A Future on Waxen Wings: Recent Episodes
afutureonwaxenwings
Examining collective wisdom, emergence, and revolutionary strategy in the crossroads of history - towards a wise, adaptive, and regenerative civilization.
In this interview, I sit down with Jeffrey Ladish to discuss future existential and catastrophic planetary risks and what we can do to stop them / mitigate their effects.
Jeffrey is a fellow at the Foresight Institute, a research organization dedicated to assessing the risks and opportunities presented by emerging technologies. Jeffrey's research focuses on nuclear risk, bio security, and cybersecurity - working to map out the catastrophic and existential risk landscape as thoroughly as possible for both himself and organizations dedicated to preparing for future crises.
Jeffrey's Medium: Absent Coordination Future Technology will cause Human Extinction Foresight Panels https://foresight.org/salon/people-friendly-coordination-tech/ Mastering the Dance: Rebooting Society with Testing and Tracing | Jeffrey Ladish
The play-by-play: 0:00 - Introductions 1:12 - Christian upbringings, ethics, and humanities capacity for self-destruction 4:40 - Developing a intuitive respect for the gravity of nuclear risk 8:00 - Valuing the latent potential of our collective future 11:00 - Which risks are most impactful, urgent, overlooked, and prone to bifurcation 14:00 - Mapping the existential risk landscape 16:00 - Biorisk 17:30 - "A deep and difficult understanding is what's required to make progress" 18:45 - Incentives and disincentives for bioterrorism 22:00 - State-sponsored bioweapon research 24:00 - Synthetic biology risks and destabilizing ecosystems - mirror life 30:00 - Institutional Reform to Combat Existential Risk 31:00 - Importance of international institutions 33:30 - One World or None - https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1681403.One_World_or_None 35:00 - Nuclear treaties 37:00 - "Everyone's incentives in the longterm are aligned" 39:00 - Optimizing for long term planning as an overlooked strategic lens 40:30 - Institutions working on the cutting edge of Existential Risk research and systemic resiliency 44:30 - "-we have to have healthy functioning institutions... we can do very broad things in social movements, but social movements can't do very fine grained or long term planning type things. So we need institutions to do that." 45:10 - Institutional senescence 48:30 - Blockchain governance methods 50:00 - Futarchy 52:00 - Cryptosecurity, Post-Quantum Cryptography and Trustable Trustless Institutions 54:00 - Hard Forks to address Quantum Security 56:00 - Book Recommendations - Strategy and Conflict, The Selfish Gene, Glen Weyl - Radical Markets, Samo Burja - Great Founder Theory 58:30 - Thinking long term about risks/resiliency in your own community
George Lakey is a renowned activist and scholar who has been a leader and founder of numerous movements over the past half century from civil rights to the modern climate movement.
In this interview, George and I discuss the revival of vision on the left, the opportunities polarization provides, the inner-work in becoming an agent of change, and how to initiate attractive and resilient social movements.
RESOURCE RECOMMENDATIONS
How we Win - George Lakey https://www.mhpbooks.com/books/how-we-win/
Viking Economics - George Lakey https://www.mhpbooks.com/books/viking-economics/
A Manual for Social Change - George Lakey https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/21570451-a-manual-for-direct-action
Why We Can't Wait - Martin Luther King https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Why_We_Can%27t_Wait
Selma (2014 film) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Selma_(film)
Bringing Down a Dictator https://www.filmsforaction.org/watch/bringing-down-a-dictator-2011/
Gunnar Myrdal https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gunnar_Myrdal
Andrew Cornell - Oppose and Propose https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/10771154-oppose-and-propose?ac=1&from_search=true&qid=DxuCrx3aue&rank=1
Herman Daly - Steady State Economics https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/44187.Herman_E_Daly
Don't Forget to Sing in the Lifeboats https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/6366808-don-t-forget-to-sing-in-the-lifeboats
Mahatma Gandhi - Experiments with Truth https://www.mkgandhi.org/ebks/An-Autobiography.pdf
Alice Paul: Claiming Power https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/18781414-alice-paul?ac=1&from_search=true&qid=QWDhtYOLVh&rank=1
Swarthmore Nonviolence Databas https://nvdatabase.swarthmore.edu/
I speak to scholar, author, and activist Stephen Zunes on his work with liberation movements around the world and discuss his thoughts on revolutionary strategy, global cooperation, and the world wide impetus for action that gives him hope. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stephen_Zunes
Obi and I discuss the intrinsic value of art and aesthetic arrest, the psychosis of industrial alienation from the cycles of the biosphere, the concurrence of scientific and social shifts, and how we might re-imagine the story we tell ourselves towards circularity and reciprocity with the rest of life. For more details and a selection of Obi's artwork, check out the description here.
Ethan dives into the western conceptualization of "nature" as being something somehow separated from "the human." He reflects on our romantic othering of wilderness, imagines a prairie formed from a single blade of grass, and reflects on the split between nature and artifice. These ideas build into our next episode with Obi Kaufmann, wherein he explore how it's only through reexamining our relationship with a romantic-and-alienated world that we might save the biosphere and ourselves.