The Age of the Unthinkable

I'm reading an interesting book right now: The Age of the Unthinkable: why the new world disorder constantly surprises us and what we can do about it by Joshua Cooper Ramo.  The book is about how we are in an unpredictable and revolutionary time, when we've been relying on old systems, practices, politics and people that are no longer relevant.., and what the impact of that has been... and suggests ideas of where we need to go next.

I liked this part and wanted to share because it seemed relevant to what AI is doing... and the 'garden' we are building:

"Concluding his Nobel speech, Hayek warned, 'if man is not to do more harm than good in his efforts to improve the social order, he will have to learn that in this, as in all other fields where essential complexity of an organized kind prevails, he cannot acquire the full knowledge which would make mastery of the events possible.' Politicians and thinkers would be wise not to try to bend history as the 'craftsmen shapes his handiwork, but rather to cultivate growth by providing the appropriate environment, in the manner a gardener does for his plants.'
 
To see the world this way, as a ceaselessly complex and adaptive system, requires revolution. It involves changing the role we imagine for ourselves, from architects of a system we can control and manage to gardeners in a living, shifting ecosystem. for hundreds of years now we have lived in our minds as builders: constructing everything from nations to bridges, heedlessly grabbing whatever resources we've needed in pursuit of a dream of some imagined palace of global prosperity. This mode of existence, which delivered amazing progress, is no longer suitable. The world is too complex, its resources too limited. Tt is now delivering the opposite of what we intend. In a revolutionary age, with rapid change all around us, our architects tools are deadly. It is time for us to put them down and follow Hayek's instructions to live and think as gardeners."
 
lisa, mikey and jp congrats on finishing the first building! loving the pictures of the garden.