Platform on concrete and steel in construction
Congratulations dear reader (!), for wanting to spend scarce time reading this column, but especially for demonstrating a desirable primal impulse called ‘curiosity’. Unfortunately, curiosity is not always seen as a positive thing, while it is in fact a primal human trait that led to earth-shattering discoveries and inventions and is thus pre-eminently also a trait that makes us ‘future-proof’.
To get right to the point: I am (like you) also curious and perhaps more heavily afflicted with it than the average person. Some would go so far as to call me a ‘knowledge omnivore of the heaviest category’ or even outright ‘professional idiot’, but I consider all of that a nickname. After all, ever since I was a kid, I wanted to understand why things work the way they do, and so this kid used to go out of his way to find out exactly how a new toy was put together ... sometimes to the chagrin of those who saw the present being unscrewed shortly after unwrapping it. From now on, however, consider that behavior a reward for the giver of the best conceivable gift for such little ones: a 100% shot in the arm and an encouragement to ‘future-proofing the next generation’!
If you know people in your environment who ask the eternal ‘why’ question, please encourage them, because (believe me) they ease the connection with the major societal transitions we face. Well, while societal transitions are of all times and even exhibit recognizable cycles, technological developments have always been the ‘drivers’ in them. However, we also see a stepped acceleration that demands ever higher reaction speeds in order not to fall behind. We too, ‘the people building concrete and steel’, are already in the vanguard of the current 4th industrial revolution. For we are all already working hard to realize the introduction of what is called a hybrid-cyberphysical system integration of humans, the Internet (IoT) and artificial intelligence (AI) in order to remain at all relevant even in the built environment.
And yes, times of great transitions cause great disruptions in the old systems. We see disruptions in favor of geopolitical instability that require accelerated reorientation of access to and cost of raw materials and energy to reduce the extreme dependence that exists today. We all see disruption ripples moving through systems and that demands lost social and technological adaptation as well as ‘system resilience’ to be able to cope with smooth relapses on previous ‘technology levels’. Resilience is robustness against system disruptions and pre-eminently something that requires human resilience, imagination, creativity and knowledge and thus... curiosity or that human quality remains the crucial system component.
I wrote this column in a personal capacity.
