🔮 Information in a pandemic; the West; uncertainty; the new normal; octopuses, submarines and robots++ #267

I’m Azeem Azhar. I convene Exponential View to help us understand how our societies and political economy will change under the force of rapidly accelerating technologies.

Navigating daily through the Corona Crisis, I am sure many of us have realized how interconnected our modern world is. It is a complex system, where changes in one far-off corner can have magnified effects somewhere else—or indeed right across the system itself. 

Increasingly, as I put this wondermissive together, I am mindful of the words of Donella H. Meadows in Thinking In Systems: 

[w]ords and sentences much, by necessity, come only one at a time in linear, logical order. Systems happen all at once. They are connected not just in one direction, but in many directions simultaneously.

The newsletter might merit a second read, to help you pick up the connections between elements that your brain missed the first time. 

The near future

🇪🇪 “Nobody had to go to the doctor’s office [to] spread the disease,” says the Presi…