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Applying resilience thinking

from Stockholm Resilience Centre….Simply enhancing the resilience of the existing ecosystem services can entrench and exacerbate inequalities. Important trade-offs exist between different ecosystem services (e.g. crop production and biodiversity), and it is not possible to enhance the resilience of all ecosystem services simultaneously.

Hurricane Helene isn’t an outlier. It’s a harbinger of the future.

by John Morales in The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists…And then came the rain.

Preliminary storm-total rainfall measured on the ground included nearly 31 inches (782 millimeters) in Yancey County, northeast of Asheville, North Carolina. Radar estimated totals in areas where there were no rain gauges exceeded 40 inches (1,000 mm) just over the state line in South Carolina’s Greenville County.

Yuval Noah Harari on the eclipsing of human intelligence

Sean Illing of The Gray Area interviews Yuval Noah Harari…If the internet age has anything like an ideology, it’s that more information and more data and more openness will create a better world. The reality is more complicated. It has never been easier to know more about The world than it is right now, and it has never been easier to share that knowledge than it is right now. But I don’t think you can look at the state of things and conclude that this has been a victory for truth and wisdom. What are we to make of that? More information might not be the solution, but neither is more ignorance.

Scaling: The state of play in AI

by Ethan Mollick in One Useful Thing…With continued advancements in model architecture and training techniques, we’re approaching a new frontier in AI capabilities. The independent AI agents that tech companies have long promised are likely just around the corner. These systems will be able to handle complex tasks with minimal human oversight, with wide-ranging implications. As the pace of AI development seems more certain to accelerate, we need to prepare for both the opportunities and challenges ahead.

Facing global risks with honest hope

From (ASRA) Accelerator for Systemic Risk Assessment report Facing global risks with honest hope….Transforming Multidimensional
Challenges into Multidimensional
Possibilities

Global trends are polarizing us: Can democracy handle it?

by Richard Heinberg in resilience.org….Today the world faces historically unique stresses that are likely to be increasingly polarizing for many societies. These stresses can be divided into three groups—environmental, economic, and technological. After examining these, we’ll explore two questions: first, is democracy inherently more polarizing than autocratic forms of government? And second, are democracies or autocracies better at handling crises?

National resilience guidance: A collaborative approach to building resilience

In National resilience guidance, a paper by FEMA.gov…This Guidance is intended to help all individuals, communities, and organizations understand our nation’s Vision for resilience, the key Principles that
must be applied to strengthen resilience, and the Resilience Players and Systems That Contribute to Resilience.