“Creating The Future” Series (Part 1): Technologies Of Post-scarcity, Freedom and Ecology
If you want to read the intro, click here
From the appendices of Hanzi Freinacht’s book on Metamodern philosophy, the following idea is revealed:
“[Metamodernists] accept that all humans and other organisms have a connecting, overarching worldview, a great story or grand narrative (a religion, in what is often interpreted as being the literal sense of the word: something that connects all things) and therefore accept the necessity of a grande histoire, an overarching story about the world. The metamodernist has her own unapologetically held grand narrative, synthesizing her available understanding. But it is held lightly, as one recognizes that it is always partly fictional — a protosynthesis.”
In the first installment of this series, I will try to synthesize all the great ideas I have come across about creating the future through technological innovation, turning it into a grand narrative on technology’s value proposition. To define technology is a hard task, especially in a way that relates it to human culture, so I will treat this essay as a protosynthesis, as Hanzi’s metamodernism defines it — a story in which we connect all that we know. I will not, in any way, try to predict what the technologies of the future will look like, but I will base my analysis on widely existing tendencies that are clearly observed and on pressing societal problems that need to be solved.
As like any story or narrative, it is bound to come from my own reality-tunnel and is meant to be my own thesis on technological change. As explained in the introduction, each one of us has to make bets on what the future holds and then work to make it happen. From this synthesis will emerge opportunities I will be placing my own bets on - if I get the chance to. As much as developed as this essay will be, I consider all the below loosely held convictions and fictional until the future actually arrives.
I also do not believe the insights here are comprehensive — no model can be. Nevertheless, it may overlap with other readers’ mental models and ideally help those designing the future make sense of the major opportunities arising from technology, know where to orient themselves, better frame their businesses for future value generation. After this, I hope that readers will venture into their own research, two steps ahead, and then construct their own models.
For the introduction to this series, which was meant to be a relatively shorter piece of inspiration before we jump into the theoretical and practical insights, please go here. You can however skip, if you don’t have the time.
The first part of this essay will explain the shift we are going through currently, and why technology can be part of the way forward, while the second part will try to dissect the longstanding value exchange between technology and humanity.
I. The Coming Technology Shift
1. Technology and the paradox of progress
2. A return to humanist technologies
3. The socio-technological connection
4. The responsibility of technologists
5. The combination of computing power and human potential
II. The Grand Narrative of Technology’s Value Proposition
1. Frictionless
2. Abundant
3. Liberatory
4. Augmentative
5. Collaborative
6. Ecological
I. The Coming Technology Shift
1. Technology and the paradox of progress
“To understand where technology is going, it helps to study from where it came. Technology has much in common with biology: it trends from simple to complex; from few species or technologies to many specialized ones; from isolated organisms or ideas or objects to highly networked combinations; from disorder to high-order, information and energy density and energy efficiency. And while life and technology follow these parallel paths, they’re now co-evolving and influencing each other.” — Josh Wolfe, investor and partner at Lux Capital
It is not easy to precisely imagine how the human race transformed its culture from mere explorers in the wild rainforests to modern levels of global civilization. The one thing we know for sure, human development would not have happened without technology. Starting a fire to heat food, building a ladder to climb trees, and inventing the wheel to travel further are in fact considered early forms of technology which amplified human nature and played a big part in the emergence of the reality we live in today. A fire, a ladder and a wheel are all tools we take for granted, and we forget how much modern culture relies on them.
Looking back to more recent time, technology in the 1800s and the early 1900s was synonymous with the industrial and military complex. As soon as the ideas of war began to fade away global capitalism took over, technologists turned their sights to “the market” as consumerization started to play a bigger role in both driving technological innovations, and determining which of them get adopted. The innovation efforts of older generations culminated in building a new and improved world as a reaction to the problems of their times — mostly poverty, disease, war and scarcity. We can thus, to a certain extent, summarize the majority of the last 50 years as a great boom in material affluence due to the commercialization of new technologies.
Because of that, humanity has never been better off and most long-term trends have been positive, some even exponential. This optimistic account of the history of technology is one which many intellectuals portray, but less and less so. The argument Harvard psychology professor and polymath Steven Pinker has been making is an equally optimistic one, and to think that his argument controversial should come as a shock to the optimists among us. Pinker says “ the world continues to improve in just about every way. Extreme poverty, child mortality, illiteracy, and global inequality are at historic lows; vaccinations, basic education, including girls, and democracy are at all-time highs”, and he’s quite right despite the bad rep our future is getting around the death of economic growth and the end of innovation.
Yet those also right are the intelligent historians and futurists who know both not to extrapolate and not to suppose those good things can last forever. In fact, assuming past data will continue unconditionally is most often the mistaken consensus view. In reality, the paradox in maintaining the systems that the older generation dreamed up is that problems are building up, boiling, unsolved and unattended. The progress that older generations made was not without externalities that currently burden the majority of people, the global economy, and the nature we live within. We can each feel and see the cultural stagnation, the dystopian sci-fi stories and the environmental crises enveloping the story we are telling ourselves about the future. The narratives from which people made meaning of the world in the past are hence in no way helpful to our current, or future, world. We are, indeed, living in the most contradictory times.
The saddest part of the story about economical progress is that we have been building, since the industrial age, an evergrowing “machine” that results on one hand in the exploitation, extraction and instrumentalization of the natural environment, and on the other hand in the restriction, manipulation and mechanization of human beings. In a system running on the promise of unlimited growth, the earth’s resources are being used up at an unsustainable rate, hence creating one of the biggest existential risks we ever faced. In the same way, the system of corporate hegemony turns laborers into instruments of production, no more equal in “value” than the machines being used, which then leads to a wide casting void and a lack of personal meaning across society. Even with all the innovation that emanated in the last 200 years and the increased standards of living it brought, normal life is still harsh, demanding and full of suffering for a worldwide majority. As a result, technology itself is also stuck in the paradox of progress:
- On one hand, technology is getting a very bad rep in the media now that we are at the end of the second decade after the millennia. The most valuable tech companies are portrayed as the new bad guys. The economic field is clearly picturing a straight path towards machines become better at being machines, hence further replacing humans, at a wider scale (Most expert reports says that 50% of today’s existing jobs will be automated away in the next 20 years) and at a faster rate (Most experts believe that there is no way we can catch up by creating new jobs at the same rate or by having people re-learn fast enough).
- On the other hand, deep within the technology industry still boils the long-standing narrative of democratizing access to resources and material abundance, which people like the entrepreneur Peter Diamandis talk much about. Since the late 60s and all through the current decade, multiple technologists brought another kind of imagination, and with it new “techno-utopian” visions that are we can rely on to build a better future. We are talking of such as those of Kevin Kelly, Steve Jobs, Hanz Moravec, Murray Bookchin, Terence McKenna, Douglas Rushkoff and others.
2. A return to humanist technologies
Ivan Illich was one author who noted, in the 1980s, that industrial tools enslaved man and preached that we should really aim to build “tools of conviviality” instead of tools for instrumentalization. He explains, “I choose the term “conviviality” to designate the opposite of industrial productivity. I intend it to mean autonomous and creative intercourse among persons, and the intercourse of persons with their environment; and this in contrast with the conditioned response of persons to the demands made upon them by others, and by a man-made environment.” Meghan O’Gieblyn, writing of “Three Visions of Technological Progress” in the Boston Review, explains that “It was visions such as [those of cybernetic uptopia] helped reframe computers — once feared as the dehumanized tools of Cold War technocracy — as mediums of collaboration, community, and even spiritual communion.” The digital world that engulfs our senses began as ideas from a handful of innovators driven by optimism and wonder and were iterated by others who then built layers upon other layers. In the same manner, there exist many more contemporary utopian dreams of technologies of community and augmentation, which have persisted for at least the last few decades, despite the negative externalities and the seemingly wrongful applications in control, exploitation and surveillance.
