Andrew Liveris on social experience

Andrew opened this section of the interview by noting that the previous historical class of institutions that were created in the last two centuries. They are clearly not capable of taking us to the places we need to reach given the systemic challenges humankind is facing on this planet as we strive for resiliency.

He continued that the big challenges humanity faces as we move to 2100, and the solution set changes required to address them, are probably going to be catalysed, in part, from the emergence of true genius.

He highlights that there are some quite visible examples of this already, for example Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Ray Kurzweil, Dean Kamen, Brian Greene, or Stephen Hawking. In history we see genius appear to help guide us and stretch us to places that we would not have reached without them.

There are historical lessons, such as Isaac Newton, Albert Einstein, Mozart et al who stretched humanity to be greater than it could have been under a static political class.

He continues that the resiliency challenges are leading to a youth rebellion as they express their dissatisfaction in the ruling institutions, in some areas this is leading towards anarchy and this is delivers first precondition to change, which is the rise of division.

Andrew notes that there are several tectonic shifts, for example our “lurch” to Globalization 2.0 given the failure of Globalization 1.0 which left too many people behind.

He encourages us to think deeply about what globalization 2.0 really looks like in terms of the forces of going smaller (smaller connected society nodes) before we go bigger; effectively we are seeing the growth of societal clusters and the pandemic has forced this upon us, leading in some important ways to the rediscovery of community and the rediscovery of family.

Many dominant forces have shaped the incumbent socio-political systems, finance, legal, capitalist-political, and most recently digitally enabled social systems (which violate citizen privacy provisions). These models are all challenged by the concept of resiliency so they will become less influential and possibly eventually disappear as we move towards 2100.