Governing in a Complex World Series: Explaining the Global Polycrisis (FON1-V45)

Transcript: Governing in a Complex World Series: Explaining the Global Polycrisis

[00:00:00 CSPS animated logo appears on screen.]

[00:00:05 Caroline Pitfield appears full screen. Text on screen: Caroline Pitfield, Executive Faculty Member, Canada School of Public Service.]

Caroline Pitfield: Good afternoon, everyone, and welcome to our event today entitled Understanding the Global Polycrisis. Thank you very much for joining us. My name is Caroline Pitfield, and I will be your session moderator for today.

So, before we begin, I would like to recognize that I'm speaking to you from the traditional unceded territory of the Algonquin Anishinaabe people. I want to express my gratitude to generations of Algonquin people, both past and present, as the original caretakers of the space that I occupy today. I'm very grateful to be here. I also recognize that participants are joining us from various parts of the country today and therefore may be on a different Indigenous territory. I would encourage you to take a moment and to think about the territory that you occupy.

So, one little housekeeping matter before we begin. I do want to let you know that we will have a Q and A session after we hear from our speaker today. And I want to encourage you to submit your questions throughout the event and not just wait until then. And to do so, you will click on the chat bubble located at the top right corner of the webcast interface. We'll try to get to as many of your questions today as we can. We would also encourage you to submit them in the language of your choice.

With that, I would like to now introduce you to our speaker.

[00:01:32 Split screen: Caroline Pitfield and Dr. Thomas Homer-Dixon appear in video chat panels.] 

Caroline Pitfield: Dr. Thomas Homer-Dixon, or Tad, as many of you might know him, is the founder and Executive Director of the Cascade Institute at Royal Roads University in Victoria, British Columbia. Tad also directed the Centre for Peace and Conflict Studies at the University of Toronto and taught at the University of Waterloo where he founded the Waterloo Institute for Complexity and Innovation.

He's one of Canada's foremost public intellectuals and a best-selling author with expertise in threats to global security in the 21st century. For those of you that want to know this, his most recent book is entitled Commanding Hope: The Power We Have to Renew a World in Peril was published in 2020. He's also widely published, including in the Globe and Mail; the Foreign Affairs Magazine; Foreign Policy; Scientific American; the New York Times; the Washington Post; and the Financial Times.

A sought-after expert, especially in these complex times, Tad has provided briefings to the Privy Council Office; the Department of Foreign Affairs; the Department of Defence in Canada; as well as offices in the UK and in the US.

So, welcome Tad, and thank you very much for joining us today.

[00:02:45 Dr. Thomas Homer-Dixon appears full screen. Text on screen: Thomas Homer Dixon; Executive Director, Cascade Institute, Royal Roads University, British Columbia. / Directeur general, Institut Cascade, Université Royal Roads, Colombie-Britannique.]

Dr. Thomas Homer-Dixon: Thank you so much, Caroline, and welcome everyone. It's terrific to have an opportunity to tell you a little bit about the work of the Cascade Institute on this issue of the polycrisis. I imagine that you've heard of this term, but may not know much about it, may not know really what it means.

[00:03:07 Split screen: Dr. Thomas Homer-Dixon and title slide. Text on slide: Cascade Institute; Polycrisis; Current Research, Future Directions. / Cascade Institute; Polycrise; Recherche actuelle, orientations futures.]

Dr. Thomas Homer-Dixon: And so today I hope to unpack it a bit and give you some introduction to the framework of thinking about what the polycrisis is that we've developed at the Cascade Institute. The Cascade Institute is a think/do tank, I guess you could call it. We really are interested in taking knowledge, especially from the complexity sciences, and applying it to solve practical problems in the world to help policymakers, communities and firms and others who are trying to deal with our complex problems, either by improving our foresight or by identifying what we call high leverage intervention points whereby we can invest resources to put the world on a better trajectory. Let's go to the next slide.

[00:03:54 Split screen: Dr. Thomas Homer-Dixon and slide, as described.]

Dr. Thomas Homer-Dixon: So, within our polycrisis research program, which is one of our three major research programs at the Cascade Institute, we asked this basic question, why are so many things going wrong in the world at the same time? I think we're all asking that question to a certain extent. In the last half dozen years or so, we've experienced a pandemic; we see the rise of political authoritarianism; there's enormous damage being caused by extreme weather events; we've had a burst of inflation; we have wars occurring in critical parts of the world and an upsurge in conflict around the world that has changed the trajectory of generally a more peaceful world that we experienced over the last decades.

So, something seems to be happening, something new going on, and we want to understand better what that is and apply some of our complexity tools to try to unpack the underlying causal mechanisms. Let's go to the next slide.

[00:04:53 Split screen: Dr. Thomas Homer-Dixon and slide, as described.]

Dr. Thomas Homer-Dixon: We have a team of people working on this issue within the Cascade Institute. As you can see here, very diverse backgrounds, people from international relations to neuroscience, working together to try to understand these underlying causal mechanisms. Next slide.

[00:05:13 Split screen: Dr. Thomas Homer-Dixon and slide, as described.]

Dr. Thomas Homer-Dixon: And we're collaborating with institutes and other research groups around the world, in particular the Potsdam Climate Centre, Germany's leading climate research group, which also has a high concentration of complex systems researchers in Potsdam. That's the "PIK" that you see there.

The Research Institute for Sustainability, RIFS, also in Potsdam, and the Centre for the Study of Existential Risk. We work very closely with them too, at the University of Cambridge. Next slide.

[00:05:47 Split screen: Dr. Thomas Homer-Dixon and slide, as described.]

Dr. Thomas Homer-Dixon: So, the polycrisis term has been around for just over 20 years, 20, 25 years or so, as you'll see in a moment. But it's useful. Looking at its usage in this ngram chart from Google over the last five years or so, you can see that there was very little use of it. As you look across the bottom, polycrisis is the red line. Until around 2022 or so there was a post published by the University, the Columbia University economic historian, Adam Tooze, in his Substack blog posted towards the end of actually 2021. And it got a lot of attention at about that time.

And then in early 2022, excuse me, early 2023, if you look at that sharp spike upwards. So, Adam Tooze's post was the end of 2022 and then early 2023 if you look at the sharp uptick of the red line. That was the World Economic Forum meeting in Davos, Switzerland where it became kind of the neologism du jour. It was a concept that was used widely at that conference and there was a fair amount of contention about it. People were arguing over whether it was useful or not.

You can also see that on occasions it actually exceeded the usage of the concept systemic risk, which is the orange line, which is much more widely used in for instance financial circles. And the big spike in systemic risk occurred later in 2022 with the failure of the Silicon Valley Bank in California. Next slide.

[00:05:47 Split screen: Dr. Thomas Homer-Dixon and slide, as described.]

Dr. Thomas Homer-Dixon: As I said, the use of the concept goes back over 20 years. It was coined by a famous, and now very senior, I think he's in his 90s, French complexity scientist and philosopher, by the name of Edgar Morin, in a book he co-wrote with Anne Brigitte Kern in 1999. It was used by a well-known South African social scientist, Mark Swilling, around 2013 or so.

But it came into widespread use in particular with the comments by the then president of the European Commission, Jean-Claude Juncker, in 2018 when he said Europe faces a polycrisis. Looking at the combination of financial crisis, Brexit, and the migration crisis, especially subsequent to the Syrian civil war.

He said that Europe is being impacted by all of these things at the same time. And so that was the first time the concept came into wide usage. Then a number of groups started to use it, including the Cascade Institute and subsequent years. Adam Tooze brought it, as I mentioned, wide popular usage around 2021, 2022 and then as I indicated World Economic Forum. It really exploded that time. And now it comes up pretty regularly in conversations about the state of the world.

I'm not, to be frank, particularly keen on the concept polycrisis, even though we've anchored a big portion of our own research at the Cascade Institute in this term, and we're trying to understand it better. I wish we had something that doesn't make me think of parrots, but there you go. There's the concept. It seems to have resonated and people are using it widely, so it's going to stick around. Next slide, please.

[00:09:36 Split screen: Dr. Thomas Homer-Dixon and slide, as described.]

Dr. Thomas Homer-Dixon: So, what is this thing that we're calling a polycrisis? We need to fill this hole, this kind of semantic hole, this gap, and try to put some content in there that is useful.

Let's go to the next slide.

[00:09:59 Split screen: Dr. Thomas Homer-Dixon and slide, as described.]

