Total Rethink

2Start a Bottom-Up Revolution

“Let me say, at the risk of seeming ridiculous, that the true revolutionary is guided by great feelings of love.”

—Che Guevara

Everything is changing fast, apart from how we think and behave. Technology and artificial intelligence are taking over many of the functions that we previously imagined would always be the domain of humans, from robots taking over jobs in factories to apps gaining control over our social and business relationships.

In the course of an average day we all interact with machines far more often than we interact with people, but our ways of thinking and making decisions have changed little since we lived in agricultural and industrial societies, even though the problems we now need to solve are entirely different than those faced by our ancestors. If we want to keep up with the changes, it will require a revolution in thinking as big as those that led us to start enclosing and farming the common land during the Agricultural Revolution and to building the factories and power stations of the Industrial Revolution that created the modern consumer world.

We each need to harness the energy which developments in technology have unleashed, for our own individual ends, if we are to benefit from the challenges and opportunities that now face us, rather than allowing them to swamp us.

Both the Agricultural Revolution and the Industrial Revolution brought enormous benefits to the human race, but they also created great injustices and ...