Finding Patterns in the Noise

While we can’t ignore the noise, it’s important to focus - and act on - on the underlying patterns driving change.

This is my first edition which is also being posted on Substack. It follows 18 years of The Cockatoo Chronicles published herewhere I’ve tried to draw coherence from the disparate threads we all observe. Pattern recognition someone once called it. What can we extract from the noise? What are the underlying drivers and what comes next?

It’s certainly a wild world out there in 2026! I will do my best to help you make sense of it in forthcoming posts, but my framework remains my 2011 book The Great Disruption. I argued there were two central drivers of instability in the economy and society - climate change (integrated with ecological damage) and economic inequality. While not a linear process, they are like threat multipliers in geopolitics and security, inviting chaos. 

I suggested that while this was clear, we wouldn’t act until the impacts got much worse.  These fundamentals haven’t changed. They are still the two central drivers of present and future instability. Even our response to AI is heavily influenced by them.

Some things have changed. For example, forecasts of future risks and new opportunities have become our daily measurable reality.

The climate is spinning into dangerous territory with powerful impacts. This puts us on the edge of food crises, which I explored in this paper at CISL alongside our capacity for radical transformation of the food system. I see climate change’s physical impacts combining with food system instability, to drive cascading economic consequences - what I called Climate Contagion in this 2020 paper. Think growing inflation, accelerating debt and geopolitical disorder and conflict with widespread refugee crises. I see the corporate and political backdowns and right-wing populists railing against climate action as just noise. Physics and economics will overcome ideology. Watch the patterns.

Another key development is the extraordinary and still accelerating transformation of the energy system. My 2015 “Fossil Fuels are Finished” argued this was inevitable with new technologies shifting the energy system from being centred around physical resources to being centred on mass manufactured, consumer technologies. This will now accelerate further as it combines with other technologies and electrification. See here from Kingsmill Bond and his team at Ember.

The inequality risk has also landed. With the rise of Trump and other right-wing extremists, we again see forecast become reality. The consequences of inequality are not as definitive as the unquestionable physics of climate change. But through history it has behaved in predictable ways. People get angry, disaffected and want change. When leaders don’t respond, people want to ‘burn it all down’ grasping at those populist extremists who tell the best stories. With the decline of neoliberal globalisation, political and economic change will certainly come.

I have a deep aversion to ideological views or simplistic fanaticism, on the left or right. I understand the causes and have been guilty of it. Now well into my 60’s, I’m more open to unexpected outcomes that challenge my worldview.

In the context of the backlash against neoliberal fanaticism, what is ‘capitalism’ - a term loosely thrown about as the problem?

If I was giving an award for the best managed capitalist society today – measured by the economic benefit to its people and global economic impact - it would go to the Chinese Communist Party. They dominate a range of powerful new technologies and growth industries. Watch that space for robots, future food and practical AI. The USA has surrendered the future to a smarter operator, risking democracy in the process.

Meanwhile, if I was giving an award for climate action it would be shared by President Trump and the Iran Revolutionary Guards Corps, with Vladimir Putin runner up. They have accelerated fossil fuels’ death spiral more than any COP waffle. 

Thus, we see the world is complex, interconnected and unpredictable. Chinese communists are better at capitalism. Oil and gas fanatics drive more climate action. But from it all we can detect patterns.

Finally, I want to put AI into the context of an historic acceleration of technology with broad social and economic impacts. AI deserves the focus it’s getting - both its risks and opportunities, but there is a larger story. From robotics, to medicine, to energy to food, we see extraordinary shifts. As in energy, where technologies and their applications accelerate each other, we need to see this broader context. There is well justified concern at the risks, including worsening inequality and concentration of power. But the opposite is also on offer - for greater and more democratic access to health, energy and food. Perhaps even a world of abundance as argued by ReThinkX.

These are the patterns I see. In future posts we will explore them, including the outcomes of human apocalypse vs a world of equality and abundance! Is it all over for humanity? Or are we just having a few bad years….