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Deep thinking and learning is also taxing on our energy stores, and so we require simplification and reinforcement. Our minds, through repetition or emotion, learn things and then, having committed them to memory, rely on this information and often never question it again; we put our energy into other things we deem more important.
But in times of great change, the beginner’s mind has the advantage.
that same disruptive force is happening to you and everything around you.
Emotion is what makes our stories memorable. The more emotion in a story, the stickier it is.
argue as if you were right, but listen as if you were wrong.
“strong opinions, weakly held.”
according to Computerworld magazine, the cost of one megabyte of hard drive memory has fallen from approximately $1 million in 1967 to 2 cents today.
Today, through a simple cellphone and set of interfaces, many people have more power at their fingertips than leaders of countries had only thirty years ago.
There are developments on the horizon that will make what we have now look primitive.
By any measure, the only thing driving economic growth is easy credit and debt. If the only way to keep growing is through the addition of more and more debt that cannot be repaid, can we honestly say that we have an economic system that still works?
global debt could become a number so high that the only way out is to hit the reset button. The truth is we have probably already passed that point at which a complete reset is required.
We should therefore expect more easing, and more chaos from it, as the can is kicked down the road once again.
The simple power of technology is that it allows for abundance without the same amount of jobs or income...
Through this example, you can see a fuller cost of the energy to move your car. It includes a staggering amount of inefficiency... and drives countless jobs.
In less than two hours, more energy from the sun hits the Earth than the yearly worldwide consumption of energy.
As the economic advantage shifts to solar, a gold rush of innovation and capacity building shifts with it, as an entire industry looks to win a new strategic market. And markets that seemingly don’t change at all will change very quickly.
Some developing countries may actually be at an advantage with respect to energy. Developing countries could avoid an entire infrastructure buildout to support energy, similarly to how millions of miles of telephone poles were not needed in Africa or Asia because of cellular technology, or how much faster China’s ecommerce adoption grew than the United States’ because they didn’t have the existing infrastructure of retail stores to slow it down.
That trend will bring with it a complete disruption to our existing energy infrastructure—and every one of the jobs that goes with that inefficiency.
“All of our knowledge grows only through the correcting of our mistakes.”
a race for AI superiority that is geopolitical in nature, the slowing of any US corporations’ artificial intelligence aspirations due to regulation might, at the same time, cede control of AI superiority to foreign governments, like China or Russia.
But whether we embrace it or not, the genie will not be put back in the bottle. These things are true: 1) error correction is at the heart of all of our “intelligence”; 2) information is growing at an exponential pace; 3) that information is being transferred to computers that can gain knowledge and correct errors faster than human brains can; and 4) Every one of our jobs is a function of our intelligence.
If every job is a function of our intelligence, as computers beat us at intelligence, how could any job be safe? These facts lead to very predictable social disruption because our entire economies are designed around jobs and far fewer will be needed to run our societies. This will lead to an inevitable rise of division and polarization if we continue to mask the fundamental issue. Can we—with our machines—learn how to solve it in time? Can we step forward and accept a new era of abundance?
We are all born without prejudice, hate, or division, so how does it get there?
“much of what human beings do is done in the service of belongingness.”
Belonging to one group most likely also means not belonging to another group. As a consequence, a natural by-product of deepening some relationships is not deepening others—or worse. This can create “us versus them,” and it is a far more powerful force in your life than you may realize.
Watch your thoughts, they become words; watch your words, they become actions; watch your actions, they become habits; watch your habits, they become character; watch your character, for it becomes your destiny.61
If beliefs on things as trivial as detergent can be molded without our knowledge or consent, what else can?
A butterfly effect where seemingly small things gradually cascade into very big things.
You could expect that if you made a big bet and were wrong, you would be wiped out—but if you were right, your hard work, ingenuity, or risk taking would be rewarded.
The rise of fiat currencies that could be manipulated domestically and the bailout in 2008 changed that strategy to one where the players whose bad bets caused the crisis, instead of being wiped out, were rewarded handsomely.
With abundance comes price deflation. This is simple supply-and-demand economics: the more abundant something is, the more likely it is that its price falls. Abundance
Take oxygen. Without it, we stop breathing and die. By that fact alone, it is probably the most valuable thing in our lives. But it is also abundant, making up about 21 percent of the atmosphere, and because it is so abundant, it is free.
Bets on the future are invariably big bets against where the market is today.
To make that bet in light of what investors and stakeholders want you to do to satisfy their immediate short-term needs requires bold leadership and time.
The data is clear in companies, where the cost of not investing in the future is death, but what about some of our biggest institutions that we do not allow to fail? Specifically, the ones like education, healthcare, government.
All over the world, measures are being explored to try to deal with the problem of rising inequality. But the solutions proposed so far only serve to drive further division, because they fail to recognize the primary reason for that rise in inequality.
free-market capitalism is not what is happening today.
It all juices the economy or parts of the economy in the short term while pushing more pain in the longer term.
As we have seen throughout this book, this strategy has only one endgame: 1) higher inequality, 2) people losing hope in the system due to not being able to make ends meet, 3) more polarization, 4) a rise of leaders that use the polarization to create “us versus them” narratives to consolidate power, and 5) commonplace revolution and wars. This solution, in the end, is a dissolution.
Both of the above solutions don’t consider that since global debt is already so high and expanding quickly, a reset of debt is needed in any truly viable solution.
Since the US dollar became the primary currency of the world without a peg to gold, it gave the US tremendous influence in global affairs.
Consider this alternative: allowing abundance without the jobs might actually open an entirely new enlightenment era where we have time to enjoy the benefits that technology brings.
In the end, the trend is already clear and foretells a different way of living. It only matters how we get there. The deflationary aspect of technology is too great a force and it will eventually overwhelm even the greatest efforts to stop it. Those efforts to stop it, and the second-order consequences of that fight to halt deflation, will look insane to future generations because that fight will bring on revolutions and wars that burn the existing system to the ground.
a currency only holds value because of the deemed trust we have in it. Beyond that, it is just a piece of paper with faces and numbers on it.
