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Resilience and wisdom to stay happy in the years ahead

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technology power

Technology Power: for whose benefit?

by

Pragmatic ways to mitigate the downsides Guest blog by Jeremy Green and Fred Barker As part of Alan’s Scanning our Future project, Jeremy Green and Fred Barker were commissioned to research the potential UK future impacts of new technologies over the next 15 years. This blog is a summary of some of their conclusions. Some … Read more

Categories Featured Post, Future Outlook Tags resilience, technology, technology power
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Current Events

  • Grow your own Happiness

    60-90-minute online workshop Cultivate your wellbeing with gardening skills! Available for group bookingsWith Alan Heeks In these stormy times, we need new skills to stay happy.  A cultivated ecosystem, like a garden, is a role model for human nature: this workshop shows how gardening methods can help you grow your own happiness and deepen the roots of your resilience.  For example: Mulching and pruning to nourish your rootsComposting stress as a source of energyUse gardening skills like observation and creativityFind new ways to adapt to the climate crisisDraw inspiration from Nature to guide you in uncertainty Alan Heeks has over 25 years of experience exploring Natural Happiness with groups. It grows from creating a 130-acre organic farm and education centre at Magdalen Farm in West Dorset, and from gardening with his wife at home. In this online workshop, Alan will describe the Seven Seeds of Natural Happiness, and participants will have a chance to try some of them out.  Alan is happy to take bookings for this event from environmental, community and other groups, at a time of their choosing for a moderate fee by negotiation. CONTACT LINK

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  • NATURAL HAPPINESS: cultivate your resilience with the Gardener’s Way

    July 9-11 2021: at Hazel Hill Wood, near Salisbury With Alan Heeks, Jane Sanders and Marcos Frangos How can you stay happy when there’s too much change and uncertainty? This workshop shows you how: to cultivate yourself like a garden, and grow your own wellbeing by learning from natural ecosystems, using Alan’s unique Natural Happiness model. In this workshop we’ll explore these questions, with the natural ecosystem of this magical wood as our guide. Our methods will include: nourishing our roots; composting problems; using co-creative skills to work with nature; growing inspiration; and ecosystem insights about community. Along with workshop sessions, there will be solo times in the wood, plus good food, campfires and songs to nourish us. This will be a residential group at Hazel Hill Wood: if Covid restrictions prevent this, it will be run with a series of online sessions with personal time in between. We will explore how to grow resilience for individuals and communities, especially in response to the climate crisis and the related pandemic. If you are interested in using this model in your professional work with individuals or groups, Alan will be happy to offer you advice and support: the content of this workshop relates to his fourth book, which is planned for publication in late 2021. Alan Heeks has been exploring resilience with people and nature for many years, and has led many groups on this theme, drawing on experience of resilient natural systems from creating an organic farm and setting up Hazel Hill. Jane Sanders has over 25 years’ experience in working with a mindfulness based approach to wellbeing with groups and individuals, and has also incorporated deep ecology, ecopsychology and the wisdom of natural systems into her work in many different settings, including numerous groups at Hazel Hill Wood. Marcos Frangos is widely experienced in group facilitation, coaching, counselling and constellations work. He was General Manager of Hazel Hill Wood for 5 years, and has co- led many groups there with Jane and Alan. Cost including food and accommodation: £220, concessions £180. We will share cooking and other community tasks. To secure a place, we will need a deposit of £40, £30 for concessions: if, nearer the time we have to run this as an event online event, your deposit will cover the cost of this, or you can receive a full refund. Hazel Hill is a magical 70-acre conservation woodland and retreat centre, 7 miles from Salisbury. It has simple, yet beautifully crafted off-grid wooden buildings with lovely indoor and outdoor group spaces, basic accommodation in bedrooms and sleeping lofts (or camping), good hot showers and compost loos. See more at www.hazelhill.org.uk For bookings and enquiries: Please contact Carol Nourse via email on: naturalhappinesscontact@gmail.com

