Food and innovation

Mention innovations or technology and thoughts immediately fly to smart phones, self driving cars or even air taxis but there has been an equal amazing revolution in our food – fertilisers, irrigation, genetics, machinery, pesticides, herbicides etc which have made a dramatic change to how we grow our food.

In the last eighty years production has increased by 4.5 times – incredible!

This has undoubtedly been good for the food producers but has it been good for society?

No!

The answer is clearly no. We need to develop ways of growing food which will feed our intelligent control system – gut food or what I now call Gbiota™ food – a blend of beneficial biology which will end up in our guts as part of our control system (pro-biotics) and to feed them, with the essential trace minerals and fibre our guts need (pre-biotics).

We simply need to work out how to grow pre and pro-biotics – and that is what the Gbiota project is all about.

Exploiting innovation

The conventional approach for anyone who has an innovation is to find a large company with financial resources and license the technology.

They would go to lengths to protect the intellectual property so they enjoy a neo-monopoly then spend a large amount of money on very clever advertising – which they would recover by the higher prices they can charge from their neo-monopoly position.

This is a formulae which has worked well in the past for both the innovator and the exploiting company and very often the public who has access to improved products – if they have the money to buy them.

Basing a commercialisation strategy for innovations purely based on profits may be beneficial for a few but could be disastrous for humanity. We need to develop commercial strategies which also take into account the benefits to the community and the impact on our planet.

Growing plants  in recycled organic waste to feed our gut brain and change our gut biology is an important technology.  But how we apply this technology will trail blaze better ways of managing innovation for the future.  This could be really significant for how humanity manages the innovation process.

The Anthropocene

Let us look at the history of food.

At first the earth was simply dead, then the microbes came and slowly made the first soil. That took about a billion years but as soon as there was soil the plants came and then the animals and evolution went crazy with the wildest collection of creatures, many massively huge and powerful.

 Then a few million years the humanoids appeared and developed into modern man a few hundred thousand years ago. At first we had virtually no impact on the earth, but then we started to innovate at an ever increasing rate.

Now we live in an era of unprecedented innovation. I am no Luddite opposed to innovation, I was a pioneer of computer aided engineering and was selected as among the top one hundred innovators by the Institute of Engineers.

But I do believe that innovation should benefit the people as a whole and not just make a handful of people and corporation excessively rich by having a neo-monopoly.

This is not simply a question of fairness, it is a question of survival of our species.

 The great challenge facing humanity is how to manage our capacity to innovate for the mutual benefit of humanity and our long term survival – a lesson we should have learned when we let off the first atomic bomb or understood global warming.

We are now in the Anthropocene where human activities can be a real threat to the planet on which we depend for our survival.

Climate change comes to mind but there is a whole range of activities which are a potential threat. Degradation of our soils, draining the aquifers we depend on for water, the availability of essential minerals, plastics and pollution – there is a long list.

 

 

Cyberpunk

 My grand daughter introduced me to cyberpunk which is just pure entertainment but seems a good model to study to develop better ways of understanding how to manage technology.

This is a fictional genre, offered referred to as cyberpunk in which a society is dominated by powerful rulers who control the sophisticated technology.

They use this to dominate the masses in what is a form of a two tier dystopian society of us and them.

While this is just fictional – in the real world society is moving towards this two tier society where technology is used to control the masses.

In the films we rarely see the dominating rulers so we don’t know if they are human or aliens, but we do see the suffering of the humans who are completely dominated by the technology.  Of course, being entertainment there must be a few rebels humans fighting against the dominating class.

 I know it is just fiction but watch films like Blade Runner and Alita, then turn off the screen, or if you are lucky, walk out of the cinema into the real world.

OK we cannot just talk into a pendant on our necklace and a flying taxi appears and whisks us across the city to Auntie Maud’s party.

But we can tap into our smart phone and have a piping hot meal (delivered by a poorly paid and harassed Uber Eats motor bike driver), in an insulated container, which we will later just throw away – but it does taste good.

It is easy to watch dramatic version of this ilk and see this as a warning of why technology should be for the benefit of the community and not a dominant minority.

 

Forward what-food-does

Backward principles-of-gbiota-beds