How to face the changes of the world

in #science6 years ago

How to face the changes of the world

The world changes rapidly. Population explosion, climate change, exponential growth of technology, decline of banks, jobs are exchanged by robots,...
I can write the list much longer and tomorrow it is even doubled.
We life in very exciting times, and this is not science fiction: Even in my company bots are working.
We are not used to thinking exponentially. Here is a nice short video of a domino chain reaction:


When chaotic systems interact, often something new emerges. Something noone could ever think about it. If you want you can call it a divine (or a hellish) creation. Often these effects are singular, but sometimes they are stable and a new system is born. In the nature one can find examples, when wind and sand create dunes or when out of the hot seas and the rotation of the earth emerges a new system: a hurricane.

In our culture it started with the control of fire, the invention of the wheel, and so on. New things consistently emerge in shorter times, it is exponential:

And exponential systems usualy end in completely new systems, a next, total different level of evolution, a new phase. This point of collapse is called "singularity."
No one knows when and what it will be. Maybe some resistant forces gain will also gain power but it does not have to end in a "crash".
The fact is, that the changes are faster than our culture can change.
The phase we are in now is called "VUCA":
Volatile
Uncertain
Complex
Ambiguous
Reza Moussavian (twitter: @rezamou‏) showed in a keynote speach, from which I took most of the ideas for this article, that there are two possibilities of our reaction:
VUCA.png
We believe, that the old way (VUCA-) is a dead end. A lot of people vote politicians that instead of overhauling the establishment, only end up further strengthening it. With Trump, Erdogan,... one can see this.
VUCA+ means:

  • Collaborate & trust
  • Sharing is power
  • Customer obsessed
  • Output driven
  • Groth mindset
  • Agile

The new way is to expect the unknown, to accept the status, to life relaxed,...
Let me show this in an short example:
Life is like a big party. God is the DJ, He plays the music. You have to accept it. You have to accept who is dancing with whom. If you don't want to accept it, you can struggle with it or drink yourself down. But you can also talk to others or go onto the dancefloor. You decide where you are, in which direction you look and what you do. And when the time is right, you go to the DJ, ask for a slow song, go to your chosen girl and ask for a dance. If it doesn't work, than you can still be proud of yourself, because at least you tried.
But if it works? Then you are the boss.

Regards, Achim

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@achimmertens, thank you for writing this post as I never knew anything about VUCA before. I really think this is a great write up on your part and really enjoyed reading it. It has become really apparent to me that our technology is advancing way faster than we can adapt and has started showing me signs even in my neighborhood. Recently near my town where I live, Tempe, AZ, there has been company's like UBER and Google's WAYMO testing autonomous cars and one of the UBER cars struck a women and killed her. When this happened I immediately questioned who's fault the accident would be? The programmers of the cars? The person 'watching over' the car inside the vehicle, the women? These are just a few intriguing thoughts I had being that this occurred miles away from where I live. I also have become really interested in Elon Musk and his advances as he is using reality distortion at its finest; On a Joe Rogan Experience podcast I listened too a while back, he brought up possible problems that could potentially occur with a roadster flying around in space. Who controls space? What systems are in place to prevent colliding particles in space? With the advancement in space travel as you put above in your adoption graph these are all real questions that have to be considered. Also another interesting topic I found was the airplane industry and how more and more planes are starting to break mid flight due to engine, wing, material issues. Before too long at this rate what else will occur? Our atmosphere? The effects our growing protein based diet has on social, economical, and environmental factors? What do you suggest to do to balance out our lives in this world in order to stay sane lol; anyways I followed you and thank you again for the intriguing post!

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