Five Foundational Sectors of Civilization
= an Adaptive Cycle analysis
Discussion
Nafeez Ahmed:
"James Arbib and Tony Seba ... categorise the production system of a civilisation into five “foundational sectors”: how we power ourselves (energy), extract and make things (materials), eat (food), get around (transport) and create and share knowledge (information). All these sectors involve harnessing energy to supply a society’s core material needs (Arbib and Seba, 2020).
A civilisation’s “organising system” (OS) determines how these material capabilities are deployed: the knowledge and cultural organisational forms by which those tools are designed, owned, distributed, deployed, regulated and governed. Encompassing models of thought, belief systems, social systems, political systems, economic systems and governance structures which impact ways of thinking, seeing and making decisions, the OS determines whether a civilisation successfully manages the production system, shaping the final design or “phase” of the civilisation. Societies which failed to adapt organisationally to the new material capabilities of their production system and emerging environmental conditions faced collapse, while those that succeeded broke through to new vistas of possibility (Arbib and Seba, 2020). ... A civilisation’s trajectory through the adaptive cycle can be measured using empirical data on the phase transition dynamics across its foundational systems.
...
As foundational technologies scale, they grow exponentially as part of the first growth stage of the adaptive cycle of a society or civilisation. As they saturate the market, they increasingly define the material structure and capabilities of a civilisation. Ultimately, a civilisation’s organising system decisions determine the extent to which it can manage, regulate and distribute the benefits. The system reaches a peak during the second stage of conservation, at which point it reaches a period of homeostasis balancing out positive and negative feedback loops within the system. This equilibrium becomes unbalanced in the context of disruptive forces such as obstructed energy flows, geopolitical perturbations (Ahmed, 2017) or new technologies of production which can potentially outcompete prevailing industries. As the system moves out of equilibrium and enters the third release stage, incumbent industries decline along with the political, economic, cultural, ideological and ethical structures that evolved to manage them. The deepening obsolescence of civilisation’s production-OS nexus clears the way for a new production-OS nexus to emerge in the fourth stage of reorganisation. This final stage either leads the civilisation to degenerate, leading to its collapse or paves the way for a new adaptive cycle. If successful, the new cycle will consist of a completely new system phase, with distinctive rules and properties encompassing both radically new technologies and radically different organising structures"
The Adaptive Cycle analysis
Nafeez Ahmed:
"The data below highlights how human civilisation is now experiencing critical phase transitions
across its foundational material systems creating a need to both engineer these systems
optimally while adapting our cultural systems accordingly. Thus, the ultimate direction of
these processes remains highly uncertain; their systemic interconnections and interactions
will also drive irreducible uncertainties; and as their direction of travel will remain hotly
contested among different social and interest groups, their outcomes remain ambiguous.
Stage 1: growth/exploitation
The initial growth stage of the global adaptive cycle that defines industrial civilisation began around the 15th century. British geographers Simon Lewis and Mark Maslin put the exact date as 1610, coinciding with an “unusual drop in atmospheric CO2 captured in Antarctic ice cores”, resulting from “vegetation regrowth on abandoned farmlands following the deaths of 50 million indigenous Americans (mostly from smallpox brought by Europeans)”. This was due to the colonial annexation of the Americas by Europe – an “essential precursor to the Industrial Revolution” (Lewis and Maslin, 2015).
Two centuries later, America’s textiles industry combined with the trans-Atlantic slave-trade played crucial roles in the vast accumulation of capital in England which facilitated the industrial revolution (Ahmed, 2009). This culminated in a dramatic shift to carbon-intensive energy and transport systems relying on exploitation of coal and steel manufacturing (Herschthal and Brooke, 2024).
This process was enabled by a transformation in Europe’s cultural and information systems. Previously, pre-industrial Europe was constrained by an information monopoly associated with church and state, linked with feudalist and pre-capitalist social property relations (Teschke, 2003). Manuscripts made from animal skin controlled by elite groups were the primary mode of written communication. But this monopoly was rapidly disrupted by the invention of the printed book in the 1,400s, which was an order of magnitude cheaper and more efficient. Manuscripts became obsolete within decades. Book printing undermined control of information and drove the emergence of a new educated class operating outside the religious establishment (Buringh and Zanden, 2009).
