What are the Next Innovations of Humanity?

How to Design the Undesignable

Humanity has been facing an exponential speed of innovation in all sorts of fields, regardless, we have been unable to overcome the main problems of humanity, and actually, we are making society extremely volatile, which might lead to unprecedented chaos.

The sort of innovations that have been happening are associated with the augmentation of our lives:

• Medicine — To augment, prolong, and improve the lives of humans — Live better and enjoy more;
• Transportation — To augment and improve the logistics of humans — Arrive faster and more safely;
• Smartphones — To augment the way we socialize, produce, engage, and are productive;
• Better housing conditions — To augment and improve where we sleep and cohabit;

These are great innovations that have been improving our lives, however, the systems we have created are increasingly extremely fragile, and highly dependent on each other, especially taking into consideration the increasing amount of people existing, and the way we expect to have better and better conditions. This leads to extreme fragility towards small yet magnificent events, where the whole system collapses. Covid-19 would hardly be a world pandemic without excessive flight connections.

The greatest problem of our current society is that we rely on big players, that are extremely impactful by increasingly unpredictable smaller events.

The unpredictable is becoming increasingly more predictable, and also smaller events are increasingly more impactful. This is because humans have been not paying attention to fragility, and systems are becoming increasingly more fragile. Currently, we fundamentally rely on the internet for everything. A lot of Covids, Russian wars, and monkeypoxes are coming at an ascending rate.

Lion drinking water — Unsplash

Nature does not play the same game

In human society, if you kill a big player the entire system collapses. If for example, Bank of America collapses, all other society subsequentially collapses.

Nature behaves exactly in the opposite way as humans— Nature relies on redundancy, where no player is extremely impactful. So if the biggest lion of the region dies, the ecosystem continues to exist, and nobody notices.

While, if Apple or Google dies, you will suffer, boy. Nature creates several layers of over-insurance. Nature does it in 2 ways:

• Redundancy — Offer more possibilities to be protected “just in case”. That’s why humans have 2 lungs. Or 2 kidneys;
• Self-sufficiency as possible — The smaller the best. Because the smallest the system, the less fragility. That’s why animals do not cooperate in large numbers, as humans do.

The main problems of humanity

The current main problems of humanity are fragile systems. This can be translated on a deeper level into the following:

• Wealth distribution — Wealth is mostly accumulated in properties or rich people that have been rich. 50% of the world’s wealth is in 8 people. This is totally absurd;
• Work — Work is a form of slavery, where the assignment consists of creating a task that generates profit for the owners. Work is ok to exist, but not as a norm. The norm should be the entrepreneurship of small players, where every single person has their own organization that generates profit. A salary-based job does not make sense in the 21st century. Work is highly unfair in terms of the type of work, working conditions, and even the way people live all their lives;
• Information interpretation — With the great amount of information, we constantly get fooled by information and the way we do the interpretations. This is a great problem because it creates bubbles of knowledge. When there is no news, television shows a lot of news. This creates a big problem for people who do not have a clear mind.
• Education — The education in most countries is not actually doing a great job. We are not teaching, we are making sure that these people will “follow rules”. We are wasting the time of people that could be way more useful doing something else. School is very important, but a good school is important;

No responsibility

As seen above, human systems do not take responsibility into account. Wealth is absolutely not even counted in most countries (but rather GDP). Journalists do not take responsibility for people's process of information. Teachers do not take responsibility for how students actually behave using the teachings.

A good system is one in which players take care of their actions, because being affected by your own actions, makes you suffer from their scratches of them.

Human institutions tend to focus on the exact opposite. The bigger the system, the human creates more bureaucracy. Bureaucracy is merely a construction in which a person is separated from their own actions.

The most bureaucratic, the worst.

Model mother nature

Taking into consideration the nature examples, humans should distribute as much self-sufficiency as possible. Nature exists for such a long time that we should try to cope if we do not understand what nature currently does, it probably makes sense on a deeper level. Just model mother nature.

From augmentation to substitution

In substitution phasis, the goal is to build robust systems that do not suffer from big impactful players, where everyone has a decent share of the whole.

Innovation of the future

Of course, it’s always impossible to know what sort of innovations will exist, but we can try to suggest, such as:

• Drone-Houses or Water-Houses — Houses should be available to everyone in an easily accessible way. Houses do not need to be that big;
• Economics — focus only on self-sustainability. Small groups. Local impact. No excess is needed;
• Work — Profit-based jobs, or only entrepreneurship sort of tasks with “soul in the game”;
• Several internet types — We cannot rely on only one internet;
• Education — focus on doers. Not in “blablabla”. Theory is important but should be followed with practice. First practice, then theory. Being able to plant, seed, find water, to connect with others is more important than knowing the capital of Turkmenistan.

And so forth.

How will be the collapse of the current human system?

These problems identified are structural defects of the system. And structural problems cannot be cured. The system corrects itself by collapsing.

Some events will just trigger the collapse. The key here is to be the least impacted as possible.

What does this have to do with design?

Everything. Designers are the creators of value in humanity. No one creates as much value as we do currently.

In every single thing we do, we should think: “hey, how can I make society more robust?”, “Hey, how can I make sure that wealth will be equality distributed?”.

A designer must be ethical and think big. Creating things with substance. Not only making things pretty but making pretty robust things for the long term. As a designer focus on 2 things:

• Distribute
• Self-sufficiency

The next innovations of humanity will be deep innovations. Not cute augmentations. Prepare yourself, babe.