I was reading a short interview with economist and author Jeremy Rifkin in new scientist which focused around the thesis of his new book “The Empathic Civilisation” (amazon) and it reminded me of my own thoughts about the future. Rifkin talks of modern civilization being near it’s “endgame” and suggests we are going towards a new industrial revolution. He suggests that the communications revolution on the internet is beginning to converge with distributed renewable energy and when this happens this will bring us together, increasing empathy without further increasing entropy.
Whilst I find what is said by Rifkin very interesting and do agree that communication and computing technology, particularly centralised cloud computing facilities, are converging with renewable energy I don’t know if I completely agree with him. I have felt for some time that we (western industrial society) are pursuing a totally unsustainable economic model and that sooner or later it will collapse, possibly slowly , possibly quickly and messily. The big ideas encompassed in environmental degradation, overpopulation, economic growth (capitalism), climate change and non-renewable energy use (oil particularly) are all linked and affecting what is going on today and I do feel we are in times of change. Unfortunately for us, in my lifetime I do expect to see extremely difficult change occurring to our civilisation that will include real hardships. Westerners are used to observing others around the world suffering though natural disasters, war etc. , but we will be facing very real hardships before long. Many of us probably believe our wealth, technology and scientific knowledge will help cushion us and that may be true to some extent, but given our wealth is founded on paper and electronic transactions that often have no basis in the real world I think we are in for a shock.
I don’t like to be a doom and gloom monger, and I do see positive changes all around, but is it too little too late?
No comments:
Post a Comment