“The stakes have never been higher. The Earth has existed for 45 million centuries, but this is the first century in which one dominant species can determine, for good or ill, the future of the entire biosphere.”
Lord Martin Rees, Author & Astronomer Royal
I was fortunate to receive a last-minute invitation to a seminar at the Royal Society last Wednesday, hosted by the Topos Institute, whose mission is ‘to shape technology for public benefit by advancing sciences of connection and integration’. The key speaker, in a ‘daring and scholarly conversation’ with Topos Chairman Ilyas Khan, was Martin Rees, the Astronomer Royal and former Master of Trinity College Cambridge. Lord Rees has just published a new book called ‘If Science is to Save Us’.
The discussion centred on the themes of ethics, technology and embracing the 21st century, all essential attributes if humanity is to extract itself from the major challenges that we have brought upon ourselves. No-one could question the risks of failure that beset us: but there are also major opportunities, many of which have the capacity to deliver massive financial returns, not just present us with cost.
These could provide very worthwhile investments for the future, and the forthcoming ‘Sustainable and Social Investing’ conference in West London on 27th October will set out a range of these opportunities. Please do consider registering to attend: Share Radio has been a supporter of the conference for several years, and can offer complimentary entry by using the code SHARERADIO22.
In our Thought for this Week we set out Martin Rees’ global mega-challenges, and we draw the connection where they could benefit significantly from our aim for a more egalitarian form of capitalism.
Lord Rees sets out four key challenges in his book, and he discussed them further in the Topos seminar:
- Threats to the biosphere: population growth and biodiversity loss;
- The climate and energy crisis;
- Biotechnology: hopes, fears and ethical conundrums; and
- Computers, robots and artificial intelligence.
We have tackled all of these to some degree in this commentary over the past five years.
Biosphere threats are particularly magnified by the unfortunate human trait of discounting the future, of which we spoke on 8th August. The fact that most democratic systems operate around a five-year electoral cycle exaggerates this danger, although there is no evidence that autocratic regimes work any better for the benefit of the long-term (in some cases, e.g. Russia, quite the contrary).
Martin Rees referred to the significance of the Pope's 2015 encyclical which moved us away from the concept of dominion (‘God blessed them, and God said to them, “Be fruitful and multiply, and fill the earth and subdue it; and have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the air and over every living thing that moves upon the earth.” (Genesis 1:26-28)) and towards a responsibility of care for the future of the biosphere. He cited Sir David Attenborough, Bill Gates and Greta Thunberg among those who most embraced this attitudinal change.
Climate change and energy are of course massive challenges, but need not be such due to the massive and very cost-effective opportunities to generate unlimited clean energy, as we reported on 20th September. There is no reason why investors should hold back from building capacity for the future, and every reason why those still committed to fossil fuels, including Russia, should beware being left with stranded assets.
Biotechnology presents some of the most complex challenges, and the COVID-19 virus has demonstrated how vulnerable humanity is to dangerous pathogens. Lord Rees, warning of the added risk we face due to our high rate of mobility and population-mixing, noted that the global village still has its ‘village idiots’ — but with a global range. He spoke of freedom, security and privacy: and warned that the latter may be necessarily compromised by the need to monitor the speed at which threats can now develop and spread.
His fourth mega-challenge is technology: computers, robots and artificial intelligence. The task here remains to harness these massive advances so that they serve, rather than control, the interests of humanity: as the Topos vision states, ‘A world where the systems that surround us benefit us all’.
This was the one area on which I could not agree with Lord Rees’ suggestion of taxing tech giants heavily and hypothecating the proceeds to supplement expenditure on care. Such a course of action is very close to a heavily-intermediated version of Universal Basic Income, in which the majority of humanity becomes a subservient species.
As listeners will be aware, we are strong advocates of a comprehensive and worldwide ‘Stock for Data’ programme in which the billions of people who commit their personal and behavioural data to tech giants — thereby enabling massive wealth creation — should see their individual equity stakes in these businesses built in return for that commitment. This would not only allow them to share in the capital gains and dividends generated by this wealth, but would also provide a platform by which the governance of these massive companies could be influenced, and in due course steered, by the huge populations that they serve — thus achieving the Topos vision objective.
Economically, it would also keep liquidity moving in order to enable all forms of human activity, including new entrepreneurial investment, to thrive; rather than hoovering money up to meet the self-driven interests of a very small number of tech oligarchs (for example, space tourism).
Hopefully this brief review has whetted your interest to take a closer look at Martin Rees’ new book!
For a thoroughly absorbing read, please visit politybooks.com.
Gavin Oldham OBE
Share Radio