Abstract

The technosphere, the interlinked network of the world’s humans and technological artefacts, is the defining structure of the Anthropocene. The technosphere is undesigned, autonomous and possesses agency. Where influenced by human knowledge, its future behaviour is unpredictable, although constrained by generic principles of organization. Humans face a fundamental dilemma in the conflict between (i) the technosphere’s increasing rate of energy consumption, required to support discovery and application of the new knowledge essential for improvement and maintenance of human well-being, and (ii) the fact that no system can sustain an accelerating regime of energy use indefinitely.