There’s a whiff of desperation in the air. By this point in the world’s business cycle, the American economy that powerhouse of global capitalism – was supposed to be rebounding sharply, and stock markets everywhere were again going to be making everyone rich. Instead, things have gone haywire: the US may be tipping into another recession; four years of growth has evaporated from North American markets; and economies around the world are in trouble.
The human population explosion is far from over, and its dire effects will be with us for many decades yet. “As many people will be added in the next 50 years as were added in the past 40 years,” the U.N. writes, “and the increase will be concentrated in the world’s poorest countries, which are already straining to provide basic social services to their people.”
Modern societies face a cruel paradox: Fast-paced technological and economic innovations may deliver unrivalled prosperity, but they also render rich nations vulnerable to crippling, unanticipated attacks. By relying on intricate networks and concentrating vital assets in small geographic clusters, advanced Western nations only amplify the destructive power of terrorists and the psychological and financial damage they can inflict.
Interview Conducted by Ted Rutland of “Uncommon Good” (Webzine) on the subject of The Ingenuity Gap.
What am I trying to say in The Ingenuity Gap? What are the book’s key points?
Most generally, the book argues that in many aspects of our lives we’re producing immense problems for ourselves far faster than we’re solving them. We’re embedded in a set of enormously complex, tightly interlinked systems — economic, political, technological, and ecological. We don’t really understand how these systems work, so we can’t manage them effectively.
The debate surrounding the events of September 11 is being clouded by sloppy logic and analysis in the haste to say something — anything — that makes sense of the situation. One issue that has become clouded is whether it’s reasonable to talk about terrorism’s “root causes.”
Some events shatter the order of things — the routines and regularities of our lives that we rely upon for our sense of safety and our sense, most importantly, of who we are and where we are going. Some events change our perceptions forever. The world never looks the same again afterward. Suddenly, the reliable landmarks of life seem strange and distorted — recognizable, yet simultaneously weirdly unrecognizable.
About two-thirds of the way through AI, Steven Spielberg’s latest film, my mind began to wander. I remembered standing at a podium in a vast hotel ballroom in Washington D.C. several months before.
Recently, the writer Ken Wiwa argued in this space that we shouldn’t worry too much about the loss of the world’s linguistic diversity. A recent study by the Worldwatch Institute, he reported, reported that half the world’s languages may soon disappear; especially vulnerable are those indigenous tongues spoken by only a few thousand people. This prospect has raised widespread alarm, because it’s generally thought that language and culture are closely related. So, when we lose a language, it’s assumed, we lose the associated culture.
This morning I’m going to talk about “The Ingenuity Gap in a Fragmented World.” I’ll ask whether humanity can meet the ever more complex and fast-paced challenges it’s creating for itself.
