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The Very Notion That Millions Of Workers Displaced By The Re-engineering And Automation Of The Agricultural, Manufacturing, And Service Sectors Can Be Retrained To Be Scientists, Engineers, Technicians, Executives, Consultants, Teachers, Lawyers And The Like, And Then Somehow Find The Appropriate Number Of Job Openings In The Very Narrow High-tech Sector, Seems At Best A Pipe Dream, And At Worst A Delusion.

-Jeremy Rifkin

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The Very Notion That

Jeremy Rifkin

...

The Very Notion That Millions Of Workers Displaced By The Re-engineering And Automation Of The Agricultural, Manufacturing, And Service Sectors Can Be Retrained To Be Scientists, Engineers, Technicians, Executives, Consultants, Teachers, Lawyers And The Like, And Then Somehow Find The Appropriate Number Of Job Openings In The Very Narrow High-tech Sector, Seems At Best A Pipe Dream, And At Worst A Delusion.

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In This Country, The Health Concerns And The Environmental Concerns Are As Deep As In Europe. All The Surveys Show That. But Here, We Didn't Have The Cultural Dimension. This Is A Fast-food Culture.

Generations Of Human Beings Were Transformed Into Machines In The Relentless Pursuit Of Material Wealth: We Lived To Work.

The Antitrust Litigation Currently In The Federal Courts In The U.s. Against Monsanto Will Be The Test Case In The Life Sciences, Just As The Microsoft Case Was The Test Case In The Information Sciences.

I Think Capitalism Will Not Disappear, But It's Going To Increasingly Not Be The Exclusive Arbiter Of Economic Life. It's Going To Have To Find Value In Interacting With The Sharing Economy On Many Levels. And This Hybrid System That's Already Emerging Among Millennials Is Going To Be A Mature System Where, By Midcentury, Part Of The Day Will Be In The Capitalist Market, Part Of The Day In The Sharing Economy, Depending On Your Marginal Costs.

A Refuge Is Supposed To Prevent What? The Genes From Flowing Out Of Sight? This Refuge Idea Won't Stop Insects From Moving Across Boundaries. That's Absurd.

Wikipedia Is An Amazing Construct. It's A Commons That Works. I Don't Know How Jimmy Wales Came Up With It. I'm Sure All Of Us Would Have Said, "this Is The Stupidest Thing We've Ever Heard Of. That'll Never Work In A Million Years."

We Are Hopeful That You Will Want To Visit Our Planet In The Near Future. We Are In The Process Of Restoring Our Environment To Its Original Grandeur, And Hope To Have Completed The Task Before Your Rsvp.

What The Public Needs To Understand Is That These New Technologies, Especially In Recombinant Dna Technology, Allow Scientists To Bypass Biological Boundaries Altogether.

Back In 1983, The United States Government Approved The Release Of The First Genetically Modified Organism. In This Case, It Was A Bacteria That Prevents Frost On Food Crops.

It Is Not Uncommon To Suppose That The Free Exchange Of Property In Markets And Capitalism Are One And The Same. They Are Not. While Capitalism Operates Through The Free Market, Free Markets Don't Require Capitalism.

It Seems Disingenuous For The Intellectual Elite Of The First World To Dwell On The Subject Of Too Many Babies Being Born In The Second- And Third-world Nations While Virtually Ignoring The Over-population Of Cattle And The Realities Of A Food Chain That Robs The Poor Of Sustenance To Feed The Rich A Steady Diet Of Grain-fed Meat.

I Know Quite A Few Farmers All Over The United States Who Have Tried This And Have Said The Opposite, That They Have To Use More Herbicides, Not Less. The Same Holds True With Bt.

The Empathic Civilization Is Emerging. A Younger Generation Is Fast Extending Its Empathic Embrace Beyond Religious Affiliations And National Identification To Include The Whole Of Humanity And The Vast Project Of Life That Envelops The Earth.

Back In The Mid-1980s, Congressional Hearings Were Held After We Brought This Litigation, And Held Up The First Experiment. At That Time, I Went In Front Of Congress, Along With The Major Agencies Involved With This.

