One of the core arguments I make in this project is that while the scientific and technological potential to improve our lives is growing exponentially we humans realize this potential insufficiently or, you could say, linearly. In historical terms we are on the brink of creating a Utopia – a world without hunger, poverty, war and one with much more leisure time and longer life spans. To create such a world is arguably the greatest opportunity in the history of our species, but it hinges entirely on us people to take this opportunity. Therefore, the most valuable question to resolve if we want to make more progress is how to get society to seize more of this exponential potential of innovation.
In simpler terms: If there are thousands of opportunities to innovate (through tech or otherwise) and make improvements in our world, however, humans are not realizing them, then to inspire people to be just a bit more innovation-friendly kills a thousand birds with one stone. But before you read this article in its entirety, I strongly recommend you to read at least about the multiplier effect of innovation, otherwise some of the dots might not connect for you.
One core problem is that the average citizen today is about as terrified of automation taking away jobs as people were 200 years ago when the Luddites destroyed the very machines that improved their lives long-term. Once we understand that our economy has increased 34-fold over the past 180 years precisely because of things like automation society will become more and more of an enabling factor rather than a barrier to progress.
Compared to what our economy and lives could (and will) look like we are at present still rather primitive. For example, do you really think that in, let’s say, 100 years we will still be stuck in traffic jams or depend on fossil fuels? There is still a lot of room for improvement.
Out of the thousands of things we can still improve some are simple while others are complex and hard to achieve. The former I call the low-hanging fruits or daily inefficiencies – things that don’t depend on radical tech breakthroughs or social revolutions, e.g. in your work place, at school or a café. For these small improvements we just need to change tiny habits and stop insisting on some old ways of thinking and doing things.
However, even the most revolutionary of innovations depend not just on getting the technology right, but ultimately on society, e.g. acceptance by consumers. After all, without acceptance the best tech breakthrough cannot benefit society. Entrepreneurs, engineers and governments are all necessary for innovation, but we rely on them way too much to take care of it all. The real power to drive progress lies with you and me – the people.
Here’s an extreme example: How quickly do you think oil companies would switch to renewables if we all, or at least the majority of us, stopped consuming energy (i.e. heat, electricity, gas/petrol) with fossil fuel sources? Granted, with renewables we would first have to pay a few hundred dollars more for the first several years, but then we would get energy much cheaper or virtually free forever. An industry that is worth a double-digit percentage of our economy, has existed in its current form for generations and would have taken generations to change entirely would transform almost over night. Businesses, engineers and politicians would all have to follow suit if only we, the people, started making some really smart decisions.
So, the solution to changing the world is really quite simple: Science and technology plus social change. We all just have to change some of our habits and align our actions around the common vision of improving things wherever we can, even if we incur costs or discomfort in the short-term. In a way, we all just have to do a rational cost/benefit analysis, i.e. between what sacrifices we make and what we can get in return. While that won’t be 100% accurate (e.g. how to measure your sacrifice in the form of discomfort) it would at least be the right direction instead of just a shot in the dark. It’s how an advanced and educated society would act.
Obviously it’s not that simple. First, we don’t like additional costs or discomfort and we do not know enough about the potential benefits of innovations. Secondly, people are mostly not rational, so it would be too much to ask to do a proper cost/benefit analysis on a case-to-case basis. Human behavior is mostly automatic, i.e. habitual.
So what’s the solution? I argue that we have to spread knowledge (i.e. about innovation and future possibilities) to people and create a pro-innovation logic that shifts people’s attitudes and habits more positively towards innovation.
Our Human Habits Are the Problem, And the Solution
The reason why I think we need to target attitudes and habits above all else, is because we cannot expect ourselves to be fully informed and rational every second of our lives. Instead of rationalizing every situation with the constant vision of making the world a better place we just follow our values, beliefs, culture, intuition, gut-feeling etc. If it feels right, we do it. We hence develop attitudes, which in turn largely determine our behavior, and most importantly, our habits.
This makes us human. We’re not robots and we don’t make perfect, coordinated decisions all the time. If we did, we could create a Utopia within years, but we would become automatons in the process. What I do think is a pity though is that we are about as reluctant to change our habits and daily routines as we were in the previous generations, therefore, nowadays we are losing out on way more potential.
The Benefits or Reasons to Change Are Greater than Ever, but We Don’t Realize It
That actually makes this generation very lucky, because the return we could get for being friendlier towards change is much greater. When in the past was it more realistic to cure cancer or ageing than now? For thousands of generations we could barely feed ourselves whereas now we could, at least in terms of technological ability, easily solve world hunger. If we only just did it.
