Transforming from Extraction and Exploitation to Collaboration and Co-Creation

“We are witnessing the emergence of a suite of new technologies that have the potential to revolutionize our production system. This new system, enabled by these technologies, is fundamentally different from the old one. It’s a beacon of hope for a better future.” –James Arbib, RethinkX

Rethink X is the cutting edge think tank based in London and San Francisco whose approach is radically different than others.  Instead of taking a linear approach to change, the team takes a holistic approach where one action creates action elsewhere.

James Arbib co-founded RethinkX, a nonprofit organization that works worldwide to examine disruptive technology that will replace our unsustainable technology and lead us toward a more sustainable future.

Our world is changing faster than most people can understand these changes and see the new possibilities that continue to emerge.  How can you explain this so people can see what’s really going on?

What we see happening is a transformation of our production system. So, you know, human civilization has been in a kind of production model now for, I mean, probably 10,000 years, but massively accelerated through the industrial period, which is based on the extraction and exploitation of scarce resources. The inputs into our system, materials, labor, capital, and so on, are scarce. And that drives a kind of competitive environment, right? It’s a world of exploitation, getting exploited, growing, or being outgrown.

Throughout history, we’ve seen that civilizations have grown, expanded, and consumed others.

Those societies have tried to live sustainably and within their means. And we’ve had plenty of them in the past. They’ve been left behind. They’ve been overtaken by others who, in their expansion, have taken them over.   Because that’s the underlying dynamic of our current system, right?   It encourages growth. If you don’t grow, you get outcompeted. And we’ve seen over the course of history that play out.

“We’re now in a situation where we have an almost global winner that has expanded through conquest and imitation, but it’s ultimately unsustainable.”

Extraction and exploitation of both people and the planet have been thee essence of the existing system, right?

On the other hand, we are witnessing the emergence of a suite of new technologies that have the potential to revolutionize our production system. This new system, enabled by these technologies, is fundamentally different from the old one. It’s a beacon of hope for a better future.

So we think of energy, for instance. You know, we’re in a world where we have a system that Thomas Edison would recognize in terms of the infrastructure, the basis of the technology, the business model, and the value check based on centralized, grand-scale fossil fuel production.

A new paradigm based on solar, wind, and batteries is emerging in the energy space. Unlike the old ones, these technologies are modular and scalable.

In this new system, resources like photons and electrons are abundant everywhere. Unlike the current system that relies on scarce supplies of oil, coal, and gas, these resources are available in abundance. This abundance ensures the sustainability of the new system.

In the new system that disappears, things like photons, electrons, and so on are abundant everywhere. So, we end up with a different system with totally different properties.

Buckminster Fuller said, “There’s nothing about a caterpillar that tells you it’s going to become a butterfly.”

And that’s a helpful analogy for thinking about what’s emerging. We have this old system, the caterpillar, and within it is emerging the new system, this butterfly. And yet, all we do is understand the caterpillar in great detail. We can’t possibly understand what’s emerging if our mind is trapped in that old paradigm and system.

So, we keep our minds in the box of the old and see all the problems with that old system. Environmental degradation leads to climate change and all kinds of other environmental issues.

Within that old paradigm, we see inequality, other social issues, poverty, and so on. When we solve those problems, we’re putting band-aids on that old system. We’re trying to make the old system less harmful. And that’s fine in the short term, but we mistake these band-aids for solutions.

Now, if we step back and look at this system shift that we’re seeing, this change in paradigm, in the paradigm of production, we can see this butterfly, this new system emerging within that old system. And those problems go away, right? There no longer is the exploitation of people and the planet, inequality, and environmental degradation; no longer are they the essence of the system…

That all falls away. And so, the biggest challenge we see for Humanity in navigating this path is understanding what’s emerging and knowing that a better world is coming. Still, it will feel incredibly destabilizing and bumpy because that old system that we’ve known, and it’s all we know, is breaking down, right?

We see the incumbents within that old system, whether in politics, business, or finance, desperately trying to hold on to the old, trying to hold on to what they had, and resisting change.

We, as individuals, resist change because we find it terrifying. We fear for our jobs, we fear for what’s coming, and we fear for our communities because we can see how they’re going to be transformed. But we also lack a clear, inspiring vision of what’s coming.

