Mother Pelican
A Journal of Solidarity and Sustainability

Vol. 18, No. 3, March 2022 Luis T. Gutiérrez, Editor

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Learning New Ways of Becoming Human Carlos Alvarez Pereira This article was originally posted to the discussion on "Technology and the Future" at the Great Transition Initiative, 15 February 2022 REPUBLISHED WITH PERMISSION "Technology is the standard response of Modernity to any issue. Can it work against the limitations of its own framing?" What could be the role of Technology in the unfolding of the Great Transition? The journey is expected to lead to a yet unknown balance of equitable wellbeing within a healthy biosphere. As many have argued, the social process of Technology as it really happens is not contributing to such a shift. Some aspects of technological innovation might be reused for purposes consistent with the Great Transition. And the attempts at achieving that deserve all our attention and support. But the overall result of the current deployment of inventions is simply to reinforce the political and economic framework under which technologies are being created. It is difficult to imagine how it could be otherwise, due to the weight of the dominant way of understanding our place in the world. Research and innovation efforts (R&I) are mostly based on two premises: knowledge is divided into separate disciplines, and it is only helpful if it produces levels of enclosure and control (of people, natural resources, intellectual property, future time,...) enabling financial returns on investments. So, our current institutions of R&I are unable to ask the questions which would be useful to address our big challenges. At the same time, public and private sectors expect R&I to deliver economic profits and keep alive the illusion of capital. Both premises are so far away from what is needed that it would require a miracle to make R&I contribute significantly to a shift in our trajectory. Let us clarify that current technological development is not based on what science knows about Life. The production of knowledge and its use in practical applications are built on an outdated notion of society, originated at the dawn of Modernity. Its premises are rationalism, reductionism, individualism, objectivity, quantification, productivity, and colonization. In trying to understand how Life works, true science went way beyond the paradigm of rationalism and separation. But we still pretend that social processes built on that paradigm are faithful to science. This continues to widen the gap "between the way we think and how nature works" (Gregory Bateson dixit), and to make difficult our reconciliation with the biosphere on which our own life depends. In Modernity we expect nature and humans to conform to our plans of exploitation and mechanization. We know this expectation is self-deceiving but current framings of R&I activities do not allow for a better attunement to Life. For instance, energy transition from fossil fuels to so-called renewable energies is conceived as a techno-economic challenge, without questioning how much energy is needed. If we assume that it will be a growing amount of energy per capita, we will continue living in the fantasy of infinite growth on a finite planet. And attempts at addressing this issue through "decoupling" consumption from human wellbeing have failed. But we keep the same strategy in the hope that renewables will buy time until we implement some other source of energy without such limitations. This is a good example of how a fundamental challenge can be formulated in a more fruitful manner by asking what drives human health and wellbeing. The obsession of Modernity with materialism and the maximization of production made us ignore that our health and sense of a meaningful life are not driven by consumerist prosperity, but rather by the quality of our relationships with others, humans and non-humans. This crucial point makes possible to imagine other ways of innovating and learning, in which relationships and interdependencies would play the dominant role. Let´s also take Covid-19. The response to the tragedy involved a mix of separation (isolating people from each other) and technical fixes at individual level (through vaccination). For public health, this was probably the most sensible thing to do. Nonetheless, by claiming to "build back better," we avoid questioning the destruction of ecosystems as a structural feature of "development". Additional layers of technology and bureaucracy are imposed to better control Covid-like disruptions in the future. Being human is made more difficult, instead of inquiring if reconnecting humans to themselves and nature could help in avoiding future Covid scenarios. And, not surprisingly, a tragedy of such a scale and impact has created a huge amount of private "wealth" in tech-driven sectors such as pharma and the digital industry. Are we more attuned to Life after Covid-19? Or more and more disconnected from it because of the framing of our responses to the crisis? Technology is the standard response of Modernity to any issue. Can it work against the limitations of its own framing? Based on a culture of separation, innovation is contributing to the destruction of social fabric and creating more inequality, dehumanization, and a greater distance between the artificial creation of financial wealth and social and biophysical realities. Moreover, technology is spreading the idea that humans are defective. We are not creating robots like humans: we are expecting humans to behave like robots. The subtext in "Artificial Intelligence" is that people are problematic, and our technical creations can be "better" than ourselves. AI tells us that we can and we should get rid of humans. In the self-defeating process of human civilizations, ecological catastrophes could combine with radical robotization to achieve the destruction of ecosystems and humanity, at the same time. Let me come back to the illusion of capital. The concept was originally grounded in living processes: land can constantly produce resources useful to humans and hence feeds the idea that future returns can be expected. But this requires the sun, water, wind, and soil materials to contribute (no coincidence: these are the Four Elements of ancient traditions). Nowadays capital is given more and more abstract forms (f.i. AI algorithms), and legal practices ensure a number of privileges and keep alive the aura of future returns, without any biophysical grounding. This is hugely problematic as far as technology is concerned: if it is good for the creation of "capital," there are good chances that it will mean a greater disconnection from the biosphere we need to regenerate. This process of abstraction of capital is actually a feature of Modernity and its R&I processes. Modernity reframes the crises it creates in a way leading to further levels of abstraction and disconnection from Life, and then to a formulation of "problems" for which R&I are called upon to design "solutions" avoiding a deeper learning. This is not the way to get out of the "suicidal war we are waging on nature" (and hence on ourselves) that UN Secretary General António Guterres speaks about. If Modernity is only able to learn whatever reinforces its own foundations, we face a daunting challenge. How do we create conditions for the kind of R&I and learning that addresses the blind spots of Modernity? For sure we need to learn in an ecosystemic framework in order to reconnect with our fundamentally relational nature. Instead of abiding by the separatist framing of Modernity, we should start repairing artificially broken interdependencies, learn the re-emergence of relationships, and regenerate ecosystems, and in that way give renewed meaning to what we already know. ABOUT THE AUTHOR Carlos Alvarez Pereira is a senior professional combining more than 30 years of experience in research and innovation, entrepreneurship, and business management, with a passion for complexity thinking and transdisciplinarity. He is keen on exploring the cultural transformation required to cross the threshold towards equitable human wellbeing within a healthy biosphere. He is a member, and currently Vice-President, of the Club of Rome, a member of the Advisory Board of the International Bateson Institute (IBI), a fellow of the World Academy of Art and Science (WAAS), and a member of the Spanish Fulbright Alumni Association, of which he has been Vice-President during 8 years. With an MSc in Aerospace Engineering, he has been a lecturer and researcher in Applied Mathematics at the Polytechnic University of Madrid (UPM). He founded and chaired for 14 years the Innaxis Foundation & Research Institute, specialized in the modelling of complex systems and big data applications. He has been the founder and top-level executive during more than 25 years of several consulting companies in Spain, Switzerland, France and Germany in the domains of digital technologies, systems integration and strategic advice. |Back to Title| LINK TO THE CURRENT ISSUE          LINK TO THE HOME PAGE

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