This information phase transition paved the way for the mass distribution of new ideas. Crucial interactions between European empires and colonised subjects facilitated the transmission of ideals of freedom and liberty from colonial peripheries into imperial centres (Gopal, 2019). Islamic civilisation, in particular, was a key conduit for transmission of scientific ideas and methods into Europe (Saliba, 2011). This paved the way for key cultural paradigm shifts: the reformation, the separation of church and state and the scientific revolution and enlightenment. All this galvanised the emergence of a new understanding of reality, and new visions for social organisation around democracy and free market capitalism. An information disruption impacting Europe’s OS was thus instrumental in catalysing the industrial revolution into the emergence of industrial civilisation (Arbib and Seba, 2020).
Stage 2: conservation
From 1945 to the 1970s, global industrial civilisation appeared to move into the second conservation stage of the adaptive cycle. This period is widely considered the “golden age” of capitalism, which perhaps can be designated as the emerging “peak” of the global system before its transition to neoliberal capitalism.
During this conservation stage, the system became increasingly stable, its structures adapted to a set of prevailing external conditions. In the period 1980–2000, circumstantial evidence of this can be found in dominant perceptions (Van den Berg, 2004) that extant systems had reached a peak of progress believed to become self-perpetuating through the inexorable dominance of key organising structures, namely, liberal democracy and capitalism (Fukuyama, 2012).
Prevailing technological and cultural structures became more defined and articulated, including centralised control of fossil fuel resources (energy), global mobility networks powered by the internal combustion engine and rail premised on these energy sources (transport), industrialised agriculture and livestock farming (food), centralised control of mass media amidst the computer age (information) and complex economies of scale introduced by industrial manufacturing and distribution (materials) across national borders (Ahmed, 2010). The organisational systems in question comprised neoliberal capitalism (economy), homo economicus (ideology of human nature), consumerist materialism (culture), scientific materialism (worldview), liberal democracy (politics), the United Nations system (international politics) and NATO (international military) – among others (Ahmed, 2011).
Stage 3: release
From 2000–2020, the global system underwent an escalating convergence of planetary- scale crises, including intensifying economic and financial crises, environmental crises, energy crises and food crises: a series of escalating polycrises. These multiple, simultaneous phase transitions signalled a shift into the third release stage of the adaptive cycle. The convergence of these planetary-scale crises was distinct from previous waves of crisis which were either regional in nature or concentrated in a particular sector (e.g. geopolitics or oil).
Figure 5 identifies the five stages of a collapse feedback loop triggered by Earth System Disruption (ESD). This leads to various shocks and crises within the human system. If not perceived through a whole systems lens, groups within the system can end up focusing on “symptoms” of crisis rather than the system itself, driving social, political and cultural polarisation that increases risks violence and leading to Human System Destabilisation (HSD). HSD undermines the capacity of the whole system to respond to the root systemic drivers of crisis, which leads to an amplified ESD crisis and, potentially, deepening HSD. Without systems-oriented interventions, this leads to an ESD-HSD feedback loop amplifying the risk of systemic collapse.
The release phase involves an accelerating breakdown of prevailing systems. Their stubborn brittleness prevents them from adapting effectively to rapidly changing environmental conditions. Figure 6 maps out how human activities are at risk of breaching fundamental planetary boundaries, which are an attempt to quantify the stability of key ecosystems that regulate the earth system in a manner that allows human civilisation to survive and thrive. Mounting scientific evidence, particularly the planetary boundaries framework, demonstrates that human activities are at risk of breaching these boundaries across critical ecosystems.
Figure 7 provides an overview of the incredible complexity of numerous interconnected ecosystems at risk of tipping over into dangerous self-reinforcing feedback within just one “planetary boundary” issue, namely, climate change. This research suggests that the risk of triggering irreversible feedback loops leading to an uninhabitable “hothouse earth” scenario is already high (Rockstro¨m et al., 2009; Steffen et al., 2018, 2015).
* Energy and transport.
