From: jimruttshow8596
Forrest Landry, CEO of Magic Flight, conducts research into how product and system design influences culture and ecology, and the nature of the interface between the organic and inorganic [00:51:00]. His company, a woodworking business, emphasizes renewable materials and first-person experiences, seeking simple solutions to complex problems by going beyond traditional design methods [01:33:00].
Technology’s Impact on Society and Environment
Technology has drastically changed the world, with the introduction of the internet, cars, and planes significantly altering human life [08:30:30]. While science and technology provide tools for understanding causation [10:03:00], modern society often faces a “lost opportunity” due to choice-making processes not grounded in long-term perspectives [04:10:00].
Humanity is currently at an epochal point where the future could be glorious or disastrous, depending on the choices made [04:36:00]. Technology has empowered humanity to create and destroy the entire world through advancements like nuclear weapons and biotechnology [33:34:00]. This immense power necessitates a high level of ethical coherence, akin to the “wisdom of gods” [33:57:00], to avoid destructive outcomes like nuclear winter [36:36:00].
One major challenge is the unsustainability of practices like industrial farming, which causes significant damage to the complex outer ecosystem [01:10:00]. The shift from an evolutionary approach that worked for billions of years changed about 250 years ago with the harvesting of fossil fuels, which exponentially increased human capability [45:28:00]. This power now dwarfs the resilience of natural systems, leading to the potential for utter destruction of ecosystems [45:47:00].
Challenges in Information Ecology
The internet, despite its potential, has inadvertently created incentives for disinformation ecologies, leading to a decline in quality information sharing [51:25:00]. Social media technology is currently primarily deployed to serve corporate interests and shareholder benefit, neglecting community and user well-being [59:01:00]. This has led to a “multipolar trap” and “rules for rulers” dynamic, which compulsively drives short-term market interests [01:00:26].
The Center for Humane Technology advocates for a reorientation of social technology to prioritize community service [59:13:00]. The argument is that technology companies with platform authority must be responsible for the well-being of the community using their platforms, preventing disinformation and prioritizing collective benefit over individual gain [01:01:00].
Towards Responsible Choice-Making
To navigate the challenges posed by technology, society needs to move from a state of “muddle blind deaf and dumb” to one of sense-making, choice-making, and action-taking [50:11:00]. This requires:
- Accurate Perception: Perceiving the world as accurately as possible and sharing information transparently, without personal filtering [52:04:00].
- Good Questions: Asking the right questions to understand the current state of the world and guide effective choices [52:19:00].
- Values-Based Approach: Acknowledging that current market-driven processes are too short-term and require a deeper, values-based, and meaningfulness-based way of thinking about decisions [01:00:16]. Values should be stronger than purposes, providing the basis for collective choice-making [39:32:00].
The current system of institutions often has tremendous implementation capacity but terrible sense-making capacity [01:13:52]. Solving global problems at a species level requires a distributed approach rather than centralized platforms, as no single human or small group can possess the wisdom of billions needed to process the vast amount of information [01:05:16]. The goal is not just efficiency but quality of choices [01:07:06].
Ultimately, humanity must develop new capacities in sense-making, choice-making, and implementation to confront the existential risks posed by the asymmetric power of technology [01:22:00]. This involves integrating knowledge from various fields including science, technology, sociology, anthropology, psychology, and philosophy to create new capacities for community design [01:23:41].