion. To understand OPL, the open planet living, we need to understand that currently humanity uses 30% of our planet’s resources that we can replace, and, if everyone on this planet wished to live like an average American then we’d need five planets to pull it off. OPL is a global initiative meant to combat these shortages. When you see through the lens of technology, few resources are truly scarce, they’re mainly inaccessible. 500 years ago, technologies werent doubling in power and halving in price every eighteen months. A hammer wasnt easier to use from one decade to the next. Iron wasnt increasing in strength, the yield of food grains varied by the season’s climate, instead of improving each year. But then the ‘disconnect’ between the local wiring of our brain and the exponential reality of our world created ‘disruptive convergence’. Technologies explode and conjoin like never before. Our brains cannot easily anticipate such rapid transformation. Neither are our current means of governance and its supporting regulatory structures designed for this pace. Abundance is a global vision built on the backbone of ‘exponential change’, but our local and linear brains are blind to the possibility, the opportunities it may present and the speed at which it’ll arrive. Instead we fall prey to what has become known as the ‘hype-cycle’. Cornucopian fundamentally believes that there’s enough matter and energy on the Earth to provide for the ever-rising population of the world. Over the past 15000 years Homo sapiens evolved in a world that was ‘local and linear’, but today’s environment is ‘global and exponential’. In our ancestor’s local environment, most everything that happened in their day happened with a day’s walk. In their linear environment change was excruciatingly slow—life from generation to the next was effectively the same---and what change did arrive always followed a ‘linear progression’. From my home at Barzalla, Srinagar, if I take up 30 ‘linear steps’… one step a meter, I’d end up thirty meters away. When I take 30 ‘exponential steps’ (1,2,4,8,16,32,64,128……..), I end up a billion meters away or effectively lapping the globe 26 times. Today’s global and exponential world is very different from the one that our brain evolved to comprehend. Our forefathers couldn’t imagine that the global transportation networks were capable of providing green beans, apples and cashew together in the same meal. The self-sufficient peasant or hunter-gatherer predecessor is defined by his multiple production and simple consumption. He doesn’t make just one thing, but many; his shelter, his clothing, his entertainments. Because he only consumes what he produces, he can’t consume very much. In the information based economy if Ive a hunk of gold and youve watch, if we trade then Ive a watch and youve a hunk of gold. But if youve an idea and Ive an idea and we can exchange then we both have two ideas. It’s non-zero. With the super geniuses on to geek out in their Nano-niche, exponentially growing fields like biotechnology and bio informatics; computational systems; networks and sensors; artificial intelligence ; robotics; digital manufacturing; medicine; materials and nanotechnology, each has the potential to solve grand challenges and reinvent industries. Looking into the future, abundance of matter and energy in space would appear to give humanity almost unlimited room for growth. In a 24 hours day it’s how we utilize those hours to determine the quality of our lives. Saved time, the true measure of something worth is the hours it takes to acquire it. The availability of almost everything a person could want has been going rapidly upward from 200 years and erratically upward for 10000 years before that; years of life span, mouthfuls of clean water, lungfuls of clean air, hours of privacy, means of travelling faster than you can run, ways of communicating faster than you can shout. Even allowing for the hundreds of millions who still live in abject poverty, disease and want, this generation of human beings has access to more calories, wants, lumen–hours, square feet, gigabyte, megahertz, light years, nano meters, quintals/acre, miles/gallon, food miles, air miles, and of course dollars than any that went before. The earliest single-cell prokaryotes to eukaryotes to multi-cellular organism involved employing biological-technology; devices such as nuclei, mitochondria, and Golgi apparatus that made cell more powerful and efficient. Technology (bones, muscles, neurons) leading to cooperation (all those parts and many more leading to our bipedal verticality) lead toward greater complexity. Amazingly that evolution has sustained the trajectory that biological evolution had established towards greater complexity and cooperation. For humans to be the world conquerors language, agriculture and advance technologies have always paved way.
Posted on: Sun, 16 Feb 2014 15:09:44 +0000
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