New Great Electrification as Cultural Transformation for Post-Oil Era – Everybody on Board!

Abstract

<p>The point of discussing renewable energy technologies in the context of cultural transformation is to highlight culture as a game changer and catalyst for change. Too often only economic, technological and political dimensions are taken as key drivers for change. This working paper presents the results of the workshop session “New great electrification as Cultural Transformation for post-oil era – Everybody on board!” that was organised as a Special Millennium Project Workshop in Tampere June 14, 2018, within the conference “Energizing Futures – Sustainable Development and Energy in Transition”. In his keynote speech Jerome Glenn opened up vistas for how it is widely understood that the applications of artificial narrow intelligence (ANI) to all elements of the industrial production processes and service industries (The Fourth Industrial Revolution) will have a great impact on energy, employment, and the economy. However, it is less well understood that the applications of artificial general intelligence (AGI) and synergies among next technologies will generate far more profound changes than ANI and could create the Self-Actualization Economy and Culture. The starting point for the workshop was to explore futures of an economy, based on a new, entirely renewable energy based energy system in a peer-to-peer society 2050. The key question addressed was how to organise a circular economy with renewable energy and peer-to-peer principles? Five moderated small groups tackled this issue as follows. One group chose mobility and equality as their special focus and discussed how they could be achieved in the envisioned society. They came up with the entity of “Mobility, equality, and distributing aspirational dreams as personal simulations”. The second group chose as their topic the nexus of skills, education-to-employment, and inequalities, asking what kinds of education and skills are needed to achieve such a society, overcome national and global inequalities, and what kinds of new jobs will be available in that kind of a society? They crystallized their reflexions to “Peer-to-peer learning – aided by robotisation and AI or not?” The third group selected health as their focal issue, especially the connection between food and health. They questioned the concepts of control, and what is natural/artificial and envisioned “Farewell to hospitals: decentralised, multi-technology health care”. The fourth group concentrated on new risks for individual members of such a society. They identified a number of compelling competences for individuals to make the most of a peer-to-peer environment. They envisioned their results into “AI-Enabled Empathy Exchange”. The fifth group took leisure as their topic and discussed how leisure is organised in the envisioned society and what the tools are that constitute the sphere of leisure. They created a vision of “Self-Actualization for leisure (and work) in virtual reality”.<br /></p>