Tag: future

In the past the Earth was populated by numerous civilizations. The Greeks, the Incas, or the Romans are just a few egregious examples. Because the temporal and spatial correlation between those civilizations was often non-existent, or very limited, if one happened to disappear or extinguish itself, others remained or new ones simply emerged, sometimes independently of each other. Today, even though there still persist ideological and religious gradients between countries and regions, because of the immense interdependency and complexity that characterizes our times, the Earth, to all effect, is populated by one single globalized society. Because of this interdependency we are all on the same boat. If our global society fails, that’s it. There is no other to replace it.

Any form of progress or growth is accompanied by an inevitable increase in complexity. However, this is true only until the so-called critical complexity is reached. Critical complexity is a sort of a physiological chaos-rich and fragile state, or limit, beyond which no system can evolve, no matter what. In order to continue evolving beyond critical complexity, a civilization must find ways of overcoming the delicate and inevitable vulnerability in which self-inflicted destruction appears to be the most probable form of demise. Our annual analyses of data published by the World Bank, which includes hundreds of thousands of variables, indicate that the world will approach its own critical complexity around 2055-2060, amidst high fragility.

The biggest threat of our civilization is entropy – disorder –which corrodes society and its structure making it fragile.

It is painful to watch as our Western civilisation dissolves itself because of rampant decadent individualism, mindless political correctness, the spread of junk culture, reckless immigration policies, abdication of responsibility, lack of moral and intellectual discipline and relativism. We are liquefying, to cite Zygmunt Bauman, the structure of our society which took millennia to form. Destruction of the family is seen as progress. Patriotism is seen as racism. Depravation, obsessive devotion to money, pornography, the celebration of ugliness and dysfunction and mindless consumption are becoming the new mainstream values, the new normal. All this is simply insane. It must stop.

Our biggest threat is entropy – the production disorder/waste – which inevitably accompanies any form of activity, including progress and growth as well as conflicts or cultural regression. Waste, in this context is not just refuse, it includes moral and intellectual waste, which corrodes society and its structure. Since the second half of the 1990s the rate of entropy and disorder production in the world has suddenly doubled. For every step of progress our global society now produces double the entropy it produced in the previous 25 years. At such rate, the garbage bin will be full in the next 30 to 40 years. Where will we dump our entropy and chaos then?

Democracy is a formidable and efficient entropy-producing regime. While it is seen as a conquest of humanity, democracy is, at the same time, protecting the endogenous mechanisms of self-annihilation that it spawns and then tolerates. Western societies, where democracy is deeply rooted, are very fragile. This is particularly true of Europe which is exposed to external and internal threats that compound its high innate fragility. Because of a temerarious immigration policy in times of economic uncertainty, fragmentation and fragility, Europe is invaded by millions of ‘immigrants’, that often import crime, the jihad and diseases, and who’s cultural contribution to an already immensely culturally diverse and rich continent is inexistent.

How can democracy be saved from itself in the three to four decades left before the world reaches its critical complexity? The book proposes to institute an entropy footprint, a sort of rating, for individual citizens, corporations, cities and countries, and to reward and tax them based upon the amount of disorder that is dumped by each into the system. In particular, the citizens rating system will allow to break the gridlock in which democracy finds itself today because of the one man one vote system, by rewarding ‘low-entropy citizens’ with the right to cast more votes during elections. The expected result of such skewing of the current system is that it will drive society to a state of lower entropy, hence greater resilience. The greatest crime of all is trying to make equal things that are not. If we really want to make a better society, we must reward those that are better than others. Under normal circumstances of ‘equilibrium’ the one man one vote paradigm is probably the obvious choice. However, when science identifies and recognizes an emergency of the magnitude and gravity which we expose in this book, it becomes necessary to adopt a solution which, in this particular case, the same science suggests.

The Quantitative Complexity Theory (QCT), the first ever theory of complexity that actually proposes a rational measure of complexity of all physical systems, lies at the basis of the proposals made in this book. Science is not about talking or dreaming about things, it is about measuring and ranking them. The QCT has been tested and applied for over a decade in countless projects, experiments and applications with tens of clients and institutions from four continents. Applications range from medicine to manufacturing, from economics, finance to defence and business intelligence. In 2018 a Complexity Chip has been developed for real-time monitoring of complexity of anything that is mission-critical, from military equipment to software on an automobile or to patients in intensive care. The QCT shows how our world is becoming increasingly complex and how there are physical limits as to how complex it can get.  It also hints a solution. If we don’t act, around 2055-2060 our global family will not be Too Big To Fail. It will be Too Complex To Survive.

The book is available here.