Dr. Thomas Homer-Dixon: We define a polycrisis in these terms: "It occurs when crises in multiple global systems become causally entangled in ways that cause major human harm. The interactions between the constituent crises are significant enough to produce emergent harms that are different from, and usually greater than, the sum of the harms those crises would produce separately." Now, you can see there are two phrases that are bolded there. The concept of entanglement and the concept of emergence. And these are the concepts I really want to highlight.

The first idea is that these crises are not actually independent of each other. It's not just a coincidence that they're all happening at the same time. This isn't some kind of perfect storm where if we just wait around long enough, things will get better. It's just an accident of history that we happen to have all these things going wrong at the same time. They're actually connected together and perhaps reinforcing each other in some way, as I'll explain in a minute.

The second part of this definition. Whoops. Let's just stay on those slides for a moment. The second part of this definition emphasizes this notion of emergence, which is a key idea within complexity science.

It's the idea that more is different. That by increasing the number of units or items in a system, you go from a quantitative change to a qualitative change. Another way of thinking about it is that when you combine these crises together, they do something in combination that you can't see by looking at the individual crises themselves, that there's a novelty to the whole system, the combined set of crises. And in this case, we suggest the novelty produces harms that are greater than would be produced even if you had all the crises operating independently.

So, that's this idea that there's something novel when everything's combined together that we need to understand in itself rather than just looking at the pieces. And this is phenomenally important for public policy, because in public policy we tend to want to divide things up into pieces and look at the bits and then combine everything back together. In the case of the polycrisis, we actually have to look at the whole thing from the get-go, from the start, otherwise we're going to miss vitally important stuff. Let's go to the next slide.

[00:12:33 Split screen: Dr. Thomas Homer-Dixon and slide, as described.]

Dr. Thomas Homer-Dixon: So, the guts of this problem, the core, is to try to understand what's going on in terms of the causal connections. So, causation is a critical foundational concept or building block within the Cascade Institute. We're always asking the question, how does causation work? So, our focus within the polycrisis has been to try to understand these underlying causal mechanisms. Let's go to the next slide.

[00:13:03 Split screen: Dr. Thomas Homer-Dixon and slide, as described.]

Dr. Thomas Homer-Dixon: So, here's an example of somebody trying to make sense of causal mechanisms. This is a slide produced by Adam Tooze in June 2022, as you can see in the top right-hand side there. He was trying to understand the connections between what was happening in Ukraine – the Ukraine Russia war; climate change; the spillover effects; the downstream effects of the pandemic, that all seemed to be kind of connected together in some way. And this is kind of a back of the envelope thing. This is where everybody always starts when they're trying to understand these connections. It's a useful diagram. It looks in some sense like time is unfolding from left to right in this diagram, but then you see some arrows going backwards. And that's one of the things that makes this particular diagram confusing.

In our work, we distinguish between what we call domino diagrams, where the time flows from left to right and you see a progression and the arrows always point from left to right and they can point from the past into the future. You can project into the future with a domino diagram. And we call them domino diagrams because it's like a bunch of dominoes falling over. Or loop diagrams, which is our other category, where you're actually looking at self-reinforcing loops. And I'll talk quite a bit about loops, especially feedback loops, as I go on in this presentation.

In this particular case, it looks like Mr. Tooze has combined both and that actually produces some conceptual confusion. But nonetheless, I think the diagram was a pretty good first step in trying to unpack the relationships between the pandemic, the war, and climate change. And I think the next slide is the French version, so let's just put that up for a moment so people can see it.

[00:14:59 Split screen: Dr. Thomas Homer-Dixon and slide, as described.]

Dr. Thomas Homer-Dixon: So, that was Mr. Tooze's attempt to understand the connections between crises in the world. There's been another organization, and many organizations in the world actually, who have tried to look at these connections, too. Probably the most famous is the World Economic Forum. They produce an annual report called the World Risk Report, the Annual Global Risks Report.

And one of the first things we did within the Cascade Institute is we went back and looked at all of these risk reports right back to 2006 and up to the present, to look at the progression of their understanding over time in terms of the connections between things happening in the world, risks happening in the world. And here's an example of a diagram they produced in 2007. You can see around the outside a whole bunch of problems or challenges humanity faces, and then they're connected together with lines of different thickness. What the World Economic Forum did is that they sent out questionnaires to experts around the world and asked them, what do you think is important in terms of threats to humanity and how do you think they're connected together? And then, after this expert elicitation, they represented the information in the diagram.

It's useful, but I actually don't think it tells us very much. I mean, one problem is that there's a kind of apples and oranges thing happening in all the different factors around the outside. They don't seem to hang together very well. Some are short term events; some are long term stresses. I'll distinguish between these things in a moment. If I would come away from a diagram like this, if I were the leader of a major corporation or a policymaker, and I'd say, well, it just tells us that a lot of bad stuff is happening in the world all at the same time. It doesn't give you much purchase on the problem. Let's go to the next slide.

[00:16:45 Split screen: Dr. Thomas Homer-Dixon and slide, as described.]

Dr. Thomas Homer-Dixon:  So, the World Economic Forum has done this successfully and successively every year in intervening time. And we get up to 2022 and we see that the diagrams are prettier, but I don't think they're necessarily more informative. They've played around with the graphics, but I don't think this particular one gives us much more analytical purchase. Now, there was a period of time in the mid 2010s when the World Economic Forum actually started to unpack some of the loops I talked about before, especially the feedback loops. It turns out that a Canadian led that effort. That was Kristel Van der Elst, who was the head of the World Economic Forum's risk group at the time and is now the Director General of Policy Horizons in Ottawa. So, we have brought that talent and expertise back to Canada. Once Ms. Van der Elst left the World Economic Forum, they returned to, I think, less analytically useful ways of representing the connections between the risks that humanity faces.

Now, in the last couple of years, and we have got the slides for 2022 and 2023 here, the World Economic Forum has started to produce somewhat more useful diagrams once again. Next slide, please.

[00:18:07 Split screen: Dr. Thomas Homer-Dixon and slide, as described.]

Dr. Thomas Homer-Dixon:  In our work at the Cascade Institute, we tried to take this analytical angle, or this approach many steps forward, to try to come up with, in a sense, a radically different way of thinking about the relationships between the constituent causes of the polycrisis that can really help us see things better. So, we've left behind the work of, for instance, the World Economic Forum and the various reinsurance companies and BlackRock and others who've been working in this area, the United Nations Disaster Risk Reduction Authority, a lot of them have been doing kind of risk analysis and we came up with our own approach. Next slide, please.

[00:18:50 Split screen: Dr. Thomas Homer-Dixon and slide, as described.]

Dr. Thomas Homer-Dixon:  And it was first articulated in the article that you just saw there, which was published by Cambridge University Press earlier in 2024.

And the core – let's go back to the previous slide, the English one, for a moment. The core content of this model is this relationship between stresses, triggers, and crisis. So, stresses are long term processes that operate often at the global level. You can think of climate heating; demographic change; widening income gaps between rich and poor people; large scale migrations. These are things that operate at a macro level. They're slow processes. And because they operate over long periods of time, and we tend to know a lot about them so they're somewhat predictable, you can project their trends over time into the future. Triggers, on the other hand, are fast processes. They can happen, as opposed to with stresses over years or even decades, triggers can happen in minutes or seconds, even. Something like an assassination, or a bankruptcy that takes place of a major corporation in a week, or a drought over several weeks, for example, a critical heat wave or storm. These are things that happen in much shorter periods of time. They tend to happen in local areas in relatively constrained geographical spaces. And they're largely stochastic. In other words, they're random in their character. They're extremely difficult to predict, whereas stresses are much easier to predict.

Now, the multiplication sign in the middle of this circle indicates that you actually need stresses and triggers together to produce a crisis. You can think of that multiplication sign as representing, for those of you who know statistics, a Boolean and operator. So, you need both stresses and triggers. They're both necessary conditions to produce a crisis. If you don't have one or the other, then you don't get your crisis. And then a crisis, we understand it as a particular kind of phenomenon. We understand a crisis as a moment of instability, a period of disequilibrium in a system. Let's go to the next slide, which is the French. Let people look at that for a second, and then we'll go on. And I didn't know that "trigger" in French is "déclencheur". I have to remember that.

[00:21:25 Split screen: Dr. Thomas Homer-Dixon and slide, as described.]