We need  a better vision of what’s coming to hang on to, to inspire us, to allow us to hold the course as we go through this incredible transformation.  It’s this lack of a compelling new vision that often makes change so difficult.

But by understanding the changes that are happening and the potential for a better world, we can begin to shape that vision for ourselves, and in doing so, find the inspiration and motivation to navigate this transition.

And what is coming? What should we be looking forward to?

When we think of the world in terms of matter, energy, and information, they’re the essence of our physical world. And they’re essentially the inputs into our production system.

What’s happening is that we’re changing how we can manipulate them. We’re going from this system of extraction and exploitation based on scarce resources to one of creation, which builds up the things we need from the individual building blocks, the molecules, the photons, and the electrons available locally in abundance.

So, we look at the food system; for instance, we look at livestock farming; we produce the protein we need by growing animals, growing plants, and breaking them down into the products we need. When we move to this new system, we start with a single molecule or cell using technologies such as precision fermentation or cellular agriculture, where we can grow individual cells into many kinds of larger products.

So, we can make a steak by starting with a single cell or a single set of cells. Precision fermentation allows us to hack microbes to produce the needed proteins. So, they’re different technologies based on minimal inputs. They need small carbohydrate sources to power the reactions and grow those foods. So they’re far more sustainable, far less impactful.

Livestock farming has greatly impacted our physical world. 70% of our farmland is used for growing animals, either providing the feed for them or providing the pastureland for them to feed. So, technology has been incredibly degrading and impactful over centuries. It’s responsible for much of the deforestation we see. It’s responsible for a huge amount of the greenhouse gases we see in the atmosphere, a lot of the runoff, a lot of the chemicals that have got into our systems, and all kinds of environmental problems that come from that.

As we see a transformation of that system coming, all those problems go away with far less impact.

But what’s driving this is the incredible improvement in technology and human knowledge that we apply to make the things we need. Those technologies are going down incredible cost curves.

So precision fermentation, one of the key technologies in disrupting livestock, has been going down a cost curve for 30 or 40 years. From the first kilogram of protein, human insulin we made in the early 1980s, through this methodology and process, cost about a billion dollars per kilo. We’re now producing proteins at well under $100 per kilo. And we’re on track by mid-decade to produce them at, say, $10 per kilo, which is about competitive with bulk proteins.

And then we’ll continue beyond it.

Those cost curves, my partner Tony talks about being like gravity. They continue almost indefinitely. And so, as that happens, there’s nothing livestock can do to compete with these new forms of food production.

It’s kind of like a horse trying to compete with a motorcar.

You can’t design a faster horse quick enough or evolve a faster horse quick enough to compete with the car. So there’s nowhere to go. So there’s an inevitable disruption coming.

Now, that could be terrifying and scary. We could think about all the job losses that come with that and all the farming communities that will be transformed through this. Or it could be hugely empowering.

We see the cost of food dropping dramatically. We see it moving from an inflationary paradigm based on scarce resources to a deflationary paradigm based essentially on these technology cost curves. We see secure, resilient, distributed food supplies everywhere in the world that will be self-sufficient in food production, localize our supply chains, localize food production, and a much more resilient, robust system with far less impact on the environment will be decarbonized. No other greenhouse gas emissions either, far less impact on all kinds of ecosystems.

So, there are huge benefits to this transformation. But we don’t often see them because we don’t understand the scale of change.

The same is happening. We talked about the materials we’ll also be able to make. The same is happening in the energy system, transforming from this paradigm based on scarce inputs that drive the centralization, the command-and-control structures that we see in our current system, to this massively distributed system where you have very low physical flows.

So energy, for instance, once you’ve built a clean energy system, which again is the lowest cost system, we build it because it makes economic sense. We also have these extraordinary cost curves, including solar, wind, and battery costs. So we build this new energy system. There’s no flow through that system. Once you’ve built it, you’ve essentially prepaid the next 30 or even 50 years of energy production. So you’ve essentially got a zero marginal cost system with almost no physical flows through that system.

So, a fundamentally different paradigm allows all kinds of financing models and different ownership structures, which don’t exist in the current paradigm.

And the same in information. We see extraordinary progress in technology with information processing and the communication of information through, say, the internet. And actually, we’ve seen the first phase of that transformation happen. We’ve gone from that old centralized structure where information is controlled from the center regarding book publishing, newspapers, and so on into a world of the internet where individuals are directly connected. And so we’ve seen that paradigm shift.

