Part Smart | Whole Stupid
The Relevance and Value of Cybernetics-Systemics in the 21st Century
William Reckmeyer
today: October 22 at 7pm
Expectations about the rosy future of humanity in the 21st century have changed profoundly over the past 35 years, since the end of the Cold War and the beginning of the World Wide Web ushered in a new era of hyper-globalization that has raised important philosophical and practical concerns about the nature of human progress writ large. Humanity’s increasing cybernetic capabilities and activities have produced exponential improvements in living conditions for people in a relatively short period of time, but they have also precipitated a runaway combination of challenges that are jeopardizing the systemic well-being of both our species and our planet as whole. I’ve found that cybernetics (a universal meta-paradigm about purposeful phenomena) and systemics (a universal meta-paradigm about all phenomena) jointly offer a rigorous and powerful way to address these matters. In this session, I will discuss some of the critical lessons I’ve learned about the relevance and value of the cybernetic-systemic field for helping humanity transcend its historic myopia (part smart | whole stupid) about all sorts of complex issues. Key topics will include the early focus of the field on purposeful behavior in general; how it has evolved over the past 60 years into an emphasis on technology-centric cybernation rather than on people-centric / planet-centric cyberneticity, and some initial results from a substantial research project I’ve been conducting – Homo Cyberneticus: Creating, Understanding, and Managing the Anthropocene – that examines the science, history, and impact of humanity’s rapidly-evolving cyberneticity over the past 500 years and its significant implications for our collective future. Continua a leggere