Dr. Thomas Homer-Dixon:  So, here's a way of thinking about this relationship between stresses, triggers, and crises in terms of a model that complexity scientists use that we call a stability landscape, or a minimum energy landscape.

You can think of the state of a system, such as a climate system, or an economic system, or a political system, as being represented by a ball, as you see the red ball there on a landscape. Normally, the ball would want to slide down to one of the basins in the landscape. We call these basins of attraction. This is a place which is a kind of energy minimum. It's comfortable there. It doesn't have to work to stay there. It just stays there because it's at the bottom of the basin. And that means that within the system, the economic system or the political system or the climate system, there are mechanisms that are stabilizing the system, keeping it within a certain equilibrium. We call those homeostatic mechanisms.

Now, what stresses do is they shallow that basin of attraction over time. They make it shallower and shallower. So, it becomes easier and easier for a trigger of smaller and smaller consequence to knock the system into an unstable state, which would be between basins, as you can see there, the top of a ridge, where it can easily slide back to where it was before, or into a completely new equilibrium that may produce very different results for societies involved. And it's that moment of disequilibrium, that instability, that we interpret as a crisis. And with the polycrisis today, we believe that we're seeing multiple moments of instability that are combining together.

So, the stresses, again, make a system less resilient over time. And the triggers are stochastic or random events that knock the system out of its current equilibrium into another place. Clearly, if we really want to understand what's happening with the polycrisis, we should spend a lot of time looking at stresses, because the stresses are the underlying processes that are changing the probable outcomes of our worlds. Next slide, please. Let's take a look at the French version for a moment.  This, conceptually, is really the core of our model. And it seems like it's simple, but it actually packs a considerable analytical punch. Next slide, please.

[00:23:58 Split screen: Dr. Thomas Homer-Dixon and slide. Text on slide: Stresses include: 1. Climate heating 2. Biodiversity loss and ecological degradation 3. Zoonotic viral diseases, microbial resistance 4. Demographic divergence (incl. population aging) 5. High uniformity and connectivity of global food supply 6. Declining power density of energy resources 7. High uniformity and connectivity of global financial system 8. Slowing economic growth, widening economic inequalities 9. Ideological polarization and epistemic fragmentation 10. Spread of populist authoritarian ideology 11. Propagation of large language model AI 12. Great-power hegemonic transition./Les contraintes comprennent: 1. réchauffement climatique 2. perte de biodiversité et degradation écologique 3. maladies virales zoonotiques, resistance microbienne 4. divergence démographique (y compris le vieillissement de la population) 5. grande uniformité et connectivité de l'approvisionnement alimentaire mondial 6. baisse de la densité de puissance des sources d'énergie 7. grande uniformité et connectivité du système financier mondial 8. ralentissement de la croissance économique , aggravation des inégalités économiques 9. polarisation idéologique et fragmentation épistémique 10. propagation de l'idéologie populiste et autoritaire 11. propagation d'un grand modèle linguistique IA 12. transition hégémonique des grandes puissances ]

Dr. Thomas Homer-Dixon: So, the stresses that we're looking at in the world include this list of about a dozen or so. We're in the process of refining this list at the moment and trying to make sure we do what the philosophers call "carve reality at the joints" effectively. I mean, these things overlap a lot, as you can see. They affect each other a lot. It's somewhat arbitrary which ones you include and which ones you don't. Different groups have different lists. We're spending some time right now engaged in what we call a global stress analysis that is unpacking with some care exactly what we're going to include in the list to make sure that it's exhaustive. Let's go to the French slide for a moment. I'm not going to talk about these in detail. When I do an extended version of this talk, I spend some time going through each one of these stresses, but that I think most of you would recognize most of them and understand the basic import of each.

I am going to mention one though, and that's this one, number eight, slowing economic growth, widening economic inequalities, simply because I think there's been a fundamental shift, especially in modern economies, that is not widely recognized, that is contributing, for instance, to the rise of populist authoritarianism in Western societies. Let's go to the next slide, and then go to the chart next.

[00:25:25 Split screen: Dr. Thomas Homer-Dixon and slide, as described.]

Dr. Thomas Homer-Dixon:  So, this is a graph, using World Bank data, of economic growth. This is per capita GDP in high income countries and looking at the growth rate of per capita GDP in high income countries going back to 1960 or so up to the present. The interesting thing about this particular graph is that I asked my team to extract all of the periods of time when there was high volatility in the system because of things like the Yom Kippur War, or more recently the pandemic, which were kind of external or exogenous shocks to the system and therefore were disturbing or distorting the signal. When we remove those variations, we can see that there has been quite a remarkable decline in economic growth rate. The R squared you see there in the top right-hand corner is nearly 0.6, which for anything in the social sciences is extraordinarily high.

The decline in economic growth over a period of decades in modern economies is unquestionably one of the drivers of the rising dissension within economies, because among other things, it's resulted in wealthy groups and credentialed groups securing for themselves an increasing amount of a less rapidly growing economic pie. As that economic pie has grown more slowly, there's been increasing competition for the division of the economic pie. And one of the results is a stagnating or even declining incomes for significant portions of our societies. And we know what the political consequences of that have been. Next slide. That's the French version. And let's go on to the next slide.

[00:27:21 Split screen: Dr. Thomas Homer-Dixon and slide, as described.]

Dr. Thomas Homer-Dixon:  So, we argue, within the Cascade Institute, the global stresses and the crisis they cause are amplifying, accelerating and synchronizing. I'm going to spend just a few minutes explaining what we mean by these concepts. Next slide. And the next slide.

[00:27:40 Split screen: Dr. Thomas Homer-Dixon and slide, as described.]

Dr. Thomas Homer-Dixon:  I'm going to start by focusing on amplification and acceleration, and then I'll talk a bit about synchronization. Next slide. And the next slide.

[00:27:54 Split screen: Dr. Thomas Homer-Dixon and slide, as described.]

Dr. Thomas Homer-Dixon:  So, in the case of amplification and acceleration, I'll use the example of climate heating. We could do this for all the stresses in that list, but most of them are showing the same kind of phenomena of amplification and acceleration. In the case of climate heating, we've seen an amplification of the problem in the sense that it's gotten worse. Around 2000, the tropospheric temperature, the planet's surface temperature, was about 0.7 degrees warmer than pre-industrial temperatures. And now it's over 1.3 degrees warmer, depending on how you average out the figures across the years we've already passed, we're significantly past 1.2 and we may even be past 1.5, but the usual figure is about 1.3, 1.35. So, there's been a significant worsening of the problem from 0.7 degrees Celsius to 1.35 warming since pre-industrial temperatures in the 19th century.

But there's also been an acceleration of the warming. In other words, it's getting warmer faster. Between 1970 and 2010, warming per decade was about 0.18 degrees Celsius. Between 2010 and 2040, it's estimated that warming per decade is going to be about 0.3 degrees per decade. So, almost 80% greater, 70 to 80% greater rate of warming. So, things are getting worse faster. One of the factors that is driving this warming is changing radiative balance of the planet. Next slide please. Next slide.

[00:29:39 Split screen: Dr. Thomas Homer-Dixon and slide, as described.]

Dr. Thomas Homer-Dixon:  Just leave it on this one for a moment. This is Earth's energy balance, or energy imbalance, which is basically a difference between the amount of energy arriving on the surface of the planet from the sun and the amount that's being reflected from the surface of the planet back out into space. Normally, the Earth should be in balance. The same amount of energy should be going in as is going out. But because we've changed the opacity of the of the atmosphere to infrared radiation, more energy is coming in than is going out. The imbalance was about, as you can see, between 2005 and 2015, about 0.7 watts per square metre. It's more than doubled to about 1.35 watts per square metre in more recent periods.

It doesn't sound like a lot of energy difference, but when you aggregate across all the square metres on the surface of the planet, the amount of the energy imbalance now is more than [if] 1 million Hiroshima bombs exploded a day in the atmosphere, every single day. The amount of energy that would be released if you exploded a million Hiroshima type bombs, atomic bombs, in the atmosphere every day, day in and day out. And that energy is accelerating or ramping up the speed of the hydrologic cycle on the surface of the planet. The cycle of water between the surface of the planet and the atmosphere, and then back down to the surface of the planet.

Which means you get more intense droughts, you get bigger storms, as we've seen around the world recently. And it's a bit like I sometimes say, we've created a leviathan, or some kind of massive beast on the planet, and every year we're pumping more energy into it and it's smashing stuff up. And as long as this energy imbalance remains, the global heating problem will get worse. Next slide, please.

