There are five such crises, which at times overlap. They are climate change and the consequences of global warming; resource scarcity – particularly for energy, minerals and fresh water; societal ageing, as life expectancy increases and birth rates concurrently fall; a growing surplus of global poor who form an ever-larger ‘unnecessariat’; and, perhaps most critically, a new machine age which will herald ever-greater technological unemployment as progressively more physical and cognitive labour is performed by machines, rather than humans.