Climate disruptions are driven by industrial civilisation’s dependence on fossil fuels. Yet prevailing fossil fuel industries are simultaneously experiencing a rapid decline. Most major analysts project that by 2050, global oil
Yet environmental disruption is intimately interrelated with the decline of key technologies across the production system of industrial civilisation. Below, this is examined by focusing on phase transitions in four foundational sectors – energy, transport, food and information.
production will be significantly diminished due to geological supply challenges and fundamental demand shifts (Mayor et al., 2020).
Figure 8 demonstrates the peak and decline of the global energy return on investment (EROI) of fossil fuels during the 20th century, and its projected continued decline. The EROI of oil, gas and coal – which measures the quantity of energy inputs required to extract corresponding energy outputs – peaked around the 1960s before declining rapidly (almost by half) over the past few decades. This process involves increasing production costs being used to generate declining energy returns (Brockway et al., 2019; Court and Fizaine, 2017).
Figure 9 demonstrates the exponential increase in the quantity of energy consumed by the global oil industry during the 20th century, and its projected continued increase. By 2030, the global oil industry will consume about 25% of the energy it produces just to keep producing more energy. By 2050, this will rise to about 50%: an economically and energetically impossible situation (Delannoy et al., 2021). Larger profits from high energy prices have buoyed the industry, temporarily masking the crisis (Rhodes, 2017). This has escalated the costs of conventional transport relying on fossil fuels, which has inflationary effects across the economy and key industries.
Long-term decline in the EROI of global fossil fuels is directly connected to a long-term decline in the rate of global economic growth since the 1970s, combated through excessive financialisation and debt-expansion (Hall, 2017; Murphy, 2014). Especially, visible in the USA, Europe and Japan, this decline marked the end of the postwar economic boom (Hall et al., 2014; Hall and Klitgaard, 2018). Periodic recessionary crises such as the 2008 global financial crash are part of this structural process, becoming longer and larger (Rye and Jackson, 2020). Declining global EROI is thus a fundamental causal factor in worsening trends of recession, stagnation, stagflation and increasing inequality (Jackson and Jackson, 2021). Figure 10 represents how the duration and size of economic recessions have increased over the last century, consistent with the “critical slowing down” of the economy, which is one of the main signs that a dynamical system is moving out of equilibrium and close to a tipping point that could lead to it a point it is unable to recover, and therefore, is forced to adopt a new state. This could suggest the onset of an unprecedented global economic collapse in which the scope for recovery is diminished or negligible.
* Food.
The global food system is reaching critical thresholds due to feedback loops between environmental, energy and economic crises, directly related to industrial forms of agriculture, livestock farming and fishing (Monbiot, 2022). Soil degradation is surpassing the rate of renewal and endangering continued food production growth (Gomiero, 2016). The collapse of biodiversity driven by industrial expansion is manifesting in record deaths of pollinator species (Lever et al., 2014). These are compounded by growing impacts of droughts, heatwaves, floods and other extreme weather events and disasters, heightening risks of simultaneous crop failures across major food baskets (Kornhuber et al., 2023). Rising energy prices are increasing the costs of inputs into industrial food production and distribution (Marshall and Brockway, 2020). Modelling funded by the British Foreign Office suggests the global industrial food system is at risk of collapse within decades (Ahmed, 2015).
* Information.
As these crises escalate, our individual and institutional sense-making capacity is increasingly destabilised. Across civilisation’s OS, major political, economic, cultural, ideological and ethical systems are moving out of equilibrium. The volume of information in the global system has never been higher – but so too are “post-truth” levels of confusion and polarisation due to poor quality information, echo chambers and bias amplification (Barber a, 2020; Milczarek, 2023; Flew, 2020). In politics, once dominant liberal norms and values are widely contested. Political polarisation is at record levels across most democracies (Casal B ertoa and Rama, 2021). Culture wars dominate public discourse, and record numbers of global citizens question the efficacy of representative democracy (Haggard and Kaufman, 2021).
Closed loop filter bubbles on major social platforms increasingly undermine the capacity for self-criticism and error-correction, the flow of accurate information and thereby the overall capacity for societal sense-making (Arora et al., 2022). As conventional group identities of belonging and inclusion are eroded and contested, they are replaced with narrower forms of identity politics premised on extreme ideologies. One hallmark of this process is the mainstreaming of far-right nationalist populism (Flew, 2020).
