The Wellbeing Economy
Let’s talk about the future of the economy. Clearly the combination of the tremendous technical advancement that we have seen in the past half century (and expect to see continue to accelerate into the future) with the many challenges that beset our current civilization have outstripped our legacy institutions, designed by and for a very different world. This fact calls for a deep reinvention of how we go about delivering the functions that are generally bundled into the concept of “economy.”
As usual, when undergoing a task of reinvention, it is important to step away from the many instruments and tools that we have developed over the past few centuries and get to the fundamentals. All too often, we can get distracted by our tools and forget both that they are invented (i.e., not laws of physics) and why they were invented in the first place. The result of this distraction is that we end up supporting unnecessary or even downright dysfunctional instruments at the expense of our actual goals.
So, to cut to the heart of the matter, the objective of our economic system is not production, wealth, innovation or even happiness. Each of these is merely an means to a more fundamental end. The fundamental objective of our economic system is to enhance the degree to which human beings are able to fulfill their needs in both the short and long term and under uncertain future conditions. I will simply call this foundation, “wellbeing.”
The proper goal of our economy is to provide for a high general level of wellbeing and we can measure the quality of our overall economic approach by the degree to which it is able to sustainably provision individual wellbeing at as high a level as possible. Everything else is a means to that end.
Today’s post is the first of two or three that will dig into how in the future economy we might be able to do a much, much better job of delivering on sustainable wellbeing for everyone. The focus of this post is to review a number of emerging tools that I believe will have a particular impact on our ability to identify (and, thence, to meet) our individual needs.
I find that this most important aspect of the economy is one that is often left unexamined. After all, identifying our needs is trivial: we want stuff. And when we want it, we ask for it. No? No. In point of fact it is not a stretch to say that almost our entire contemporary economy from top to bottom is designed to get us to want what we do not need. As a consequence, by participating in our current economy we find ourselves all too often “full but not fulfilled.”
No economic system, however productive and however judiciously distributive can do its job of providing for our wellbeing if we are unable to accurately and consistently identify and share our real needs. And a big part of the good news of the movement into the abundance economy is that over the next several decades we are going to get enormously better at doing just that. As will be discussed in the following posts, the result will be an economy that is much simpler, vastly less wasteful and yet much, much better at actually supporting the long term wellbeing of the human species.
The Internet of Things
Over the next several decades one of the more important changes in our lives is going to be the degree to which everything is tracked. I don’t mean this in the NSA sense (that is another story altogether), I mean it in the sense of things like bar code scanners and RFID tags that keep track of the stuff sloshing through Wal-Mart. Or our phones constantly asking permission to use the internal GPS to tell some app provider where we are. We already are tracking and tracing the movement of things through or economy, and by 2030 or so this is going to have absolutely exploded.
We are now developing low power (and low cost) sensors that can provide rich data about everything from your toothbrush and shoes to the hamburger you just ate and the wrapper the hamburger came in. At first blush, this might seem like a waste of perfectly good sensors. But in the economy of the future where just in time provisioning and resource lifecycle tracing are a fundamental, this kind of data is the bread and butter.
As a consequence, we can expect the real time location and in many cases the real time “state” (i.e., some assessment of condition — like are the batteries charged or is the gas tank full) of essentially every object that you encounter to be known, tracked and available as data in the cloud.
Think about it. Right now, Uber knows the location of every car in their fleet. And those cars on-board computers know everything from the state of the gas tank to the interior air conditioning to the ratio of acceleration to braking in its movement. This information is useful and valuable. It currently powers the advanced logistics (getting the right car to the right place as quickly and efficiently as possible) that has been one of their killer advantages. And it is central to their plans to ultimately move their entire fleet to autonomous vehicles.
The result of the Internet of Things will be “autonomous everything”. Toothbrushes that know when they are due for replacement and automatically order their replacement. Or smart toothbrushes that automatically measure gum and tooth health and send that data into the cloud. (Get on it Philips!)
Or shoes that not only track how much you are walking, but how you are walking and can connect with software to suggest why this might be bad for your knees. Food wrappers that are robustly marked with their identity — making littering an easy offense to police. And products will indelibly trace every step of their supply chain — making it possible to easily make values-based purchases. Or, more specifically, making it hard to avoid being hypocritical about it.
Today we are just starting to ramp into the phenomenon dubbed by Gary Wolf and Kevin Kelly the “Quantified Self,” where we use a combination of technologies and practices to track more and more data about our personal state. Products like FitBit show the way. The little wrist band tracks how you are moving around in the world to assess your level of exercise and can even take a decent swing at how well your are sleeping by observing how you toss and turn. Combined with a smart scale that can measure things like BMI and lean mass, FitBit can give a decent assessment of your day to day fitness profile.
