Now for something seriously off-piste if you view sustainability as basically about corporate social responsibility.
One of the many, many replies yesterday to my initial call for inputs to my year-long learning journey on system change came from Roland Kupers, who I first met many years ago when he was running the sustainability side of Shell’s activities.
He suggested a number of resources, one of which was the monumental book The Dawn of Everything - which I already had, but had only got some 50 pages into last time I tried. So that has been retrieved from the garden studio this morning and gone into my reading pile.
But Roland also recommended a TED talk by Stephen Wolfram, titled How to think computationally about AI, the universe and everything. I watched it this morning and it quite literally blew my mind.
Had long been interested in the concept that the Earth is a computing process - indeed one reason why I want to visit the Santa Fe Institute later in the year is because of the work under way there on chemistry as computing. But this talk really blew open the doors on my #5 theme, looking at the future of AI and its implications for the sustainability field.
One of the key points Wolfram makes is that there is an inexorable trend in automating various aspects of what we do as a species - but, eventually, that opens up the possibility of our (or somebody) doing completely new things. There is something at the heart of all this which, though I struggle to grasp it, speaks to the essence of the paradigm shift that is under way all around us.
So I am keen to explore some of the links back to the work of the late, great James Lovelock - whose Gaia theory that has had such an impact on my own thinking since I first came across it in 1975. I tell that story in my forthcoming book, Tickling Sharks: How We Sold Business on Sustainability (Fast Company Press, May 2024). More on that later.
@johnelkington I love the direction you are taking your thinking on sustainability + role of business. Can’t wait for the new book!!
Another wonderful source original thinking on earth systems is Donella Meadows: Thinking in Systems.
It’s delightful to think that this approach to complexity (as old as Lovelocks Gaia theory and of the same family) was all based on biodiversity and the natural world’s interdependent systems.
So inspiring that the driver of her work was the urgency of climate change (Limits to Growth, alongside the great and still living Jorgen Randers (and later, his brilliant co-thinker Per Espen Stokness).
Nature, being of course, the only efficient system in existence :-)
From the perspective of information physics, the universe and life are indeed computational, and in many more ways than Wolfram predicts. In my article above I explain why, and how the accelerating rate of innovation and novelty in conscious living systems including Gaia is simply a feature of the entangled evolution of our universe