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From the Editor: Balancing nature and tech

With the amping of summertime energy and the visceral fast-moving of industry and of technology, there’s a near audible buzz of electricity, a current in the air, and half the time I can’t tell if it’s coming from a wireless network or from nature. 

It’s strange to think the two can be compared – an electronic device and a rolling ocean as it churns negative ions – but they can. And now here we are beyond the threshold of AI immersion, attempting to merge the two. 

Regardless of inventor apprehension (Elon Musk with Neuralink), we simply can’t help not knowing how far we can push the envelope, so we’ll give it a go, melding the forward-thinking of industry and the optimization of technology with our biological bodies. Or in the case of the regulated cannabis industry: AI tech with an ancient plant and all of her sacredness. 

I see these two phenomena, nature and “the machine,” as the ultimate dichotomy – similar to the duality created by reason and intuition.  Another opposition, when woven together, has the capacity to create endless abundance. 

So, I instruct Open AI to poeticize what I’ve just written and here’s what it comes up with: 

The air hums with the electricity of the ages, a strange melody of technology and of nature. The potential thrumming, a millennia-spanning symphony of invention, influenced by invention, built to reason and intuit further invention still. The wheels of progress and progress itself, rounding the bend to an as-of-yet unknown future.

With a regal, three tier AI-generated cake on the cover of our magazine, we nod (holler?) to the times in this anniversary issue and take a pause to circle the date and reflect on how far we’ve come and how much further we have to go. 

This issue operates as an exclamation mark punctuating Grow Opportunity’s five-year anniversary covering this industry, in conjunction with the five-year anniversary of Canada’s legal market, this Fall.   

When you examine the leaves on the cake, you can see their imperfections – cannabis leaves with 12-plus points, lacking symmetry and consistency. It’s cute, I think, how AI hasn’t quite mastered the composition of a pot leaf. But allow it another handful of years and it becomes child’s play. 

This issue seeks to illuminate the current market conditions at a time when tech infiltrates most of our processes for better or worse and, of course, the deep gratitude our team has for this space as it continues to mature with each passing day (albeit slower than AI).

Around legalization, I was working as a legacy journalist, so I took the liberty of sharing a couple throwback photos from 4/20 in Vancouver, 2016. I’m thrilled that the maturity of my own journey has led me to the unique B2B media domain, polarizing the B2C I was doing back then.   

Yet at the end of the day, the question still remains: how do you reconcile seeming opposites? 

I recently heard the equation 1+1=3. Maybe this relates to mergers in cannabis, but could it also be applied here? 

Rather than the duality working to cancel itself out, perhaps there’s a third point we’re after. The middle path. Perhaps the union of opposites, in this case of nature and technology, can create a better third option. And maybe there’s a way to achieve it without tipping the scales toward our tendency for self-destruction. 

The philosophical questions mostly end here, though it’s certainly fun to mull over in the sun, with a free joint.

I present to you our latest issue, complete with brilliantly critical and articulate writers touching on some of the most pressing topics of our time in cannabis. Look around now, because in five years’ time, everything will be different again.