Sep 09
29
The Future Is Going To Be A Sci Fi Movie Script
Bob May was a guest on The Science Show a couple of weeks ago. Or Lord May to all of us plebs.
He was born in Australia and has variously been Chief Scientific advisor to the British government, President of the Royal Society, and a host of other titles too many to include here but available on wikipedia. The bottom line is that this is a very credible scientist, well respected and pretty damned intelligent.
Now here is a direct quote from the interview with Robin Williams on the Science Show where Lord May was talking about how humans are going to evolve in a climate change environment where we may not be equipped for the kinds of changes that we are going to face:
“Is the trajectory that we are on, which doesn't look very hopeful at the moment. Its looks like a trajectory that at best is going to go to the world of the cult movie, “Blade Runner” and more likely to “Mad Max”.
Now there are several things that are really interesting about his insights.
The first and the most obvious is that neither of those scenarios sound too attractive to me! But this is what the ex-Chief Scientist of the UK believes is where we are heading.
Second is that he uses popular culture as the reference point to communicate an idea. If you haven't seen either of these movies, then it might be worth getting hold of a copy and checking out the world of the near future.
The other thing that is interesting is that Lord May talks not just about Climate Change, but about a whole raft of things that are in flux and likely to change the way that life will be conducted in the next few years. He also approaches this topic with the wonder that only an eminent scientist can bring to the equation. He is interested in whether these societal changes are something that any civilization may go through on any planet. He goes on to wonder whether what we are experiencing is part of the normal evolution of a species or whether our experience is one that is aberrant.
This, then is where the debate really is now.
The governments of the world all have scientific advisors who are all, I imagine, communicating a similar message.
But in the meetings of government leaders no one wants to be the first one to blink and give the other side an advantage.
So what happens is that we keep on moving ever closer to the brink.
Just read the letters page of the Sydney Morning Herald on any day. (And I imagine that other newspapers in other countries are not too different). The general theme of the letters is that people are totally pissed off with our state government, because they do nothing. They feel let down by our federal government because they have reneged on their promises to really get active about climate change.
And why do these elected officials do nothing?
Because the corporate leaders know that there is no benefit in telling the shareholders the truth: the truth being that the business that they are invested in can only operate profitably in an ecosystem where there is cheap energy and people consuming, and the possibility of something other than that is too dreadful to contemplate.
And yet there is hope.
One investment banker that I know, who is super aware of the problems the world is facing, absolutely will not think about the possibility of social or financial breakdown. Her attitude is that it is the job of people like her to find the entrepreneurs that will pull society and the planet back from the brink. So you have to be optimistic and positive.
I agree with that, but I think that the key problems that we face are very much of our own doing. They can be fixed, but they require a significant change in thinking at the very top.
We actually need to change a whole lot of laws to the direct opposite of what they are right now. Ok, some people are going say that this is anarchy. But its not. Man makes laws. Man can change laws.
Here are some that need to be changed:
We need to decriminalize the use of all drugs and make the trafficking in drugs the crime that demands punishment. That would mean that the police wouldn't be spending a lot of time chasing down people who smoke a joint or do a line, or whatever people do these days. (In my youth in the 60's we smoked pot and dropped trips). People are always going to want to get high on something, so let them. Prohibition just makes profit margins go so high that there is enough margin to bribe people all over the place, thus introducing corruption into the system.
Decriminalize file sharing for no profit and introduce a levy on blank media. There is no benefit to society in locking people up or fining them for that matter for having a piece of content on a hard drive. Back when I was a kid, I had a reel to reel tape recorder and used to record music from the radio. Was that a crime? Should I have been locked up for it? It was fifty years ago so maybe it is past the statute of limitations. I don't see what the difference is now with regard to file sharing. As things stand now, telcos make money out of file sharing by selling the bandwidth; lawyers make money out of file sharing by filing law suits and by inventing ways to sue people; device manufacturers make money out of selling storage to people who want to store their movies digitally (some of which they have presumably downloaded) – and on and on. It may be true that the artists and writers don't get paid for the download or the stored movie copied from a DVD to a flash memory device. All this can be fixed simply by putting a levy on digital storage and then paying a disproportionate amount of that to local talent. That means that you prime the pump and get more creative stuff generated.
Stop quarterly reporting as the primary way of reporting a company's state of health. Instead institute a system whereby a company has to show that its stated plan over 5 years is being met. And have every company register its business plan (as amended) every year where its aims have to include being sustainable ecologically as well as economically. If you did this every company in the country would have to invest in R&D to meet the ecological guidelines over the target period. Fine the CEO's if they don't hit their objectives. If they are going to get the big bucks, better make sure that they know they are also going to get caned for non-performance in the social milieu.
Obviously we need to cut out corruption in government. By this I mean campaign finance reform. Stop big corporations driving the way that government creates and then exercises laws. How do you do this? First – and only a beginning – generate a trailing benefit for people who sell land to developers so that the previous owner gets part of the profit of the entrepreneur who gets the rezoning certificate, gets the development application etc. Then everyone is going to want to see the developer succeed – but the developer has to pass on some of his profit, preferably a significant amount, to the person he bought it from.
Encourage local communities to support themselves in terms of services like schools and hospitals by giving everyone in a local community a direct tax benefit if they contribute money to a local school or hospital. It just cuts out the government middleman and a whole lot of handling, and gets the community involved in managing the money and the things that they want.
These are things that we are going to have to face in either of the scenarios that Lord May sees for us all, so we might as well start thinking about it now, and doing something about it.