The Modern Age Has Been Characterized By A Promethean Spirit, A Restless Energy That Preys On Speed Records And Shortcuts, Unmindful Of The Past, Uncaring Of The Future, Existing Only For The Moment And The Quick Fix. The Earthly Rhythms That Characterize A More Pastoral Way Of Life Have Been Shunted Aside To Make Room For The Fast Track Of An Urbanized Existence. Lost In A Sea Of Perpetual Technological Transition, Modern Man And Woman Find Themselves Increasingly Alienated From The Ecological Choreography Of The Planet.

President Obama, I Voted For Him. I Think He's A Mature Politician, But Here's What Happened. Obama Wanted A Green Economy. He Spent Billions Of Dollars Of Tax Money To Create A Green Economy And It Didn't Happen. The Question Is Why.

Now In Wikipedia It's Really Interesting. If You Put Something Incorrect Up On Wikipedia Within Minutes There Are People Crawling All Over That Sentence Saying, "this Is Wrong" Or "i Want To Change This" Or "you've Got To Include An Amplification," Et Cetera. So There's This Massive Checks And Balances That Actually Makes That Accuracy Work. This Is The Kind Of Model That We - And I'm Not Sure Why No One's Discussing This - That We Now Have To Begin To Apply To Fake News.

The Industry's Not Stupid. The Industry Knows That If Those Foods Are Labeled "genetically Engineered," The Public Will Shy Away And Won't Take Them.

James Watt Patented His Steam Engine On The Eve Of The American Revolution, Consummating A Relationship Between Coal And The New Promethean Spirit Of The Age, And Humanity Made Its First Tentative Steps Into An Industrial Way Of Life That Would, Over The Next Two Centuries, Forever Change The World.

Turning Points In Human Consciousness Occur When New Energy Regimes Converge With New Communications Revolutions, Creating New Economic Eras.

The Transition Of World Agriculture From Food Grain To Feed Grains Represents An...evil Whose Consequences May Be Far Greater And Longer Lasting Than Any Past Examples Of Violence Inflicted By Men Against Thier Fellow Human Beings.

We Were Making The First Step Out Of The Age Of Chemistry And Physics, And Into The Age Of Biology.

We Need A Game Plan To Deploy It Very Quickly To Both Move The Economy Forward And Create The New Businesses And Jobs, And Address Climate Change. It's A Pretty Big Task. Pretty Challenging.

We're Finally Going To Get The Bill For The Industrial Age. If The Projections Are Right, It's Going To Be A Big One: The Ecological Collapse Of The Planet.

We Now Have An Opportunity, Though, To Do Something We Didn't Do In The Industrial Age, And That Is To Get A Leg Up On This, To Bring The Public In Quickly, To Have An Informed Debate.

Many Of The Mainstream Agricultural Scientists, Especially At The Agricultural Schools, But At All Of Our Major Universities, Are Tied Into All Sorts Of Contractual Relationships And Consulting Relationships With The Life Science Companies.

Being Both Entrepreneurial And Social Is No Longer An Oxymoron, But Rather A Tautology.

Entrepreneurial

Solar And Wind Are Now Cheaper In Many Places Than Some Fossil Fuels And Within The Next Two Years, Three, Four, Five Years At The Most. What The Exponential Curve Does Isn't Going To Go Away. It Is Totally Over For Fossil Fuels And Nuclear. Nuclear's Actually Gone Out.

When We Seed Millions Of Acres Of Land With These Plants, What Happens To Foraging Birds, To Insects, To Microbes, To The Other Animals, When They Come In Contact And Digest Plants That Are Producing Materials Ranging From Plastics To Vaccines To Pharmaceutical Products?

The Very Notion That Millions Of Workers Displaced By The Re-engineering And Automation Of The Agricultural, Manufacturing, And Service Sectors Can Be Retrained To Be Scientists, Engineers, Technicians, Executives, Consultants, Teachers, Lawyers And The Like, And Then Somehow Find The Appropriate Number Of Job Openings In The Very Narrow High-tech Sector, Seems At Best A Pipe Dream, And At Worst A Delusion.

The Position I Took At The Time Was That We Hadn't Really Examined Any Of The Potential Environmental Consequences Of Introducing Genetically Modified Organisms.

