Net Positive for the Planet – from Beavers to Bionics
The Great Simplification #120 with Tom Chi
Today, I’m pleased to be joined by inventor and investor Tom Chi to take a broad look at the principles guiding innovation and capital - and how we might shift these to be more biophysically aligned in the future. For the past few centuries, our global industrial system has been dominated by growth-based economics without awareness of its dependence on the biosphere - or the waste that it leaves behind.
Tom Chi is the founding partner of At One Ventures, which backs early-stage (Seed, Series A) companies using disruptive deep tech to upend the unit economics of established industries while dramatically reducing their planetary footprint. Previously, Tom was a founding member of Google X where he led the teams that created self-driving cars, deep learning artificial intelligence, wearable augmented reality and internet connectivity expansion.
What would it mean for our technology to be ecologically centered, working in service of and in synergy with complex, biodiverse life on Earth? How can we work within our current financial and governance systems to create initiatives that benefit both ecosystems and economies? More broadly, what cultural shifts could we imagine that move beyond seeing ourselves as simply dependent on ecological systems - but rather as a part of the entangled whole?
In case you missed it…
Last week’s Frankly highlighted the importance of the Strait of Hormuz, a global supply chain choke point where nearly half of the world’s oil available for export travels through on a daily basis. In the midst of high-stakes geo-political events where threats (and misery) from warring nations dominate the discourse, we remain (mostly) energy blind to the bottlenecks that lie at the center of these conflicts, which if disrupted could send our liquid-combustible-fuel dependent economies crashing. Can a heightened awareness of our global system’s dependency on fragile energy supply chains shift our focus away from escalating risks towards deconfliction and peace?
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So, I really hope At One Ventures are paying indigenous elders and permaculture folks very well as consultants when working with ecosystem restoration. I’m not convinced at all by the techno fetishization (actually I’m a bit turned off). If they aren’t changing the incentive structure, I’m sorry, it’s not the good work we need. It’s just more startup hype. The cost/benefit breakdown would need to be waaaay more diverse and inclusive to start getting at these eco-issues. We need more political activism and less engineering.
Ideology can absolutely be constructed via our chosen focal point on particular information in addition to the facts contained in that information. So facts (or stories) by themselves aren’t that helpful if that’s what you think you have. It’s the way we relate information to the patternings we desire (all with our own biased set of values and experiences). So it’s important to admit these values and experiences keeping in mind that we are usually pushing what has worked for us in the past (or those around us) and also pushing against what has not worked for us.
I’m pushing against the engineering mentality because I’ve been there and have done it to momentous effect for a couple large companies, but these solutions always directed people toward a mentality of reductionism with substantial blind spots to the underlying resource stack. To boot, the companies substantially underpaid me compared to the automation value I produced for them. So yeah, I’m a bit angry at corporate hierarchical design. Does this bias nullify my perspective? I guess it depends on how much it resonates with others.
Tom, you sound like a nice guy, but you need to be more transparent about the outsized benefits you’re receiving for stroking the egos of capitalists in order to build trust with those on the ground. The more you align with a perverse incentive structure, the worse the conditions are for those struggling to end perverse incentives. It may mean you have to give up some things like multiple properties in the most beautiful places in the world—smallest violin, etc. Trust me, there’s plenty of intellectual stimulation in the lower working classes, so no worries there. The difference is that you will be less focused on clever tech and more focused on caring closely for others.