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The Great Disruption

Videos Dec 25, 2018 Gordon Brown

As new technologies, globalization, and growing inequality fuel a populist backlash across the West, 2018 could be remembered as a turning point for the liberal world order. Rising nationalism, widening trade wars, and the overall weakening of international cooperation are symptoms of a deeper struggle over what international arrangements will come next.

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nigel southway Feb 23, 2019

Brown is a failed globalist and multilateralist and keeps playing the same old tune that got us into this mess in the first place….. Globalization since 1980 has increased 8 times but prosperity has gone negative in the west with an increase in inequality… The so called world order he talks about cannot work with such a spread of wealth across nations, as it just creates wealth transfer and fosters unwelcome migration… enough we say!!… Bring it on… lets support the direction Trump is trying to take before its too late and we give it all away and get over-ran.
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Mike Robinson Jan 2, 2019

"Clue 'ya ..." it ISN'T just "a disruption," and "international arrangements" ARE NOT(!) "what will come next."

For (literally ...) thousands of years before now, one very simple island stood resolute above the tempests of uncertainty – the SOVEREIGN nation. And, even though these nations at various times warred among themselves, all of them prevailed – by the very simple strategy of "myself, first."

And so, if "international cooperation is weakening," this should be read as a realization that well-managed "bastions in a tempest of uncertainty" do not require life-preservers if they are in fact well-managed. It should be read as a realization that these latest fashions are in fact fatally flawed and ought not be followed – as many generations of our forefathers knew.
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Prashant Kotak Jan 1, 2019

Preface: This is not counsel of despair, or one of nihilism, it's a simple comment on what I observe, coming from a four decade Tech background.

Saw the video, and ok fine, got the analysis, nothing really to disagree with there.

But...Gordon Brown is merely stating the problem, which is already known, he ain't proposing any answers, not even in outline. And I suspect, that's because he can't - at least not answers that can demonstrably be seen to work to mitigate the effects of Globalisation on those least equipped to deal with it's fallout.

Because the issue of Globalisation boils down to one about the winners and losers of Tech. Nothing else matters (barring force majeure). And answers, well, they entail a pie-in-the-sky assumption that the winners of the Tech Game can somehow be made, forced even, to work for the benefit of all humanity, instead of a hedonistic utopia of the few. But I don't think they can. Because that is not the nature of either humanity or of Tech. I don't think I can say anything useful about the nature of humanity. Tech, on the other hand, it's outcomes are very 'binary' (haha), they don't promote a diverse ecosystem in balance, Tech is not evolutionary biology - you get a very small number of winners who climb to the stars, and the losers quickly die out. So a sliver of humanity, perhaps 200 million out of 7.5 billion+, will end up diverging out while they keep the rest of humanity at arms length, as humanity goes to hell in a handcart. This is especially true of poorer countries in Africa and around the world, who don't own any Tech, don't have first-world governance, and are on course to become victims of bought-in Tech from the west and the far east (for example by being cut out from employment).

So my contention is, no real answers are going to be possible to tech driven chaos in free societies. Oh, you can pass laws, make pleas and exhortations that STEM must embed ethics, blah, blah, none of that is going to work if you can't police it - and my contention is that Tech (both IT and Biotech) is essentially unregulatable and unpolicable. This is easy to show, and I can do so if challenged with literally hundreds of examples, to which no-one has yet ever shown me any coherent answers or solutions. The ONLY offer available to avoid this chaos is the flip, some varient of an odious 24/7, Big Brother dystopia that socially engineers it's population, the route China has embarked on with it's terrifying tech-powered 'Social Credit' platforms.
- Mirek Fatyga Jan 10, 2019
  
  personally, I think way too much is made out of "tech". If tech is understood as playing with data in computers, tech is not all that relevant. Present day tech is the creature of stock markets which are unhinged by ideologically motivated deregulation, letting the financial sector in the west periodically print money for personal gain with impunity.
  
  The problem is far more simple conceptually, and more difficult to fix in reality. There are too many people for the current resource base. There is not enough stuff to go around, in more colloquial terms. The solution is technological progress, which can only take place at a measured pace.
  
  Tech does not generate energy, in fact tech uses a lot of it. Currently, as soon as some economic growth is generated by fiscal means, the price of commodities spikes and the growth stops or worse, produces a financial crisis. This is the real problem. This is why there is such a large pool of labor willing to work for food, while the potential consumer base for products is limited. This is why there is a limit to the middle class growth in countries like China or India.
  
  AI of today is just a set of classifier algorithms with large databases. Perhaps they can match a little better a person to a product that this person may want to buy. AI makes nothing, though. 3D printing is very cool, until you realize how long it takes to 3D print anything. The tech evangelism is both mistaken and dangerous, because it distracts us from real problems.
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The Great Disruption

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