    ... Read more

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Featured Blog

  • Carbots, carebots, therabots and more…

    Coming to your life soon Whilst robots and artificial intelligence are just one of a swathe of major technologies which will impact our lives in the next 10 years, I’ve chosen to focus on them because they are likely to be one of the most visible and unavoidable big changes on the technology front. Here are just a few examples of robots that already exist:• Carbots: Ford have just demonstrated an empathic car, with biometric sensors which recognise when a driver is stressed, and could then take control…• Carebots: care homes in Japan are already using small robots which have conversations with elderly people, who respond as if they were human.• Therabots: a recent Channel 4 documentary showed a robot counsellor with lie detector, who seemed very affective at the job. For more on these and other marvels coming soon, click here Carbots We know about driverless cars: they may be hard to believe, but the scale of spending by big names suggests it will happen: most experts expect them to be on the road somewhere around 2020. See more at www.driverless-future.com. However, an ‘empathic’ car which had the power to take control of the car forcibly from its human driver when the carbot decided the driver wasn’t up to it: this is surely another frontier? The car recently demonstrated on the road by Ford in London used facial recognition technology and sensors tracking pulse and breath rate. The clever bits come from a Belfast company, Censum, a specialist in “emphatic technology.” If the car itself decides that the driver is suffering from fatigue, stress (or alcohol?) it will first issue prompts and alerts, but could actually take over the driving of the car. I wonder if this technology might be sponsored by nice people like McDonalds or Esso, and if your car would suddenly decide that you were too tired and needed to head for one of their outlets? Carebots Japan has an ageing population and labour shortages, which is one reason why it is a world leader in the use of robots. The Telenoid robot is only 50cm tall, but has an expressionless human face, microphone and video camera, and is capable of responding to care home patients and conversing with them. Experience shows that patients relate to Telenoid as if it was a human, and really appreciate its care for them.The use of technology in health care is galloping ahead on other fronts too: the US health care giant Kaiser Permanente announced that in 2017, 52% of patient contacts with physicians were virtual, and 25% of its capital spending is on IT developments. Pepper is a humanoid robot which was one tested out on the Channel 4 showed a documentary called The Robot Will See You Now. Jess the Therabot In November 2017, Channel 4 showed a documentary called The Robot Will See You Now. Jess is essentially a robot therapist. Her (its?) AI system is programmed to assess all of your electronic data, not only emails but also social media, retail orders etc. and to have a counselling dialogue with humans. The programme showed Jess interviewing a couple with relationship problems and getting down to the key issues pretty quickly. What was even more striking is that Hayley and Ronnie found Jess’ approach really helpful, and even wanted to take her (it?) home with them.As a Guardian review of the programme pointed out, the therapist is a profession which scores pretty low on the risk of being automated out of existence. On this evidence, very few jobs are safe… The Future’s in Japan Japan is certainly one of the world leaders both in the development and use of robots, partly due to severe labour shortages. In Japan, it would not be uncommon to:– Have your luggage carried by a porter robot, e.g. at Haneda Airport– Order drinks or food from a robot in a restaurant– Get directions from a robot dressed in a kimono (Mitsukoshi department store)– Have a humanoid robot chanting Buddhist sutras at your funeral (see more on this one here…) Another trend in Japan is the creation of robots designed to look and talk as much like real humans as possible. Click here for more about Erica, who is just one example. What is striking about these humaoids is that they are intended to have enough AI to give them a degree of autonomous action… Having visited Japan a few times, I know that Japanese society is pretty orderly, and the Japanese are probably more willing than average to relate with robots. However, it’s pretty likely that the British will be asked to converse with robots on a widespread basis within the next few years. The UK has 33 robots per 10 thousand workers, compared with 93 thousand in the US and 213 thousand in Japan. Within 10 years, the UK robot population will surely quadruple or more.

    ... Read more

Resources & Models

  • Growing through Climate Change: Research Report
  • Deep Adaptation and climate change: An intro to the work of Jem Bendell
  • Using humour to defuse tensions
  • Discerning, Valuing, Tolerating
  • Deep ecology: a way to face the future

Useful Links

Deep Adaptation Blog

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