“We've engineered a volatile world where Starbucks is completely unchanging from year to year, but democracies are collapsing and rivers are drying up.” The climate is changing because of the human actions and main difference between the old times and the current times is that the hunter-gatherers that came before us lived in a world that was defined by local instability, but global stability, says political scientist Dr. Brian Klaas.
As hunter-gatherers, their day-to-day lives in their local environment was unpredictable - they didn't how if they would found or hunt food but the world around them were very stable. Now we have flipped that world. We experience local stability, but global instability and we have extreme regularity in our daily lives. We can order products online and expect exactly when they're going to arrive. We can go to Starbucks anywhere in the world and it's going to taste roughly the same.
But our world is changing faster than it ever has before. Consequentially, when things do go wrong, the ripple effects are much more profound and much more immediate. This is where that sort of aspect of global instability becomes very dangerous.
The video chapter are the following:
- 00:00 - Modern volatility
- 01:20 - Complex systems theory
- 06:06 - The sandpile model
- 06:47 - Basins of attraction
- 07:49 - Black swan events