[00:31:33 Split screen: Dr. Thomas Homer-Dixon and slide, as described.]

Dr. Thomas Homer-Dixon:  One way of thinking about amplification and acceleration is in terms of a wave function. And you can think that, over time, our crises are getting more serious and they're becoming more frequent. Here you can see across the bottom the World Health Organization's list of zoonotic viral diseases. They seem to start out with big gaps between them. Pandemics, or major outbreaks of zoonotic viral diseases; HIV, 1980; SARS, 2002; and as you get towards the end of the sequence, it seems like they're just happening a lot more often and the consequences seem to be more grave.

So, you're getting a compression of the frequency, as you can see in this wave function, and an amplification of the seriousness of the crises that are resulting. It's a useful metaphor for how we can think about amplification and acceleration. Next slide, please. And the next slide.

[00:32:42 Split screen: Dr. Thomas Homer-Dixon and slide, as described.]

Dr. Thomas Homer-Dixon:  But the thing that we are most concerned about at the Cascade Institute is the synchronization of crises. And that's really where we're focusing our attention. Next slide, please. Next slide.

[00:33:01 Split screen: Dr. Thomas Homer-Dixon and slide, as described.]

Dr. Thomas Homer-Dixon:  One way of thinking about this is in terms of metronomes that are out of sequence and then over time come into sequence with each other. I would urge you, if you can, to take a look at some videos of this phenomenon online. It's really quite remarkable. If you put metronomes on a particular kind of platform, you can start them out with the same tempo, but with different moments of starting so they're not in sequence. And then over time, they will all start to synchronize with each other because there's a signal being sent through the platform, basically small amounts of energy that are encouraging all of the metronomes to eventually basically tick in the same sequence with each other. So, they're all synchronized. It's quite a remarkable thing.

In our work, we're looking for the mechanisms that are allowing systems to communicate with each other so that they synchronize in this same sort of way. Next slide.

[00:34:00 Split screen: Dr. Thomas Homer-Dixon and slide, as described.]

Dr. Thomas Homer-Dixon:  So, let's talk about how this might happen, how the synchronization might happen. We have here two generic systems. We might have an economic system, a climate system, an economic system, and a health system, for example. And there are various ways that the stresses and triggers in each of these systems can connect with each other. Next slide.

[00:34:23 Split screen: Dr. Thomas Homer-Dixon and slide, as described.]

Dr. Thomas Homer-Dixon:  Right at the moment, they're not connected, but it's possible, as you see here, that the stresses in one could affect the stresses in another. Next slide. There's the French version.

[00:34:34 Split screen: Dr. Thomas Homer-Dixon and slide, as described.]

Dr. Thomas Homer-Dixon:  It's also possible that stresses in one could affect the triggers in another. Next slide.

[00:34:45 Split screen: Dr. Thomas Homer-Dixon and slide, as described.]

Dr. Thomas Homer-Dixon:  And the crises in one could affect both stresses and triggers in another. Next slide. Next slide.

[00:34:55 Split screen: Dr. Thomas Homer-Dixon and slide, as described.]

Dr. Thomas Homer-Dixon:  And the crises in both systems could affect each other. Now, these are various combinations across two systems of stresses, triggers, and crises. We call this a grammar of possible inter-systemic interactions. And we can use these basic tools to understand how two systems are affecting each other so that they start to synchronize their behaviour in the same way metronomes do. Next slide.

[00:35:21 Split screen: Dr. Thomas Homer-Dixon and slide, as described.]

Dr. Thomas Homer-Dixon:  And I'll give you an example here. Here we have system one. This is something that we have seen, an example we've seen very simplified, but nonetheless, it represents synchronization. Here we have a stress, which is increased connectivity between human communities because of travel and the like. And then you have a viral escape from a lab, perhaps, as we've seen in Wuhan in China. The two things together contribute to a pandemic. Now, many more things go into making a pandemic, of course, but these are two critical factors. They're both necessary conditions, a stress, and a trigger. Next slide. That's the French version.

[00:35:58 Split screen: Dr. Thomas Homer-Dixon and slide, as described.]

Dr. Thomas Homer-Dixon:  And now we're going to introduce a second system, the healthcare system, which for instance, in Canada and in many places around the world was suffering from chronic health care underfunding. Next slide.

[00:36:12 Split screen: Dr. Thomas Homer-Dixon and slide, as described.]

Dr. Thomas Homer-Dixon:  The pandemic then contributed a trigger that, combined with chronic health care underfunding, it caused the trigger of health care worker burnout. The two things combined. Next slide.

[00:36:28 Split screen: Dr. Thomas Homer-Dixon and slide, as described.]

Dr. Thomas Homer-Dixon:  The two things combined produced a systemic healthcare crisis. So, here we see the pandemic aggravating the problems within the health care system by producing a particular trigger, producing a systemic healthcare crisis. Next slide.

[00:36:42 Split screen: Dr. Thomas Homer-Dixon and slide, as described.]

Dr. Thomas Homer-Dixon:  Which then further contributed to the pandemic. And we saw this process unfold in real time in Canada, for example, and around the world. And here we're seeing the synchronization of two otherwise relatively independent systems because of the connections between them. Next slide.

[00:37:02 Split screen: Dr. Thomas Homer-Dixon and slide, as described.]

Dr. Thomas Homer-Dixon:  So, that gives you a sense for how we see the causal mechanisms of the polycrisis operating in our research. I mentioned that we are undertaking a global systemic stress analysis. And during the conversation in a few minutes, I may talk a little bit about the particular method we're using, which is Cross Impact Balance analysis, which is a way of actually producing a kind of quasi quantitative understanding of interactions that allows us to identify where the stability zones are, and maybe pathways by which we can avoid really bad outcomes with the polycrisis.

So, hopefully I'll get a moment to talk a little bit more about what we call CIB analysis, Cross Impact Balance analysis. Next slide. And the next slide.

[00:37:52 Split screen: Dr. Thomas Homer-Dixon and slide, as described.]

Dr. Thomas Homer-Dixon:  And a couple of words just at the end about some of the resources if you want to learn more about what we're doing, understand in more depth the model that we're developing and how we're applying it. Next slide.

[00:38:09 Split screen: Dr. Thomas Homer-Dixon and slide, as described.]

Dr. Thomas Homer-Dixon:  We have online this introduction to polycrisis analysis, which gives the full story of what we call STC model, Stress Trigger Crisis model, that I've just introduced to you and shows how we apply it in a variety of cases and actually walks people through how to actually do the systems modelling and the systems mapping that we use within the Cascade Institute. Next slide.

[00:38:41 Split screen: Dr. Thomas Homer-Dixon and slide, as described.]

Dr. Thomas Homer-Dixon:  If you go to polycrisis.org you'll find an enormous amount of information, very carefully curated and organized, bringing you right up to date on the latest conversation about the polycrisis. Comments, criticisms, research papers and the like, all organized with a search engine so you can find specific sub issues really, really easily. There's a learning journey that's organized around key questions that allows you to understand the entire conversation very quickly. And then there's a community map that shows you all the people and groups and organizations working on polycrisis issues around the world and how they're connected together.

[00:39:21 Split screen: Dr. Thomas Homer-Dixon and slide, as described.]

Dr. Thomas Homer-Dixon:  We produced a Positive Pathways Report. It's not all doom and gloom and grim news. You could argue that the polycrisis is also creating opportunities for rapid positive change to create reform in some of the underlying systems or address some of the deep stresses that are driving the polycrisis. And these possibilities are outlined, and how we can think about these possibilities is outlined, in this Positive Pathways Report. Next slide.

[00:39:54 Split screen: Dr. Thomas Homer-Dixon and slide, as described.]

Dr. Thomas Homer-Dixon:  We recently released, in early October, an assessment of the global inter-systemic risks of a second Trump presidency. And in fact, today or tomorrow, we're doing an update of this report that will appear on our website. We take these tools, loop analysis, causal loop analysis, the Stress Trigger Crisis model, and something we call Causal Junction Analysis, and we apply them to try to understand very specifically the various risks that a second Trump presidency could produce and the global implications of those risks, including potential feedback loops that a second Trump presidency could induce. Next slide.

[00:40:39 Split screen: Dr. Thomas Homer-Dixon and slide, as described.]

Dr. Thomas Homer-Dixon:  In terms of our further research, we have developed a Polycrisis Research and Action Roadmap that's collaborative across the four organizations that I identified before that lays out our plans for pushing the research frontier forward in coming years. Next slide. Next slide.

