Mike Berners-Lee is a professor and fellow of the Institute for Social Futures at Lancaster University and director and principal consultant of Small World Consulting. His books include How Bad are Bananas?, The Burning Question and There Is No Planet B and he is a contributing author to The Climate Book created by Greta Thunberg. His latest book is A Climate of Truth.
In Sentientist Conversations we talk about the most important questions: “what’s real?”, “who matters?” and "how can we make a better world?"
Sentientism answers those questions with "evidence, reason & compassion for all sentient beings." The video of our conversation is here on YouTube.
00:00 Clips
01:02 Welcome
03:03 Mike's Intro
- "A professor of what... I'm not really quite sure... a professor of the future?"
- Academic: Climate change, carbon flows, sustainable food systems, AI, technology
- Small World Consulting "help organisations to respond to the environmental and wilder polycrisis that we are accelerating towards"
- "Trying to create a better world for humans and other beings to live in"
- From climate change to "the climate emergency... crisis... breakdown"
- From trying to deal with climate change in isolation to..."all these things are just so joined up... climate... nature... food... population... social questions... politics... economics..."
- "You can't deal with that separate from questions about what matters, who matters, does truth matter... you have to go deeper and deeper..."
- Philosophy "I'm very pragmatic about it."
- "It's important to work at all of these levels at once"
- "I lose patience [with fellow academics] when they lose contact with everyday reality"
- "How much of how we basically think and how we basically run society is fit for purpose... and how much we need to go back to the drawing board?"
- The Anthropocene "the era in which suddenly it's humans that are so powerful"
- "How we do economics... politics... how we think... it all dates back to a time when we could just expand our activities... the world was a robust playground... we could get away with anything we liked... Now we're right up against the stops... a hard physical boundary"
- "We've given ourselves enormous physical power and wejust haven't given ourselves, yet, the wisdom with which to wield that power"
- "We're like babies running around with machine guns"
09:52 What's Real?
- Mathematician parents "they also went to church"
- "They asked a lot of questions [about religion]... they were not literalists"
...
21:53 What Matters?
34:00 Who Matters?
51:05 A Better World?
01:24:30 Follow Mike:
- "A Climate of Truth" A very simple guide to what’s going on in the world…"
- Mike on BlueSky @mikebernerslee “I’m on BlueSky and I’m not on X… Please do avoid any social media in which you do not trust the owner… please switch right now”.
And more... full show notes at Sentientism.info.
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