Let’s talk about natural technology

This is where I want to speak to pathways that combine fields of finance, technology innovation, and biological adaptation, and why this future is worth investment.

  • Recognizing the genius in nature, and not havesting, harnessing or reducing impact, but integrating with that genius, in a way that enable the future.

  • To me, so many things about economics are wrong and dehumanizing, starting with the hubris of the discipline. But let’s talk about new financial spaces for recognizing and fueling natural entrepreneurship, creativity, and innovation.

  • My background is in energy, and in shaping what motivates its development. Energy is a very dynamic field, with big ideas for energy futures driving investments across the world.

I want to integrate new values into the technology itself, into new technologies — my brand of technology optimism — to make them deliver more local benefits, create more equitable outcomes for those who benefit the least from the current system, and to make infrastructure more artful.

Take the leaf, above.

Even with the strongest resources without disabling heat, solar photovoltaics today still cannot convert energy from sunlight with the efficiency and effect readily available in a common leaf.

This is partly because the product is electricity, but electricity is only a medium. And the biological talent of a leaf is beyond the power of an individual person. What could a comparable technology of a leaf unlock, at the scale of a person? Why not scale?

DISCIPLINARY BRIDGE

Driving across America, I was inspired to write an essay, about what it would take for biologists to make as much money as chemical engineers, and why these kinds of investments have dividends for the vanishing economic power and endemic diversity of rural communities >>

This is why I enrolled in biomimicry and business masters courses. I wanted to bring these disciplines together with how we enable new technology.

When I talk about this, I specifically do not mean the very broad disciplines of biology, engineering, and economics. I mean the alignment of a subset of each of these disciplines that (I believe) can be integrated into a cooperative path forward.

ELECTRICITY

The currency of electricity is vital; the grid is an enormous synchronous machine; and big companies can make a lot of money by building plants and retiring plants and building more plants and wires. The risks are dominantly corporate, incentives are dominantly financial.

Talk about how finance can influence technology characteristics

Here, a thought experiment on a biomimetic electric grid —>

SCIENCE FICTION

I could add another dimension to the diagram above, it would be science fiction! but I don’t have that game right now, only admiration. But let’s talk about how sci-fi shapes our imagination of our future, and enabling technologies, and how that imagination is what drives technology choices forward. Cli-fi, or climate fiction, helps us grapple with changes and new visions, but it is important (to me) also to leap over the immediate political/geophysical connections to break through to new understanding.

Talk about NK Jemisin’s worlds and how things people build could be alive