Sarah Wilson

It's a hard thing to enter into because when we talk collapse, we're not necessarily talking the collapse of humanity, although that is definitely a possibility according to most modelling that's out there at the moment.

What we're really talking about is the collapse of the system.

And this is sort of a bit of a misnomer.

I think we think that collapse is going to be like the movies, you know, people wandering around with a shopping trolley, you know, through apocalyptic scenes.

That is not how it goes.

It's a very gradual at first and then a sped up sort of undoing of all the complexifying that has been happening for the last 270 years or so.

We tend to explain things in a very linear format where we grab an issue and work with it as a system in isolation.

But to understand actually what's happening to the world today, we need to actually think in terms of complex systems theory, which is about understanding that we are in a complex system of complex systems.

That is essentially what our civilisation is.

Every complex civilisation throughout history has collapsed and it has collapsed because of its complexity.

So if you think of the Roman Empire, the Mayan Empire, the Jing Dynasty, they've all collapsed because they've just got too many armies, too many cities, it's required too many taxes, too many farmers that are required to pay the taxes.

And then what happens is some small volcano erupts

a small climate catastrophe, perhaps a small army entering the system.

It can't actually deal with something like, for instance, a flood or a volcano eruption or something like that.

And that is essentially what brings a civilisation to its knees.

And every complex civilisation has gone this way.

We are a complex civilisation and we are at a point where all the systems that make up our civilisation, the post-industrial civilisation, are under all kinds of stress and they're interacting with each other.

So trade route system, the AI system, the nuclear threat system, the food security system, they're all wobbling.

They're all feeding into each other.

And the extra element to all of this, Ruby, is that unlike the Roman Empire, our civilisation is global.