What all these visions have in common, is a return to humanism, a return to taking responsibility for stewarding the world and using the evolutionary power they have amassed over thousands of years — from language proficiency to medical understanding, to scientific knowledge, to their capacity to love and collaborate — in order to produce a kind of paradise on earth (as Terence McKenna has literally said). The story goes something like this: As our technology give us the superpowers to shape the world, we consent to it shaping us back into what we have never known as human. So when we create beauty, we ontologically get some beauty back. Once again today, we need to reclaim those visions and readjust them to current world issues.
We rather, as explained in my introduction to the series, should be intelligently, and conditionally, optimistic and from there actively and obsessively work to build a better future instead of simply predicting if it will appear evil or good. Murray Bookchin, a post-postmodern and humanist philosopher at best, criticized in his 1995 book “Re-enchanting Humanity” both the culture of technophobia and that of treating technology as an autonomous force separate from society. He writes that “The notion that science and technology are ‘autonomous’ of society, that they themselves are controlling factors in guiding society, is perhaps one of the most insidious illusions of our time” and then goes on to speak of multiple ways we can use technology, and also notes that “Various societies use a given technology in radically different ways: Some for personally profitable and exploitative ends; others use it restrictively, owing to traditions of parsimoney or fears of social instability; and still others might well use it rationally, to advance human freedom, self-development, and an ecological sensibility”. The insight here is that technology, if used well and for the sake of humanity, can be a powerful force guiding our social evolution and giving new pathways to our personal lives.
3. The socio-technological connection
The future decisively depends on the cultural and economic ideas that engender it. And as technology is created from society, technology then creates changes in society. Murray Bookchin also said, in Ecology of Freedom that “our imagery of technics cannot evade the highly fluid nature of the world in which we live and the highly fluid nature of humanity itself.” Creating the future, therefore, is about recognizing that technology cannot be detached from the social and culture aspects it lives by — we are effectively participating in, and even designing, the new paths of evolution, as well as engaging with novelty until it makes everything, including us, better and more well-off. Charlie Gilkey said it best in this way: “The many hundreds of small ways that technology alters our individual and collective behavior on a daily basis add up to the cultural changes the technologists and historians point to.”
“No marvelous technological developments alone — computers and the internet, nanotechnology, space technology, biotechnology, VR, AR, A.I. — will stop continuing warfare, racism, environmental destruction, and global injustice. The source of these sufferings is in the human heart.” — Jack Kornfield, “Our Crisis of Heart” on Medium
The apparent truth is, after years of contemplating innovation, is that we can’t separate human ideals and technology: We can’t think of biotechnology without pondering the potential of designing life and upgrading the metaphysical definition of “human”. We can’t think of the future of virtual social media realities without mentioning the impact it had on the interconnectedness of all people, as well as on human behaviour, influence even modern dating (40% of relationships in the US today started online). We can’t think of nuclear power technologies as separate from its significance in war and peace, and on energy creation as a basis for powering the future of civilization. We can’t think of the autonomous technologies that Uber and Lyft are creating without mentioning how the structure of whole cities will change. We can’t think of internet marketplaces and how they are turning a life of individual ownership and stable careers into one of collaborative consumption and gig economies. We can’t think of Google and the world wide web without analyzing how education and knowledge turned from school-based and book-based, to internet-based and personal blogging-based. You get the gist — progress is then to be seen in evolving culture, and evolving the concept of the human self, as much as it is seen in technological and material growth.
We inherently are the drivers behind the technological rocketship. For external changes to happen, what must happen first are internal changes in worldviews, perspectives and values that guide creating a future where human-being themselves flourish. We are ourselves responsible for not letting the machine run loose and start “thinking” by itself. Because society and technology intermingle in a fundamental way, the re-design of society through technology is not only possible, but may be our only path. In fact, what many intellectuals are saying is that it’s time to build a new “operating system” for humanity itself. What is important to preach, hence, is product design that uses thousands of years worth of learning to nudge end-users to create an optimistic future.
4. The responsibility of entrepreneurs and technologists
It is no secret that our current society has given entrepreneurs, software developers and UX designers the power and responsibility to create the new features of culture. How we create the future of humanity increasingly depends upon the decisions they make, and the mental models they use for making them. The US military coined, in the 1990s, the acronym VUCA — which stands for volatility, uncertainty, complexity and ambiguity — to describe the state of the world. This has been increasingly adopted in the technology business world, where everything is not just VUCA but also exponential and multidimensional. Certainty in decision-making, hence is dead, whereas people still look for certainty in uncertain times when there is none. In parallel, the systems we live in are more complex and messy than ever. They are constantly shifting. Everything exists in relationships, and product managers no longer can shape whole ecosystems on their own, but should instead know how to participate and enable positive change. Ecosystem-building are a collective effort; the people creating the infrastructures are not the same people creating the middlewares nor the ones developing the contextual applications. And so all the discoveries and innovations will converge, expand, and adapt, ultimately leading to a very different world that no one person can predict or take responsibility for.
“We must always be on a quest for the new, for the potentialities that ripen with the development of the world and the new visions that unfold with them. True development is cumulative, not sequential, it is growth, not succession. The new always embodies the present and past, but it does so in new ways and more adequately as parts of a greater whole.” — Murray Bookchin
Greg Satell, author of “Mapping Innovation”, further explains that important innovation is driven by a process of building ecosystems, rather than by single discoveries or inventions. Entrepreneurs can build on top of what other tinkerers before them have built. “As a general rule of thumb, it takes about 30 years for all of this to take place, because thousands, if not millions of people need to change their behavior, coordinate their activity and start new businesses.” After looking at how Artificial intelligence, robotics, genetic engineering and quantum computers have only begun to show signs of early ecosystem development, he then concludes that the next decade will see the system tipping and going into a phase transition from which major new value opportunities will emerge. To outsiders of the venture world, they can probably talk about the stagnation on the economical and criticize the role of technology, but this stagnation is far from the truth for the people on the inside who regularly analyze new ventures and witness thousands of deals made for funding early-stage innovation. The ecosystems are indeed getting built and many platform shifts are on the way — from smart homes to the mixed reality headsets, to wearables and body-as-a-platform. What we should also understand is that innovation is increasingly based on a trial and error process — that’s mainly because of the lean startup method and the ease of software iteration. The progress may be slow, but it is very real — and it’s about to shift.
Therefore, the grand narrative of technology in which the entrepreneurs of the next decade have to situate themselves is this: Our technological systems are in phase transition that can either go awry if we apply traditional thinking to it, or can propel us into god-like humanity if we open ourselves to new potentialities. The creators of technology today should hence be intrinsically and extrinsically incentivized to build tools that optimize for human wellbeing. The challenge of the newer generations is hence in seeing the growing pains of the status-quo, solving current and deep societal problems and realizing the importance of transcending the systems that run the world. Innovation becomes the process of how we turn the creative potential of technology into real value for all of humanity. The entrepreneur’s job is then to use technology and make impactful innovation — hence deliberately creating human incentive systems for positive value generation and sustainability through our tools.
5. The combination of computing power and human potential
We can actually note that even some technology investors, as apparent in the highly acclaimed yearly document “Internet trends” made by the VC firm Kleiner Perkins, agree that the growth drivers of the economy of the 21st century are unveiling themselves as part of a mix of computing power and human potential. The narrative is still unclear on whether we will aim to increase both levers, or just one of them.
