Episode 7: Becoming a Protopia

Fireside Chats with Empathic Futures Lab

This episode starts off a series in which we will be discussing Kevin Kelly's "The Inevitable: Understanding the 12 technological forces that will shape our future." In this first episode of the series, we discuss the chapter entitled "Becoming." The premise of the chapter is that we live in a Protopia meaning a world that is constantly updating itself in incremental fashion.

The episode starts with Christian posing a question around the societal effects of an increasing rate of change mean for our environments? Will we even notice these changes as they occur or will we be blind to them until one day, we wake up and realize the whole world is different?

The second half of the episode is spent discussing the ramifications of where we are in the updating process. We have updated our world to such extent that everything is becoming smart. Everything is producing information. How do we handle this?