But FitBit is the Nokia 3310 of the Quantified Self and we are just beginning to ramp onto the steep part of the innovation curve in this fascinating area. Consider Google’s recently announced IM2Calories project. The Googlers are working on using an Instagram photo of your meal to determine precisely what you are eating — and, of course, to then connect this information with “big data” to return all sorts of useful tidbits, not least the nutritional content of your meal. Combine this technology with a FitBit and you are a long way towards being able to shed that last five pounds. Or at least being able to explain why you can’t.
Now fast forward fifteen years or so. If the FitBit is the Nokia, what is the iPhone 6 of the Quantified Self?
How about a wrist band that uses graphene nanotubes and non-invasive lasers to take realtime measures of your blood chemistry and the state of your epigenetic system? (Both of these are in meaningful R&D right now.) This kind of technology would allow you to understand in detail the connection between how you treat your body and how it ultimately manifests in the state of your body.
In the not so distant future, we should expect to be able to monitor in real time your cholesterol level and blood sugar and stress hormones like cortisol and epinephrine and even the deep structural ways that your body is trying to respond to its chemical state. In other words, no more wondering whether you are lactose intolerant or have a gluten allergy.
And new technology is starting to go beyond just measuring your physical state. By observing your facial expression, voice and body language, technologists are starting to get a handle on assessing your emotional state as well. Are you happy? Sad? Hiding a building frustration behind a veil of indifference? In a couple of decades, all of this will be assessed, recorded, tracked and cross-compared with all of the other data in the cloud. Automatically and highly accurately.
You ever notice that you tend to be cranky after not getting enough sleep and trying to push yourself with a third coffee and a chocolate donut? In the coming decade, the Quantified Self is going to bring us to a level of real time understanding of our physical state and the inputs that drive that physical state that is nothing short of revolutionary.
The Evaluated World
Now we step away from the technical side of the emergent economy and take a look at the human contribution. Futurists looking for some new capacity that is destined to become a near-universal necessity sometimes frame the question as: “What is the new literacy of the 21st Century?” My answer is that is that the new literacy is “evaluation”.
Already we are watching the emergence of the importance of this capacity. Amazon, Yelp, Uber, Quora, StackExchange, etc. all use human evaluation of experience (books, restaurants, rides, etc.) to substantially improve their ability to assess the quality of the experiences that they are providing and to provide more and more satisfying experiences.
This kind of information is gold, but hard to get. Today only a small fraction (typically less than 5%) of people take the time to rate or review most of their experiences and of these even a smaller fraction are any good at it. But this capacity is so useful that I expect the science, technology and art of evaluation to ultimately become as ubiquitous, effortless and satisfying as reading this sentence.
It is my proposition that the ability to provide honest and discerning evaluation of your experiences is going to become a primary economic contribution in the 21st Century.
Let me emphasize that — having the ability to discern the difference between a bad (or superficially good) experience and an experience that really was “time well spent” and actively taking the time to provide that information back into the collective economy for everyone’s benefit is going to be as important a piece of human value creation as, say, design is today or engineering was fifty years ago. In fact, as the pace of automation and machine intelligence continues to accelerate, it might ultimately become the principal contribution that human beings make to the economy. But more on that some other time.
For now the key point is this: I expect to see more and more of our time spent carefully evaluating our experiences and providing this information back into the big database in the sky. Every song, every meal, every car ride, every front yard, every conversation, every sunset. Naturally, there is both a physical and aesthetic limit to this “Evaluated World,” but you get the point. In the future, the careful evaluation of experience by everyone and for everyone is going to be like reading and writing today.
The Personal Autonomous Organization
OK, now we are ready to talk about something that I’m calling a Personal Autonomous Organization. I’m stealing this phrase from a new concept that is the darling of the blockchain community: the Decentralized Autonomous Organization. A DAO is a mix of software, AI, digital contracts, decentralized ledgers, and digital currencies that is anticipated to be the future of how we go about organizing much of our activities in the future. In other words, it is the Internet’s replacement for the old fashioned economic tool called “The Corporation”.
The PAO, by contrast is what happens when you start to apply these kinds of concepts to what it means to be you. Follow me down the rabbit hole. You are a highly decentralized system consisting of tens of trillions of cells (most of which don’t share your DNA) and hundreds of trillions of various molecules that all co-ordinate to keep your soul enshrouded in corporeal manifestation. But, of course, you are much more than that. You are constantly in relation. You relate to the food that goes into your body and the space that your body goes through. You relate to your enviroment, to technologies,to ideas and, most importantly, to other people.