[00:41:01 Split screen: Dr. Thomas Homer-Dixon and slide, as described.]

Dr. Thomas Homer-Dixon:  Thank you. I thought there was one more, but it turns out that was the end. So, thank you very much and I look forward to our conversation.

[00:41:11 Split screen: Caroline Pitfield and Dr. Thomas Homer-Dixon appear in video chat panels.] 

Caroline Pitfield: Thank you, Tad, that was excellent. I really, really appreciated your analysis of all that. I particularly appreciated the visualization, that really helped me see with a little bit more clarity something that I think is so complex and so important. And the only downside of all that is I have so many questions and I do want to make sure that I also keep time for everybody else's questions.

[00:41:32 Overlaid text on screen: Governing in a Complex World Series: Explaining the Global Polycrisis. / Série sur la gouvernance dans un monde complexe: Comprendre ce qu'est la polycrise mondiale.] 

Caroline Pitfield: So, we're trying to think how to use my facilitator's privilege most effectively and give you a question that may allow you to touch on some of the various things that I'm curious about.

So, here it is. I am ever the pragmatic public servant. And if you know public servants, we often talk about prioritization. I'm hesitating to ask you this question because I think you said very clearly, we need to think of the polycrisis as a whole. And yet I can't help but wonder, is there one stress or one trigger, one area that we should be prioritizing, as public servants perhaps, or that you just feel as a community of people interested in this we should be prioritizing. And if prioritizing is really anathema to what you're doing, how do we tackle the polycrisis?

[00:42:24 Dr. Thomas Homer-Dixon appears full screen.] 

Dr. Thomas Homer-Dixon: No, it's a perfectly appropriate question because we ask it ourselves. First of all, the human brain only has capacity to manage so much stuff at the same time. And you know, in some sense, even though we insist that you have to see these things as a whole, we do introduce a kind of reductionist tool, the STC model, which allows us to get inside and break apart the parts. So, seeing the parts is always essential. In any kind of emergent system, you've got to know what the parts are. And it's not unreasonable to ask which of those parts seem to be having the best or the biggest impact on this whole phenomenon.

Now, technically the question you want to ask is which of those parts, or which of those components, is changing faster than anything else and therefore most powerfully changing the larger phenomena, the larger emergent phenomenon, in this case the polycrisis. And if I were to – when I ask that question, I always keep coming back to climate heating. And then the policy intervention kind of drops out that very directly: we've got to solve the problem of carbon emissions.

And the climate problem is basically an energy problem. And our energy problem is basically an electricity problem, as a low or zero carbon electricity problem. So, how is it that humankind is going to generate vast amounts of near zero carbon electricity as quickly as possible and transition from a civilization that's built around fossil fuels to a civilization that's built around zero carbon electricity sources?

So, the climate problem. The reason that I highlighted it when I talked about stresses, I talked about declining economic growth, but I also talked when I was mentioning amplification, acceleration of climate heating, and I showed James Hansen's graph with the acceleration and then James Hansen's data on Earth's energy imbalances, because I really want to drive that point home. That energy imbalance, that injection of a million plus Hiroshima bombs worth of energy into the atmosphere and ocean system around the planet every day, is ultimately an existential threat to human civilization. If we don't solve that, nothing else matters.

Now, that being said, there's a lot of other stuff happening independently in the system that's aggravating climate impacts, to the extent that we're seeing widening wealth gaps. And those would be happening independently of what's happening with the climate system, although I think the climate impacts are starting to actually aggravate those wealth gaps. But those wealth gaps make large portions of our societies, and around the world, poor folks who are more vulnerable and poorer societies, much more susceptible to climate change. There's an interaction effect there between the two, so you do have to ultimately step back and look at the whole story.

But at the Cascade Institute, recognizing that climate is a critical problem, that energy is the core of it, we have a major research program on alternative energy, on ultra deep geothermal power, because that's a necessary condition for the survival of human civilization solving this energy problem.

[00:46:06 Split screen: Caroline Pitfield and Dr. Thomas Homer-Dixon appear in video chat panels.] 

Dr. Thomas Homer-Dixon: Did that at least partially satisfy you?

Caroline Pitfield: Absolutely. It's a wonderful additional argument with respect to why we need to do something about climate change in that it contributes to all these other factors.

Dr. Thomas Homer-Dixon: Right. So, in fact, if you start to trace out the relationships, and that's part of what we're going to do in our global stress analysis, my expectation is that when you actually do the causal map of the relationships between these stresses, climate is increasingly affecting just about everything in the system because it's so destabilizing. And you always look for kind of the necessary conditions, the sine qua nons. We don't fix climate, nothing else matters. And so, it's an essential starting point.

Caroline Pitfield: I would table another one that occurred to me when I was listening to you, which is that cluster of things that have to do with good governance or good global governance. So, the rise of autocracy, the distrust in government, that whole cluster worries me a little bit because you said we need to solve the climate crisis. Well, solve means coming together, solve means leadership, solve means collaboration. So, that cluster worries me a little bit, too.

Dr. Thomas Homer-Dixon: Yes. And in fact, there's a pernicious feedback loop here, a really nasty feedback loop that is undermining our capacity to address or solve the climate problem. Because – this goes back to work I actually did over 30 years ago, that is now starting to come back into the forefront of people's minds, I think – these deep stresses, like climate stresses, actually tend to induce conflict, weaken institutions, they can weaken governments, they suck capital out of the system that has to be used, for instance, to repair infrastructure or damage from extreme events. And to the extent that they reduce economic growth, and climate change is definitely having an impact on economic growth. They worsen the zero-sum competitions between groups, between various stakeholders and interest groups within societies. All that makes it harder ultimately for us to develop the cooperation around solving the climate change problem.

So, this is a feedback loop that I identified back in the 1990s in my work on the ingenuity gap. There's a group now at the University of Exeter, and Chatham House in the UK that calls this derailment risk, as in derailing a train.

[00:48:29 Dr. Thomas Homer-Dixon appears full screen.] 

Dr. Thomas Homer-Dixon: And it's essentially the same argument. And it's really heartening to see that other folks are starting to recognize the power of this pernicious feedback loop where things like climate change are actually undermining our ability to address the problem of climate change. That is something that we need to understand much better and see if we can get ahead of.
The standard neoclassical economic response to these problems in the past is, well, you have a scarcity induced by climate change. There's a shortage of food, or something like that, prices will adjust and that will stimulate incentives and initiatives and entrepreneurship, and you'll get a flow of new ideas and problem solutions and technologies to respond to the underlying scarcity.
Our argument, the argument of the Exeter Group and the argument I was making before, is that in some cases it can actually weaken your ability to adapt and respond, not strengthen your ability to adapt and respond. And we need to address that pernicious feedback loop as quickly as possible.

[00:49:40 Split screen: Caroline Pitfield and Dr. Thomas Homer-Dixon appear in video chat panels.] 

Caroline Pitfield: Also, here you're saying we need to work against our innate optimism bias. I want to give you the chance to go back to the question of research, research gaps and models, because you did mention that you've got more to share there. But before I invite you to do that, I want to just remind people to share their questions,

[00:49:58 Caroline Pitfield appears full screen.] 

Caroline Pitfield: because we will have about half an hour for Q and A after this, and I want to remind them how they do that. So, if you do have questions, please share them with us now. Click on the little bubble icon at the top right corner of the webcast interface. Ideally, we'd have a couple good to go when I stop exercising my facilitator's privilege.

So, I would go back again to that question about – a couple of questions. What research gaps do we have? What kind of tools are you working with that might help us solve those research gaps? What do we need to do, in that regard, to really address this cluster of problems, or this problem?

[00:50:35 Dr. Thomas Homer-Dixon appears full screen.] 

Dr. Thomas Homer-Dixon: Yes. So, in some sense, fundamentally this polycrisis research is a foresight exercise, developing better probabilistic estimates of what the future is going to look like. And there are lots of foresight methodologies out there, some used within the Canadian Government. There are cross cutting foresight groups like Policy Horizons. A lot of the departments have their own internal small foresight groups. I think that the tools that are being used for the most part – and this is not to disparage or depreciate anything that anybody's doing. And I think, for instance, the work of Policy Horizons is enormously important and it's just excellent work – but I think we need new tools. And at the Cascade Institute we're trying to develop those tools. And I can just mention very quickly, if we can bring up the methods slide for just a moment, what we're doing at the Cascade Institute.