The current focus, however, seems to be too much on increasing automation and computing power without increasing human potential. In fact John Markoff, technology writer for the New York Times observes that “In a capitalist economy, if artificial intelligence technologies improve to the point that they can replace new kinds of white-collar and professional workers, they will inevitably be used in that way.” Yet this is in no way deterministic, especially in a world where capitalism is already both deeply criticized and greatly evolving. It is also far from the truth of what’s actually happening. As we go forward, AI for now seems to be automating tasks, not whole jobs. And when one task is automated, the human is now free to think about other things. The great opportunity to take out the mechanistic labor from the human, and replace it with new forms of meaning, lies just there.
If the formula stands as is, the interdependence of the two sides — a multiplicity in which computation is optimized to augment the human — creates a multiplier effect. In this way, defining the future of man-machine relations is crucial for real growth and there are, indeed, a few voices in AI saying that out of automation and powerful technologies should emerge a movement of re-learning how to be truly human, and then transcending even our humanity. Yuval Harari, one of the most prominent historical thinkers, talks for example in his widely popular books “Sapiens” and “Homo Deus”, of a present where the innovations that define our world are no longer dumb tools like a hammers and knives, but intelligent entities which both blends into the user’s way of life to help achieve whatever desire and reconstruct the deepest subjective worldviews. For Harari, “the result is a burgeoning and quite inexorable intimacy between machines and the organic bodies that comprise us.”
Creating the future, in this sense, not only requires vision but also requires a deep existential meaning of participation in the emergence of a more beautiful human reality. Technology is but a tool we use to bring sustainable complexity into being, in the same way evolution brings new systems into being (to paraphrase Josh Wolf’s introductory quote to this essay). Yet the main difference, which Daniel Schmachtenberger (Founder of Neurohacker) regularly alludes to, between life and technology, is that technology is done through conscious design — the human being an agent of consciousness. As an agent, a technologist relying on science and technology can only take him/her so far in creating real value in this world. He/She has to go also through the archaic fields of religious narratives, ethics, philosophy, sociology, as well as unfolding fields of new sciences such as positive psychology, behavioural economics, and complexity theory, that can guide us in future value-generation. He/She has to understand that “techne”, in its very original use of the word, meant a process of creating art inseparable from its creator. It’s also Bookchin who reminds us of this — that technology is not just the “ensemble of raw materials, tools, machines, and related devices that are needed to produce a usable object”, but that it is “the product has to exist and the ethical light by which to form a metaphysical judgment about this why.”
“Technology wants what life wants: Increasing efficiency; Increasing opportunity; Increasing emergence; Increasing complexity; Increasing diversity; Increasing specialization; Increasing ubiquity; Increasing freedom; Increasing mutualism; Increasing beauty; Increasing sentience; Increasing structure; Increasing evolvability.” —Kevin Kelly, Wired Magazine founder and author of the book “What Technology Wants”
II. The Human-Technology Value Exchange
It seems that today we have decades of data and insights on how innovation evolves and progress work, hence we can even try to dissect them then build on them, all in order to imagine how new phenomena of value creation will come into being. To create the future, we can look at that past and how it’s resurfacing through modern technologies. We also have to stop for a moment and look at how the future can be radically different, or how our lives can be better under alternative socio-economical forms. To resolve the paradox we’re in, we have to re-orient technological advance in new directions, extracting only its benefits and then taking them to their extreme. Personally, I engaged on a research to synthesize the main value-generating aspects of technology, and they can widely be used as a framework to think through new value propositions. Combinations of them can lead to the right questions to ask when designing innovation.
What this model shows is this:
- Expanding our individual freedom, and fulfilling new meaningful lives, will come first as a result of expanding our material capacity and ultimately our creativity.
- Once that is done, we should become free to engage in upgrading our knowledge of the world so that we understand the hidden connections that surround us.
- Our technology will make sure that we do this in a collaborative, open, and civic way that knows no exploitation, but that only knows complete freedom, all-embracing purpose, exploration, ecstasy, re-attuned participation in universal narratives.
- Our goal is to become so free that we venture to increase simultaneously both our own agency, and our symbiosis with the rest of the species and the whole planet — the end result being the wellbeing of the whole universe we live in, out of which emerged our own consciousness and the notion of freedom itself.
1. Frictionless
Past innovations such as the washing machine, the word processor and the plane were all introduced to make our lives easier and more comfortable. Most people don’t even remember what washing clothes, transcribing written text on paper, and going by boat from country to country was like before these technologies appeared (hint: they were arduous!). New products would make the same consumption activities require 10-100x the time to complete. While we didn’t often have such major innovations come into our lives, the rate at which technology is introduced is in fact increasing. This means that everything is about to change soon, and that the age of abundance is just beginning.
As with the innovative products above, the “most welcomed” technological breakthroughs seem to all reduce and mask friction that used to exist in achieving personal consumption goals — otherwise known in the technology world as “Job- to-be-done” (thanks to Clayton Christensen). The narrative of successful innovation shows pattern which follows the “I want X but Y” framework. While X is the JBTD, Y is one or more friction points that are between the I and the X. Different sources of friction can be time, choice, intermediaries, unnecessary actions, complexity, uncertainty, distrust, distance, security, transportation, cost etc. Reducing friction through innovation designates the removal by design of both unnecessary clutter and cognitive effort, so that higher experiential utility and well-being are eliminated from the consumption journey. Just as previous industrial technologies limited the physical effort we need to do to achieve our daily work objectives, frictionless consumer software technologies end up increasing our living standards and freeing up our internal psyche from needless cognitive effort and nuisances.
“Much like how the washing machine automated cleaning our clothes with our hands, or how the word processor simplified writing and erasing, or how the airlines enabled us to go from city to city in a fraction of the time while being taken care of by hostesses, the new wave of startups should aim remove the most friction from consumer journeys in new industries like health, food, finance, physical retail and others. The most valuable companies of the future will therefore be the ones that reach zero-friction.” — Jad El Jamous, Frictionless Consumption: A New Lens for Early-stage B2C Opportunity Evaluation
When we look at most internet applications such as Music streaming apps like Spotify, Communication apps like Facebook Messenger or Snapchat, ride Hailing apps such as Uber and Lyft, we notice that the entrepreneurs behind them have chosen to digitize a previously existing physical experience and c completely remove friction out. To illustrate, we can compare the on-demand, personalized and instant listening experience of Spotify to preliminary music experiences where the musician had to come to you, or more recently when you had to go to the store to buy the CD, which really only works with a CD-player that you also have to purchase. In between those we find that the music listening activity has been completely digitized to reach zero-friction. As another example, we can look to Whatsapp and other widely used messaging software such as Skype or Slack. The friction point of real distance between users and their contacts has been incredibly eliminated, and the experience became one of transcending time and place to be with others people. Another notable example is using Uber, where the driver comes to us through a GPS-based real-time tracking app. The uncertainty we previously felt when waiting for a cab, as well as the aimless waiting we had to go through, are both reduced to near-zero.
Interestingly, the way in which we discover new things to consume is also getting frictionless. The challenges involved in finding products, deciding on them, and being certain about trying them out are alleviated by smarter algorithms that can first understand user preferences, and second, use the collective wisdom of other similar peoples’ preferences for personal recommendations. This has been going on for a few years, and shows no sign of stopping. Media companies such as Netflix have been leaders in this type of friction-reducing innovation, yet all tech companies will follow. Indeed, personalization is here to stay, and will expand in its concept to denote intelligence as the world “intelligence”, at its roots, means to choose (legere) between (inter) a pair or set of options or choices. Deep-learning algorithms have already started to make their way in more and more consumer apps. These apps will learn more about the user through tracking their behavious and then start recommending content or products in a personalized way — this can range from new music they might like, new friends they may want to connect with or services they should try out. These early case studies of Artificiial Intelligence will become much more valuable when they understand exactly what the user needs at all time, and go on figuring out how to get the end product to him/her. This is a huge theme for the future — think fintech, insurance, commerce, dating etc. In a very comprehensive way, digital businesses will look at historical patterns of consumption, at previous interests, or at how other people like the user behave, and then suggest the next course of action to be taken and what we need to do with each piece of information.