* Prognosis.
Recognising disparate megatrends as interconnected crises reveals that their mutual escalation is symptomatic of a deeper process: the movement of the global system into the third release stage of the life-cycle of industrial civilisation. The system moves out of equilibrium as dominant technologies of production alongside prevailing social organisational systems enter an accelerating decline. The same process surfaces radical new spaces for systemic and structural innovation visible in many of the same sectors. These trends of innovation and creativity reinforce the conclusion that the release stage is paving the way for a shift into the fourth reorganisation stage of a planetary-scale adaptive cycle. This process, however, has opened up increasing volatility, uncertainty, complexity and ambiguity as incumbent structures weaken – undermining the stability of the prevailing liberal-materialist paradigm – and paving the way for post-liberal and post-materialist cultural and technological order whose precise contours are yet to be determined.
Stage 4: metamorphosis of civilisation
Amidst the incredibly complex interlocking front loops and back loops of interconnected and competing systems, the planetary phase shift framework allows researchers and practitioners to focus on critical leverage points in the system. Compelling evidence that industrial civilisation is moving into the final reorganisation stage of its adaptive cycle can be gleaned from empirical data across foundational sectors of material production, demonstrating simultaneous interconnected phase transitions in energy, transport, food and information. Emerging advancements in material capabilities, however, are creating a widening gap with the industrial-era OS, which is unable to adapt and fracturing as a result.
Across the production system, as the capabilities and performance of key technologies improve exponentially, they undergo exponential decline in costs of production. This accelerates through a self-reinforcing feedback loop driving an increasing rate of market adoption rapidly displacing incumbent technologies (Bond and Butler Sloss, 2022; Seba, 2016).
* Energy and transport.
As prevailing fossil fuel industries decline due to internal technological, economic and geological challenges, they are displaced by new disruptive renewable energy technologies, namely, solar photovoltaics, wind turbines and battery storage. These are experiencing exponential cost declines and exponentially increasing adoption rates (Butler-Sloss et al., 2023). Projecting these cost-curve and adoption rates forward shows that solar, wind and batteries are on track to disrupt, dominate and transform the global energy system, starting with the electricity sector, within the next two to four decades (Way et al., 2022). Figure 11 demonstrates the exponential declines in costs for key renewable energy technologies, namely, solar photovoltaics, wind turbines and battery storage, over a decade. Figure 12 demonstrates the exponential adoption of key renewable energy technologies throughout the first two decades of the 20th century.
Figure 13 projects the global adoption of renewable and solar technologies out to 2060 based on economic competitiveness and shows that solar will dominate global electricity production by 2050 due to economic factors alone. The precise speed and impact of this transformation depends on societal choices: governments, businesses and civil society can delay or accelerate the transition. Economic factors alone will drive solar power to approach global dominance between 2050 and 2060, but this outcome can be obstructed if lack of investment persists in poorer countries (Nijsse et al., 2023). Excessive delays due to regulatory barriers could have dangerous environmental consequences (Arbib et al., 2021).
Without such barriers, solar power, renewables and electric vehicles (EV) could reach global dominance as early as the 2030s (Mercure et al., 2021). New energy technologies will bring fundamental systemic changes to the operation of the energy system. Figure 14 illustrates the counterintuitive relationship between the deployment of solar and wind generating capacity and battery storage, whereby supersizing generation capacity allows the quantity of batteries required for grid parity to be reduced dramatically.
If designed poorly, the new energy system might produce less energy at higher cost, and with destructive environmental impacts amidst destabilising materials bottlenecks. But if optimised, the cheapest possible energy system will involve supersizing solar and wind generating capacity by at least three times existing demand (Desing et al., 2019; Perez, 2014), while reducing battery storage by up to 90% (Perez and Perez, 2023) – dramatically reducing materials intensity (Perez et al., 2016).
