We have become exceptionally capable of reproducing (our, collective) insecurity in the name of security.
We have become exceptionally capable of reproducing (our, collective) insecurity in the name of security.
Climate change becomes civilisational risk when insurance can no longer translate catastrophe into recoverable cost.
Ebola reminds us that civilisation may not fail through drama, but through delay, distraction, and a pathogen moving faster than our institutional cadence and cultural expectations.
Many of the critically defining problems of our time resist piecemeal treatment. Understanding consciousness, curing cancer, alleviating poverty, managing environmental sustainability, mitigating climate change without triggering new failures, securing digital infrastructure, managing geopolitical instability, slowing social decay, and containing the adverse effects of runaway technological growth are not separate challenges but tightly coupled dynamical processes. […]
Humanity is moving through a narrow and dangerous passage. Environmental damage, political instability, rapid technological change, and economic pressure are all rising at once. Energy use is climbing, ecosystems are under strain, information systems are flooded with polarising noise, and institutions are struggling to keep pace. A major driver of this acceleration is corporate greed […]
Extraterrestrial intelligence is extremely unlikely to help us. Not because its existence is impossible, but because if any such intelligence were already here, and in any sense benevolent, it would have intervened long before our crises reached the planetary scale they clearly have. Short of the darker possibility that it is they, rather than rogue […]