The emergence of the Internet of Things and new device interfaces will exponentially accelerate the personalization of consumption. The best way to get personal recommendations is to be surrounded with devices that know people so well they can predict what everyone wants to achieve given their current mindset, personality, location, intent, online behaviour, context etc. After the release of Siri, Alexa and Google Home, speech recognition and chatbots are becoming the faster and more frictionless tools for interacting with our devices, replacing keyboards and touch screens. It is more convenient to tell a bot who can access all our devices and apps what we want it to do so it executes those tasks for us. I do believe that this signals the start of a platform shift, as I’ve written in an essay about future HCI. Just take the example of Amazon Echo turning off the lights for us — a simple task that links the user who asks for this to happen, the Echo that processes this demand, and the light switch which is connected and ready to execute. A bit further away, we also can envision that fully-connected wearables will predict the needs of their users with minimum interference from the user. They will use the body-as-a-platform and order products, food and medicine that it demands.
Looking even further, we also started to see a market forming around robots that can, in an affective way, communicate with humans to better understand their context. In a similar way that human interaction is centered around emotions and body language, we can give apps and robots human understanding and expressiveness, thereby improving human-machine interaction and collaboration. Collecting bodily behavioural and emotional intent data can improve digital products further. Facial expression analysis can be coupled by speech and tone of voice analysis in what is called multimodal emotion recognition. Gesture recognition, as an addition, is important today for the smart home and smart car market and plays a large part in creating new ways for people to control technology by just moving the hands for example. Human sensing technology can find its way into unlimited use cases as it will augment almost every digital offering when apps, objects and robots begin to deeply understand humans. In healthcare, any researcher that is trying to make people happier, stronger, and healthier will benefit.
“What we did in the 20th century was to make manufacturing more efficient. After the Second World War, we started to make consumption more efficient. This is because once you’ve made manufacturing more efficient there’s a hell of a lot of products on the market. It becomes necessary to make purchasing efficient so that people can manage to buy them. This is what we’re up to right now.” — Bo Dahlbom, Professor at IT university, University of Gothenburg
Consumption, however, is not the only activity that technologists are looking to reduce friction from; There’s also lots happening around the future of work. Human-centric SaaS products are quickly making their way into the workplace. In this fast-paced and ever-complicated world, it seems that we are supposed to be constantly learning, constantly producing, and constantly making decisions. This mode de vie seems an inevitable part of our current society if we want to be regarded and regard ourselves as “good” and “productive” human beings. We need all the help we can get from technology to make our lives easier and alleviate the weight of the world from our shoulders. Business leaders also need virtual assistants in our office that answer questions, send emails, and organize our workday. Production, manufacturing, and construction workers will need those Mixed Reality Headsets that will simplify tasks and increase their input-output through the “machine”. Doctors will also need AI-assistants such as Watson Health and Deepmind Health to diagnose and notify us about diseases and medical treatments etc. As Kevin Kelly, Wired Founder and futurist said, “If AI can help humans become better chess players, it stands to reason that it can help us become better pilots, better doctors, better judges, better teachers.”
2. Abundant
18th and 19th-century industrialism was based both on a model of scarcity and on the reconfiguration of the material world to meet basic needs at scale. The economic models which were created in that period and which we still use today are mainly about allocating scarce resources — and this goes way back to when things like food and housing were scarce and we needed either totalitarian leaders or a competitive system of resource allocation to determine who gets what and who goes hungry. “Much of the world as we know it is based on scarcity”, explains the marketing thinker Seth Godin, citing things that are even non-physical such as college admissions, hierarchies and limited shelf space. Today, the economic game has changed. We have more resources than we ever needed, and we have the early technologies to make them even more abundant.
“If I pluck all the oranges from the lower branches, I am effectively out of accessible fruit. From my limited perspective, oranges are now scarce. But once someone invents a piece of technology called ladder, I’ve suddenly got new reach. Problem solved. Technology is a resource liberating mechanism. It can make the once scarce now abundant.” — Peter Diamandis and Steven Kotler, in the book Abundance
Technology came to change the whole game because its primary purpose was to increase access to what is scarce. Technology delivers affordable, faster, and better solutions and bridges the gap between the non-rich and the rich by both harnessing resources from nature and multiplying them. By introducing industrial and innovative business models that take away the cost for end consumers, we have used technology to make the means of life more sufficient to all. It can even be said that the smartphone applications of today create much more value for society than they extract from it by facilitating information flows, helping people find another, and giving them the ability to come together.
For example, messaging has moved away from a high price under telco control to free on the open internet of Whatsapp and Facebook. Social media is created and consumed for free by the crowd. For less than $50 per month, we use our relatively cheap smartphones for 6–8 hours per day to browse through news and entertainment content on applications like Spotify, Netflix, Youtube and the thousand other content creators. Taken to its end point, the abundance model makes supply and demand economics obsolete and revokes any need for a pricing mechanism. This is not some sort of utopian dream anymore but is strongly grounded in existing economic tendencies such as the digitization of products, unlimited production at scale, near-zero marginal costs, and work automation.
A very specific abundance-creating example include long-tail supply models. The long-tail a concept explained by Chris Anderson and understood through services such as Netflix which increased access to niche movies, Google which increased access to niche websites, AirBnB increased access to niche vacation rentals and so on). In its most basic form, online marketplaces are business models that create limitless supply, and that give people freedom of choice. A step beyond, marketplaces that enable the sharing of assets — such as Zipcar, BlaBlaCar and AirBnB — democratize ownership and makes access to goods cheaper and helps the suppliers monetize them. This is essentially based on “inventory growth is not limited by traditional time or capital constraints”, as Barbara Gray the author of Ubernomics, interprets it.
In addition to increasing supply through the long-tail, we can digitize supply and automate distribution chains. For example, both the price of consuming content have gone down to near-zero levels in the last 10 years. Where we used to buy DVDs and Vinyls, music and video are now distributed in bits. Software, in general, behaves like that and reducing marginal cost of distribution. As a result of a huge push by technologists to automate everything, the price of goods and services that were traditionally outside of the digital realm can also go down significantly. Sectors that are already affected are many — financial services delivered through mobile interfaces, energy delivered through solar grids, education delivered through VR, fashion delivered through 3D printers, counseling delivered through video, health delivered through robotic diagnosis and surgery, and retail delivered through 3D/holographic images. These sectors, combined, represent more than 60% of GDP in developed countries and are the most imminent to become abundant through digital transformation.
Personally, my biggest bet is on Augmented Reality and spatial computing will add a digital layer of 3D objects on top of the physical world. Augmented and mixed reality will move the fundamental essence of production beyond the current state of consumerist capitalism and into a mostly-digital world. Since the digital sphere is easier to design, the efforts of everyone involved in the economy will be focused on making the world a better and more enjoyable place not through the production of more “stuff”, but through the creation of more interactive digital art and 3D content that can be layered on top of the real world (AR) or exist fully in cyberspace (VR). In addition to lowering the impact of manufacturing on the environment. People will no longer be addicted to buying what are considered useless physical goods, but will switch to more virtual goods. And we should not turn a blind eye to the fields of biotechnology and nanotechnology which will speed up the journey towards multiplying physical resources, cognifying them and even creating new materials from scratch.
