Jeremy Rifkin Lecture

Remember Entropy, that big bestseller of the early 80’s? Well, author Jeremy Rifkin is back in the spotlight, this week being featured on BBC’s HARDTalk. It was nice to actually watch something on TV that caught my attention without the lure of dazzling visuals. Rifkin seems to be a sincere, well-intentioned man. And from looking through Entropy several years ago I know that he’s also a very well-educated one.

Rifkin makes some interesting points about the need for a new energy grid that works on principles much like the internet. That is, we all produce and share energy in the future, just as we do with information on the web today.

Of course, to say that we all ’share’ information on the web is a bit simplistic. There’s still a hierarchy and pecking order. But it’s also true that the internet is more egalitarian and open to personal innovation than, say, newspapers, magazines and TV–these being some of the ‘old standards’ for knowledge dissemination.

I tried to find the BBC HARDTalk interview on youtube but it’s too recent and hasn’t appeared yet. But I did find a fairly recent Rifkin lecture. And here, something just felt wrong when I watched it. I guess my biggest beef with this video is that Rifkin says we should let the machines (i.e. technology) speed up but stay put as human beings. To my mind that doesn’t leave much room for species evolution. It may be our calling and thus responsibility to not just linger in some kind of slow-motion ‘contentedess’ while our machines whiz around us. Instead, we probably will have to speed up (i.e. multitask) along with them. Otherwise some kind of fundamental balance could be lost. Multitasking as a species may be a challenge. But has evolution ever been easy?

Here’s the video…