3 Mega Trends That Will Change Our World (and Why We're Not Ready)
The future is hurtling towards us, packed with incredible advancements.
In this video I explore 3 Mega-Trends that will reshape our world: electric vehicles, artificial intelligence, and the shift to a sustainable society.
Are we truly prepared for this level of change?
(Prefer to read about it? There is a transcript below the video)
3 Mega Trends That Will Change Our World (and Why We're Not Ready) - Video Transcript
This is the first video of a new series about the coming decade of large scale change.
I will discuss the challenges of implementing 3 new complexes of technologies and systems that seem to be little understood at present:
- electrification of industry and the change to electric vehicles
- artificial intelligence and the continuation and perhaps completion of computerization
- the change to a sustainable society, the type of society that humanity abandoned 100 years ago in order to build the industrial society.
Few people seem to understand how technology will change the future in an unprecedented way.
Technology is a double edged sword.
New technologies bring new advantages but also challenges and risks. Most people seem to think that society will continue to improve step by step in the way it has been improved in the past. They think technology development will primarily bring advantages and that the risk of continuing along present paths will be minor or even negligible. But driving technology development forward will require increasing amounts of resources, the processes will need to be managed, and the risk of adverse consequences will increase.
One reason behind our limited understanding is that different technologies need different amounts of resources and will have different consequences.
Electromobility is about changing transportation to electric vehicle fleets. This will need very large investment in physical resources like vehicles, power plants, power grids, and charging infrastructure. We don't have the power necessary to fuel all vehicles and it will take many decades to build infrastructure.
Artificial intelligence is a digital technology with the gigantic advantages of scale. One team of programmers can develop code that can be used by everyone on the planet, but many companies and organizations will still need to implement AI tools and start to use them. This can be a more rapid process than that of building electromobility, and the consequences of AI can be horrifying. Computers can potentially take over large parts of human activity with dramatic consequences for us, our children and grandchildren.
The change to sustainability has barely even started. This is a matter of building new sustainable supply chains for all types of products over the coming decades, a process that will take a lot of time and that will be need to be managed and if it is going to succeed.
The reason why I will do this series of videos is that 3 changes will change society in a way that few people understand. More people need to learn about these three tremendous changes and how humanity will need to approach them.
They can bring great benefits, but these changes are of an extreme scale and big mistakes can cause havoc to our present society and change the opportunities for many people to make a living. Mistakes are highly likely, and we need to learn how to avoid them.
Read my recent book, The Severe Economic and Social Consequences of the rapid change to electric vehicles, to learn more about one of the aspects of this video series. Available on Amazon: https://amzn.to/3UQCf0t
I'm in the process of writing my next book, The World in 2035, which will describe the complex challenges facing humanity over the coming decade as the present generations tackle the complex issues of implementing a number of new technologies.
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