The Nature and Promise of Disruptive Technologies

In this and future blogs here at Earth Watch, I am going to explore the nature of disruptive technologies happening in four major sectors of our economy: energy, transportation, food, and labor. A disruption in just one of these major sectors would be transformative. That this disruption is happening simultaneously across all four of these sectors is revolutionary.

The nature of this transformation will be one of moving from a centralized, extraction-based economic system to a highly decentralized, creation-based system that is networked and local. Our current economic system is vulnerable and easily damaged. If one utility company goes down, so does the electricity for the surrounding cities and towns it serves. In a decentralized system, the energy is local. It is networked. People will increasingly get their energy from solar panels and batteries installed at their homes and places of business. Such a networked, decentralized system is much more resilient because if one part goes down, it doesn’t take the rest with it.

A hugh infrastructure has grown up around the extraction economy, that is now propped up by the oil-coal lobby and susidies. As the new, cleaner technolgies scale up they will become cheaper and will eventually out-compete the older technologies which will become increasingly expensive and unattractive.

In transporation, electric cars will increasingly replace internal combustion engies (ICE). Automatic driving will create robotaxi systems. These newer transporation systems from taxis, to cars, to trucks will be less expensive and much safer, and they will have a major impact on decreasing pollution.

In food a hugh revolution is brewing in the form of precision fermentation. Food will be increasingly created as software, completly free from the biological sources it has depended on. Protein will be created free of animals which means feed lots and hugh industrial farm system will dissappear freeing up enormous amounts of land that can be reforrested and used to make a major impact of global pollution.

Finally, another disruption is taking place in labor. As robots replace humans in the work place, we will have to re-define what work means and how we measure it. As robots scale up they will eventually be so cheap that they will out-compete many human labor positions. This has major implications, both positive and negative, but the change is coming, and will again have a major impact on our lives and our planet.

Because these disruptions have the potential for progress and positive developments, they also have the potential to go off the rails with negative developments as well. The nature of disruptive technolgies is that they happen much quicker than we can imagine. So this is why, I think we need to start anticipating these changes now, because they are going to happen quickly, and what they bring forth will be hard for us to imagine in our current situation.

I am very positive about all of this. I know it is popular in the environmental movement to dismiss solving our problems through technology, but how else will we solve these problems? It seems to me technological innovation is the primary way we will lift ourselves up and out of the current global crisis we face. So instead of prosperity and a clean, healthy planet being mutally exclusive, I think they are mutually inclusive. This is my assumption and my bias, and I welcome your feedback and constructive criticism as I move through this journey into the future.