Driverless Cars will Run in Packs
By the year 2050 almost all vehicles will be fully automated. Hardly anyone will own a vehicle themselves, since there will always be an on-demand vehicle close by: a utility car to take the...
Econosystemics Blog
The Autonomous Car That Won’t Be — What Google Wants
Take a drive through Mountain View, CA, Austin, TX, Kirkland, WA or Phoenix, AZ and you will see them. Little Google cars driving themselves around town. Their new concept car doesn’t even have a...
Big Data, Privacy, and Corporate Responsibility and Accountability
By Chip Pitts [originally posted in Choose Privacy Week] The American Library Association’s current celebration of “Choose Privacy Week” highlights the diminishing scope – yet increased importance – of this choice. After all, privacy...
Our Exo-metabolism
Everybody has to work for a living. From the most primitive bacterium, to his cousin the investment banker, every living organism has to dissipate energy to build and maintain its complex molecular structure. “Do...
Engineered Evolution
If evolution were an epic novel, I suggest that it would be divided into three books, a trilogy. Each book begins with one of the three greatest evolutionary innovations. Book One begins with the...
Thin Blue Line
The astronaut orbiting Earth sees a thin blue line on the planet’s horizon, separating our Earth from the blackness of space. This blue line is our atmosphere, just a few kilometers of nitrogen, oxygen,...
What is Econosystemics? Revisited.
Every time someone asks me what econosystemics is, I find I tell it a little differently. I guess that’s the honest mark of an evolving paradigm; it gets a little clearer the more you...
Why Gregor is Wrong on Nuclear Energy
When it comes to commenting on the world energy situation, Gregor MacDonald stands out as exceptional. If you haven’t been following Gregor.US, you should put that on your regular reading list — especially if...
A CSR Approach to Nuclear: Reform not Rejection
by Chip Pitts The Fukushima nuclear disaster gives rise to many consequences, for the people and country of Japan, but also globally: consequences for the nuclear power industry, for energy more broadly, and for...
World Poverty Econosystemics (Part I)
With the industrial revolution, beginning around 1775, large flows of energy and resources began to bypass the majority of humans under control of the higher sociopolitical layers. As represented by the dark arrows, fossil fuel and mineral resource flows fed a rapidly developing “high-technium”, implemented by engineers, architects, and managerial talent, and controlled by “capitalists” or political leaders. The lower social majority had to find a way to serve the Technium as “labor”, or continue basic subsistence largely outside the transformational processes of the Technium.
Poverty Puzzles for $1600
An IBM supercomputer named Watson easily defeated the two most successful past winners of the popular game show Jeopardy. Meanwhile, there are three billion brains out there trying to survive on $2.50 per day. What if we could tap into it? Could we figure out a way for the poor to earn income through brainwork rather than begging or back-breaking labor?
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