By Lucy Jones in GQ….The founder of the Deep Adaptation movement – which predicts that climate change will lead to nothing less than social collapse – has divided climate scientists and supercharged protest movements. Critics call him a doomsayer. Others say he’s the only one acknowledging the truth
Artificial Intelligence and The superorganism
Nate Hagens interviews Daniel Schmachtenberger on The Great Simplification….What is the role of intelligence vs wisdom on our current global pathway, and can we change course? Does artificial intelligence have a role to play in creating a more stable system or will it be the tipping point that drives our current one out of control?
Global polycrisis as a pathway for economic transition
By Zack Walsh, Polycrisis Transition Consultancy….This article is part of an ongoing collaboration between the United Nations Development Programme (Bureau for Program & Policy Support’s Strategic Innovation Unit & the Inclusive Growth/Chief Economist) and One Project. The purpose of the collaboration is to connect expertise in new economics with an emerging understanding of the global polycrisis. In this first article, we synthesize existing work and identify potential connections between these two fields. We seek to identify economic alternatives that provide systemic and proactive responses to the global polycrisis and propose potential supporting roles for development organizations like the UNDP.
On the ‘Polycrisis’: Part I
by Bo Harvey….“There is no single vital problem, but many vital problems, and it is this complex intersolidarity of problems, antagonisms, crises, uncontrolled processes, and the general crisis of the planet that constitutes the number one vital problem.”3
The Desert of the Anthropocene: An ongoing installation from artist Ravi Agarwal
The long engagement is a part of an ongoing investigation into the current state of the nature, both as a crisis which traverses a political realm, but also a cultural contestation of how ‘nature’ is thought of in the era of the Anthropocene.
The worst-case scenario for drought on the Colorado River
By Umair Irfan, Vox.com…One in eight Americans depend on a river that’s disappearing.
Navigating the polycrisis–life in turbulent times
By Michael Lerner, Angle of Vision…The polycrisis has many names—cascading crises, the metacrisis, the permacrisis, the great unraveling, the great simplification, “the end of the world as we know it” [TEOTWAWKI], and more. In Latin America it’s called “eco-social collapse.” The French call it “collapsologie.” Or one can simply call it turbulent times or a rapidly changing world.
Global rice shortage is set to be the biggest in 20 years
There’s a strained supply of rice as a result of the ongoing war in Ukraine, as well as weather woes in rice-producing economies like China and Pakistan.
The surprising thing A.I. engineers will tell you if you let them
by Ezra Klein, The New York Times…This is an example of “alignment risk,” the danger that what we want the systems to do and what they will actually do could diverge, and perhaps do so violently. Curbing alignment risk requires curbing the systems themselves, not just the ways we permit people to use them.
#20 – Global polycrisis with Thomas Homer-Dixon
A discussion with a researcher who studies the way global crises intersect.
More in this tag
Jul
06
2023
Global polycrisis: The causal mechanisms of crisis entanglement
by Dr. Michael Lawrence at The Cascade Institute….. In this framework, a global crisis arises when one or more fast-moving trigger events combines with...
Oct
10
2024
The collapse is coming. Will humanity adapt?
by Peter Watts in The MIT Press…..Now, Homo sapiens of some form or another is going to survive no matter what we do, short of blowing up the planet with nuclear...
Oct
10
2024
Applying resilience thinking
from Stockholm Resilience Centre….Simply enhancing the resilience of the existing ecosystem services can entrench and exacerbate inequalities. Important...
Oct
10
2024
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...
Oct
10
2024
Chartbook 325: Wrestling with transition thinking. Or on being “interregnumed” and how to resist it. (Hegemony notes 8)
by Adam Tooze in Chartbook 325…The crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying but the new cannot be born; in this interregnum a great variety of...
Sep
24
2024
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...
Sep
24
2024
How rising global heat connects catastrophic floods on four continents
by Scott Dance in The Washington Post…At this time of year, that flood potential amped up by global warming can become especially evident.
Sep
18
2024
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...
Sep
18
2024
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...
Sep
18
2024
Superbugs ‘could kill 39m people by 2050’ amid rising drug resistance
by Kat Lay in The Guardian…Child deaths from infections see ‘remarkable’ decline but AMR fatalities of over-70s likely to rise by 146%, study finds Analysis:...
Sep
16
2024
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...