13:30-14:30
"The Environmental Conundrum, the Complexity Surge and the Digital Revolution"
GRUMBACH, Stephane

The current world political order is unstable, transitioning to some future equilibrium, still to be defined. Major global transformations are at play. The awareness of the non favorable evolution of Earth ecosystem, and its implication for human societies. The emergence of new organization and governance modes based on digital technologies. A turbulent geopolitical order with the relative decline of the US Empire and the raise of China, opening the risk for Thucydides trap.

In this talk, I want to show that a major aspect of the present epoch is the rapid complexity increase for human societies. I will show different facets of this surge. Historically, information technologies have co-evolved with the complexity of societies. The digital revolution is no exception. Although some aspects of the present transformation are part of historical cycles, and as such relatively predictable, others, such as the complexity, correspond to an evolutionary path, and are potentially more difficult to apprehend.

Global actors (corporations, nations, etc.) are positioning themselves (or not) in this setting dominated by resource scarcity, information asymmetry, unpredictability, instability, and risk of collapse. As a result, power is reshuffled, but increasingly concentrated around nodes with the strongest innovative strength.

14:40-15:40
"The Prehistory of Planetary Design and the Nature of the Future"
PARRY, Jason Rhys

Some of the most prominent thinkers of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries were advocates of what we would today call geoengineering. The destiny of the earth, they surmised, was to serve as a canvas for human expression. The shock of the Anthropocene is the realization that the earth has become an artifact of human desires, and that this transformation has simultaneously endangered the planet's future as a viable host for human civilization. In this talk, I discuss what lessons might be learned from revisiting these early advocates of geoengineering, and discuss a philosophy of design that posits nature itself, rather than human creativity, as a telos and guiding principle.

15:40-16:00
Crosscutting discussion