Today We Are Raised With The Notion That To Be Secure Is To Be Financially Autonomous. Amassing Wealth Is Viewed As The Primary Rite Of Passage To A Secure, Autonomous Existence.

So My Attorneys Brought Litigation In The U.s. Federal Courts. The Judge Ruled In Our Favor.

The Prospect Of Cheap Fusion Energy Is The Worst Thing That Could Happen To The Planet.

I Wanted To Make Sure That This Be The First Scientific And Technology Revolution In History In Which The Public Thoroughly Discussed All The Potential Benefits And All The Potential Harms, In Advance Of The Technology Coming Online And Running Its Course.

We Are Already Producing Enough Food To Feed The World. We Already Have Technology In Place That Allows Us To Produce More Than We Can Find A Market For.

If Your Corn Has A Herbicide-tolerant Gene, It Means You Can Pray Your Herbicides And Kill The Weeds; You Won't Kill Your Corn.

T Century, Hundreds Of Millions - And Eventually Billions - Of Human Beings Will Transform Their Buildings Into Power Plants To Harvest Renewable Energies On Site, Store Those Energies In The Form Of Hydrogen And Share Electricity, Peer-to-peer, Across Local, Regional, National And Continental Inter-grids That Act Much Like The Internet.

Basic Income Is Not A Utopia, It's A Practical Business Plan For The Next Step Of The Human Journey.

It May Be That Everything The Life Science Companies Are Telling Us Will Turn Out To Be Right, And There's No Problem Here Whatsoever. That Defies Logic.

The Greenhouse Crisis Is The Bill Coming Due For The Industrial Revolution. It's Not An Accident. It's The Logical Outcome Of Our World View - The Idea That We Can Control The Forces Of Nature, That We Can Have Short-term Expedient Gains Without Paying For Them, That There Are No Limits To Exploitation Of The Environment, That We Can Produce And Consume Faster Than Nature's Ability To Replenish.

One Thing I've Learned Over These Last 30 Or 40 Years Is That People Make History. There's No Fait Accompli To Any Of This.

Humanity Cannot Afford To Acknowledge All Of The Blood That It Spills And The Destruction It Inflicts On The World In Its Effort To Perpetuate Itself. Desacralization Is A Process That Allows Us To Sever Any Relationship We Might Feel To Other Living Things. By Draining The Aliveness Out Of Things, We Can Pretend That Our Control And Manipulation Are Of Little Consequence. Man The Trapper Becomes Man The Taxidermist, Disemboweling Nature Of Its Spontaneity And Movement, And Stuffing It With A Leaden Inanimateness.

Cosmologies Are Made Up Of Small Snippets Of Physical Reality That Have Been Remodeled By Society Into Vast Cosmic Deceptions.

If I Were Mark Zuckerberg Or Any Of These Guys, I Would Say, "my God. How Does The World Expect Us To Deal With This?" I Mean, It's Too Big A Responsibility; I Think They're Going To Welcome This. They'll Maybe Keep It In The Private Sector, But They'll Welcome Some Form Of Regulatory Operation Because They've Been So Successful That They Are A Global, Public Good. Everyone Needs Them.

The Revolution Here Is From Hierarchical To Lateral Power. That's The Power Shift. So Increasingly A Younger Generation That's Grown Up On The Internet And Now Increasingly Distributing Renewable Energies, They're Measuring Politics In Terms Of A Struggle Between Centralized, Hierarchical, Top-down And Closed And Proprietary, Versus Distributed, Open, Collaborative, Transparent. This Shift, From Hierarchical To Lateral Power, Is Going To Change The Way We Live, The Way We Educate Our Children, And The Way We Govern The World.

The Hydrogen Economy Will Make Possible A Vast Redistribution Of Power, With Far-reaching Consequences For Society. Today's Centralized, Top-down Flow Of Energy, Controlled By Global Oil Companies And Utilities, Could Become Obsolete.

What Makes The Iot A Disruptive Technology In The Way We Organize Economic Life Is That It Helps Humanity Reintegrate Itself Into The Complex Choreography Of The Biosphere, And By Doing So, Dramatically Increases Productivity Without Compromising The Ecological Relationships That Govern The Planet.