[00:51:31 Split screen: Dr. Thomas Homer-Dixon and slide, as described.]

Dr. Thomas Homer-Dixon:  This is a teeny bit technical, but I think it will be of interest to people. Is the method slide up?

Caroline Pitfield: Yes.

Dr. Thomas Homer-Dixon:  Yes. Good. So, we're adopting or starting to apply a method called Cross Impact Balance assessment. So, let's just go two slides ahead and you'll see the front cover of an article that was published by a German scholar Wolfgang – whoa, that's too far.

[00:52:05 Split screen: Dr. Thomas Homer-Dixon and slide, as described.]

Dr. Thomas Homer-Dixon:  There you go. Wolfgang Weimer-Jehle. This one was published in 2006. He's published a lot since then. He's the pioneer of this approach. It allows for the aggregation of very large amounts of what you would call fuzzy data or expert elicited information about the nature of how systems work.

So, when you're dealing with something like a polycrisis, you're trying to integrate the global economic system; the food system; the energy system; the transport system; the geopolitical system; various regime types around the world, just an enormous amount of stuff. Now any one expert would have an understanding of one bit of these systems. [That] maybe would know, after decades of work and research and following what's going on in the world, that when something happens in this part of the system, they understand that something else happens over here. They can say, with a high probability, that these two things are connected together. But they don't know very much about what's happening elsewhere across all these systems, perhaps nothing at all.

So, what this Cross Impact Balance method allows one to do is bring all that diverse knowledge from experts together, all that intuition into one large model. Let's go to the next slide.

[00:53:23 Split screen: Dr. Thomas Homer-Dixon and slide, as described.]

Dr. Thomas Homer-Dixon:  And I'm not going to go further than this matrix and it looks terrible. Actually, let's go to the next slide and we'll leave it on the next one. There's going to be a French version and then I think there's French version. I'm just amazed that folks can do this, do the translations.

[00:53:42 Split screen: Dr. Thomas Homer-Dixon and slide, as described.]

Dr. Thomas Homer-Dixon:  Let's just leave it on this slide for a moment. I'm not going to get into the details here, but what you can see on the left-hand side surrounded by the blue line is a series of basically variables that describe the macro state of the global system: climate; energy; global food production. And then, within each of those variables, are discrete states: highly Nonlinear climate in 2030; non-linear stable. And this is just the very first attempt. We're about to produce what we call PolyCrisis Model 2.0, which will have a larger number of state variables.

Each one of the numbers in these sub matrices that you see represents a possible relationship between a particular state of one input variable and a particular state of one output variable. Across the top you can have exactly the same variables with exactly the same states. And I'm not going to get into the details of how we generate these numbers, but they're all grounded in specific expert judgments. They are, for those of you who know statistics, Bayesian assessments of one's confidence of a particular relationship between the two variables. This is the kind of stuff where we could use expert elicited information and plug it into this matrix.

We can leave these slides aside for a moment and then I'll just tell you what the punchline is. Here's the French version and then we can pull out of the slides. The punchline is that by about next spring we are going to have PCM 2.0 up online.

[00:55:22 Dr. Thomas Homer-Dixon appears full screen.] 

Dr. Thomas Homer-Dixon: Everybody will be able to see how we arrived at the judgments for the specific numbers. So, every one of those numbers, you'll be able to roll over it and see what the justification is for it. The way the analysis is done, the math that's applied to these numbers will be very clear. And what this method allows you to do is identify where the system is most likely going to settle, what the interactions between all these systems are in a way that produces a stability zone or maybe multiple stability zones.

So, some of those stability zones can be really bad news. In fact, this particular matrix generates there are almost 14,000 different possible combinations of these different states. It generates one highly stable zone, and it's not a very happy one in 2030. It looks like today's world, except worse. But it also generates 12 or so ones that are not quite as stable. But where we could go, they're shallower basins of attraction, and six of those are relatively positive.

[00:56:21 Overlaid text on screen: Thomas Homer Dixon; Executive Director, Cascade Institute, Royal Roads University, British Columbia. / Directeur general, Institut Cascade, Université Royal Roads, Colombie-Britannique.]

Dr. Thomas Homer-Dixon: And the thing about this approach is that it helps you identify pathways through this highly complex landscape of all this stuff interacting that can take you from where we are now, to one of those more stable basins. What kind of policy tweaks, what kind of things you'd have to change within the system across multiple ministries in Canada or at the global level to actually get ourselves to a good place as opposed to a bad place. We think this is going to be a phenomenally powerful tool. There are only about 50 people in the world right now who know how to use it effectively, but we want to make it widely usable within the next year.

[00:56:57 Split screen: Caroline Pitfield and Dr. Thomas Homer-Dixon appear in video chat panels.] 

Caroline Pitfield: Thanks very much for that. I do see we have some questions from the audience and some of these might touch a little bit of what we're talking about now. So, for instance, one of the questions for you here, Tad, is how does futurology and forecasting come into the picture and maybe how does this tool interact with other people in these disciplines working together?

[00:57:20 Dr. Thomas Homer-Dixon appears full screen.] 

Dr. Thomas Homer-Dixon: Right. Well, most foresight exercises right now are scenario based and involve eliciting information through some kind of process, a Delphi process or the like, from experts and then telling stories, narratives about the future. That can be very useful, but there's an inevitable availability bias. Your stories about the future tend to reflect what you understand right now. And we have some evidence of extraordinary availability bias in the world economic forums risk analysis report in one of our assessments in the introduction of polycrisis analysis. I think what this particular approach, the Process Impact Balance Approach, allows us to do is break away from and separate ourselves a bit from that connection to the immediate past and look for combinations of factors that we might not otherwise see or that experts aren't recognizing.

It also allows us to identify these self-reinforcing feedback loops, what complexity scientists call positive feedback loops. These aren't good feedback loops. They're ones that are destabilizing because they reinforce each other. I tell my team look for the positive feedbacks. And a lot of them aren't particularly visible. I showed one in my presentation with the pandemic and the healthcare system. What's going to be useful in foresight is trying to see where those positive feedbacks could kick in before they actually start to kick in. Like that one that I identified between a pandemic and the healthcare system was entirely foreseeable but, for the most part, it was not foreseen. The healthcare worker burnout and how that was going to ultimately aggravate the pandemic. And I think we could do a better job of using some of these new modelling technologies to complement, not to replace, but to complement existing foresight approaches.

And the last thing I'd say is there are other more quantitative approaches. This Process Impact Balance Approaches, I call it quasi quantitative. It's sort of fuzzy database. They are approaches like system dynamics or general equilibrium models that are used by economists, by people doing integrated assessment models on climate change impacts. I think we need to figure out how we can couple these things together and kind of hand the baton from one approach to another. The Cross Impact Balance approach is very much a kind of coarse-grained picture of the whole. It's what Murray Gell-Mann, the famous physicist, would call a crude look at the whole. That's very useful. But then sometimes you have to dive down into specific parts of the system, the economy and the otherwise, and do much more specific modelling. And that's where something like system dynamics can come in.

[01:00:24 Split screen: Caroline Pitfield and Dr. Thomas Homer-Dixon appear in video chat panels.] 

Caroline Pitfield: Thank you so much for that. One thing you said in particular really stuck with me, which is the need to break away from what we already know, or to break away from that availability bias, that we tell ourselves stories based on what happened before, but based on what we've already seen, that breaking away from that so important to see those things we otherwise wouldn't see.

And it does maybe relate to another question we have from the audience here, which is with respect to the use of AI in the space. So, a suggestion may be that given the complexity, the interrelation of stresses, the triggers, the crises, the analysis by AI may be the only way we can get beyond our own limited capacity to mentally deal with the scope of the problem. The reason I'm tying it to the though the availability problem is AI does have some of those problems too, that is based on what we already know.

So, AI and this work, how do those two fit together in your work or in your view of the polycrisis?

[01:01:21 Dr. Thomas Homer-Dixon appears full screen.] 

Dr. Thomas Homer-Dixon: So, I think there's enormous potential for using AI in this space. And we're going to generate PolyCrisis Model 2.0, PCM 2.0, this spring without using AI. But I want to bring some AI experts into the process to see how we do it and to see what parts of it can be automated.

