Imagination Catalyst & Time Traveller. 'From What Is to What If'. Speaker, Transition. 'Field Recordings from the Future'. He/Him. @robintransition.bsky.social
Whatever world Tony Blair inhabits appears to be one without climate change & where UK temperature record for May hasn’t just been smashed by over 2C. How else to explain his extraordinary dismissal of net zero & erroneous claim that fossil fuels are cheaper than renewables? 🙄
The Sahel is at record temperatures. India is baking at 45°C. 90 dead in Uttar Pradesh from flooding.
This is not a forecast. This is not a warning. This is now. Every week, another record. Every week, more bodies.
Large parts of the UK/France are forecast to be around 12°C above average. Places like London could reach 35°C with UHI and it’s still May.
The UK Climate Committee has warned that 40°C summers are now on the horizon. The climate is changing faster than systems are prepared for.
Name a better engineer than a London beaver. We’ll wait. 🦫
These incredible creatures were reintroduced to the city and have already stepped up to stop flooding at a Tube station and restore local habitats. Nature is healing (and civil engineering).
https://t.co/t3nLEbQwkR
The most dystopian part of AI isn’t the technology itself.
It’s the sheer amount of electricity and water being burned so corporations can automate things nobody asked to automate.
Entire rivers diverted so an app can generate “funny medieval Breaking Bad images.”
So LinkedIn users can produce motivational posts written in the tone of a traumatized flight attendant.
We are constructing cathedrals of computation to eliminate the burden of having an original thought.
And they keep selling this as progress.
Meanwhile the actual physical world decays.
Bridges collapse.
Cities rot.
Public transit looks post-apocalyptic.
Young people can’t afford houses.
But thank God the machine can generate 9,000 fake podcast clips per second.
Civilizations used to build aqueducts and railways.
Now we build data centers.
Palantir has been granted “unlimited access” to NHS patient data.
This is the same company that is involved in mass surveillance and genocide.
We did not consent to this. Get Palantir out of our NHS, now.
Two Women in A Garden, Eric Ravilious, 1932. Painted at Brick House, Great Bardfield in #Essex, it depicts Tirzah Garwood, Eric’s wife, and Charlotte Bawden, who was married to artist Edward Bawden. The original artwork is in the collection of @FryArtGallery.
if right now it seems like the end of the world is easier to imagine than the end of capitalism… maybe it’s time to fill our imaginations with stories of the post-capitalist future we could build together.
@robintransition on the Better Future Pod:
I don’t want a city on Mars. I don’t want AI in every app. I don’t want data centres in space. I don’t want humanoids or flying cars. I want clean water. I want a stable climate. I want bees to survive. And a habitable planet.
@Eurostar Thanks. Do you feel no obligation to honour the original price? If I went to a supermarket to buy apples, dropped my purse at the till and then went to pay and the price had doubled, would that be acceptable to you? Where else does this ever happen?
Dear @Eurostar . I just went to buy a London to Paris ticket on your website for £114. The code to verify my bank card didn't come in time, it cancelled the order, I started again, and in that time the price was now £156. For the same ticket. How is that OK? #dynamicpricing?
A Friday like no other in the company of doctors who care deeply about the climate and the inspiring @robintransition who dared us to reimagine the future of healthcare…. Now just got to condense a hugely hopeful, joyful, creative day into a piece for @TheDrMagazine