Nick King

This work explores solutions for efficient large-scale pension administration, examining historical and current roles of pensions and their interaction with society amid a 21st-century crisis driven by demographic change and technological stagnation. Pensioners, governments, regulators, and administrators face growing challenges that risk deepening societal imbalances. Through field research, single-/multi-country case studies, a practical example and expert insights, this work makes a compelling case for distributed ledger technology (DLT) as a scalable, efficient solution. It contrasts DLT with alternatives like cloud technology and draws on Socio-Technical and Structuration Theory to reveal broader societal and structural benefits. While promising, DLT's adoption is tempered by regulatory hurdles, its experimental nature, and institutional conservatism.

?This book is an exploration of energy and its unique role to date as one of the fundamental enabling and controlling factors in human development and progress at the scale of global civilization, and how it will be fundamental to the type of future that collective humanity is likely to experience. The first section provides a contextual overview of energy and human civilization through a chronological description of how human energy use has evolved over time and led to the current ‘energy bind’. The second section explores what this energy bind might mean for our future energy choices when trying to meet the various challenges of dwindling resources, costs, and climate change, through exploration of three broad systems-based scenarios for the human ‘energy future’. The final section draws conclusions as to which scenario is most achievable and desirable, and what this might mean for longer-term human prospects.