Taking this argument to the extreme, a post-scarcity society is one in which the question of “How do we get access to services and products at near-zero prices” has been solved. There are, in front of us, three paths to designing a more abundant future:
- I’ve previously written on Alex Danco’s (from Social Capital) explanation of abundance creation, that is the removal of the scarce element via technology to meet unserved needs in the market. According to Alex, a concurrent shift from i (abstraction of a scarce element) to i+1 (emerging scarce element) and from j (overserved customers) to j+1 (underserved customers) causes market transformation where customers are attracted to a certain product/service. A specific example, relating to Airbnb, shows that people overserved by expensive hotels have switched to solve a higher level more abstract job-to-be-done such as “feeling like a local”. Therefore, a shift from scarcity to abundance causes market transformation that again abstracts away the newly emerging scarce element, and so on. This, for me, results in a really important question that we should ask ourselves about the future value proposition of any new innovation: “What’s the next scarce resource that we can master and turn into value?”
- Inequality in access to resources is one of the major sources of conflict in the world today. Billions who are still living in poverty should have access to the same life-improving products and services than those who have more economic power. The formation of abundant communities enabled by technological and scientific progress should happen at the same pace all around the globe. Furthermore, we should be thinking about what money buys, not how much money we have. Wealth is not in how much money we have, but in how much resources we have access to. Goods and services like cars, smartphones, air travel, which were previously only available to the rich and powerful are today more affordable to people of all incomes. And as more people are self-fulfilled and attended to, the ability of the whole to bring more wellbeing into being increases (We will revisit this concept later in the “collaborative” and “ecological” sections).
- The more modern and intelligent technology entities, such as those cited by Yuval Harari, are the ones we outsource our thinking to and encode our intelligence into so that they do the thinking work for us. The economist Friedrich Hayek, in the ‘The Use of Knowledge in Society’ has famously noted that “Civilization advances by extending the number of important operations which we can perform without thinking about them.” Hayek also speaks of extending the utilization of resources beyond the span of the control of any one mind” in order make everyone want to do the desirable things in society “without anyone having to tell them what to do”. We would go beyond merely satisfying the sufficiency of basic needs, to creating more free time and more consciousness on an individual level, all the while redesigning our lives on a cultural level.
3. Liberatory
“In a properly automated and educated world, then, machines may prove to be the true humanizing influence. It may be that machines will do the work that makes life possible and that human beings will do all the other things that make life pleasant and worthwhile.” — Isaac Asimov, Robot Visions
Nick Srineck and Alex Williams, in their book “Inventing the future”, postulate that “Our level of freedom is highly dependent upon the historical conditions of scientific and technological development.” They explain that because technology provides the material capacity to carry out desires, it shifts a person from the realm of “negative” freedom (which is a limited concept equivalent only to having a formal right without the ability to exercise it due to inequality and unemployment) to the realm of “synthetic” freedom. The latter kind of freedom seems to be the prerequisite for people to engage in play and existential enterprise, and hence truly embrace their human potential. Bookchin, with similar ideas of freedom, contrasts the “mere satisfaction of our survival needs for food, shelter, clothing, and material security”, which he calls needs of our animal organism, with the “satisfaction of our intellectual, esthetic, sensuous and playful daydreams”, the latter being from which people can begin the full realization of their most creative potential. Good and liberatory technologies then, we can conclude, are made to maximize future freedom of action and creativity.
Ultimately, the goal of technological tools is to allow the fullest actualization of the self and the achievement of autonomy. The technology industry thus has a duty to cater to our more complete selves rather than just to our narrow interests and daily tasks. We, therefore, go from technologies of truth and instrumentalism towards technologies of subjective freedom and psychological wellness — where our tools are infinitely customizable to the self. In more recent writing, put forward after the internet boom, James Swurillo talks in his book “Metamodern Leadership” that social media requires active engagement instead of aloofness, and that it hence puts man again in an empowered “acting” position, in opposition to a previously passive one, from which he/she can create their own individualized production. Seth Abramson, writing an intro on metamodernism, also describes the metamodern philosophy as “[seeing] the internet as a place of boundless self-creation, unfettered problem-solving, and limitless invention.” Other disruptive technologies remain equal contenders performing the same function of turning people into creators and producers — things like marketplace platforms, augmented creativity software, and 3D printers and even biotechnology where we can assemble physical matter into anything we set our imagination to, a movement also known as Do-It-Yourself Biology (“DIY Bio”).
The future of the self is an interesting notion to analyze when it comes to technological change, because as the economy develops more automation tools and improve the allocation of resources, it leaves space for a new vision of selfhood in relation to culture. Things like religion, yoga, binging Youtube content, mathematics, and foodie culture are all outcomes of our “necessary” daily tasks being taken over by automation and hence leaving a space-time gap which can be filled by cultural novelty. Cultural potentialities created in the future, similar to such actions I described, will emerge without us predicting them or understanding them at full-tilt because the properties that emerge are mostly unknown to us, as they are created from parts that don’t have the same properties. The “collaborative commons”, and I’m including in my definition of commons these cultural ideas that no one person owns but are universally shared, is where people will increasingly spend their time once technology does even more “heavy lifting”
“If the steam engine freed human beings from feudal bondage to pursue material self-interest in the capitalist marketplace, the Internet of Things frees human beings from the market economy to pursue nonmaterial shared interests on the Collaborative Commons. Many — but not all — of our basic material needs will be met for nearly free in a near zero marginal cost society. Intelligent technology will do most of the heavy lifting in an economy centered on abundance rather than scarcity. A half century from now, our grandchildren are likely to look back at the era of mass employment in the market with the same sense of utter disbelief as we look upon slavery and serfdom in former times. The very idea that a human being’s worth was measured almost exclusively by his or her productive output of goods and services and material wealth will seem primitive, even barbaric, and be regarded as a terrible loss of human value to our progeny living in a highly automated world where much of life is lived on the Collaborative Commons.” ― Jeremy Rifkin, The Zero Marginal Cost Society
This sort of “Synthetic” freedom also elevates a person to a higher quest for self-transcendence where he/she can have the idealistic courage to go beyond themselves and solve large, world-class challenges. After explaining long and clear about a society where any sort of repression of the psyche is removed (speaks of two kinds of “authentic” happiness, which are hedonism (pleasure, having fun) and eudemonia (meaning, purpose in life) — the metamodern political thinker Hanzi Freinacht goes on to say that the goal of the combined civil-political-market spheres should be to generate both kinds of happiness which will, in turn, create more functional and equal societies. David Foster Wallace builds on this idea, noting that “The really important kind of freedom involves attention, and awareness, and discipline, and effort, and being able to truly care about other people and to sacrifice for them, over and over, in myriad petty little unsexy ways, every day. That is real freedom. The alternative is unconsciousness, the default setting, the “rate race” — the constant gnawing sense of having had and lost some infinite thing.”
Jordan Greenhall, internet entrepreneur and social thinker, believes that “the foundational axiom of all economic theories is being deleted when we are capable of automating the shitty jobs” — and this in turn, radically makes more human freedom possible. Looking back on the history of the self, we can only see individual expression and creative endeavours increasing in one’s career. There is no doubt that progress made many people better off by replacing most mechanical and mundane jobs with knowledge work, and even enabling a new kind of digital nomadism. One thing is for sure, that the future of work will look nothing like today, and our minds will be free to ponder about much more abstractions.
The question of “How do we find people more jobs?” seems a wrong one in the context of technology having the power to replace any job. Instead, we should be asking things like “What do we do with the extra free time we get?”, “What is the meaning of life without routine and tiresome work?” and “How we can we promote more creative potential?”. When we all realize that artificial intelligence is a movement aimed at making our lives more fulfilling, we will stop fearing digitization and automation. The rise of the machines will not be seen anymore as a dystopian nightmare but will be awaited like a sort of “Second Coming” event where we will let go of mind-dulling jobs, and instead pursue purposeful hobbies and occupations that really make us happy. The second-order consequence is even more interesting: by eliminating the constraints of scarcity, fear-based zero-sum mindset will decrease and individuals will both stop seeing others as threats and no more feel the need to manipulate others in a competitive way.
