Generation Utopia

The question of how to build a better world or even a Utopia is not just a trillion-dollar question, it’s also borderline insane and obviously too complex to answer precisely. Over the years I’ve noticed a recurring pattern that simplifies things a great deal and shows us the basic boxes we have to tick when we think about questions of innovation and progress. Let’s start big. When we look at the progress – in terms of improving our lives – that humankind has made over the last few thousand years, we see that it always follows certain steps. In fact, “STEPS” is an acronym for science, technology, economy, politics and society.

1. Science

The first thing we have to do if we want to improve our lives is to understand the world around us better. If we don’t, anything we do is just like shooting in the dark. In fact, there are an infinite amount of ways to be wrong about anything, but usually just one way to be right. We humans are a special species, because we can understand our world. The method by which we have mastered this skill is science, or to be more precise, the scientific method. The principle is simple; we make hypotheses about things, collect data, confirm or reject our guesses and build theory. A child can do it.

And that’s really all that science is, the Latin word for knowledge; the relentless application of human common sense. This is not just about physics or medicine, it’s even about politics, your own life choices and really any aspect of life. I believe to really understand this point, although it might take years to internalize fully, is the most important thing to understand in life. The opposite of being a person of truth, of rationality, of science is to be ignorant – and that is only a bliss in the short-term. I go into more detail why science is the most important asset to our modern civilization in another article.

2. Technology

Once we understand how things work, we can apply that knowledge to solve problems or make our lives better. For the most part, we do this through technology so I use it as the umbrella term, but of course that also includes medicine or processes, e.g. doing things differently in our daily lives, organizations or politics. Technology itself is neutral, it is not good or bad – it can be both. It depends on us humans. We can cure diseases, but we can also build nuclear bombs.

3. Economy

The economy is where knowledge that we have built and applied (technology), creates value for us people, broadly speaking through goods and services. This includes health care, infrastructure, education, manufacturing, but also art and entertainment. In fact, I use the word ‘value’ to summarize all the things that we people want or that make us happy. It’s the key unit for increasing progress. If value is seen as output and the things we have to do in turn is the input, e.g. to work in a job to get money – our main measurement of value – to spend on things we want like a house, health care and holidays.

This is how I derive my input/output matrix and how we all have our own version of it that can be seen as a square:

When we want to ask how to make our lives better we ask how to increase value, e.g. mostly through improving the input/output ratio, which is done through innovation as I explain in more detail in the multiplier of innovation article.

A good, but not perfect, way to measure value is the GDP, but of course there are other things we value like family, love, friendship and free-time. This logic still holds up though, because, for example, it has value to have more free-time or time to spend with your family, which usually means to work less (i.e. less input) and so on.

What it comes down to is that we want to increase our pieces of the cake so to speak, individually and collectively.

4. Politics

Politics, or the government, is what sets a kind of framework with structures that allow the system – where value is created – to work optimally. Things like infrastructure, health care and education – together worth over a third of the economy – or laws and institutions in general are best coordinated and managed collectively. If we all just pull in our own directions the system would collapse and we end with less value for each of us than if we just work together. Imagine if we all had to build our own roads.

We cannot all spend our entire days thinking about how to best design certain systems and where to intervene in what way. So a good government (in theory) first embraces science and reason, i.e. it is informed as well as possible. Secondly, its guiding principle should be to minimize suffering and maximize happiness – modern, humanist ethics. Therefore, it takes actions (laws, policies, interventions, social security etc.) that foster value creation.

It plays a key role in ensuring equality, sustainability, helping the sick and poor – things that individuals cannot be relied on. Especially over the next generation where artificial intelligence and automation will increase exponentially, the political process has to ensure the best possible education system as well as social system so that not only the rich get richer but we all benefit. In the meantime, we need smart policy to actually enable innovation and ‘value-maximization’, precisely in those cases where individuals would not do what is best for everyone (e.g. sustainability).

5. Society

The last piece of this big puzzle is society, we the people. Our attitudes and ultimately our actions collectively lead to certain pathways. In fact, I call society the floodgate of progress – the step where most potential is lost, but where at the same time the biggest opportunity lies. Why do I say that? First off, we vote politicians to represent our interests (the things that give us value) in the government. A bad government – *cough* Trump – can do insanely harmful things, because it has so much power.

Moreover, we make consumer choices all the time and therefore it is up to society to a large extent what is valued or not and even how much progress can be made. And because we mostly don’t make rational choices, most of our consumption choices and patterns are not what would actually be most beneficial for us. For example, most of us drive cars instead of using public forms of transport, even though switching to a different system would, rationally speaking, be better for individuals, too (I prove this statement in this article). Similarly, people have been afraid of automation and been rejecting it for two hundred years while our income has risen 34-fold largely because of automation.

Ultimately, it is also people that perform inputs (jobs) to our outputs, so value creation depends on the quality of people’s work. Generally the more educated a population the more value is created in the economy. On the contrary, ignorance – the opposite of science, knowledge and reason – is arguably our single biggest hurdle for making progress.

And thus the cycle closes. The first two steps, science and technology, are the very source for creating value and making the world and our lives better, while it comes down to humans to fulfill that potential. It’s not like we cannot solve world hunger or climate change or transform our transport or education systems because we lack the science or technology. It comes down to people.

 

Therefore, derived from this STEPS pattern one key argument is that we need to find ways to make people more scientific and rational, i.e. how can the last step be more of the first? Education, for the most part – but that is covered in detail in other articles (e.g. on education or the innovation habit).

To summarize, the purpose of the STEPS framework is to show what the main categories of topics are that we have to look at in order to answer how to make more progress. It shows us what is most important (i.e. our ability to do science and to educate people) and it guides our thinking and research to develop an ultimate, unifying logic about how to change the world. But that’s a bit megalomaniacal; so let me show you how it also applies to any idea, technology, action etc.

The Co-evolution, Interdependencies and What Topics to Cover

With any idea we have to make more progress we have to also go through the different STEPS. For example, if you have a start-up idea, no matter how great, you might be surprised how the main challenge is not the technology, but social factors. In fact, I think it is almost always useless to think about any topic, innovation or improvement from just one point of view, without considering the whole picture. The complexity increases exponentially, but so does our understanding and accuracy when we tackle it, which is crucial, as we know from the first step, science.

The complexity arises from the fact that often factors co-evolve and are interdependent. For example, to innovate the transport or education system means not just to get the technology, system or service right, but you also have to convince individuals to change their behavior. The vast majority of people are, however, not willing to change unless the new technology, system or service already exists. This leads to problems resembling chicken-and-egg problems, so-called lock-ins – more on this in education or the insanity of modern transport.

At the same time, the more you go through the STEPS and especially the deeper you go, the more important and valuable (multiplier effect) will be the factors that you find (in regard to progress) and the more essential the connections between factors. For example, electric cars are a great technology, but they don’t go deep enough, they’re still closer to a two-dimensional innovation, i.e. too close to the current system. When we go a bit deeper and consider more factors, then we see how because vehicles are parked 96.5% of the time even more value would be created if people shared them. This is a mega-complex idea, but it holds a greater potential multiplier effect and thus significantly more value. In order to figure out how a transition to such a new transport system could come about, we need to carefully study the co-evolution of factors in all different STEPS.