The Adjacent Possible: technologies to change our future Peter McCarthy, AMC Consultants Pty Ltd This article is adapted from the October 2019 AusIMM Bulletin.
T
he greatest challenge our industry faces today is the growing public antipathy to mining projects, exacerbated by events such as tailings dam failures and facilitated by social media.
We can overcome this challenge by changing the way we operate through technical innovation and better two-way communication with our community. We also need to revisit the concept of value, and to question the drive for large developments to achieve economies of scale. To understand the opportunities, we must explore the concept of the ‘adjacent possible’ - the new and emerging technologies that have not yet been adopted by the minerals industry. What is ‘adjacent possible’? Biologist Stuart Kauffman introduced the idea of the ‘adjacent possible’ in relation to prebiotic chemical combinations, which are all the possible combinations that could arise from a primordial soup. Author Steven Johnson took this further in his 2010 book Where good ideas come from, saying the adjacent possible is “a kind of shadow future hovering on the edge of the present state of things, a map of all the ways in which the present can reinvent itself.” 58
BBMC Yearbook 2019
