A New World Culture Without Limits

Could economic and market size growth take off on a scale never before imagined, and start Universal Prosperity?

Could we develop a world culture without limits, with an expanding number of ways to reach the many kinds of greatness in all of us? If a Digital Earth delivers the world’s best to everyone, being connected will mean being at the top of the world in the ways we each choose. For everyone, all the time, for everything they want and decide.

Could economic and market size growth take off on a scale never before imagined, and start Universal Prosperity?

For the past 10,000 years, the long wave of human history has been like a gentle swell traveling across a smooth ocean. From the start of civilization to the Industrial Revolution in about 1800, most of humanity lived like livestock.

Almost everyone was stuck and lived impoverished agricultural lives, even when their country did well. The prevailing belief was bleak: Nearly universal poverty was inevitable.

Before the Industrial Revolution science and technology led nowhere. Our minds were governed by what we saw and thought, so we were trapped in a comparatively small and poor world. We believed that was the only world.

During those thousands of years our greatest obstacle was never ignorance. It was the illusion of knowledge, the certainty that we knew the world we live in.

The Great Divergence: The world added a self-created future

About the year about 1800, only about 200 years ago, an unprecedented expansion began. For one thing, population growth took off. The human population has multiplied repeatedly in just 200 years. By today we have swelled to over seven billion people. By the year 2050, the middle of this century, the United Nations forecasts that the human population will stabilize at about nine billion people on the Earth.

A similar expansion began in the economy. Starting about 200 years ago, with the birth of the Industrial Revolution in the United Kingdom, Western Europe and in the United States — which came to be called The West — there was an economic acceleration some historians call “The Great Divergence.” The West took off economically by embracing technology and science.

For the next 150 years The West made the mistake of thinking they were different from the rest of the world, because they outgrew the world economically.

That triggered a global awakening. Other countries wanted these benefits but had to spend generations absorbing the advances.

The great convergence: Prosperity made the West better, and everyone else too

By the middle of the 1900’s the Industrial Revolution was reaching the rest of the world, with many countries catching up.

By the year 2050, the middle of this century, the West’s leadership will vanish. Four of the top five economies in the world will not be from the West. China and India will be one and two. The United States will fall to third. Brazil and Japan will be the fourth and fifth largest economies in the world.

While each of these countries are different culturally, they have learned the same economic patterns.

History will record that the West was not different. It was just first.

Economies that grow don’t require abundant natural resources. That’s shown by resource-poor island nations like Japan and Britain that have led the world, while some resource-rich countries in Africa and South America remained behind.

The future will say that the world reached a centuries-long turning point. It will say that we are only half-way through an industrial revolution that is still spreading to include the whole planet.

Crucially, it could say that the digital stage of that planetary evolution found a turning point, a way to accelerate its progress.

What is that turning point?

Can technology remove our ceilings, so people can blossom?

The most powerful changes come from growing beyond the world we see. We were always limited by believing the visible world is all there is. An industrial revolution came from discovering that numerous innovations are ready to advance the world, and relentlessly finding and adding them.

By now we should know that wealth comes from our minds. Yet we still struggle with eliminating our current illusions, removing bureaucratic barriers, and replacing them with improvements.

Technological imagination is still able to become one of our largest sources of wealth and progress. For a vivid example, Apple is the the most valuable company in the world.

For another example, new Expandiverse Technology, in confidential development for years, adds to our knowledge of how to build a more powerful future — how to conceive and build tomorrow’s digital world today.

With a new opportunity to accelerate, a more successful Earth becomes imaginable, distributable and buildable.

Everyone who is motivated can periodically update their screens — and their minds — to this latest vision of tomorrow’s Earth. As each step is added, connected screens can be used to see or try new versions. Each step moves the cycle forward another turn, flipping our biggest question from whether to when.

With the Industrial Revolution, we started evolving a new culture where everyone has the chance to be free of what held back societies and people since the dawn of human history.

As tomorrow’s world becomes one digital room, every person could have a new and more personally valuable opportunity — to rise to personal greatness.

If we learn to do this, economic and market size growth could take off on a scale never before imagined: Universal prosperity. For 9 billion people over the coming centuries.

Until this has been imagined, and we see how to build it, it can’t happen. But once we do, and “get it,” watch out.

Recognizing this could make us ready for a new stage in history, for a worldwide Journey to Greatness.

A torrent of continuous, amazing advances could become a new world culture.

Sources

• J. Bradford DeLong, Department of Economics, U.C. Berkeley, Estimating World GDP, One Million B.C. – Present,http://econ161.berkeley.edu/TCEH/1998_Draft/World_GDP/Estimating_World_GDP.html

• Derek Thompson, The Atlantic, The Economic History of the Last 2000 Years: Part II, http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2012/06/the-economic-history-of-the-world-after-jesus-in-4-slides/258762/

• Larry Elliott, The Guardian, GDP projections from PwC: how China, India and Brazil will overtake the West by 2050,http://www.theguardian.com/news/datablog/2011/jan/07/gdp-projections-china-us-uk-brazil

Image credits:

First image: Shutterstock.

Second image: Based on EI T (public domain), via Wikimedia Commons,http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File%3APopulation_curve.svg

Third image: Based on Derek Thompson, The Atlantic, The Economic History of the Last 2000 Years: Part II, http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2012/06/the-economic-history-of-the-last-2000-years-part-ii/258762/

Fourth image copyright Dan Abelow.

Next Section and Chapter: Tomorrow’s Digital Life: How Far Can You Expand?

When you have the freedom to choose, will you choose a future where others control you, or where you’re in control?

Dan Abelow is an independent inventor, author, speaker and technology consultant. His previous patents have been licensed by over 500 corporations that include Apple, Google, Microsoft, Samsung Electronics and others. He holds degrees from Harvard and the Wharton School.

The Expandiverse is new technology to simultaneously solve personal, economic and societal problems worldwide. Within months after its first patent issued, it was cited over 450 times by subsequent patents.

The Expandiverse vision is a people-first Digital Earth that includes:

• A Global Digital Transformation that eclipses individual company transformations, by developing personal and planetary success.
• Personal Exponential Growth begins, so everyone can rise to Personal Greatness and start Universal Prosperity. This accelerates growth throughout continuously connected markets and supply chains.
• Partnership Capitalism shifts Adam Smith’s “invisible hand of the marketplace” (from 1776) to the “visible hand of digital consumers.” When people use Digital Boundaries, customer-centered companies can respond accurately. People receive Journeys to Quality Lives.
• A small number of winner-take-all companies can drive this Expandiverse transformation. Your company can use this to lead your Industries, then scale that to lead a people-first Digital Earth.

Industry Roadmaps, Executive Briefings and Foresight Examples are at the Digital Earth 2025 website.

Expandiverse Technology and Services are at the Expandiverse website.

Can you envision a world where tech helps everyone succeed and prosper? If yes, can you share this with senior executives who may want to lead a people-first Digital Earth and its Digital Economy?

Get in touch. Let’s discuss how your company can improve lives and fortunes everywhere, and lead our planet.