I remember watching one of the global tech leviathans – I can’t recall whether it was Gates or Jobs, but I’m sure it was one or the other – speaking about what was on the horizon and seeding the concept of business at the speed of thought. To the accompaniment of ‘oohs’ and ‘aghs’ in the audience, he unloaded his conceptual box of tricks via a clicker and big screen. I stared into my own screen with a somewhat ill feeling in the pit of my stomach.

Some of you may recall that I have occasionally expressed the belief that one of the real issues we face as a civilisation is our propensity to lock up wisdom in rest homes. By the time we reach our seventh and eighth decades our view on many things is likely to be profoundly altered. We’ve all heard, ‘Yeah, shit, he/she was a hard bastard/bitch in the early days, but they’re mellowing now.” The perception of a mellowing taking place is a combination of an altering of the physiological state that saps the urge to hunt, procreate and seek power, and a tsunami of life experiences contributing to the evaluation processes. By the time we’re 60 even, our emotions are both richly rewarded and irreparably damaged from what our lives have dished us up. I’m not saying everyone in the Wrinkly Skin Hilton is the font of all answers, but there are plenty in there who would offer a more than worthwhile comment on things…things like the idea of business at speed of thought.

Nature’s mechanism is for wisdom to curb youthful exuberance. We’ve binned that impediment. Today’s world is largely run by the attributes of youth; education, ambition and haste. We’re constantly sold an endless sea of solutions soaked in rivers of PR venom. To the young, and I’m talking sub-45 probably, business at the speed of thought must be the equivalent of a cocaine addict being presented with a glass tray, half a kilo of dust, and a straw like a culvert pipe.

I had a movie recommended to the other week, Don’t Look Up, a black comedy depicting Earth half a year from a planet-killing comet impact and the inability of the inhabitants to either address or act to prevent it. An Earth better equipped in terms of tools to deal with the problem than any civilisation known, yet so intoxicated by the lusts of the natural man they were about as much use as a drunk in a juggling competition.

Obviously, the comet thing was a metaphor for global warming, for which there’s still a huge body of disbelievers. Personally, I’m not much on climate change, but I’m big on global warming. I see them as two distinctly different things. I think having more than nine billion of the solar system’s most greedy, self-obsessed critters with big brains and two opposable thumbs, all living on one small idyllic planet, is unlikely to mean anything great for the environment and the other inhabitants. Unless, of course, we enrich tomorrow’s decisions with the values of those who have learned the lessons that take almost a lifetime to amass.

If only we would spend more time in the rest homes, chatting, laughing, and listening, and less time on Messrs Gates, Jobs, Bezos, Zuckerberg et al’s creations. If we did that we might learn how to use the inventions of the aforementioned folk a little more responsibly. We might be reminded to be wary of fixing problems with the same mechanisms that got us there, that using the $50 billion crisis hand-out to increase personal debt is at some point going to hurt, that living in a way that ensures our children can never afford a home, then feeling momentarily sorry for them, is, in fact, sociopathic.

As one of the sharpest 88-year-olds I’ve ever met said to me recently, “You know? You actually don’t need much.”

Business at the speed of thought. Maybe it is not a bad concept? It just takes 80 years to do the critical portion of the thinking.

All the best

Dave McCoid
Editorial Director