The Electronic Media Introduced This Idea To The Larger Audience Very, Very Quickly. We Spent Years And Years And Years Meeting With Activists All Over Europe To Lay The Groundwork For A Political Response, As We Did Here.

We Have Come To Discover What We Suspect Is A New Political Mindset Emerging Among A Younger Generation Of Political Leaders Socialized On Internet Communications. Their Politics Are Less About Right Versus Left And More About Centralized And Authoritarian Versus Distributed And Collaborative.

Many Of The Genetically Modified Foods Will Be Safe, I'm Sure. Will Most Of Them Be Safe? Nobody Knows.

Companies That Actually Survive And Flourish Are Going To Change Their Business Model From Production To Aggregating The Networks And The Network Services And Solutions. If You're A Construction Company Or An It Company Or A Logistics Company Or An Information Data Operation, To The Extent That You Can Find Ways To Help Build The Commons, You Can Get Some Commercial Value In That.

Facebook's A Wonderful, Incredible Way To Bring Humanity Together. They've Brought Together 2 Billion People In The Largest Fictional Family In History. So Young People Are Starting To Empathize With Each Other Through Facebook Across The Globe. This Is Wonderful. However, When Everyone Needs Facebook Because It's So Successful That Everyone's On It, Then It Starts To Look Like A Global Public Utility, A Public Good. Same With Amazon.

When You're Sharing The Music, You're Not Buying The Cd. When You're Sharing That Video, You're Not Buying The Tv. But We Thought, Really, There'd Be A Firewall. While Near-zero Marginal Cost Would Impact Virtual Goods, We Never Thought It Would Move Over To The Physical World.

The World's Environment Can No Longer Handle Beef.

The 10 Largest Antitrust Law Firms In The United States Have Gone Into The Federal Courts Charging Monsanto With Creating A Global Conspiracy In Violation Of The Antitrust Laws, To Control The Global Market In Seeds.

Using Less Of The Earth’s Resources More Efficiently And Productively In A Circular Economy And Making The Transition From Carbon-based Fuels To Renewable Energies Are Defining Features Of The Emerging Economic Paradigm. In The New Era, We Each Become A Node In The Nervous System Of The Biosphere.

With The Communication Internet, Whole Industries Have Been Disrupted. You're In The Publishing Industry, You Understand That. Before, We Had Newspapers, Magazines - Now You're On The Web. I'm In Book Publishing. I Don't Have To Tell You What's Happened To Us. Television Has Taken A Hit. The Music Industry. But, Thousands Of New Businesses Have Emerged On This New Communication Revolution Platform. Not Just Google, Facebook, And Twitter. There Are Thousands Of Operations. Businesses That Are Doing The Platforms, The Apps. They're Mining The Big Data. They're Creating The Connections.

We Are Learning That The Earth Functions Like An Invisible Organism. We Are The Various Cells Of One Living Being. Those Who Work To Save The Earth Are Its Antibodies.

A Half Century From Now, Our Grandchildren Are Likely To Look Back At The Era Of Mass Employment In The Market With The Same Sense Of Utter Disbelief As We Look Upon Slavery And Serfdom In Former Times. The Very Idea That A Human Being's Worth Was Measured Almost Exclusively By His Or Her Productive Output Of Goods And Services And Material Wealth Will Seem Primitive, Even Barbaric, And Be Regarded As A Terrible Loss Of Human Value To Our Progeny Living In A Highly Automated World Where Much Of Life Is Lived On The Collaborative Commons.

We Are Entering A New Phase In Human History - One In Which Fewer And Fewer Workers Will Be Needed To Produce The Goods And Services For The Global Population.

Deep Play Precedes Deep Work.

You Can Eliminate, For Example, A Brazil Nut Gene If You Know That It Will Create An Allergenic Effect.

The American Public Is Not Aware That There Might Be Potential Allergenic And Toxic Reactions. With Regular Food, At Least People Know Which Foods They Have An Allergy To.

Europe Will Not Accept Genetically Modified Foods. It Doesn't Make Any Difference In The Final Analysis What Brussels Does, What Washington Does, Or What The World Trade Organization Does.

