Earth Is Overtaxed From Our Negative Influences

Welcome to the era of mobility as a service. Forget about daydreaming out the window. The future of personalized mobility will transform the time you now spend in between point A and B into whatever kind of event you want it to be. The future of mobility will physically move us where we want to go efficiently and safety, and it will also transport our minds, elevate our moods, and deliver us a transformative cognitive experience as well. Society is on the cusp of a new cultural, technological, and industrial revolution. In the coming decade we will be profoundly swept up in the full immersive experience of technology in ways that far exceed gaming, watching television, or engaging in social media. Our lives will be transformed by products that communicate with each other, absent our involvement. We will be the first generation to reconcile the rights of humans as we establish rights for robots. What once read like a science fiction novel will become our new normal, a world where technology is precariously dangling out ahead of humanity’s capacity to fully vet and grasp the nuance of the ethical, social, legal, and moral requirements and impacts of the new technologies. This rapid ascension of a technocratic society will yield a new age of social, ethical, economic, and environmental challenges we have never had to contend with before and likely also give us the opportunities to solve them. Thus our individual notion of what sustainability should mean and look like will be increasingly be drawn into question. There is a burgeoning tension in society.

Do It Now

It is between political elites and technologists and between wealthy corporate elites and the working class, those that have been forgotten and those that simply are not even recognized as part of society. If we continue down the path of swift technological change absent of a strong moral compass to guide human evolution appropriately, we stand to lose ourselves to an intelligence that we created but cannot control. There is irony in this because ever since we learned to transform our existence, humans have continually pursued methods for manipulating the world around us to conform to our needs. Although we have never fully controlled the weather, we have been successful at shaping the environment. Look no further than the cityscape or suburban areas and countryside around you. The roads, tunnels, bridges, houses, buildings, shopping centers, eateries, schools, and hospitals all exist at the hand of humanity. We have dramatically transformed the earth, putting a firm imprint of our existence on the face of this rock we call home. We have literally moved mountains, drained and diverted waterways, and turned deserts into an oasis just to meet our needs. Some of this alteration occurred to enable our survival. However, make no mistake. Humans exert sheer force to seek control over our landscapes. We slice, carve, nip, and tuck the earth as if we are giving it a constant facial makeover, never quite satisfied or pleased with how it is aging.

Getting Closer

Our desire to transform and reface the earth is not solely the pursuit of vanity. Over the course of millennia, we have come to better understand, value, and respect the symbiotic relationship we have with our planet. We understand that if we create, stimulate, and accelerate limiting factors and feedback loops within Earth’s ecosystem we will ultimately become the recipient of its limitations as well. Today our extreme weather events, water pollution, and problems of resource scarcity are intensifying at a rate that severely challenges our ability to respond. How we choose to inhabit and shape Earth, continues to foster negative feedback loops at a scale, reach, and impact that we can barely measure, let alone comprehend. The signs are all around us. Our challenges with poverty, hunger, pollution, resource scarcity, and ecologic collapse are all symptoms of our daily relationship with each other and our planet. Our technological innovations are also demonstrations of our desire and need to adapt to change by modifying scientific solutions to guarantee our survival. Take industrial agriculture, for instance. A century ago, we worked to mechanize production on the farm to provide food more efficiently and cost effectively to hungry mouths around the world. In less than one century, we have shifted from manipulating how we industrialize crop harvesting to manipulating the science of how the agriculture commodity is grown from the start. Knowing that weather events have become more erratic and that the growing seasons can only yield so much profit, scientists have genetically modified seeds to produce crops that are more resilient to drought and disease and which can grow faster and yield more food.

Love Comes Tumbling

Our Earth has actively signaled to us that it is overtaxed from our negative influences. There is also a moral obligation in all that we do as individuals, families, communities, and humans, during our time on Earth. We have greater scientific knowledge and technological capability than previous generations and a greater understanding of earth’s natural processes and our impact on climate change and environmental degradation. We have better tools and resources to prevent further ecological destruction and restore existing, ecologic damage. The question is whether we have the personal and political will and conviction to utilize our knowledge and resources for this purpose. Life is a paradox, a sarcastic sitcom of illogical contrasts. Consider the everyday disparities that plague even the most free and wealthy of nations because a portion of their population struggles with basic survival from a lack of adequate water, food, shelter, and adequate clothing. The conflicts of interest impeding solutions to this come from many directions of opposing values. For all the great things technology has made possible for humanity, it has simultaneously amplified some of our less favorable social and personal idiosyncrasies. Powered by an iPhone or Android device, anyone can have an ear and microphone to the world. The data and information we choose to see and hear, however, mutates several times over before we actually receive it, interpret it, and decipher it as having value, meaning, or purpose for our lives.