Hence, I argue that if people understood that the potential of science and technology to improve our lives is exponentially greater than ever before their motivation to change habits would grow over-proportionally. For example, while radical innovations like robot taxis seem like moonshots I think consumer acceptance could be achieved more easily than with boring, low-value innovations. But only if we succeed at getting the message across why robot taxis are awesome (hint: because they could help grow the economy by trillions of dollars). In other words, I believe society doesn’t like to change or innovate because it doesn’t have good enough reasons to do so.
Hence, firms are forced to find the best way to adapt and market their innovations to consumers on a case-to-case basis, whereas consumers mostly sit and wait for firms to convince them. I mean, who really knows about the complete potential benefits of an innovation, not to mention goes and researches it? That means, however, that the potential benefits of innovations are not fully and fairly appreciated.
The root cause for this is that few have a deep understanding of and passion for science, technology and innovation – although that’s what our living standards are based on entirely.
We Overestimate the Cost or Discomfort of Change
At the same time virtually all of us misinterpret the cost of change based on what has been and not on what could be. Our standards of living are already extremely high in the West, so to change even a small thing could be seen as a great loss. For example, 90% of society eats meat and to give it up would be seen as a big sacrifice for most. The same goes for cars and pretty much everything else about our way of living. We take it for granted and our consumption becomes a habit. At the same time we all have certain values and beliefs and cultural as well as social influences that often-times new things are not compatible with. All these factors (and more) are reasons why people don’t like change.
My intention is not to make any judgments here and my goal is not to convince anybody to give anything up without offering an even better alternative. However, I’m analyzing how we perceive costs and benefits in order to establish a sufficient understanding of why we behave the way we behave and to offer a well-informed and academically accurate solution.
The fact that we are usually rather ignorant to the benefits or value of innovations and because change implies costs, discomfort, incompatibility with our values we often form negative attitudes towards it, which in turn forms our behavior. How exactly this works I will explain in the next section. But perhaps the most important key to any kind of change and especially to building a better world is that if you don’t change attitudes and behavior you cannot succeed.
The Attitude-Behavior Link
From all the studies and academic literature I have read so far in my life, one of the most interesting and in my opinion most important pieces of research is of how our beliefs, perceptions and attitudes by and large determine our behavior (1). This is quintessential to driving any kind of change in the world. We form attitudes based on our beliefs and perceptions of the world, mostly how it has been instilled in us since we were little or based on our culture. According to these attitudes then, and other factors like social influence (e.g. peer-group pressure) we act in certain ways.
One obvious example of this would be how we don’t just punch people in the face merely because they jumped the queue. Two thousand years ago we were perhaps much more prone to violence. Nowadays though our culture is to use words, hence almost all of us think using fists would be wrong in this situation (for conscious or subconscious reasons) and therefore we don’t behave that way.
Extending this line of thought, we know from technology acceptance research (2) that attitude toward certain technologies or innovations can lead to people either wanting to try, use or reject that innovation. In that last sentence lie some trillion-dollar, perhaps even quadrillion-dollar questions. Forget cute little billions. I write this not for fun, but to get the point across how important this is. My favorite case of innovation right now is that of the shared autonomous vehicle (SAV), i.e. robot taxis.
As I explained in my article about the insanity of modern traffic, we in the West own about 0.75 cars for every person, cars that cost us over $10,000 a year (incl. all costs like parking spaces) but are unused 96.5% of the time. However, there is still a strong culture against automation (i.e. due to a fear of job losses) and people don’t know about how many thousands of dollars a year a new transport paradigm could save them. Hence, people’s attitude towards self-driving cars or giving up their own vehicles for sharing hyper-efficient taxis is overwhelmingly negative and that means that most reject these SAVs by default. Factors like the perceived benefit (value), compatibility with your culture or values, ease of use and price are all part of what forms your attitude.
Therefore, you can see that most of our attitudes towards innovations are barely based on rational factors, complete information and logic alone, but rather our feelings and intuition.
Irrational = Inaccurate = Low Change of Improvement
The problem with being uninformed is that we are missing out on understanding the value of innovations worth trillions of dollars and hence higher living standards, better lives and a better world (so cheesy, I know). At the end of the day, that is what we all want, whether you realize it or not. You buy a product or service because you get something out of it and you could reject an innovation because you think it is bad, e.g. because it could cost someone their job or because you think it’s not useful.
