The little boy was still in primary school. Rubik’s Cubes bored him. Too easy to solve in just a few minutes.
“What are you doing at school?” we asked.
“Writing code,” he answered.
“What for?”
“Games, mainly.”
What did he think of supercomputers and robots coming into our world? And what might computers soon look like?
“Love them,” he said. But he would like them to have more human feelings, like us.
Horrified, we said: “But that would mean they would soon want human rights?”
“Yes, what’s wrong with that?” he answered.
“Well, they might take over and end up destroying us…”
“Nah,” said the kid, “It just means we’ll be equal because we’ll have computers in us, too.”
This little boy’s vision for our future was an augmented reality where the boundaries between human and supercomputing blurred and bled into each other, on equal footing.
A little breathless and shocked, we implored him: “Take good care of what you do with our future.”
In this brief exchange with this little boy, we got a glimpse of the future, 15 or 20 years from now, when he and his friends have come of age and they’re busy working in one of the high tech industries or labs that are bubbling away already, largely unseen, around Australia.
The conversation galvanised how poignant was our theme for our Tomorrowland event back this year on 1 December in Sydney, where we look just five years in advance, to what our world needs to look like.
Look further ahead – say as in a conversation with a primary school kid – and you can get dizzy, but this horizon is manageable, it’s ours, and we can make it what we want.
In a conversation with another thoughtful human, an adult this time, we got a sense of the bigger challenge at play to save our planet from unbearable warming.
According to Mat Nelson, EY partner, and it’s Oceania chief sustainability officer who we finally nailed for a pre-podcast chat after about oh, three months, we actually have everything we need to limit warming on this amazing planet we live on to the recommended 1.5 degrees Celsius.
We have the science, the tech, the breakthrough engineering, Mat said. These are the things we want to look at in Tomorrowland – to understand what’s possible.
What we don’t have is the commercialisation of this tech to make the brilliant ideas and innovations affordable and scalable.
So what exactly does he mean by that? Surely the investors have certainty that the demand for clean energy is not going away; that it will only grow.
And what exactly is affordable?
And how much is a planet worth anyway?
From our layperson’s understanding, finance is a very slippery thing. It’s just numbers on a page, someone’s calculation of risk and return, without actual solid grounding in fact or matter. It can be manipulated. It reminds of a layperson’s cursory glimpse of string theory, which says that if you observe a string it turns to a particle, depending on the distance and scale (or something like that).
In the time before the global financial crisis, for instance, it was unheard of that bunch of mortgages could bought, then cut and diced and sold off in completely new packages to unsuspecting investors who had no idea what the quality of the underlying asset was, or the ability of its mortgagees to keep paying for that asset.
And it was probably unthinkable to most of us that major banks would participate with enthusiasm in this Ponzi scheme, masking their involvement under guise of third tier lenders to hide the fact they were lending at very high interest rates to very problematic borrowers.
If we told you one of the four major banks would lend a pensioner couple with a disabled son $1 million you might think that’s against the laws of common sense or at least the physics of commerce.
Of course eventually the reality of the real world eventually caught up and the whole Ponzi scheme collapsed.
But the banks and the biggest investors survived. Not because of merit but because next-level financial engineering took hold, the one that manipulated governments to stage a bailout using our money, or future income as taxpayers.
All this might sound unrelated to our task but we mention it because the clear and proven reality is there are forces much greater in the financial universe than we were taught at school.
(News flash: those conspiracy theories are sometimes based in reality. There really are groups who by default of their own immense power are the ones that governments and policy makers allow to influence them. It’s the sheer weight and density of their existence that does it. Like a black hole in space, it’s there, we know it’s there, and these governments feel they must do what the rules of these financial physics say in order stop being absorbed by them. By the way, want to know what a black hole sounds like? Here is a recording from deep space.)
Point is what Mat said.
We have the skills and the science to limit warming to 1.5 degrees. But we don’t have the commercialisation structures.
Or as we put it squiggles on a page.
Which we phrase this way, so as not to feel intimidated. Stripped down to its essence, finance and commercialisation are not insurmountable odds against action. Even better, they do not live in isolation from the real world. We have the power to direct their action, if we all work together.
Which is actually happening. So we have to keep the pressure up. Let them do their clever stuff. Let’s make sure we ask the finance panel at Tomorrowland for some answers and likely scenarios to get the result we want, not what the current world of finance thinks is possible because we’ve looked at string theory and we know these dudes can shape-shift if they want.
Mat also pointed out the other big missing pieces to galvanising action were policy settings and timing.
We’ve got the correct policy settings now in place through the 43 per cent emissions reductions by 2030 target legislated by the federal government. Now we need to know how that target will be apportioned across the sectors of the economy.
With buildings and cities responsible for nearly 70 per cent of emissions, we can bet a big load of responsibility will fall on the built environment.
In yet another conversation the week prior with Bryon Price from AG Coombs who is supporting our Extreme Green Buildings ebook we’re currently publishing, this had not yet even started to work its way through the property world and will be interesting to watch how it plays out.
There is so much work on offer, he says, on value alone it’s immense.
More questions for Tomorrowland.
Stay tuned, more to come next week.
We think you’ll love what we’re cooking up!
