Author:
Sergey D. Bodrunov, S.Y. Witte Institute for New Industrial Development (INID), (Saint Petersburg, Russia)
Abstract:
The author raises the issue of the growing crisis of modern civilization. The existing socio-economic system, having ensured significant technological progress, was unable to cope with the consequences of using the latest technologies. For a long time, the ecological crisis has been escalating, the problem of social inequality has been increasing, the pace of economic development has been slowing down, and international conflicts keep flaring up. Due to the financialization of the economy, the interests of production development become subordinate to the interests of the expansion of the financial market. At the same time, it is the latest technologies that contain the potential to overcome the crisis phenomena. The core of these technological capabilities is shaped by the industrial sector of the economy, which remains the driver of economic development. The technologies of current technological orders are characterized by the increasing role of knowledge in production with a corresponding decreasing role of material costs. At the same time, the production of knowledge does not replace material production but transfers it to a new stage of development - the stage of knowledge-intensive material production. This allows for a significantly higher level of satisfaction of people’s needs with relatively lower costs. However, to realize this potential, it is necessary to move away from today’s economic rationality, which often leads to the inflation of simulated needs in pursuit of a large sales volume, and thus to the aggravation of thoughtless waste of natural resources, which has already brought the world to the brink of an ecological crisis. It is necessary to move from economy to noonomy, a social system based on the gradual displacement of humans from direct production, the transition of people to predominantly creative activity and a change in social priorities and values. In such a production system, the issues of meeting people’s needs are resolved by a relatively autonomously functioning technosphere, and people are connected not so much by relations in the system of direct production as by interaction in the process of creative activity. The requirements of the old economic production rationality and consumer behavior are replaced by the requirements of knowledge and culture. The pursuit of the volume of consumed goods is replaced by ensuring the growth of people’s abilities, determined by the level of their cultural development
Keywords: crisis of civilization, industrial production, knowledge intensity, technological order, economic rationality, noonomy
For citation:Bodrunov S. D. (2024). Beyond Modern Capitalism: Knowledge, Technolosies, Noonomy. Noonomy and Noosociety. Almanac of Scientific Works of the S.Y. Witte INID, Vol. 3, No. 3, pp. 9–18. DOI: 10.37930/2782-6465-2024-3-3-9-18