So, these are, as I said, these are Bayesian judgments. Each one of these numbers represents a Bayesian judgment about the potential influence of one state and one system on a particular state of another system. So, a Bayesian judgment is basically a confidence level and a particular hypothesis about a relationship between the two states. And it should be possible to train AI to look for, in a sense to scan existing data, to look for the best judgment about confidence between two states. Or perhaps even to do a better job of disaggregating the system variables, the kind of global stress analysis.

I would have been skeptical, but I went to the Geoffrey Hinton Lecture last night here in Toronto and listened to the extraordinary progress in artificial intelligence which is leaps and bounds beyond what folks were expecting, even the leading experts in the field just a couple of years ago. We're starting to see what experts call superhuman intelligence. Intelligence beyond anything that any one individual can produce. Nonetheless, I think it's going to be a while before we remove human beings from this entirely.

And you've got to remember that – I think of somebody like Tom Friedman, who is the New York Times reporter who I happen to know a bit, and Mr. Friedman's knowledge of the Middle East, who's been studying it for decades. And Tom would say, when this kind of thing happens over here, then I expect that to happen over there. That's essentially a neural net. He's trained his neural net with pattern recognition over decades to have that intuition. AI is not going to pick that up. We actually need to get people like Tom Friedman and other experts to actually argue over the number that goes into the cross-impact balance.

One thing I should say, these matrices will be entirely corrigible. In other words, they'll be open. People can look at them. If they don't like the numbers, they can change them. They can run the software and do their own sensitivity analysis. So, unlike something like the World 3 model that has under lain many global approaches. For instance, going all the way back to Limits to Growth, which is in differential calculus, this is going to be entirely open, open sourced. And I think that's going to be really exciting. People will be able to do their own research in a sense and understand what the results are. To do their own sensitivity testing.

[01:04:13 Split screen: Caroline Pitfield and Dr. Thomas Homer-Dixon appear in video chat panels.] 

Caroline Pitfield: Sounds like we may need to have another public service dig in in a year's time when you launch it.

Dr. Thomas Homer-Dixon: Exactly.

Caroline Pitfield: Maybe staying on the topic of technology generally, another question here, which is what impact does new technology have both on helping but also on making the stresses and triggers worse in the global polycrisis?

Dr. Thomas Homer-Dixon: Well, it's a truism to say that every technology has two sides, benefits as well as harms.

[01:04:43 Dr. Thomas Homer-Dixon appears full screen.] 

Dr. Thomas Homer-Dixon: But, having studied this stuff for decades, going all the way back to my PhD work at MIT, I don't think it's the case that the harms and benefits are always equal. There are some technologies that are biased towards benefits and some that are biased towards harms. In some cases, it might very much be a, on the one hand, on the other hand thing. And unfortunately, it's hard to know how you adjudicate these differences and develop policy to accentuate the benefits and reduce the harms in the absence of competent government, competent states. And unfortunately, around the world we're seeing a kind of broad-based rejection of the role of government in solving problems. And it's particularly virulent in some parts of the world. I think in some communities south of the border, for example, that government is just a waste of time, it's useless, it sucks resources out of the system through its taxes and these elites are incompetent.

One of the issues, of course, is that as our problems have become harder in the world, it is true that our technocratic elites have become less successful in addressing them. And outsiders look at it and say, well, you're not doing your job, you're supposed to be taking care of us. And why are we giving you all this wealth and power and status in our system if you're not taking care of us? So, go away, let's get rid of government.

But when it comes to stuff like AI, and that was a punchline at the presentation last night at the Hinton Lecture, we actually do need regulation. We do need governments involved, very competent government involvement in trying to accentuate the benefits and decrease the harms. We're not going to solve the climate change problem in the absence of competent government. We'll get an explosion of various bits and pieces of technology. But this has to be a globally coordinated solution with lots of governmental involvement at the national level, at the global level. And the same with zoonotic viral disease. Those are two examples, by the way, climate change and zoonotic viral disease, of problems that have to be solved globally or they won't be solved at all.

And unfortunately, the evolution of human institutions and human civilizations seems to be away from that kind of collaboration. This goes back to what I was talking about before this pernicious feedback. As we get angrier and more scared, we tend to pull away from the institutions that actually will help us address these problems. That's not a happy story, but I can only say, one hopes that there's a broader recognition of the critical role of government across our societies in the future.

[01:07:42 Caroline Pitfield appears full screen.] 

Caroline Pitfield: Yes, global regulation has always been a challenge. And I think as we see multilateral institutions playing a role differently these days, that question does become –

[01:07:53 Split screen: Caroline Pitfield and Dr. Thomas Homer-Dixon appear in video chat panels.] 

Dr. Thomas Homer-Dixon: Yes, multilateralism either seems naive or it's now kind of a pejorative term. You throw it out there as almost like a swear word, oh, it's just multilateralism, you know.

Caroline Pitfield: Absolutely. It's unfortunate. One of the questions we just got, which I think you've touched on in your answer, but is, have we lost the ambition we need to confront the dimensions of the polycrisis? And I think a little bit of what you said did suggest that at least governments maybe need to take it up again. They need to feel the full power of their mandate and do more in some of these spaces, not directly on the polycrisis per se, but on these various other components, whether it's regulation or whether it's AI. Maybe we have lost our ambition a little bit.

Dr. Thomas Homer-Dixon: Yes. So, two parts to this answer. I'm going to start expansive and then I'll get a bit more specific about what I think governments should do.

[01:08:53 Dr. Thomas Homer-Dixon appears full screen.] 

Dr. Thomas Homer-Dixon: The expansive answer is that this is a – and this isn't very satisfying – but we just have to recognize that this is a species transition we're going through at the global level. The 8.5 billion of us will probably peak out at 9.5 to 10 billion and then start to decline very quickly. But this is what E.O. Wilson, the famous Harvard entomologist, called a bottleneck. We're squeezing through an exceptionally difficult period of material and technological transition and demographic transition this century, and it's generating an enormous amount of turbulence. And bluntly, I'm a conflict theorist. That's where I started out and that's ultimately why I'm working in this area. There's going to be a lot of violence around the world because of the disruption involved.

That could be, though, again, the expansive answer, the more optimistic side is that – and this is what I tell my children who are 19 and 16 right now – that it will create opportunities for some more radical changes and radical reforms in our systems. This is something that I labelled in one of my earlier books, Catagenesis, a process of breakdown and then rebirth and reconstruction. This goes back to the work of folks like Buzz Holling, the famous Canadian ecologist, and the Resilience Alliance. Coming out of the Austrian School of Economics, Schumpeter's notion of creative destruction. You need a crisis sometimes to break down the sclerosis and create opportunities for fundamental change. And that's where ideas that maybe people are experimenting with in various communities or within various Governments and various policy circles, may have opportunities. Those ideas may have opportunities to flourish that they don't have otherwise now.

So, what we see in the world right now isn't working very well. So, when my children are particularly despairing, I tend to say, well, it's got to break before you can fix it. And we're going through a breaking process right now and it's going to be scary and terrifying, but nonetheless, this is how all complex systems ultimately adapt. They have crisis moments and then they reconfigure themselves to adjust to the new environment.

So, that's the broader answer. The more specific answer is I think the policy community and government needs to do three things. We need to focus on three areas. Foresight, resilience, and flexibility. Because I was thinking about this question and what people need to hear and would want to hear. There is a role for government. We need to collectively get better. And I see the foresight thing, it's not just in government, but it's a broader societal enterprise. We need to collectively get better at foresight. Right now, Policy Horizons does great work, but I mean, it was just moved outside the city, among other things. It's out there near the train station. It was originally, in the earlier incarnation, part of the Privy Council Office. I think these abilities and skills need to be at the centre of government. They need to be just down the hall from the most senior decision makers in government. And they need to have the capacity and be resourced to be expansive in sense, not just be on demand and on command in response to particular questions that a minister might have, but to be exploring for things that people may not be thinking about yet but may turn out to be incredibly important. And I know Policy Horizons does some of that very well, but I think we need to amplify that capacity.

So, the resilience thing comes right out of that. Because resilience is about making us better able to respond to contingencies or eventualities that shock the system and use those shocks as ways of creating that positive change I was talking about before. Now, resilience is a term that's used all over the place right now. It's embedded in lots of policy. I just don't think we do it very well, in part because it's not really well informed currently by foresight. You have to have a sense for what the possibilities are in order to be resilient to those possible shocks. So, foresight and resilience are very closely coupled together.

