A disturbing discussion at Hot Futures Think Tank tonight.
Bob said a number of times: Civilisation could collapse in a couple of months. He was meaning in a couple of months time from now.
Ian said that he was listening to ABC Managing Director Mark Scott saying we had at most 8 years left. [We’ve both tried unsuccessfully to find the link.]
The discussion got stressful because these things were being said as the evening was winding up yet it seemed we should be talking them through. What if anything should we be doing? How justified are these statements? What are they founded on?
People were being serious about it and saying things like: All the information on computers will go because they all take huge amounts of power to store the data and run the networks.
We were trying to have a discussion about education for the future – what the future held what skills were needed to deal with it and what sorts of educational processes might work. But it was at risk of running off the rails into a sense that what would happen would be that everything would collapse in a heap and then adaptive learning to survive would be the only thing that would work. How could knowledge be preserved and transmitted forward? What key knowledge would be needed?
I feel very distressed by this. We didn’t part in a congenial mood as we usually do.