Relaxing at their regular Saturday morning café, Lukas and Tom were discussing their upcoming 40th birthday parties. Friends now for almost thirty years, they were classmates from early secondary school, they had shared many of life’s milestones. Celebrating each other’s weddings, children’s birthdays, and academic and career successes.
As we look back, whether either big or small, the world has been through many changes. Take but one — the industrial revolution. Over the centuries industrial revolutions have brought about first mechanisation through coal and steam power, then mass production and the distribution of electrical power. Developments in electronics, information and computing power are the hallmarks of the third industrial revolution. Finally, and what is building now, is a fourth wave of revolution. The melding of the physical and the digital, the development of forms of power based on data, on artificial intelligence.
Let us not forget other major changes that have been wrought throughout our history. Consider: the development of the printing press, the spread outwards of colonialism from European centres, the ravages of pandemics on broad swathes of people, and the embrace of democracy as well as the scientific method.
This list is long.
But one thing remains constant through all of this — change. The situation, the…
