Our society, as the collection of humans on this planet, has grown to a degree of complexity – and size – that, if you just take a moment to reflect on it, is mind-boggling. Our society has not always been so complicated and intertwined as it is today. While not less challenging living in small family like groups with lots of empty space between the groups wandering the African planes as hunter-gatherers the social structures and economics must have been less complex then when we decided to settle as farmers in Mesopotamia. When we started to create cities social and economic complexity increased yet again. This increase in complexity has continued ever since. We can all see it getting more complex during our lifetimes.
With his book “The Future” Al Gore in my opinion did a pretty fine job to describe and analyse the changes and challenges we as the human tribe are faced with today. Gore identifies 6 different “mega-trends”, which he labels as:
- 1) Earth Inc: the deeply interconnected global economy;
- 2) The Global Mind: a planet wide communications grid connecting humans, sensors, data and (intelligent) devices;
- 3) Power in the Balance: new balance of political, economic and military power;
- 4) Outgrowth: rapid unsustainable growth;
- 5) The Reinvention of Life and Death: technologies enabling the design of matter and life;
- 6) The Edge: the relationship between human civilisation and the earth’s ecological systems.
Based on Gore’s work it is not difficult to argue that the complexity – and challenges – of our global society will increase even further in the future.
As described earlier by Thomas Friedman in “The World is Flat” we see the world changing and we can see that our ways of collaboration are changing. He describes a world in which the borders are dismantled by new technologies. The effect that location independency for instance has on the cooperation and competition between people and businesses leads to large shifts worldwide. These shifts are part of what we have been addressing by the generic term ‘globalization’.