The Design Revolution

“I sought to cope with all humanly unfavorable conditions, customs, and afflictions by searching for the family of relevant physical principles involved, and therewith through indention and-technological development to solve all problems by physical data and devices that were so much more effective as to be spontaneously adopted by humans and thereby to result in producing more desirable life-styles and thus emancipate humans from the previously unfavorable circumstances.”

- Buckminster Fuller

“I think it’s important to reason from first principles rather than by analogy. The normal way we conduct our lives is we reason by analogy. [With analogy] we are doing this because it’s like something else that was done, or it is like what other people are doing. [With first principles] you boil things down to the most fundamental truths…and then reason up from there.”

- Elon Musk

   We are currently living a transition from an industrial economy into a new historic era which is still in its early stages. We can see it all around us, a hybrid economy, where new pockets of innovation are emerging parallel to a 20th century industrial socio-economic system. Inefficient governments living alongside a global communications network, a new distributed currency among an industrial monetary system, solar power power and electric cars amongst an outdated electrical grid. In each case, these are technological innovations (the transistor, the photovoltaic cell, TCP/IP, the blockchain) that will ultimately change the existing social fabric. 

   We are transitioning from a centralized, industrial civilization towards a global organic one. From an evolutional perspective, cities are information processing "hives" which control the resources in their surroundings. Technology is part of nature, an extension of homo-sapiens and is subject to the same evolutionary rules as other organisms. As Kevin Kelly states, we can see several trends in evolution (and technology):

Possibilities

• To increase diversity

• To maximize freedom/choices

• To expand the space of the possible

Efficiencies

• To increase specialization/uniqueness

• To increase power density

• To increase density of meaning

• To engage all matter and energy

• To reach ubiquity and free-ness

• To become beautiful

Complexity

• To increase complexity

• To increase social co-dependency

• To increase self-referential nature

• To align with nature

Evolvability

• To accelerate evolvability

• To play the infinite game

   For example, take communications. The telephone and telegraph evolved into the internet, which itself serves as a platform for further evolution of new technologies: the cell phone, social networks, bitcoin, the internet of things, etc.  As the system co-evolves, it starts to process increasing amounts of information till the point that every single object on earth will be connected to it one way or another. It is not hard to compare it to a global nervous system. In the same way a plant's roots will be constricted by a pot, the internet resists any sort of limits "unnaturally" brought on it. Governments are currently restricting such a free flow of information but will ultimately fail.

   If we start taking this "organic" approach to different markets we can gain powerful insights. Now take the electric grid. Such system it's still at the equivalent of the telephone in the 1950's. Given the energy sources are mostly concentrated (oil) it is a highly centralized system. The smart grid, contrarily, will generate a new decentralized platform where solar power, battery powered cars and smart appliances will start exchanging energy "packets" in the same way our app's use tcp/ip.  Furthermore, in the same way an internet network can survive a nuclear attack (more robust), this new grid would be able to survive a major outage. It is decentralized and can co-evolve with new innovations.

   Now take agriculture, it is in a similar stage as the electric grid. It is still centralized, has low diversity and is unsustainable with respect to ecological balance. What is the smart-grid/internet equivalent of the agricultural system? It is still hard to imagine it, however, employing the same principles one can guess it will be more diverse (not monocrop), distributed, allow for increasing co-evolution (what are the cell phones and "apps" of this system?), more efficient, etc. The image that appears is an informational organic farming that uses biodiversity as a tool with which to increase yields (think of growing "crop ecosystems" rather than monocrop). Alongside it would also make use of aquaponics and vertical farming, thus avoiding unnecessary inefficiencies in transport.

   One then, could classify the different civilization maintaining systems according to their level of evolution. Furthermore, all these systems are related and will co-evolve with each other (For example, the smart grid and the monetary system may move from dollars to some sort of basic energy measure underlying the whole economy: how many bitcoins for a Watt?)

Communications: Developed ( Transistor, Moore's Law )

Energy & Electrical: In transition ( Photovoltaics, Swanson's Law).

Government: Early Transition (Blockchain technology )

Health: In transition (DNA sequencing technology and Moore's Law)

Monetary System: In Transition (Blockchain technology)

Agriculture: Early Transition (DNA Sequencing, Transistors and Photovoltaics)

Education: In Transition (MOOCs)
Transport: Early Transition (AI)

   From an entrepreneurial point of view we are at a golden age! There are 7 out of 8 systems that are waiting to radically change in the next twenty years and will need that people start thinking from first principles. Our generation will be the one making the transition but we need to start thinking boldly. By the time we retire, we may well be living in a new historic era where many illnesses of the present (poverty, corruption, war, scarcity, stress, consumerism, national ideologies, inequality, ecological destruction) may seem as archaic as feudalism and slavery are today. There are no "developed" nations, we are a "developing" global civilization.

I'm a hopeless optimist, what can I say!