However, the problem in the information space is that we’re still managing that system through our old organizing and governance structures.

And that’s leading to the kind of dystopia we see in that space. Because essentially what you’re doing when you do that is you’re essentially pinning wings on the caterpillar. It’s not a butterfly; it can’t fly. So we have to, if we’re to take advantage of the potential benefits that come with this transformation, we have to change what we call our organizing system, our governance structures, our institutions, and so on, to enable us to take advantage of what’s coming.

Obviously, the entire education systems will need to focus on the transformation for the sake of employment and civic leadership? We’ve seen this before.  The automobile disrupting the horse and buggy enabled an entirely new employment opportunities, the building of roads, of gas stations and repair shops and everything that came with it.  The transformation from analog entertainment to digital, the MP3 and the MP4, and now—AI.

But of course, as you said, it was inevitable that the horse and buggy would end, and we would move on to vehicles. Likewise, as you said, we’ll move to more sustainable technology, whether electric vehicles or so forth. But what do we do for those communities, particularly, let’s say, coal mining communities and so forth, that are terrified that their entire livelihood is going to disappear or evaporate overnight?

So, that’s a great question. And it’s the heart of what we do and why we set up RethinkX. My answer to that is that this  is a fundamental transformation. And it’s a transformation quite unlike other transformations we’ve seen.

In previous transformations, we’ve seen industries disrupted, job losses, and communities destroyed, we have also seen in the new sector that jobs have been created, and usually, many more jobs have been created, but in different areas requiring different skills and so on.

However, we expect to see the disruption and transcendence of the production system for human labor over the next couple of decades

So, the developments we see in artificial intelligence and robotics will replace all kinds of jobs, not just that kind of manual labor jobs, those jobs involved directly in the production system, but also many of the more creative jobs, the white-collar jobs, the lawyers, accountants and so on.

And that’s inevitable, right? We’ll see that happen. And that’s a terrifying thing for people in those industries. But we’ll also see the potential for a whole new social contract. We’ll see that the cost of everything we need- food, energy, transformation, housing, healthcare, and so on- also drops dramatically.

So, we have the potential to provide those needs at a far lower cost.

Some concepts, like a universal basic income today, make no economic sense. It’s just too expensive to provide that for a population at anything like the kind of level required.

As we move forward, we’ll see that become possible. We’ll see the ability to provide the things we need differently. And we’ll have to think about work, rewards, and things like purpose differently.

The things we do with our time might look fundamentally different from how we’ve seen happen in many other instances. But we’ll be in a world where essentially, we have our needs met, our time freed up, and we can think about optimizing our potential to thrive in that world.

But it requires a different conversation from the one we’re having now. It’s not simply a like-for-like replacement of one type of job for another.

It’s a rethinking of everything:

How can we meet our needs where we find purpose. That’s probably not a simple answer, but it requires a complete shift in our thoughts.

Is this something that’s going to happen on the local level, or is this going to happen at the national or even international level? But what can local communities do concerning trying to facilitate this process of disrupting unsustainable technology that’s ultimately killing us? 

 

So, the old system is centralized. So, power resides at the center, the national, the kind of state, the nation-state level. And that’s the old incumbency, where decisions in our current system exist. But change tends to happen at the edges.

Change is an evolutionary process.

It’s bottom-up, and it’s emergent.

And when you see transformation happen, it usually comes from the edge. It doesn’t come from the center.

In technology, in Silicon Valley, for instance, thousands of entrepreneurs are running all kinds of experiments, and the best ones go out and spread. And that’s the same thing we think will happen at a societal level: we’ll have to have individual communities and regions, the kind of experimentation to work out and develop the winning systems.

It is a bottom-up emergent process. But the problem is that we have an incumbency that represents the old system that will hang on, cling to power, has an incumbent mindset, cannot conceive of something fundamentally different, and has incentive structures based on the old structure.

So, we’ve got this difficult period of transformation where the old system inevitably collapses as it gets outcompeted by the new.

But the old power structures and decision-making processes hang on and cling on. I hope we find communities and regions prepared to take the leap, build these new systems, experiment, and understand an evolutionary process. And I’m sure that will happen. It will be very, you know, painful and challenging at the center, but we’ll see some winning solutions emerge.

