Thoughts about the future — part 2
I previously described three fundamental principles that determine the long term choices people collectively make: the inevitable pursuit of progress; the inevitable choice of the wisest available option; and the new ability to engineer anything we want.
If we hold this template over our current world, it reveals the big inconsistencies of our time: The predetermined breaking points where reality and logic diverge. These biggest inconsistencies educate us about the strategic fault lines in human civilization that currently experience the greatest pressure to change.
I identified three of them:
Biggest inconsistency #1: Noone seems to work on the biggest problems .
All of us share mostly the same big problems and have more and more time to solve them. But we don’t even try.
We all share a set of big problems that all of us have, among them disease and death, the struggle for money, relationships, insufficient health or beauty, a lack of purpose.
We also know that these problems can be solved by building new systems and technologies. At least we have overwhelming evidence that this might be the case.
However, the vast majority of us are not involved in building these systems and technologies.
And it’s not that most of us are busy fighting for our survival. In fact, an increasing share of people has a lot of spare time, and boredom continues to hit new heights.
Biggest inconsistency #2: We can engineer everything, but don’t do it
The knowledge how to engineer anything we want is today available on YouTube. But the vast majority of our research and innovation projects ignore it and are highly unproductive.
Have you heard of Elon Musk? He first created PayPal, and then decided to build efficiency rockets. And electric cars. And the biggest solar energy company.
He then went ahead in 2002 and build these three things. Today, he is CEO of the biggest rocket company in the world (SpaceX), the biggest electric car company in the world (Tesla), and the biggest solar energy company in the US (SolarCity).
That in itself shouldn’t be surprising. It’s what pioneers do. What is surprising is that there are giant organizations in aerospace and car production with budgets hundreds of times bigger than Elon Musk’s that tried the same thing and failed miserably. From ITER to NASA to early every Fortune 500 corporate R&D division: instead of breakthrough innovation, we generate massive amounts of failure.
The reason we fail is simple: we organize the engineering of progress in the wrong way. Instead of applying the engineering cycle, our organizations invest in chaotic science projects or linear planning processes that are proven to fail. In effect, humanity spends over 95% of its innovation budgets in ways that don’t make any sense. Why? That’s the big inconsistency.
Big inconsistency #3: We have trillions of dollars standing by, but don’t invest it in progress.
Our capitalist system was designed to steer our financial assets into the most profitable investments. But it doesn’t do it.
Maybe you have heard of Venture Capital (VC) funds. It’s investment funds that invest in technology startups, because they generate the most value.
The best startups generate huge returns for their investors; but VC as a whole represents less than 0.1% of global investments. The reason is that investors, including VC investors, believe there aren’t enough great startups to invest in.
This is a very big inconsistency:
if we have such great problems to solve; and know how to solve them; why don’t we have enough pioneers to solve them? Why doesn’t VC build a system that creates more great startups?
The current situation is like sitting next to a giant goldmine and seeing a single gold miner turning a little gold into three gold bars per week. Instead of investing in more miners, all the investors start a bidding war over the three gold bars.
That doesn’t make sense.
Together, these are humanity’s three biggest inconsistencies:
the vast majority of humans doesn’t work on solving big problems;
we can engineer any future we want, but don’t do it;
we have trillions of dollars in capital sitting on the sidelines, but don’t invest it in progress.
By recognizing these inconsistencies, we get a clearer picture of a more effective society:
In a future society, we will remove these three inconsistencies. All people who can will become pioneers; and all of us will be involved in solving the biggest problems first.
In the next part, will investigate how this society will look like.
