[Original Image © Synthitect]
PLANETARY REVOLUTION
Are we on the verge of a planetary revolution? Digital
& quantum platforms have long awaited their opportunity to take command
over our society. We’ve allowed these technologies to trickle into our lives; first
into our homes tethered to landlines, then into our pockets remotely
controlled by satellite. We pretend to have a sacred bond with Mother Nature, yet we
live nourished by the next technological advancement. We hold on so tightly to the
things we can grasp, without realizing that most things hardly exist in
physical form any longer. Your contact information, your money, your photos,
your communications mostly exist in digital form. We’ve surrendered our trust
to a digital society that most people cannot explain the inner-workings of. Maybe
that’s OK. There’s a lot of us meandering among this planet; aimlessly depleting
natural resources beyond our capacity to replenish them. And since that’s the
case, why wouldn’t we trust these systems? Why shouldn’t mankind look to a more
powerful degree of management; a better system for implementing sustainability.
Proposal:
The next industrial revolution (4IR) is capable of defragmenting
the disparate conditions that make our society so wasteful, so sluggish, and so
inefficient. We are entering the era of “The Internet of Things”, where objects
become smart; capable of relaying data; capable of managing their own life-cycles
and informing us how to sustain our own. These systems are designed to
communicate across higher levels of resource management than we can comprehend; interconnectivities too complex for us to code or script, lending themselves to
be developed by artificial intelligence. This is initially achieved by machine learning; teaching AI to understand the basic principles & patterns of our
daily routines and natural resource usage, then enabling modes of efficiency-management
to inform our habits. Digital fabrication techniques are becoming more
resourceful, less wasteful, faster and more economical. Industrial production
will be intertwined with economic consumption. This is achieved by additive manufacturing
technologies such as 3D Printing or Continuous Liquid Interface Production
(CLIP) merged with synthetic biology; where the feedback loop for production
& recycled products is 1-to-1; continuous, and self-replenishing. Digital currency
merges with social media, becoming a merit system for user-cooperation and to
manage micro-fluctuations in systematic equity.
A future informed by principles of logic to ensure mankind
is on the most efficient path towards a sustained existence.