Light-hearted thoughts on Brexit, Climate Change and Population.

So Brexit happened. That is, Britain had a referendum and by 52% to 48% voted to leave the EU. It was an odd thing to wake up to. The markets went a little down, the pound lost a little on the foreign exchanges, but has made most of it up again.

It seems like the leave side was campaigning on a platform of “making Britain great again” (smacks of Trumps idea to make America “great” again). Taking the borders back and keeping immigration down. What it’ll mean for UK workers abroad, or the current workers who are legally working in the UK at the moment I have no idea. Will the city of london move some of their business out into Dublin/Frankfurt/Amsterdam ? A lot of unknowns. Will it ultimately DOOM! the EU? I have no idea.

It’s funny, my family originally came from England, though I was born in Ireland, and consider myself Irish. But I like to think of myself as European too. Do I think of myself more Irish than European? I dunno, honestly probably. But I feel strongly that having Europe around has been great. Travel is easier, ability to work wherever is nice. Maybe it has benefited Germany a bit more than others, as they’re exports are artificially cheaper than they ought to be, but it feels more outward looking and inclusive to be part of Europe, rather than to go back to a lot of little states.

Hey ho. It’s a funny old world. I feel that we have a lot of challenges ahead of us as the Human Race. 7.4 billion of us on the planet. CO2 going up and up – as this chart below from NASA shows.

We are heading into uncharted waters. I dunno, I’m definitely on the DOOM! end of the scale, but it seems to me that Climate Change & 7.4 Billion people is going to be a lot of stresses on our planet. Crop yields may change / have to move, quite likely. Then the other extremely interesting thing that’s coming along is AI & Automation. You probably haven’t seen it – but here is a wonderful video we watched a while ago in Resolve Digital at one of our learning lunches. Called Sandi Metz tells your future, it’s given by Sandi, and she gives a history of the evolution of printing mainly. You see how there were step changes along the way, where entire swathes of people were made redundant overnight. Like here in the BBC article entitled “Foxconn replaces ‘60,000 factory workers with robots'”. How is society going to cope with the massively reduced need for certain types of workers. If you don’t have the skills that are needed what’s going to happen to you? Will we have a Universal Basic Income to help a bit? Will there be a job as a taxi driver within 10 years – or will it all be automated self driving cars?

I have no idea. I really have no idea. I don’t know how we get from where we are, living pretty energy intensive lives to a less energy intensive one. How do you get there when it means that people will probably have to lead less comfortable lives for a while. What right do we have to tell other countries that they have to pollute less, when we’re simply further along the technology curve and have already done all our polluting to allow us to get to where we are? How do you get an electorate to vote in measures which will mean they’re life will get more expensive / less comfortable? What if my country does it, but yours doesn’t and keeps on polluting. And what if climate change will mean actually things might even end up better for me (melting snow so that I can get at resources previously locked away) so I might not even want to change anything?

So yes, lots to think about. I don’t have the answers, please leave a comment if you do ;)

Some pictures from Brexit. It is horrible to see the level of overt racism go up, even a little. Friends here in London have said some of their friends have experienced insults on the street since Brexit.