Category Archives: future

Communism is dead. Long live (corporate) Communism!

05 Tuesday Aug 2014

Posted by in business, capitalism, future, human capital, knowledge, management, philosophy, society

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Communism

The sensible consensus is that communism became all but extinct with the end of the Cold War. I say it may be so, but the mindset that fueled it continues to live unhindered. Your next thought may be that I am referring to North Korea. But I have something much closer to home in mind: the U.S. corporate sector. Yes, you didn’t misread. I will dare to say that the mindset of the corporate sector in 2014 is eerily reminiscent of communist thinking.

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Measuring our way into meaninglessness, stagnation and crisis

12 Wednesday Mar 2014

Posted by in Crisis, future, human capital, innovation, problem solving, science

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I posit excessive measurement is the culprit behind the world’s biggest problems, as well as the likely initiator of its future crises. It is the largest hidden systemic risk to our future livelihood. Our obsession with quantity is the very incarnation of the materialistic credo, a worldview focusing on physical resources and antagonist to a knowledge economy.

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Facebook vs. Nicolay Kardashev: the sustainable economic growth argument

02 Sunday Mar 2014

Posted by in business, capitalism, democracy, future, human capital, innovation, Investment, science, society, technology

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I’ve often wondered whether social networking companies like Facebook qualify as innovations driving sustainable economic growth, i.e. fueling human prosperity.

As more of the world’s discretionary capital (equity, venture, etc.) is sunk into social technologies we should I think explore the link between virtual technologies facilitating human connectivity (i.e. social media) and vibrant economies conducent to democratic political systems, invention and human prosperity.

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Modern society as an inertial machine

18 Tuesday Feb 2014

Posted by in Crisis, future, human capital, learning, society, technology

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Conspiracy theories vs. idiosyncrasies

I for one am no big fan of conspiracy theories. I see them as the construct of minds unable to grasp modern life’s intricacies. The fact that few of us manage to agree within the same family leaves me suspicious as to the proliferation of occult groups with the coherence to pull the world’s strings – that is assuming they would possess the means. I have however become convinced that society doesn’t need conspiracies to create its own self-imposed idiosyncrasies which in turn come with a hefty price.

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Big idea 2014: the world still defenseless against mediocrity

05 Sunday Jan 2014

Posted by in democracy, future, human capital, society

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From Ivy League scholars to country presidents, mediocrity permeates society’s highest echelons. Indeed, we remain defenseless against it in the 21st century. We are hard at work battling world financial crises, poverty and social inequality even as we produce mediocre leaders who proliferate populist, symptomatic, efficient but not effective “solutions” to these and other pressing issues. Democracy itself, the most advanced social construct to date, is no match for mediocrity. I propose keeping mediocrity in check is a much more effective way to go about our world’s progress. We would first need to understand how it evades society’s filters.

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The True Capitalist Manifesto

29 Tuesday Oct 2013

Posted by in capitalism, future, human capital, philosophy, society

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Picture the time in which Karl Marx’s Communist Manifesto emerged. The Industrial Revolution, unraveling in full force, was very much based on a materialist world view. Since physical resources are limited it’s only normal that someone, Marx or otherwise, would have signaled that a zero sum race for wealth will make some extremely rich only at the expense of others. And indeed there was some truth to that, as exceedingly ambitious industrialists seemed to have no limit to their greed. There’s no leap of logic required to arrive at the “class warfare” idea aimed to right the inequities generated by a zero sum game world. Accumulation of things, cordially known as consumerism in our time, was also decried by communists as a sickness of the soul.

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A brief history of complexity and the mechanisms of resilience

04 Wednesday Sep 2013

Posted by in business, capitalism, complexity, consulting, future, innovation, society, technology

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Resilience will receive a lot of attention as the complexity of our world increases. Below is a brief description of the logical correspondence between complexity and resilience, followed by a succinct primer on mechanisms of resilience. But first, a bit of history is in order.

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Why higher education requires a new underlying philosophy

18 Thursday Jul 2013

Posted by in future, knowledge, philosophy, society, technology, Uncategorized

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Futurists, scholars and entrepreneurs seem to agree: the higher education establishment will be disrupted in the near future. Thomas Frey foretells the collapse of over 50% of colleges by 2030 while Clay Christensen proposes higher education to be just on the edge of the crevasse. The culprit responsible for the disruption in their view? Technology, or more precisely the increasing availability of online learning to which Michael Saylor would add the proliferation of mobile devices.

My view? There is more to the story than technological disruption. To understand such subtleties, one has to look at the underlying philosophy of education.

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The foundations and future of economics

26 Wednesday Jun 2013

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I’ve often wondered whether economics can be called a fundamental “science.” Much like physics can describe the rules of the game we call “reality” without a definitive answer as to how the game was set in motion in the primordial universe, so does economics seem to me to focus primarily on transactional mechanisms for value without a profound appreciation for how value materializes out of grey matter. Money is, or should be, an accurate measure of value, but ever since we moved away from bartering we have forever decoupled our transactional mechanisms (either in time or measure) from fundamental value, allowing us additional transactional flexibility in time and space, but also resulting in economic cycles, nothing more than periodic corrections to the coupling mechanisms.

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What’s beyond the knowledge economy shouldn’t scare anyone

22 Saturday Jun 2013

Posted by in capitalism, complexity, Crisis, future, human capital, society, technology

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The love-hate relationship of humanity with technology seems to be universal across ages. We love the benefits that technology brings, but hate it when it threatens our jobs, or forces us to learn new skills faster than our comfortable pace.

In the words of Clayton Christensen, one could say that technology is slowly disrupting human labor (and I include here knowledge work). The latest scare for humanity is the so called “technological singularity”, where artificial intelligence learns how to design improved versions of itself, and so exponentially surpasses human intelligence, leaving us humans well…irrelevant. Popular author Kurzweil predicts the year for this around 2045. Less extreme viewpoints still see automation as a major disruptive force to social order as even knowledge workers will be out of jobs in the next few decades. And so the fatalists wonder: how do we deal with the social implications of a few billion unemployed – will anarchy be the norm in 2045?

While the logical thread leading to a fatalist view of the future may seem sound, it is in fact plagued with serious flaws based in a misunderstanding of the differences between silicon and carbon-based intelligence.

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