So, there’s a lot that communities can do, but it requires embracing a whole new model, being open to change, welcoming it even, and doing what it takes to make the adaptations necessary to survive.

Since Governments are centralized, is real significant change is going to happen at the local level?  How can governments help to enable the transformation, especially in incumbent sectors that are going to go extinct? What can Governments do to help? Or are they the problem?

 

We would argue that the government’s job through this process is to create the conditions in which that evolutionary process can happen, right? So they need to make the ability for the new system to emerge and kick off that cycle of creativity, entrepreneurialism, investment, and consumer demand changes that drive the kind of changes we see.

But most Governments don’t act. They react.

So we need to create the conditions for that to happen. And there are some principles that governments can follow, you know, to open up markets, to allow, to remove regulation, to remove the support for the incumbency that allows that change to happen.

Because, until the scale of the new system, governments can crush them, right? They have the power; they have the power to resist, you know, to ban some of these new foods, or perhaps to resist the kind of, or at least create a more dystopian version of the old, or to make it the whole process, you know, much more, you know, much more painful.

In terms of kinds of multinational global structures, you know, they’re, you know, powerless in many ways; they don’t have the type of power that national governments or nation-states have. And our view is very much that, you know, we won’t get some global agreement, you know, at speed and at the scale that we need that, I think if we take one of the problems that you’ve been referencing—climate change. 

As we see, there have been 29 COP events, and little has changed but a new date added to the calendar.  What’s wrong with their thinking?

I think there’s a kind of perception, kind of in, you know, in the conventional, in the traditional thinking, that it’s a kind of, it’s almost an enormous task that we face, we have a massive boulder sitting at the bottom of a hill.

And  their job is to use all available force to push this enormous boulder up the mountain. And that, you know, the higher we get up the hill, the steeper and harder it gets.

So we need, you know, tax, regulation, behavior change, technology, breakthroughs, and miracles in some ways, and we need, you know, vast amounts of investment.

And we have to mobilize, you know, every tool at our disposal to make it happen. It’s on governments, right, to make the changes.

Our view is that it’s a different situation; the inverse of that is that we have essentially a snowball sitting on top of that hill.

And the role of government is to get it going, to give it the initial push, right, to provide it with that impetus to start rolling down the hill, to gather pace. And that as it rolls down the mountain, the role of government is to keep it on track, to make sure it doesn’t crush things as it tumbles down that mountain, to make sure that it doesn’t cause collateral damage.

And so it’s a very different mindset, it’s a very different way of thinking.

And that’s a challenge. In many ways, we see this as a race to the top. We see this tremendous opportunity to transform your economy to this new model, right, to transform your food, energy, transportation, and healthcare systems.

There’s a massive prize for those, you know, those countries or those regions that lead, that go first, that transform economically and socially and geopolitically. But right now, we see it as a high-cost, difficult thing to do. And it’s, you know, it’s a carrot and a stick. And we’re using the stick when we don’t see an alternate reality; it’s extremely difficult because every possible solution looks bad. We have to accept higher costs, a worse quality of life, or more instability. That’s not the case at all. We can win, win, win across all those categories if we transform. And so our hope very much is that we’ll find cities or smaller regions that will make this transition, that will see the opportunity, see the possibility, see the benefits of making this transition, and that their lead and others will follow and copy eventually, because they have to, to keep up. We only have about a minute left, which is excellent information.

Can you tell us, of course, that people can visit rethinkx.com or just Google RethinkX to visit your website? Because you tell us, give us a kind of cliff notes version of what they might find there and how they can educate themselves about the work that you’re doing.

Yeah, so right now, we have a series of reports we’ve published. We have a book called Rethinking Humanity on the website, and everything’s freely available to download. So we have sector reports on transport, energy, and food, and we have a report on some of the implications of all this change. So, looking at climate change, for instance, we’re working on several other reports in that series. Rethinking Humanity, the book is about the civilizational scale change and the possibilities that emerge as we move from one system into another. And so there’s much reading. Tony, my co-founder, has several videos you can find on the website, which are great to watch and give a little more detail. And over the course of the following year, we’ll be producing, you know, many more formats to communicate our ideas. So we’re working hard on videos and podcasts, which allow us to address all kinds of issues and hopefully change the debate around several problems we think we have problematic ways of thinking about.