4. Augmentative
If technology is meant to take friction out of our lives and promote a freedom to self-actualize and indulge in playful desire, the next big leap is towards a freedom to upgrade oneself to “do more” and “be more”. In an interview with the idealized innovator Steve Jobs in 1980s, he compares a computer to “a bicycle for the mind”, explaining that when one is on a bicycle, his/her human body becomes metaphorically extended through the wheels and disappears into the bicycle. He continues “This is how technology should work: starting with a human need, and a purpose, technology should extend outwards with the intent of expanding the human, not confining or reducing”. Our learning here is that the main question to ask when were are innovating is “How do we use technology to give ourselves superpowers?”. We can also deduce that technology must expand our social freedom as much as our physical freedom — the bike, while it enables our bodies to move faster, gives us the freedom to travel further and meet new people, or to visit exciting places that would not have been in reach in the absence of it.
“The bicycle of the mind” idea includes an assumption that tools can become seamlessly integrated into how we think. Objects we already use today, such as smartphones or work software, are often just as functionally essential to our cognition as the synapses firing in our heads. AI tools and XR headsets for example, augment our cognitive power and act as “upskilling technologies”. They are starting to be used in industrial contexts to improve worker performance. Within the heated debate around automation lies an argument for using technology to increase human productivity, and it’s not only because robots are not capable of doing everything yet (and probably won’t be for another couple of decades), but also because of an emerging ethical view of empowering employees and improving their satisfaction through human-machine collaboration. The view is mainly coming from positive psychology, which means to push the envelope of performance and capabilities through treating people nicely and taking care of their mental wellness.
Outshining this particular idea are those of Transhumanism thought, of which its spirit revolves around refusing the natural barriers of evolution and replacing it with potentiality in overcoming our humanity. Transhumanists agree that we should be able to technologically enhance our brains to reach higher levels of intelligence, to upgrade the body through gene editing, connected wearables and nano-implants which in order to generate longevity. Nick Bostrom, Professor in the Faculty of Philosophy at Oxford University and founding Director of the Future of Humanity Institute, thinks that “there are vastly better ways of being than we humans can currently reach and experience”, and that not making use of digital technologies to rewire ourselves is an existential catastrophe in itself. We are the first generation ever that is saying “ Hey, we have a real shot at upgrading ourselves”, and we should not be doing it because we have to compete with the machines, or because we have to keep working and keeping up with the machine intelligence.
“What comes next will depend on our metaphysical characterizations of the human and the universe. The way we answer questions such as, “What is the human?” will determine the next century due to the emerging power of new technologies that render the human malleable in unpresented ways” — Zachary Stein, Love in a Time Between Worlds: On the Metamodern “Return” to a Metaphysics of Eros
To mirror again Harari’s point on the intricate merge of machines and humans and go beyond it, Ray Kurzweil states that “humans, in the next few decades, will be a hybrid of biological and non-biological intelligence that becomes increasingly dominated by its non-biological component. He further stresses that Artificial Intelligence is a mental extender and is part of who we are, as opposed to an alien technology that is outside of us. New Human-computer interfaces are bound to reshape human experience by allowing people to think in new ways and feel new things — this is done by “hijacking” (adding a layer to) our senses to create illusions of reality, such as in VR, and by exchanging information between the brain and outside networks. Not long from now, interfaces of such advanced input-output technologies — immersive mixed reality headsets, neural brain links, voice-commands, and haptic-based wearables — will combine the logic-enhancing algorithms of cognified devices and the human consciousness to create a far more powerful intelligence than a solely artificial one created by us outside of natural evolution.
Ray Kurzweil also talks openly about humans become more godlike and hacking flawed evolutionary processes which could be hastened with technology. Two main ways this could be done, is on one hand to expand the brain’s neocortex and on the other hand to foster human longevity. Transhumanists believe that, like Gods, humans could one day live forever with the help of smart algorithms and nanodevices injected into the body. These algorithms can monitor the body’s make health decisions based on comprehensive complexity and holistic knowledge that no human doctor could master. Other fields such as biotech, gene editing and regenerative medecine can help organs from decaying with age.
If technology is really another abstraction of Godlike abilities, what is being presented by transhumanists and similar ideas here is a metamodern worldview narrative where humans create god, instead of god creating humanity like in any ancient religious narrative. Like Sigmund Freud once explained, the omniscience and omnipotence — which were considered unattainable — were embodied in supernatural gods; yet they are now in closer reach, and hence we are nearly becoming those gods ourselves. We can think about it in this way: the digital capture of unlimited data for its use in understanding and prediction is the new omniscience. By the same token, the control of resources in a mass-personalized way is the new omnipotence.
“Us human beings are such ambitious creatures. We dream of cosmic expansion, we dream to soar the heavens, to transcend the biological shackles that limit us…One of the most interesting ways in which we ‘rehearse’ our own ambitions is through the use of metaphorical entities — Greek and Roman Gods being the best example. This is a way for us to safely idealize ourselves. This is where we can, without censorship, aspire to be. And of course by labeling them “gods”, we don’t have to admit that it’s really us who long for those attributes and qualities of omniscience and omnipotence… Having invented the gods, we can turn into them. This is the human yearning! This is what we want! [We need to] just come out of it. Admit it to ourselves already, and go about actualizing it. ” — Jason Silva “Mirroring Gods”
But then this project of becoming is to be an open innovation process that doesn’t transform into totalitarianist destiny, because the ideals of god themselves develop in parallel with changes in the context of an evolving society — with new scientific discoveries and technological breakthroughs, with new problems that arise from solving existing paradoxes, with new limitations that the world can impose on us. Rebecca Wilbanks notes in Aeon Magazine that it is hard to pin down what life will be like in the future and that “the capacity for open-ended evolution — ‘inventiveness, pluripotentiality, open-endedness’ — is the critical criteria of life”, while also saying that ‘‘ Because of this gap between actual life and potential life, many definitions of life focus on its capacity to change and evolve rather than trying to pin down fixed characteristics.” There is always this unknown potential that “will be”. Within this worldview, change is the only constant and we are killing the old Gods and birthing new divine ideals, as Hanzi Freinacht explains.
5. Collaborative
From the 18th to the 21st century, free-market capitalism managed to provide incentives for people to engage freely in productive activities for the benefit of others, and to work together for creating products that make our lives better. In the same way, Governments, and large corporations are abstractions we created to allow for wide-scale cooperation. While the culmination of modernity, as a project of increasing freedom and material affluence, led to a sort of hyper-individuality which is good for the soul, we must see, nonetheless, that individualism was not the sole objective — around the individual are networks of people that work as an integrated whole, so the individual who represents one node in the network should strive to improve the whole. It is hard for many, however, to hold this paradox in our minds — that both the expression of individuality and the capacity for universal cooperation should be improving. It is even harder to accept this as a paradigm and proceed to take both sides of the equation to the extreme, in order to balance it and find positive emergence from it.
Bookchin makes a great point on power versus domination and solves this paradox in an interesting way. He writes “Power, itself, is not something whose elimination is actually possible. Hierarchy, domination, and classes can and should be eliminated, as should the use of power to force people to act against their will. But the liberator use of power, the empowerment of the disempowered, is indispensable for creating a society based on self-management and the need for social responsibility — in short, free institutions.” It has always been that freedom, meaning in our context the full capacity to exercise the right and attain desires, has to be balanced with the collective freedom also. The famous quote “One person’s freedom ends where another’s begins”, means that freedom should not exist without responsibility. Our concern should be then to make sure that personal liberty is not corrupted by the ego, but works in favor of universal collaboration and community. When we identify ourselves as parts of an interconnected humanity, rather than separate from it, we stop thinking that there is any concept of freedom of self without freedom of every other being. We become agents for the interconnected whole, and we stop thinking that the idea of advantages ourself at the expense of something else.