The less informed and rational you are, the more potential for improvement and betterment you will miss out on – not just for grand societal goals but even in your own life. Culture and gut-feeling are like shooting in the dark – not very accurate. Basing your attitudes on facts and logic is like shining a light on the target.
In retrospect we know that it was a good idea to boil water before drinking it, to develop vaccines, to research and adopt computers. But at every step along the way people were pulling in all different directions, quite literally the whole 360°. At some point most of society literally rejected all of these innovations for countless reasons that were not at all thought-through. Of course, now it’s easy for anybody to agree that we were silly in the past.
Educating Society: Innovation-Friendly Attitudes
There’s good news though. It is possible to actively shape people’s perception by educating them, (worked before) i.e. by telling them about the advantages of an innovation which they didn’t know about before. This way we can shift the influence of purely cultural or irrational factors on people’s behavior to a degree.
Right now the vast majority of people have attitudes and habits that are based on a, as I call it, two-dimensional logic. For example: Many worry about automation taking away jobs and hence reject countless innovations every day, like supermarket self-checkouts, even though such innovations make the pie bigger for everyone. If this project has to be reduced down to one goal, it would be to educate the public on what I call an “innovation logic” and hence shift people’s attitudes more towards innovating. In fact, this might still be too complicated and some of you might wonder what mega-Utopian changes in behavior I expect, but the innovation logic is really just an anti-BS-logic. There are so many inefficiencies in our world that are really just BS, and to understand that innovating these inefficiencies (low-hanging fruits) creates value for you and me is a great start.
Ideally, more and more of us would either notice potential for improvements and act upon it in our daily lives or at least help enable innovations, e.g. through daily consumer choices.
That’s why I want to spend most of my waking seconds to understand the interface between politics, society and technology better than our current understanding; to shine more light on that target. To propagate an innovation logic that makes people think and act more on the lines of wanting to make improvements. And if I can influence people’s attitudes by just a few percentage points and change people’s behavior and habits towards innovation and progress ever so slightly then this project will have a huge, wait for it, multiplier effect.
Innovation Logic → Innovation Habit
So far we have established that finding better ways to do things is what has made our lives many times better over the last few generations and that this pattern depends on people. Humans, however, are very irrational and uninformed making us the bottleneck of innovation and slowing down progress. Educating society about innovation and thus shifting attitudes and behavior (most importantly habits) is the key to reducing that bottleneck. Habits are so important because, as mentioned above, most of our behavior is simply automatic. And in that same sense, behavior that enables innovation has to become automatic, hence a habit.
The innovation logic, i.e. the attitude to improve things and resist inefficiencies and BS is needed to change people’s behavior in all aspects of the economy and society. This starts with low-hanging fruits or daily inefficiencies, and both active (make improvements yourself) and passive (consumer choices) behavior. Regarding the former, we all go to work from 9 to 5, but few of us spend even 5 seconds a day thinking about improvements, short-cuts, unnecessary inefficiencies and so on. Imagine if we all, not just the few entrepreneurs, spent a few minutes a day to find ways to do things better just by 2-3% a year. The economy would grow twice as fast and (this took my breathe away) quadruple in a generation!
I could give a lot of examples here where we could do better things better, but the point is that we are still so far from an optimum of doing things. Our transport system is quite literally insane. Education is a joke. And considering the next wave of innovation where we could have robots that build and repair robots that create more goods and services (than we humans ever could), it is clear that people need to change some habits and ways of thinking.
At the point where doing better things better becomes a habit, magic happens.
To summarize: The potential to make the world a better place is exponentially greater than ever before, but society, specifically the way people think and do things, is the key limiting factor. The issue is that for any kind of improvement, human action and change are needed. However, our culture, our ignorance and hard-to-break habits are all reasons why we resist change. When people understand that certain kinds of innovations have tremendous benefits and that small kinds of changes can have a large multiplier effect, they have a greater motivation to adapt. If we succeed at changing people’s attitudes towards innovation across the board because they understand the innovation logic, then their behavior can be more pro-innovation. At the point where innovation – doing better things better – becomes a societal habit our civilization will be ready to build a Utopia.
References:
1. Fishbein, M., Ajzen, I. (1975). Belief, attitude, intention and behavior: An introduction to theory and research. Addison-Wesley, MA.
2. Venkatesh, V., Thong, J. Y. L., Xu, X. (2012). Consumer acceptance and use of information technology: Extending the unified theory of acceptance and use of technology. MIS Quarterly, 36, pp. 157–178.
Generation Utopia 