On The Edge #005 The Age of Abundance - James Burke
In this episode we welcome back James Burke for the second half of the conversation we had back in May in a busy cafe in West London. The first half of the conversation was first shared in episode 1 of the On The Edge podcast, and so if you haven’t already heard that episode, then we would really recommend that you listen to that first before listening to this next instalment.
The previous episode was largely about looking back into the history of science and technology and exploring how everything really is incredibly connected and what we do about that. In this episode we jump far into the future, into what James called the Age of Abundance which he argues is no more than a generation or two away. However before we get there he predicts what he calls “severe turbulence and chaos”, which some might argue we are already in.
The key technology that he talks about, to unlock this new age of abundance, he calls nano fabricators or motes - these are a tiny specks that can make anything. This may sounds like science fiction but he shares examples of where this technology already exists in labs around the world.
He goes on to share his thoughts on the implications of this new for education, democracy and beyond. Once again, like the first episode, it is a wide ranging and mind bending conversation but I think there is lots of food for thought and I hope it sparks some ideas and reactions as you listen to it.
James covers similar ground to what we discussed in this episode in a recent BBC programme called the end of scarcity: