What Box?

“Logic will get you from A to Z; imagination will get you everywhere.” Albert Einstein

Whilst a few people are busy building rocket ships as their Plan B for whatever happens next - the rest of us are too busy riding the rollercoaster of life for such galactic endeavour!

However, jumping off a rollercoaster in motion isn't to be encouraged, but in many ways from birth to death, the ride never ceases!...

It never stops for individuals and for collectives:-families, religions, economies, nation-states, cities, political parties, shared interest groups etc.

As I watched some recent data animations from my friend Aron Strandberg - the world whizzing by over time as more and more people arrived here on earth, people who then got engaged in making and consuming ever more stuff, and how the unintended consequence of it all then turned into really bad stuff - aka global warming - and I'm now left wondering what next?

And another really big challenge hurtling towards us is the ageing global population - in relative terms...

As I see it, if the world was a start-up business and our pitch deck reflected all this and more - pretty quickly any savvy investor would declare it not to be a sustainable business model...

In truth, modern technology and medicine have been both a blessing and a curse, for they are at the core of our explosive growth as a species this past century or so, as it took 200,000 years for our population to reach 1 billion, and only 200 years to reach 7 billion.

Unsustainable in that if we keep doing what we've always done we will keep getting what we've always got!

And as that very clever physicist from Ulm in Germany suggested back in the day...

“The measure of intelligence is the ability to change.” 

So here we all are, at a moment in time where simply sustaining the day to day global modus operandi simply won't do - we have to shift so something else - otherwise we may well be...

"flying' mother nature's silver seed to a new home in the sun"

as Neil Young's prescient 1970 song 'After The Goldrush' spookily suggested.

And as the boy on the Titanic suggests...

"To be clear, this is not about telling people to change their light bulbs or buy a hybrid car. This disaster has grown BEYOND the choices that individuals make. This is now about our industries, and governments around the world taking decisive, large-scale action. Now must be our moment for action"

And is that happening? To some extent, yes it is. But mostly - it is not.

We are all 'riding the rollercoaster' and stopping it mid ride in any fashion seems beyond our collective abilities. However, despite all that, I am optimistic.

Image Credit: Transforming Capitalism :Lab

?There is great imagination amidst all the mess before us.

Here's an example from December's WIRED magazine in which Shaun Raviv shares how Mr Karl Friston's free energy principle "might be the most all encompassing idea since Charles Darwin's theory of natural selection"...blimey!

To my mind, that which resides within the coupling of artificial intelligence with human intellect is where we must be. We can then accelerate the countermeasures for climate change, maximising efficiency and minimising waste along the way.

Within that journey resides risk and reward of course, but failure to take the trip is not an option. We might as well all be sitting in a tiny space capsule rapidly running out of oxygen unless we can figure out how to use what we have to hand to fix things.

It's been done before! - but instead of saving just three souls - Astronauts Lovell, Haise and Swigert on Apollo 13 - we might just save a few billion!

And as we all know...

Failure is not an option!

And finally,

A whole article with no mention of electric vehicles?

Oops! I just squeezed one in!