**Growth Bad – Topshelf
Download 0.81 Mb.
|
- Navigate this page:
- K waves are made up of patterns of technological innovation characterized by periods of growth and recession
Unsustainable – K-WavesThe next K-Wave is coming now, by 2050 there will be an overpopulation crisis that will outpace technological innovation, causing it to cease and leading the recession of the global economy- we need to dedevelop before the global crisis nowWileniusa AND John, University of Turku, Turku School of Business, and the Center for Complex Systems and Enterprise, Stevens Institute of Technology, 12 December 2014 (Markku and Castib, Seizing the X-events. The sixth K-wave and the shocks that may upend it, pg 1, http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0040162514003783) The next K-wave, which will now be truly global for the first time in human history, will eventually be about raising the level of awareness concerning key human predicaments and then searching for and implementing measures that can really make a difference. We envision here things like new smart and decentralised power grids, and new welfare models that stand up to scrutiny. This is a massive learning challenge for societies, which need to wake up and recognize that they are in great trouble unless old attitudes and policies change. In this emerging sixth wave, the next big race to which the principal thrust of our technological development, economic growth, social cohesion, and even our cultural and spiritual activities will be devoted, has to do with making our systems more intelligent. A lot of this intelligence must come from understanding how we can use our natural resources more efficiently. As social and individual awareness concerning the limits of our fragile planet grows, new innovations will be forced to create a technological and social infrastructure that helps us live more meaningful lives. As always, human intention is what will lead the way. The information revolution has occurred in two ways. First, scientific evidence abounds that the present industrial model of development will not take us to the kind of future we want. Second, we now have novel channels for networking. There are over six billion mobile phones in the world. A whole new digitised space has been created, and the number of active Facebook users has hit the magical one billion mark. Moreover, there are new technologies, such as nano- and biotechnologies, moving on to the stage. Nanoparticles are used everywhere, from helping to filter fresh water to providing self-cleaning windows. Biomaterials will eliminate the excessive use of non-renewable materials in many fields, such as in the construction, insulation and packaging industries, as new products based on natural woven products will begin to substitute for existing products. In terms of price and industrial scale, new renewable energy technologies are fast approaching market entry. There are thus two fundamental factors at work here: first, needs arising from the observed limitations of existing ways of producing and consuming, and second, a new awareness concerning the innovative ways by which we can make society smarter and more human through the use of various technologies. Today we are in a situation in which new breakthroughs are taking us onto a new level in the interaction between humanity and technology. Futurist Ray Kurzweil, who with an astonishing rate of success has forecast the rise of a new high-tech paradigm, recently pointed out how the operations of the human mind and brain can be tracked and this knowledge can be “ported” into vastly intelligent human machines (Kurzweil, 2012). Not only are we seeing the birth of new super-intelligence through the application of our know-how of technology, we are also witnessing totally new possibilities for extending the powers of our own minds. To summarise, thus far we have claimed that the world is increasingly becoming a place where surprises can lurk around any corner. At the same time, we know that certain developments in our societies unfold in patterns. We also know that bio-, nano- and ICT technologies will play a role in the future, probably converging into something totally new and unexpected. In what follows, we shall explore four different disruptions; developments that can take a radically different direction from what is now taking place. We call this de-trending, as the idea is to show how various triggers can push the trend off its current course, resulting in a major shift in our perception about the future. 3. Four shocks to shake the world At first glance, a reader seeing the shocks we present below that could undo the trend of the Sixth K-wave might well say that these shocks themselves are trends. So how can they be a “shock” or “X-event”? The answer is simply a question of timescale. Every event, X- or otherwise, has a certain unfolding time. Maybe it's very short on an absolute scale like an asteroid impact or an earthquake. But generally the unfolding time is much longer, as with a pandemic or a technological innovation. The point is that the unfolding time of the event is still much shorter than that of the process/trend that the X-event changes. So the four “shocks” presented below should be seen in this light. From the viewpoint of the timescale of the K-wave, they are short, in essence “points”. But they are still trends on their own timescale. With this point in mind, let's now turn to the shocks. 