This planetary renewable energy system will potentially enable citizens everywhere to produce clean energy “superabundance” at near-zero marginal costs for most times of the year (Dorr and Seba, 2020). This huge energy surplus – as much as ten times what we produce today – could power a global “circular economy” system in which materials are rigorously recycled, (Desing et al., 2019) with the system overall requiring 300 times less materials by weight than the fossil fuel system (Bond, 2021). Potential instabilities and demand gaps (Clack et al., 2017) can be closed through cross-sector energy interconnections (Bogdanov et al., 2021); cross-border grid interconnections (Wu et al., 2021); and using surplus electricity to generate clean fuels (Pfennig et al., 2023).
The energy phase transition is unfolding in tandem with the electrification of transportation. Figure 15 demonstrates that adoption rate in EV has increased exponentially on a global scale over the preceding decade. EVs are experiencing exponential production cost declines, capability improvements and adoption rates on track to achieve market dominance within the next 10–15 years (Arbib and Seba, 2017) and almost certainly by around 2050 (Carlier, 2022), depending on societal choices.
Again, if shoehorned into prevailing transport models, EVs could drive unsustainable levels of energy and materials demand with dangerous environmental and economic consequences. Yet, if deployed to maximise distribution of its benefits, they could have the opposite effect: cost and performance improvements in autonomous driving technology (Olson, 2019) could enable a new model called transport-as-a-service, leading private car ownership to collapse by about 90% – replaced by fleets of privately or publicly-owned autonomous taxis and buses up to ten times cheaper than transport today – as early as the 2030s. (Arbib and Seba, 2017) Figure 16 projects forward the learning rate for autonomous vehicles, suggesting maturation of the technology at current rates of improvement by the mid-2030s. More conservative projections suggest mass adoption of safe and reliable self- driving vehicles between 2040 and 2045 (Litman, 2023).
* Food.
Solar power and electrification of transport could have major benefits for conventional farming (Hailstone, 2023). But the most disruptive food technologies are precision fermentation (PF), which uses the same process used to brew beer to produce vegetable and animal proteins and cellular agriculture (CA) which combines with PF to programme animal proteins. Widely used to produce key food ingredients, PFCA’s costs have dropped exponentially over the past two decades and are set to drop further. Without barriers, this could drive exponential adoption out to the 2030s (Tubb and Seba, 2019).
Figure 17 charts this exponential decline in costs of PF and CA over the preceding decade, and projects forward how these cost declines will continue and drive an exponential growth in adoption.
The main barrier to implementation is expensive fossil fuel dependence. If established without a sufficiently robust renewable energy transition, PFCA would compound environmental destruction and boost carbon emissions. However, if powered by renewables PFCA is at least an order of magnitude more energy and environmentally efficient, using less water, land and fertiliser – enabling the production of nutritious proteins anywhere at an order of magnitude cheaper than today (Leger et al., 2021). Food scientists acknowledge that PF is “projected to completely disrupt traditional animal-based agriculture” (Nielsen et al., 2024). This could potentially free up as much as 2.7 billion hectares land no longer needed for animal farming for rewilding, reforestation, regenerative agriculture and natural carbon sequestration (Arbib et al., 2021).
* Information.
The information sector has already experienced a series of phase transitions through the 20th century, including the smartphone, internet, video streaming and social media. The next major phase transition is from artificial intelligence (AI), most visibly through large language models experiencing exponential cost declines, performance improvements and adoption rates. AI is projected to accelerate performance in the information components of foundational technologies in energy, transport and food (Ahmed, 2023). Yet it is also creating new opportunities for disinformation, warfare and exploitation that could reinforce power and wealth disparities.
Figure 18 illustrates how generative AI is likely to scale exponentially across all significant sectors of civilisation’s production system out to 2045 due to current rates of improvement in costs and performance. Exponential improvements in autonomous robotics are also on track to disrupt manual labour. This is likely to pass a tipping point following the maturation of 3D sensing and mobility in autonomous driving, which will be applicable to other sectors (Dorr, 2022). The disruption of manual labour would, in principle, eliminate the most fundamental limiting factor in economic growth – labour productivity – potentially unleashing a new era of post-scarcity economic productivity. Yet, if this innovation evolves within the incumbent economic paradigm of neoliberal capitalism, such potential abundance could be constrained and monopolised by a highly centralised elite; it might also be aborted before it is able to fully emerge in the context of mass uncontrolled unemployment and the unpredictable social and political consequences."