Rob and Kaihan join Kimberly to talk about their new book, Proximity: How Coming Breakthroughs in Just-in-Time Transform Business, Society, and Daily Life. Highlighting the failures that laid the foundation for the success stories of how to attain P = 0, Rob and Kaihan offer ways to bring consumers and producers closer together while achieving greater sustainability in the process. Innovations as diverse as specialty lab-grown meats, 3D-printed inoculations, and virtual reality implants show how much more immersed we are in a world of on-demand, proximate goods and services than we might realize.
Rob, Kaihan, and Kimberly spend time considering:
If Covid-19 was the catalyst or just another building block toward digital adoption
Whether proximity technologies are going to put most of us out of work
Whether increased demand for minerals will be just as exploitative an industry as the fossil fuel it’s likely to replace
Whether we colonize Mars because it’s one more planet humans can (irresponsibly) exploit
How both developing and developed countries can benefit from the leapfrogging proximity technologies
The possibility that AI takes over the world, justifying the fears of Campaign to Stop Killer Robots
Ways businesses can integrate proximity into their strategies
For more on her thoughts about Proximity, check out Kimberly’s Substack post
Follow Rob Wolcott on X, LinkedIn, and his website
Follow Kaihan Krippendorff on X, LinkedIn, and his website