3.1. Shock #1: the decline and fall of populations 3.1.1. Current trend Driven by the fact that the global population increased by nearly 140% during the second half of the twentieth century, seers of the future envision population levels soaring onward and upward for the next 50–100 years along a similar, although not necessarily identical trajectory. Conventional wisdom has it that this population growth will be concentrated in Africa and Asia, as shown in the graphic below from the UN Population Division. Here we see the population (measured in billions) at three points in time. The picture that emerges from this projection is one of population decline in Europe, along with fairly moderate growth in Latin America and North America. The action, though, resides in Asia and especially Africa, where the growth rate exceeds 100% in Africa and over 40% in Asia. The overall picture here is clear: a global population increase of about 2 billion people, almost all of it concentrated in Africa and Asia (Fig. 3). 3.1.2. Implications The picture just painted above has it that extrapolation of the above population picture suggests a world of 2050 involving a dramatically increased focus on financial services for pensions and healthcare services and facilities for the aged world, accompanied by major shifts in biotechnology and pharmaceuticals in the developed world. Let us look at an X-event whose occurrence would cast serious doubt upon parts of the standard picture. 3.1.3. X-event To begin this story, consider the chart below showing the fifty-year percentage change in the total global population. This chart should be read as follows: Pick a year, say 2000, and read the percentage change from the chart, which in this instance is 140%. This means that in the half century preceding the chosen year, global population increased by 140%, which happens to be the largest half-century change on the entire chart. What's immensely revealing about this figure is that in the year 2050, the global population will have increased by only about 20% from its level in 2000 (a nominal increase of around 1.4 billion), and should actually begin to decline in about 2070 from its level in 2020. So the enormous increase seen in the second half of the twentieth century was not the beginning of a trend, but rather the end of one, an anomaly, and in the second part of this century, the population will actually start falling dramatically ( Fig. 4). It is well worth asking the question: Why can we expect to see a worldwide population decline in the second part of this century, at an even faster rate than it rose during the last century? The primary driving force is decreased fertility rates. This phenomenon has already been taking place in most of the developed world for at least the past couple of decades or more, most prominently in the countries of Western Europe. Prime examples include Italy and Germany at a rate of 1.4, the Netherlands, with a rate of 1.8, and a rate of 1.9 in the UK, all well below the replacement level of 2.1. The graph below shows the global situation, along with the fact that the rapid decline infertility is not something confined to developed countries — it is now being seen in many Muslim countries around the world as well, with the fertility decline in Iran, Turkey and Pakistan even exceeding the global rate. Many reasons have been put forward for this fertility decline, ranging from family planning policies in China and India to the widespread availability of contraceptives and even partnership instability. No doubt all these things make their contribution, but by far the most convincing explanation is the dramatic worldwide increase in literacy ( Fig. 5). K waves are made up of patterns of technological innovation characterized by periods of growth and recessionWileniusa AND John, University of Turku, Turku School of Business, and the Center for Complex Systems and Enterprise, Stevens Institute of Technology, 12 December 2014 (Markku and Castib, Seizing the X-events. The sixth K-wave and the shocks that may upend it, pg 1, http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0040162514003783) One of the most popular explanations to the existence of the K-waves has been that of looking at the clusters of technological innovation. This causal hypothesis comes originally from Joseph Schumpeter, whose main question was how innovation and technology influence economic growth. In his early work Schumpeter approached this by investigating the long-term economic growth patterns and their relationship to innovation. The Schumpeterian framework became thus based on the idea that temporal clusters of major innovations create new opportunities that in turn accelerate economic growth (Schumpeter, 1939b). Later, many of the interesting K-wave theories have built on this by trying to explain historical growth patterns by changes in key areas, such as communications, energy, production, or transport technologies. To complement Schumpeter's original theory, Gerhard Mensch has added the idea that the reason major innovations occur during recessions relates to investment behaviour: Mensch argues that during prosperity investors tend to invest in less risky ventures, and in stagnation or recession fewer low-risk investment opportunities are available. Together the Schumpeter–Mensch theory of technological innovation as the key to the waves has inspired the main body of literature related to the Kondratieff waves. Directory: file -> view view -> Western Europe after wwii view -> Author study: paul fleischman view -> Qpa1 7ela study Guide view -> Arctic Oil/Gas Neg view -> November 1970 Approximately 150,000-500,000 deaths Bhola Cyclone Bangladesh view -> Grade Level: 6 Unit of Study: Caribbean glce view -> Citation: Duffield, Katy view -> Table of Contents Lesson # view -> Chinese Wind Energy Disad Download 0.81 Mb. Share with your friends:
|