What's Really Clear To All Of Us In The Business Community Is That Gdp Is Slowing Everywhere. And The Reason Is Productivity Has Been Declining Now For 15 Or 20 Years All Over The World. So We've Got Very High Unemployment, And It's Structural. And It's Compounded By Real-time Climate Change - That's Really A Game Changer.

What I'm Suggesting To You Is That This Could Be A Renaissance. We May Be On The Cusp Of A Future Which Could Provide A Tremendous Leap Forward For Humanity.

What Type Of New Economical System Can Organize This System? There Is Another Sector In Our Life, That We Rely On Every Single Day, That Are Absolutely Essential: The Social Commons, The Social Economy. It Is All The Activity We Engage In To Create Social Capital. It Doesn't Create Capital Market. Social Commons Is Growing Faster Than The Market Place. It Is Growing Faster Than The Market Place. The Social Commons Include Any Activity That Is Deeply Social And Collaborative.

The Public Should Know That The Liability Issues Here Have Yet To Be Resolved, Or Even Raised. If You're A Farmer And You're Growing A Genetically Engineering Food Crop, Those Genes Are Going To Flow To The Other Farm.

Economic Activity Is No Longer An Adversarial Contest Between Embattled Sellers And Buyers "in The Distributed Economy, Where Collaboration Trumps Competition, Inclusivity Replaces Exclusivity And Transparency And Openness To Others Becomes Essential To The New Way Of Conducting Business, Empathic Sensibility Has Room To Breathe And Thrive. It Is No Longer So Constrained By Hierarchies, Boundaries Of Exclusion, And A Concept Of Human Nature That Places Acquisitiveness, Self-interest, And Utility At The Center Of The Human Experience."

The Eu Constitution Is Something New In Human History. Though It Is Not As Eloquent As The French And U.s. Constitutions, It Is The First Governing Document Of Its Kind To Expand The Human Franchise To The Level Of Global Consciousness. The Language Throughout The Draft Constitution Speaks Of Universalism, Making It Clear That Its Focus Is Not A People, Or A Territory, Or A Nation, But Rather The Human Race And The Planet We Inhabit.

Starvation Does Not Occur Because Of A World Food Shortage. If Everyone Ate A Vegetarian, Or Better Still, A Vegan Diet There Would Be Enough Food For Everyone. The Only Sane Way Forward Is To Grow Food For Humans Rather Than To Feed It To Farmed Animals.

How Do We Address Network Neutrality When The Whole World Is Connected? How Do We Ensure Governments Don't Purloin This For Political Purposes? It's Already Happening. Look At Russia On The American Election. How Do We Protect Data Security When Everyone's Connected? Look What Happened With The Ransomware. How Do We Deal With Cybercrime And Cyberterrorism And The Disruptions Of The System? And We're Seeing This Every Week Now.

We're Creating Multiple Personas. We're Creating A Thespian Sense Of Personality Where We See Ourselves As Works Of Art, And We See Everything In Our Environment As A Prop, As A Set, As A Stage, As A Backdrop For Filling Ourselves In. We Don't See Ourselves As Ever Completed. We Are In-formation.

The Interesting Thing Is, While We Die Of Diseases Of Affluence From Eating All These Fatty Meats, Our Poor Brethren In The Developing World Die Of Diseases Of Poverty, Because The Land Is Not Used Now To Grow Food Grain For Their Families.

Can We Reach Biosphere Consciousness And Global Empathy In Time To Avert Planetary Collapse?

They're Now Turning Those Seeds Into Intellectual Property, So They Have A Virtual Lock On The Seeds Upon Which We All Depend For Our Food And Survival.

We Need A Change In Consciousness To Go With This Technology Platform. We Need A New Narrative: We Need To Shift From Geopolitics To Biosphere Consciousness In One Generation. The Biosphere Is Understood Here As What Goes From The Biosphere To The Depths Of The Ocean 40 Miles Where All Living Beings Interact With All Chemicals To Create A Very Complex Choreography That We Call "life On Earth". That Is Biosphere That Is Our Indivisible Community.

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