“According to Joshua Cooper Ramo, It can’t be understood in simple either-or terms. Power and influence will, in the near future, become even more centralized than in feudal times and more distributed than it was in the most vibrant democracies.” What this dichotomy means is that we may yet see more concentration in the wealth and power of a privileged few; those who control the design and structure of certain protocols, companies, and platforms. It also means we’ll hear more stories of ordinary people, connected to information flows, doing interesting things as well.” — Aaron Frank, writing for SingularityHub
Many of us feel alone in today’s world, that we don’t belong, that everyone else is out to get us. The problem with capitalism is that it created an individualistic culture that separates us from others. Social networks are not so social when it comes to understanding others, and even lead to polarization. Modern “Social media” interfaces are reaching the end of their lifecycle, and the next step is just magical. Virtual Reality and Augmented reality are new interfaces bound to reconstruct the concept of “human self”, cultural reality and the social experience we share with others. By forming the new building blocks of reality, but still taking learnings from ancient mythological and animistic imaginations that gave a soul to the inanimate, they will give new meanings to our world. Multiple VR/AR/XR investors believe that these technologies won’t become mainstream and affect daily lives until they become collaborative and let people share experiences in new and engaging ways. I’ve also previously researched and written that “on a grand level, we should aim that Augmented Reality and NIO bring about a species-wide merging of consciousness, in which everyone understands everyone else and their perspectives”
The problems within today’s corporate-capitalism, in regards to collaboration, are many:
- It results in mindless hyper-competitive, zero-sum environment and leaves many people without any sort of empathy or regards to other human beings
- We don’t yet have the capacity to solve the clash of civilizations and handle the melding of multiple perspectives in a globalized world
- The system we have built seems to have an objective of endless accumulation of wealth, which doesn’t serve the common good
- The “tragedy of the commons” is real and must be addressed
- The rewards of the system, for most people who feel the system is not fair, became a price for submission and ceding power to the rich under a highly hierarchical system, rather than a reward for creativity and self-transcendence.
Furthermore, our solutions to the issues of capitalism have become too attentive to topics such as equality of outcomes and inequality of income, without regards to deeper problems of unity and integration and without solutions for enlarging the pie to include those who are poor and who feel the system is not fair. Until we have full abundance, capitalism seems unreplaceable — and its unequivocal effect in reducing poverty should only continue. The way forward hence seems, and to an increasing extent under the pressure of increased automation, to keep a fair and healthy competition level where people are incentivized to work, then complement it with another layer that reduces inequality and exclusion (which have become major problems in the last 30 years), that favors collaboration in parallel with a healthy level competition, that spreads its rewards/benefits to more people, as well as democratize ownership decision-making and ownership even further.
“Like all social constructs, the market could be different: we have created the market and we can change it. It may not be possible to imagine a world without a market, but it is possible to think of one where the market helps to discourage greed, selfishness, cynicism and exploitation, rather than positively encourages them.” — Tomas Björkman, Social Theorist, Entrepreneur and Founder of Perspectiva
Decentralized infrastructures and networked businesses are a key feature of the internet; they enable a move from corporatism to high-freedom freelancing and self-employment. They change the nature of work because they enable lower-cost interactions than those associated with the consolidation of production under centralized corporations. They find ways to reduce the frictions in supporting needless bureaucratic, political and administrative processes and replace those with ways in which people can get together in more complex and non-hierarchical ways, to crowdsource solutions. We have already seen many tools designed for collaboration, from Facebook workplace to Slack, already bring value to the market, and we will see more ecosystems developing for tapping into collective intelligence and swarm-like decision making — and ultimately, for merging minds together and surpassing individual knowledge and subjectivities. Jordan Greenhall, in his post on “The Coming Great Transition” explains that if we can provide a collaborative and decentralized environments where people can share safely and fearlessly with each other, then we will set free new levels of creativity, innovation and mastery.
Enabling this transformation really means to remove the alienation and purposeless jobs we find in corporations, and instead empower more and more people to become entrepreneurs. Micro financier and nobel peace prize winner Muhammad Yunus reminds us, “All humans are entrepreneurs. When we were in the caves we were self-employed…finding our food, feeding ourselves. That’s where history began, As civilization came, we suppressed it. We became “labor” because they stamped us “You are Labor” and we forgot that we are entrepreneurs.” Even Brian Chesky, CEO and co-founder of Airbnb, agrees with and explains “I want to live in a world where people can become entrepreneurs or micro-entrepreneurs and if we can lower the friction and inspire them to do that, especially in an economy like today, this is the promise of the sharing economy….But what’s getting them to the threshold [of adopting sharing economy platforms] in the first place is a damaged economy, and harmful public policy that has forced millions of people to look to odd jobs for sustenance.”
To bring back both fair-competition rules requires collaboration tools that provide opportunities for active and free participation, for synergistic interconnectedness in teamwork, plus for instilling a sort of “unity in diversity” that no amount of hierarchical control and power can pervert (as Murray Bookchin would say). We currently have a powerful new set of communication technologies that permit new organizational structures, in which we can empower the edges and enable them with the potential to innovate and contribute in the most self-fulfilling ways. A networked business increases its intellectual capital as the nodes of the network do the same. A firm, then, is not anymore a bundle of assets belonging to owners, but a group of dynamic, smart people whose knowledge is amplified far beyond the capabilities of any traditional firm. Fred Ehrsam, co-founder Coinbase, explains, “We are birthing into existence systems which transcend us…These systems are organisms which take on lives of their own and are more concerned with perpetuating themselves than the individuals which comprise them.”
One such technology of collaboration is the blockchain — its future potential in creating decentralized and self-governing collectives around problems (or Jobs-To-Be-Done) is limitless. Many thinkers in the blockchain movement speak of adding highly intelligent algorithms that would govern our collaborative efforts, in a “Rules without rulers” manner that offers the right risk/reward incentives.As Naval Ravikant, investor and founder of Angelist describes them, “Blockchains are a new invention that allows meritorious participants in an open network to govern without a ruler and without money…As society gives you money for giving society what it wants, blockchains give you coins for giving the network what it wants.” The most interesting use-case of the Blockchain seems to be in Governance, incentive creation, and token-level rewards. Blockchains have been indeed called “incentive machines”, and are tools that can align incentives towards what the whole network commonly wants. The space is quite new, and human irrationalities can be hard to overcome, but the impact blockchains can have economics and culture, if used properly, are value generating on a historical degree.
6. Ecological
After covering human freedom and societal progress, we can now finally put our focus on ecology. Ecology deals with the dynamic balance of humans and other living things in nature. Since humanity is not separate from nature, new narratives must look at the future of humanity’s role within the rest of the biotic environment. As Ed Gibney notes in Humanist Magazine, when we concern ourselves with the survival of humans, we also we have to concern ourself with the survival of other forms life because all of life is really just one intricate web of support. If we are to become gods, then we should be the gods that are in attunement with nature or that come from within nature, more like the Greek gods or Spinoza’s god than any of the other supra-natural gods living in a heaven, separately from earthly environments. Essentially, the topic of the biosphere is not to be dismissed when it comes to the future of technology, because as we journey into a more conscious evolutionary design process there is a high risk of creating imbalances with nature’s evolutionary force.
As we develop powerful tools that derive from natural resources and use natural forces, we have to maintain that our technology doesn’t put the socio-ecological system out of order and risk ruining its balance — which is something already happening: we are today faced with pressing environmental problems, ranging from the climate changing due to CO2 emissions, to plastics killing off the oceans, to the removal of natural environments leading to extinction of multiple living species, to even the air’s pollution causing a multitude of diseases. These things have all started because of the longstanding western scientific mindset of setting the human ego in opposition with nature, which then culminated a vicious industrial process of bringing nature under human control. The project of manifesting material abundance, until now, was done at the expense of nature’s ability to sustain itself and conserve its biodiversity.
