Categories
Philosophy

Big Problems Don’t Fit in Small Boxes

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. […]

Categories
Philosophy

The Great Filter: Greed, Entropy, and the Continuity of Civilisation

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 […]

Categories
Alien Anthropology

Strange Days on Planet Earth

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 […]

Categories
technology

Policing Generative Tool Use

It does not matter whether you write with generative technologies or not. If you have no ideas, no curiosity, no necessity to think, then artificial intelligence will simply amplify the emptiness. It will generate fluent noise, decorative coherence, and nothing else. The result is regurgitated pattern-matching, consumed as novelty and mistaken for intelligence. Most people […]

Categories
life

Crunch Time: Metacrisis

We are now in genuine crunch time—globally, systemically, and environmentally. The convergence of political instability, ecological degradation, technological acceleration, and institutional fragility has pushed human civilisation into a narrow and dangerous corridor. This is not rhetorical escalation. It is structural reality. I have spent decades developing a rigorous systems model for sustainable global engagement, grounded […]

Categories
cybernetics

Sensemaking in Organisations

Karl Weick’s Sensemaking in Organizations emerged from a dissatisfaction with how organisations were typically described: as decision machines, information processors, or rational planners. Weick’s work cut against that grain. Drawing on psychology, sociology, and organisational studies, he focused instead on how people inside organisations actually come to understand what they are doing, usually after they […]