Change doesn’t travel in a straight line. It ripples and cascades and after long periods of stability, big change happens fast. That is the premise of Rethinking Humanity, a book (available for download here) authored by Tony Seba and James Arbib, co-founders of RethinkX. Rethinking shows a pathway for the world to move past the extraction mindset to a more productive and environmentally compatible ethos, an age of freedom.
From Extraction to Freedom
During this decade, the world will undergo an unprecedented technological transformation never before seen in the history of humankind. It will affect every single aspect of our lives — the foods we eat, the materials we use, how we move around, our energy systems and how we communicate and exchange information.
We are on the cusp of the fastest, deepest, most consequential transformation of human civilization in history.
We need a new generation of rethinkers like Tony Seba, one of the world’s foremost thinkers on the impacts of disruptive technology and its potential for solving some of our most complex problems.
“We all feel on edge because that’s exactly where we are,” is the opening statement of the Rethinking Humanity video.
Rethinking Humanity
May 28, 2021
YouTube Licence
Video description:
During the 2020s, key technologies will converge to completely disrupt the five foundational sectors that underpin the global economy, and with them every major industry in the world today. In information, energy, food, transportation, and materials, costs will fall by 10x or more, while production processes an order of magnitude more efficient will use 90% fewer natural resources with 10x-100x less waste.
The knock-on effects for society will be as profound as the extraordinary possibilities that emerge. For the first time in history, we could overcome poverty easily. Access to all our basic needs could become a fundamental human right. But this is just one future outcome. The alternative could see our civilization collapse into a new dark age. Which path we take depends on the choices we make, starting today. The stakes could not be higher.
From the video:
“Right now technologies are converging deep in the foundations of our civilization. In the coming decade, they will disrupt the world as we know it and open a window of extraordinary opportunity.”
“Every civilization has been built on the same five foundational sectors: information, energy, transport, food and materials.”
“Each breakthrough only allowed us to become more advanced at extracting scarce resources…and expand beyond our limits to survive. It is a tragic story that repeats, always ending in a dark age, until now.”
“As our old world collapses, we have a chance to break through. Today all five foundational sectors are being disrupted at once creating new ways of producing everything we need.”
“We need a new generation of rethinkers to bring a new lens to the world. If we do, we will create a new chapter for humanity…the age of freedom.”
“If we fail to see what’s coming, things could go bad.”
Related Tony Seba posts:
Industrial Age of Energy and Transportation Over by 2030
The Good Disruption: When Transportation Goes Electric and Autonomous
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.