But that must now change. According to many think-tanks and NGOs, we have until 2030–35 to reverse the destructive course we are walking on, or we will pass critical threshold beyond which the consequences grow rapidly worse. Our future depends upon a complete cultural transformation in how we deal with nature. If we are really serious about eliminating the environmental crisis completely, humanity must again see itself as part of a complex system of diverse lifeforms. The dualism between mind and external world must turn into an understanding of how to be part of the whole, and furthermore how to practically design a more thriving, diverse whole.
Again, I draw on Murray Bookchin’s writing for explaining that this participatory consciousness should not only be poetic, but must marry this new mythological imagination with science and actual technology, so that new potentialities will emerge. Humanity’s viability, after all, depends on this very sustainability and conservation. Bookchin is not alone in preaching this superposition — Fanny Morlin, writing for Perspectiva’s medium publication, beautifully wrote about merging the scienitific perspective with the spiritual one. She explains, “Both perspectives are needed to sustain life… We need to be able to flow in and out of spirituality and science, holism and reductionism, heart and mind, in order to choose which to use depending on context and need.” If we don’t, we will always end up staring and dealing with parts of the ecological system, with no understanding of how everything flows together beautifully, and maintain a subtle balance in life.
“The health and wellbeing of individuals, communities, cities and societies depend critically on the resilience and health of ecosystems and on vital ecosystems services that are provided by ecological processes within the biosphere. Therefore ,one overarching goal of design for sustainability should be to improve and maintain human, ecosystems, and planetary health. […] sustainable design is by necessity scale-linking and salutogenic (health-generating) design across all scales of the complex dynamic system that joins nature and culture, as well as global, national, regional and local scales.” — Daniel Christian Wahl, ‘Scale-linking design for systemic health’ (Wahl, 2007)
The new environmental paradigm is yet unclear. It took decades, since the environmental movement in the 70s to find the right messages that trigger interest from businesses in renewable energies and from states in recycling. However, clean energy and the restriction of greenhouse gas emissions, for example, won’t save the world alone and are movement that are only looking at parts, not systems. The public and private sector will have to adapt their decision-making to new ethical standards, as Millenials and later generations adhere to new values and put pressure on those decision makers. The following ideas are a summary of what’s emerging, and from these values will slowly but surely arise new eco-technologies.
Ecologists can only start tackling environmental threats by understanding and forecasting how human activity, in parallel with environmental changes, produces negative externalities in a systemic way. Modern data capture and analytics capabilities, such as those done through 3D LIDAR and computer vision-based surveys, biodiversity databases, animal plus plant gene sequencing, drone plus satellite imaging analysis, micro-sensors and wifi transmitters on plants and natural resources, GPS and accelerometry-based tracking of animals, as well as crowdsources smartphone pictures are giving us the capacity to do things like have data analytic capabilities, all to monitor the world’s living ecosystems and resources. Creating these smart environments will lay the scientific foundation to reverse cost externalities and bring innovative solutions that will ultimately manage environmental resources in a more orderly way — and hence preserve our complex, fragile planet.
In a similar manner, forming a better understanding of living ecosystems dynamics and how biodiversity comes into play can reverse the endangerment of species and any unknown negative outcomes that may come as a result. As we have more information on natural flows, systems dynamics can here help us recreate real-world scenarios through simulations and better model possible and plausible scenarios. It’s only by sensing and understanding the hidden interactions and flows nested in the complex web of a living planet, we can then strive to facilitate the emergence of health and wellbeing-focused positive outcomes beyond human considerations. We have to safeguard the health of non-human species and the processes that sustain them as well. This requires special consideration, because let’s face it, our track record of casual stewardship has not yielded very much success. This means making sure that our activities do not cripple the soil’s nutrient balance, the viability of the hydrologic cycles, the diversity of species needed to create a healthy ecosystem, etc.
“If the technology platforms of the First and Second Industrial Revolutions aided in the severing and enclosing of the Earth’s myriad ecological interdependencies for market exchange and personal gain, the IoT platform of the Third Industrial Revolution reverses the process. What makes the IoT a disruptive technology in the way we organize economic life is that it helps humanity reintegrate itself into the complex choreography of the biosphere, and by doing so, dramatically increases productivity without compromising the ecological relationships that govern the planet. Using less of the Earth’s resources more efficiently and productively in a circular economy and making the transition from carbon-based fuels to renewable energies are defining features of the emerging economic paradigm. In the new era, we each become a node in the nervous system of the biosphere.”
― Jeremy Rifkin, The Zero Marginal Cost Society
Looking at the overarching context, we are in transition from the concept of sustainability as the duty to “do no harm” and limit the damages, towards a vision of regenerative design and technology, in which exist resilient planetary systems and healthy socio-ecological systems. In her recent book “Doughnut economics”, Kate Raworth dedicated a whole chapter on regenerative design, arguing that economies which are built on such design models are better in preserving both human life and life in general, the latter which naturally thrives based on renewable resources such as solar energy and biodiverse synergies. The transition into regenerative culture talked about here will replace a degenerative linear materials economy where we unsustainably extract finite resources from the earth at ever-growing rates, and then turn them into waste — these processes are unidirectional and generate waste and pollutants that end up becoming “externalities” and never finding their way back into the system.
In the circular economy, which plays a major role in regenerative culture, products at the end of their lives are not just wasted but are used again used as resources and inserted back into the production circuit. Materials are re-used, refurbished, dismantled, recycled and resold in a continuous circle, with the help of data and information accounting for better managing resources. Analogously, composting of home food waste — which turns organic waste into fertilizers for farms that exist nearby, or even for vertical farms that exist within the same building — is a great climate change solution coming from the circular economy. Regeneration is, in summary, about leaving positive environmental impacts and aiming for positive emergence.
By doing regenerative design, Raworth explains that we would be mimicing life’s cyclical processes of “take and give, death and renewal”. Nature is inherently self-renovative, complexifying and regenerative. As nature’s creativity is within us, we must use the responsibility of peak creativity it gave us and strive to make nature even more creative. This leads to another path, which is only starting to emerge recently as a technology, and that is synthetic biology. The evolution of this discipline will unlock a very different future and alter the whole economy — it’s why it is called by some the “100 Trillion Dollar opportunity”. Synthetic biology, in essence, marries the insights of engineering and computer science with life and biology. We are talking about creating new living things and re-assembling old living things hrough playing with their genome and RNA “software”.
If this will start with simple components such as biomaterials used as fuel, food and drugs, this will continue into enabling whole ecosystems to re-generate and protect the world’s biodiversity. We can redesign life in a way that reverses climate change by synthesizing alternative fuel sources, by printing products with 3D biomaterials, by recreating coral reefs that have been devastated, and by reproducing leather, plastics and food from a lab. Wahl, writing after the quote above, here again explains that “This shift will entail a transformation of the material resource basis of our civilization, away from fossil resources and towards renewably regenerated biological resources, along with a radical increase in resource productivity and recycling”, thereby both further increasing abundance and giving back to the living systems we are part of. Essentially, we can let go of Beaudrillard digital “Simulacra” and move technology into the physical world, into matter and real reality. In one of the most interesting TED talks ever, a man I forgot his name says that life will be all around us, all the inanimate will be living, we will connect quantumly with everything.
“Synthetic biology will be driven by the pursuit of goals, both anticipated and desired. It will challenge the human capacity for wisdom and foresight. It might defeat it. But carefully nurtured, it might also help expand it.” — The Economist Magazine
To end section II at exactly where we started section I — the Josh Wolfe quote — I will finally conclude that it will be an amazing journey to see what emerges in the future when technology meets and converge with the whole of life, as well as what happens when they really start co-evolving together. Anything is possible!
