What would be the ideal social innovation?
A friend asked me recently how would I conceptualize an ideal social innovation. If I dare to be completely free to brainstorm the ideal social innovation:
I will start from the point of Effective Altruism (combining rationality and heart — economics and philosophy/morality/values) and will go two levels deeper, through a systemic change into a change of mindset/mental models.
An ideal social innovation would bring a solution to a major problem, that would require a change of mindsets and mental models, or creating “mental debugs”, that will help to transform the current economy from rivalrous foundations to anti-rivalrous foundations. And these would at the same time need to survive in the current competitive world. (by being anti-fragile to the current rivalrous economy, and being built on solid game-theoretical foundations). This hasn’t been tried before. For example, communism or socialism was still based on rivalrous foundations (people and countries competing in zero-sum games).
How to measure social impact
Imagine a cube (or a rectangular cuboid) with three dimensions. These dimensions are Importance, Solvability and Neglectedness of a problem. This problem should be ideally global in scope. You could add another dimension of a “personal fit”, or organizational fit, or country fit — something that is relevant for you personally, or for your country, or for your organization. This could be a color of the cube.
Now you want to find cube(s) with the biggest volume = the most solvable, important and neglected problem(s), and at the same time ideally a problem that is the closest to your heart. Imagine that there are more than 500,000 people killed by violence each year, and more than 1 million people killed in traffic accidents each year globally. Imagine your solution (e.g. a self-driven car) would reduce the number of fatal road accidents by 90%. It would represent 900,000 lives saved each year. So a very big problem would be solved by 90%. For example particle pollution is even a 3x bigger problem.
(There are other considerations regarding counterfactuals, like who else is working on developing autonomous cars, if not just you. And this is the dimension of Neglectedness.)
In terms of size, these big problems (and opportunities) are very unequally distributed in the problem-space. It means there are very few very big problems, and very many small problems. Imagine a very rare earthquake of magnitude 9 that happens once in a hundred years compared to magnitude 1 earthquakes that happen thousand times a year. The same distribution applies for so called 500-year floods. In the same way, imagine a place where there is a lot of gold underground, compared to the total amount of soil, where there is no gold. To look for social impact is similar to prospecting for gold. Most places (problems or solutions clusters) will yield very little to no gold, and a very few places will hold the most gold in the world.
The biggest and most solvable and neglected problems represent the biggest golden nuggets to discover in a very unequally distributed problem-space.
The biggest problems
There is a class of risks that are called existential risks, and another class or intensity of risks, that is called global catastrophic risks. Existential risks mean that the whole human population wouldn’t survive. The global catastrophic risks mean a major global catastrophe, e.g. meteorite crushing to earth, or global nuclear winter, or catastrophic climate change, but not killing everyone.
There is a class of information-enabled technologies, or digital technologies, that we call exponential technologies, because their performance compared to the cost seems to grow exponentially in time — e.g. doubles every two years, before stagnating and creating an “S” shaped curve.
These exponential technologies represent a lever on our choice-making with ever increasing power. So the results of these exponential technologies can be increasingly and exponentially super good or super bad for the humanity as a whole. It depends on our choice-making ability. Imagine an AI used with misinformation, biotechnology, nanotechnology and digital fabrication. So insufficient or bad choice-making (based on inadequate sense-making) combined with exponential technologies equals the global civilization will self-terminate at some point in the near future, probably by 22nd century.
The choice-making capacity also needs to grow exponentially in order to catch up with exponential technologies. Otherwise the humanity as a whole will self-terminate at some point in the future.
The systemic change should solve all existential risks
Existential technologies produce these S curves of ever faster and stronger performance. Solving for one existential risk (reduction of nuclear warheads to zero) will reduce the overall global existential risk by a little — because there still will remain other existential and catastrophic risks, for example from a powerful general AI that is not human-aligned. Or from the current but militarized AI and autonomous weapons.
So to solve for all existential risks would mean to solve the generator function of all existential risks. Imagine a process that creates this ever bigger cubes — growing problems and existential risks of humanity’s self-termination. David Schmachtenberger, thinker influenced by complexity science, says the generator function of these existential risks seems to be rivalrous behavior and rivalrous economy itself, meaning zero-sum games.
The rivalrous behavior was very effective in making us the apex predators and winning in the evolution game, and getting people into space, and building the current global civilization and all the previous ones. But it cannot survive exponential technologies in the long term. After the nuclear bomb the situation changed for the humanity. And after the innovation in AI, digital fabrication, biotech and nanotechnology, the dimensions of existential risk proliferated further.
Evolution and zero-sum games helped us to get into the current state of economic and technological development. But evolution and rivalrous dynamics are not useful in the age of exponential technology and existential risks. Because all win-lose games will turn into lose-lose games in the face of a nuclear winter.
All win-lose games will turn into lose-lose games in the face of a nuclear winter.
What could be the foundation for an anti-rivalrous economy?
A good example is caterpillar-to-butterfly metaphor. Caterpillar eats all the vegetation in the process of getting ever bigger and destroys the environment. You wouldn’t predict a butterfly by observing a caterpillar. But then something happens and the caterpillar is transformed via a cocoon into a butterfly. The ideal social innovation for me would represent such cocoons — places that can nurture and protect innovation of the anti-rivalrous economy. Some hacker places, maker places, Fab Labs, think-tanks, communities, or places such as Santa Fe Institute can serve as a precursor to such collaborative and anti-rivalrous environments.
What does it mean to aim for an anti-rivalrous economy?
While home ownership in the big rich cities is an example of very rivalrous goods, the example of anti-rivalrous goods, like the use language or some other platform influenced by the network effect is the exact opposite: anti-rivalrous = you want as many people to use the language or the platform as possible, and you are willing to share it for free. Or even pay people to learn the language or the calculus. Because the more people use the language, the more valuable it is.
Or imagine the difference between car ownership and the use of shopping carts in the supermarket. Almost no-one feels they want to fight with others over an access to a shopping cart — you can just put a euro there and use it and then put it back. These dynamics can be made true also for shared cars, or autonomous vehicles. It happened previously in the area of digital photography — you can make as many copies of digital photos as you want — it is not perceived as scarce anymore. The world of atoms is more difficult to disrupt than the world of bits, but it can be done — e.g. 3D printing, or 4D printing, AI, smart materials, bio-mimicry… can make even house-building much cheaper than it is today.
But the systemic change needs to start by changing the mindset and instilling new mental models and by expanding the space to imagine the impossible — the idea of an economy build on anti-rivalrous foundations. This type of innovations that will give rise to anti-rivalrous economy need to have solid game-theoretical foundations (that don’t create externalities and have closed loops and don’t create zero-sum win-lose games). And they need to be anti-fragile to the existing rivalrous economy environment.
Not an easy task, but to create such a space of a cocoon for the future would be my example of the ideal social innovation.
