The Liminal Learning Portal

Source: Good Food Institute Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is about to set in motion a chain of feedback effects leading to a sudden, rapid escalation of global political instability. Various UN agencies, and now the IMF, have warned of social unrest at a similar scale to the ‘Arab Spring’ events in 2011. What few understand is the role of key technology disruptions in driving these processes, and helping us solve for them.  A new era of unrest   In addition to being the world’s top oil and gas exporter, Russia is the world’s largest wheat exporter, and Ukraine the fifth. Together Russia and …

A global food crisis is looming, with high natural gas prices driving up the cost of ammonia fertilizer and the war in Ukraine threatening this year’s crops from both there and Russia. The consequences of mishandling this crisis could be dire. Research by complexity theorist Yaneer Bar-Yam suggests that high food prices are directly connected to riots. High food prices precipitated the 2011 ‘Arab Spring’, the 2007 Mexican ‘tortilla riots’, and numerous other incidents of unrest. Now we might be on the cusp of a new wave of chaos if we are not able to manage the global supply. To …

Fence in the colours of the national flag of Ukraine, photo by Tina Hartung on Unsplash We are now at a crossroads in history, and no path forward looks pleasant. The war in Ukraine is killing innocent civilians, disrupting lives, and shaking the markets in energy, food and other commodities, making us wonder how we let ourselves become so complacent in trading with Russia, whose government has shown such little respect for the rights of its neighbors and its own citizens. The obvious path seems to be to boost oil, gas, coal, food and metals production from friendly countries. Cut …

  When people figure out how to do something that previously only nature had done, this new technology can completely transform the possibility space for a sector while making old ways of doing things obsolete – and all in a surprisingly short period of time. While the time can be very long between when an idea is first dreamt up and when its first practical demonstration appears, the time between the first practical demonstration and the idea becoming  commonplace can be quite abrupt.   Flight – from mythology to reality Cave paintings suggest that human beings have long imagined being …