From this point of view, you are best understood to be a semi-coherent flux of relations moving through time and space to destinations unknown. And in this context, your PAO is the technical support system that uses all of the stuff we’ve been talking about above to help you be the best flux of relations that you can (possibly) be.
How might this work? Lets take a very simple example to start. Say you are hungry. Lets be more precise. Say that your body-system has begun to run short of certain molecules that are necessary for its wellbeing. And that this fact is beginning to manifest itself in various ways.
Your blood sugar is low. You are showing signs of fatigue and stress — both in your blood chemistry and in measurable behaviour like your voice and facial expressions. A statistical assessment of your behavior, state and recent history, compared with both your long term history and the best current understanding of human metabolism indicates that you likely need to refuel.
In other words, you are hungry — and your PAO knows it. It knows it in ways that you can’t really begin to know it. It knows exactly what you need. It knows what kind of nutrition would simultaneously be most metabolically useful and — since you’ve been dutifully evaluating every food experience of the past ten years with increasing nuance and care — what kind of food experience would be the most delightful. It can bring to bear your entire history of food and biochemistry, your stated values and your actual evaluations. And over time it has come to know you much better than you know yourself.
And your PAO is plugged into the cloud. Remember the Internet of Things? Your PAO has the ability (mediated by DAOs out there in the virtual space) to locate, secure and connect you with what you need. It doesn’t need to read the box or respond to advertisements of beautiful people being implausibly happy. It can quickly and (from your point of view) effortlessly connect what you actually need with what out there in the world will actually satisfy those needs.
Lets say that it really happens to be a bacon cheeseburger that is called for. No problem, it is a matter of milliseconds for this fact to be assessed and for an appropriate query to discover that a chef is ready and able to provide the needed victuals just when you will need it. Just the way you like it and with ingredients sourced in just the way you prefer.
A PAO to PAO transaction is made and the logistics kick into action. A local drone is routed to pick up the burger and zips it hot and ready to your waiting maw. Your Quantified Self rig watches carefully as your biochemistry changes and can tell by the noises you make and the change in your demeanor that the burger has hit the spot. Of course, if it turns out that you get indigestion somewhere down the road; or that you later feel it necessary to suggest that it would have been better with slightly less aioli; or that you’ve decided that even permaculture beef is not as good for the world as the new lab-grown beef; this data will be added to the record to continuously improve the total performance of the economy for for self and or everyone else.
This example is a trivial exercise of the power of a PAO. Big wins come when we can provide experiences that seamlessly satisfy many human needs at once. Max Neef calls these “synergistic satisfiers” and they are the absolute bedrock of an economy that is truly well designed for our wellbeing. After all, even in the abundant economy of the future, our time is still a scarce and precious resource. The more needs that a given experience can elegantly fill, the better.
So perhaps it isn’t a delicious bacon cheese burger airlifted to your door that is called for. Man does not live on bacon alone! Different people have identified different lists of human needs, but, following Neef, I’ll suggest the following as a gesture: Food, Shelter, Physical Safety, Health, Reproductive Access, Care for Young, Membership in Community, Community Health, Creativity, Connection, A Sense of Purpose, A Sense of Transcendence. If you get these all of these needs really satisfied on a consistent basis, you are going to be doing pretty well. And, of course, your PAO knows what you need and is doing its level best to set you up for success.
Perhaps a query out into the economy reveals that a group of friends is gathering for a picnic at a nearby park that has a view that you will love. The assembly includes someone who you’ve been yearning to collaborate with on a creative project and someone else who consistently causes your blood pressure to elevate in a very good way. A quick check-in with their PAO’s indicates that your addition to the group would be well received — and a self-driving car is routed in your direction to take care of the heavy lifting. Or maybe it is a beautiful day and you need the exercise . . .
Oh, and in the meantime the necessary ingredients for a meal to meet your specific needs is assembled and delivered to the picnic. You can get your bacon cheeseburger after all.
A brave new world indeed. But, unless we fall onto one of the numerous pitfalls that daunt our path to the future, it is a reasonably probable one. And having this kind of detailed and accurate inputs to our economy will go a long way toward reconstructing the way that we go about providing our collective wellbeing.
Yet, as intriguing as this narrative might be, it is but one part of what we need as we navigate the Great Transition towards a wellbeing economy. We now have an idea of how in the future we are going to go about being much smarter at understanding what the economy needs to produce. Now we need to take a look at how we are going to do a better job at actually producing it and how we are going to make sure that everyone actually gets what they need.
Hat tip to John Smart for his concept of the “digital twin” that substantially influenced the notion of the PAO. You can read more about his thoughts here.
or, for a deeper look, here.