And then the third thing is, and this is the hardest thing, I think, for our policy community and for government is this notion of flexibility. Because no matter how good your foresight is and how much of resiliency [is] baked into your institutions with your buffering capacity and the like, surprises are going to happen. They're going to be unknown unknowns, or what now the military in the United States calls "Unk-Unks". You don't even know what questions to ask in a lot of cases. Things will just happen out of the blue. And government needs the ability to just to pivot, to reallocate resources quickly, to experiment.

And also – and this is really hard. I mentioned this in the Manion Lecture back in 2011 in the National Arts Centre, and you could just see the folks there crossing their arms – have to be willing to fail and learn from failure, because it's the failures where we learn the most. We know from our personal lives that it's our failures that have taught us the most. Government is terrible at this. So, that flexibility means experimentation. It means willingness to learn from failure. It means a nimbleness and responsiveness to change, which is kind of anathema to this proceduralization of government that we impose everywhere rules, and the clarity of rules. So, this is a profound cultural challenge that I think government faces, but it's one that we have to address.

[01:15:14 Split screen: Caroline Pitfield and Dr. Thomas Homer-Dixon appear in video chat panels.] 

Caroline Pitfield: Yes, I'm a big fan of the positive failure, learning to fail thing. There are so many other questions, but I have one which is about catagenesis, because I think that's an interesting concept, and it does relate to foresight, resilience, flexibility, all these things.

Some might say we've had quite a few pretty significant crises in the last little while that could lead to quite significant change in terms of how we do things. Well, the pandemic in particular had a lot of impacts on how we do things. But there is a tendency to not stick with the new normal. There is a tendency to snap back to what we're comfortable with. There is a tendency to want to go back to what we knew. How do you fight against that? How do you recognize the positive part of catagenesis and not be uncomfortable or not be keen to return to what was before?

[01:16:15 Dr. Thomas Homer-Dixon appears full screen. Overlaid text on screen: Thomas Homer Dixon; Executive Director, Cascade Institute, Royal Roads University, British Columbia. / Directeur general, Institut Cascade, Université Royal Roads, Colombie-Britannique.]

Dr. Thomas Homer-Dixon: Well, sometimes, if the breakdown process is bad enough, there's not anything really to go back to. So, to be blunt, that's what happened with the Bretton Woods Institution after the Second World War and the United Nations. I mean, the Bretton Woods Institution laid the foundation for 60, 70 years of the most extraordinary prosperity that humankind has ever known. And the United Nations, for all its awards and everything, has done actually a lot of good in the world. The most vigorous economies in the world after the Second World War were Germany and Japan. And that was largely because their infrastructure had been destroyed and the sclerotic and, in some ways, really pernicious internal social structures had been wrecked.

So, sometimes you can't go back, but I also think that even in those cases where you do get kind of a reversion to the status quo ante, that human beings do learn, even though sometimes they try everything else first and then, oh, okay, I guess we've got to change. I think the received wisdom about the pandemic right now is that that was a lost opportunity. And yet I want to just point out a couple of things that make it, in the larger picture of human evolution, what an extraordinary phenomenon.

So, between early March 2020 and about the end of March 2020, half the human population locked down. In that period of time, the concept of social/physical distancing went global and changed people's behaviour all over the planet. There has never been such a significant change in such a large percentage of the behaviour of the human population in so short a time in the history of the species. And that was possible because of the extraordinary connectivity. It saved, unquestionably, tens of millions of lives. Just those changes in social behaviour. Deaths would have exceeded well over 100 million people in the absence of these changes. And we're probably at around 30 million or so.

And that's coupled with something else, another positive story. Within two days of the Chinese downloading the molecular structure for the RNA of the SARS CoV2 virus, both Pfizer and Moderna had crunched those data in their computer and had come up with the morphology of vaccine molecule within two days. So, it was quite a while before the vaccine was developed and tested. It took a certain amount of time, but I think we reached the 40% threshold of vaccination of the human population within 24 months. Now, it was unfair. Rich people were vaccinated before poor people. A lot of people still aren't properly vaccinated. But the record for vaccinating 40% of the human population prior to this pandemic was 80 years. We got there in two.

So, those are pretty remarkable changes, and they happen almost despite all the contention and the grumbling and everything. So, there is something new in this world and the capacity to innovate and respond and to learn that we haven't seen previously. So, those are reasons for optimism, reasons for hope.

[01:19:36 Split screen: Caroline Pitfield and Dr. Thomas Homer-Dixon appear in video chat panels.] 

Caroline Pitfield: So, we're almost end of time, and I have unfortunately not been able to get to all the questions. One very quick question for you, a point of clarification from someone looking for clarification on definitions. So, very quickly, so we have time for some closing remarks from you. Are the terms polycrisis, meta crisis and multi crisis interchangeable? Can you answer that quickly? I thought maybe you could.

Dr. Thomas Homer-Dixon: No, no. And in fact, you'll see if you go to the Cascade Institute website, we have a blog called Chalkboard and you'll see a conversation about this. Various people have introduced other concepts. For instance, the meta crisis concept has been introduced because the person who has argued for it, whose name escapes me right now, has suggested that the real problem here is a kind of deep ideational sort of cultural or belief system or worldview system misalignment between humanity and the nature of the world. Okay. People have different diagnoses, and they use different terminology. The terms are not, when you get into them, synonymous. If you go to polycrisis.org, I'm pretty sure that you'll see this question addressed directly in the learning journey comparing the various ways of labelling these phenomena. Ultimately, the polycrisis concept will stick around if it's useful for people, and we're trying at the Cascade Institute to make sure it's useful.

[01:21:02 Caroline Pitfield appears full screen.] 

Caroline Pitfield: So, did you hear I was going to give you the opportunity to share closing words with public servants? We haven't covered everything that is of interest. We haven't covered how do we break down the silos. We haven't covered the role of social inequality. But if you could give some quick closing words of wisdom to public servants looking to make a difference in this space, what would they be?

[01:21:22 Dr. Thomas Homer-Dixon appears full screen.] 

Dr. Thomas Homer-Dixon: Well, both of those are really important issues and so maybe I'll have to come back and address them, because I think I could address them. But I would urge folks who are interested to investigate the topic and start to become more comfortable with some of these complex systems ideas. They provide you with very powerful tools to understand what is going on in your day-to-day work.

And, when introduced into the public service, I think we will find that it just functions better, that there's more understanding of the need for and more incentive to communicate across these silos and to bring people together, different kinds of knowledge together to deal with problems that are proliferating across the silos. If the problems are moving across silos, then we have to collaborate and work across silos and break down some of those institutional boundaries within academe and also within government. And the tools that help us do that, to get started, are complex systems tools. So, I'd urge people to, if they have any space in their heads in any moment of time, to go to the, for instance, the Cascade Institute website and start to become familiar with some of these ways of looking at the world that are particularly powerful.

[01:22:36 Split screen: Caroline Pitfield and Dr. Thomas Homer-Dixon appear in video chat panels.] 

Caroline Pitfield: That's wonderful. Well, we do have 1,000 people listening today who are interested in understanding these concepts better, so I think your advice will be well heeded. That did occur to me, too, when you were talking about Horizons, that we should mainline this stuff. That everybody should be thinking about this and not just small clusters of people.

But that does conclude our time together. I want to thank you so much, Tad, for that. It was a really wonderful conversation. Very, very grateful for all of the insights you shared and all your wonderful answers to the questions we got from the audience. Thank you as well to the audience for being with us here today.

[01:23:12 Caroline Pitfield appears full screen. Text on screen: Caroline Pitfield, Executive Faculty Member, Canada School of Public Service. / Caroline Pitfield, Membre-cadre du corps professoral, École de la fonction publique du Canada.]

Caroline Pitfield: I would like to invite anybody who wants to provide us with feedback. You're going to receive an evaluation form. We actually use that feedback to make sure that our programming is as good as possible. It's very, very important to us, so please take a moment to fill it out for us.

I would also like to tell you that we do have an upcoming event, it builds a little bit on this one, December 2nd. It's called Democracy. It's part of our Democracy in Practice series, and it's going to be on incivility in the public sphere.

So, I don't know if you'll be there listening to that one, Tad, but we'll be thinking of you and everything we learned from you today. So, I want to thank you once again for an absolutely fascinating discussion on behalf of the School, on behalf of myself, and on behalf of everybody in the audience. So, thank you.

Dr. Thomas Homer-Dixon: Thank you.

[01:23:56 The CSPS animated logo appears on screen.]

[01:24:00 The Government of Canada wordmark appears and fades to black.]