9 questions for SingularityU Summit NZ

It's brilliant  to have the SingularityU NZ Summit   this week present the ideas and possibilities of exponential growth to so many New Zealanders. Great work Kaila and your team!

I am excited to attend.  I have a lot to learn.

Here are my questions I hope get answered this week:

1. As an once-intern of Bucky Fuller, I want to know whatever happened to Bucky's vision of doing more with less, allowing all of humanity to live at a higher standard of living while consuming ever less resources? Are we on track?

2. It hurts my head to think about planetary environmental limits at the same time as thinking about exponential tech growth.   How do I reconcile the realities of exponential growth with hard  planetary limits?

3. Those of us working in  tech  companies are finally learning, via agile methods, how to work with a material ( information) that is continually  changing.   But evidence from around the world ( Brexit, US election) suggests that the general public  react to imposed change with anger and confusion. What can tech industry practioners teach NZ about how to work constructively with exponential change?

4. What changes due to technology do we want, which do we not want? What is the decision process? Who decides?

5. Money is an informational concept that we all use to make decisions. But what is it? Humans have always invented & agreed on non-physical concepts to allow us to work en-masse ( business, money, countries, religion, memes, maths to name a few). What kind of  "money" do we need for the exponential/connected/information/environmental yet kinder age?

6. Its great we have so many enthusiastic, motivated and talented people in Christchurch startups creating new solutions to problems. An Uber of this, an AirBnb of that. But many of the most important problems today don't have solutions - they are not classic problems, but wicked problems, for example climate change and biodiversity. Wicked problems don't have "solutions", at best they have iterations. Wicked problems are  real and vitally important.  How do we do together in NZ to iterate wicked problems?

7. Economists ( and now politicians) know most of our decisions are (despite what we think in our heads)  made based on our feelings ( our "fast brain") not on rational thinking. It has been my experience that the best  rational group decisions are made when decision makers  look at the same  "sources of truth". What are the information systems needed to give us a planetary "sources of truth"? 

8. How do sources of truth get corrected? 

9. In our emerging exponential world, what is it that we value in being human? How do we use exponential ideas to evolve a world that preserves all that is good in us and our world?

Congrats to Kaila and all her team for pulling this together!