Directed by Graça Castanheira • Documentary • With Braden Allenby • 2013 • 30 minutes
Ten personalities from diverse social and geographical backgrounds reflect on the world and its future. A portrait in multiple voices of contemporary reality, revealing the deep connections that exist between our mental models and the consequences thereof in our present day—for the individual, for life, and for the planet. A series of lessons about our time and the way we live in it.
Episode 10 stars Braden Allenby, the writer and American professor of Law and Civil and Enviromental Engineering. Born in 1950 in Illinois. Professor of Law and Civil and Environmental Engineering at Arizona State University; director and founder of the Center for Earth Systems Engineering and Management and founding member of the Consortium for Emerging Technologies. Co-author of the book The Techno-Human Condition. Braden Allenby introduces us to today's world in all its complexity, revealing the discreet yet powerful connections that exist between the human, natural and technological systems. We currently live integrated in the systems we created; technological objects have become an extension of our body, our personality and our cognition. We inhabit a world ever more dominated by human systems that operate at various levels and are imbricated in the life of individuals and of the planet. This condition has important ethical implications, because stopping is no longer an option for us. Navigating in plain sight in a world with an unfinished design, adapting ourselves to the system as it evolves, will be our non-remediable condition from now on. For Allenby, the future is uncertain, different, more difficult, but fascinating.