Can we learn to responsibly wield the double-edged sword of technology on our tiny blue planet?

Schalk Cloete

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A Balanced Transition

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40 min read

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Aug 4, 2022

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“The real problem of humanity is the following: We have Paleolithic emotions, medieval institutions, and godlike technology.” — Edward O. Wilson

Seven months ago, I published a long-form article presenting my ranking of the world’s 13 biggest problems. Here they are in order:

1. Extreme Inequality of Opportunity
2. The Instant Pleasure Industry (IPI)
3. Women’s Rights in the Global South
4. Uncontrollably Expanding Complexity
5. The Desire to Impose Ideologies
6. Crime (Especially Cybercrime)
7. The Consumerist Treadmill
8. A World Built for Cars
9. Political Inefficiencies
10. Unsustainable Agriculture
11. The Western Retirement Model
12. Bullshit Jobs
13. Excessive Use of Fossil Fuels

It took me a good long while to properly formulate my view of how we can most effectively address all these major problems. But it finally happened, and the result will be laid out as ten concrete solutions below.

In line with the opening quote, each solution aims to close the yawning gap between our primitive instincts and our godlike technology. “Godlike” is a strong word, but I think it’s a fair description of 21st-century society. We already have the power to destroy life on a planetary scale, and we are gaining increasing power to manipulate and extend biological life and even create synthetic life. On an individual level, hundreds of millions are now able to satisfy their desires to a degree previously reserved for only a handful of revered royalty, and millions more are gaining this power each year.

And here we encounter our fundamental problem: Humanity has gained this godlike power within an evolutionary blink of an eye, driven by an astonishing 3300% expansion in our productive capacity over the last 0.03% of human existence. As a result, we now live in a world alien to the gradually evolved instincts that kept us alive over the first 99.9% of our existence. It is this mismatch that drives the wide range of counterproductive behaviors that ultimately add up to the 13 major problems listed above.

The solutions proposed below aim to build institutional and technological structures that guide our natural actions toward enhancing our collective future instead of jeopardizing it — a framework for deploying our godlike power for the greater good. When successfully implemented, these structures should allow us to thrive as a civilization by allowing any individual to be successful simply by being human.

So, without further ado, let’s get into the ten foundational solutions to the world’s greatest problems.

Solution 1: The Shared Universal Mind (SUM)

• The rich world could boost “Life Efficiency” by an incredible 500%
• This alone will address most of the world’s biggest problems
• Successfully launching the SUM can unlock this potential

Life Efficiency

My favorite measure of individual success in the 21st century is called Life Efficiency, conveniently estimated using this new online calculator.

Simply put, your Life Efficiency is the number of happy and healthy life years you gain from each dollar of daily spending. A truly Efficient Life is filled with joy and meaning, but it also leaves space for 8 billion other souls to build similarly enjoyable and meaningful lives.

As the following graph illustrates, the average rich-world citizen can vastly improve their Life Efficiency through strategies that simultaneously increase health and happiness and reduce spending. Here are my top seven.

Extreme underperformance

As shown above, average Life Efficiency in the rich world today is about 6x lower than it could potentially be. This means we could be getting an incredible 500% more healthy and happy life from every dollar we spend.

Why this astounding underperformance? Well, the main culprit is our consumerist economy that is designed for delivering the instant pleasure and comfort demanded by our primitive instincts with no regard for the longer-term consequences. The obvious result is compromised health and happiness and extraordinarily wasteful consumption. Typical symptoms include obesity and other lifestyle diseases, chronic stress, overwhelm, and sleep deprivation, high indebtedness, various addictions, and massive ecological overshoot.

While any thinking person can appreciate the absurdity of this situation, the self-sustaining forces that keep our collective Life Efficiency at embarrassing lows are near-impossible to overcome. Many spiritual, religious, and philosophical solutions have been proposed over the centuries, and yet our society remains as self-destructive and wasteful as ever.

Maybe it’s time to give our newfound godlike technological powers a chance.

The SUM: A massively scalable solution

The Shared Universal Mind (SUM) concept offers a practical way for anyone with an internet connection to make decisions informed by the shared wisdom and experience of billions of people worldwide. By putting the best and most personalized intelligence at everyone’s fingertips, the SUM would provide a large and persistent boost to global Life Efficiency.

So, what would the SUM look like in practice? Let’s take its effects on health as an example. In this case, the SUM would start by collecting various health metrics via wearable tech like smartwatches and rings. The ultimate goal is an accurate biological clock, but we can also go a long way by monitoring things like heart rate, blood pressure, VO2max, and glucose levels.

Simultaneously, we can measure a broad range of variables that could potentially impact our health. For example, my supermarket has an app that automatically registers all my food purchases, my watch counts how much I move and sleep each day, my bank tracks how I spend my money, and RescueTime tracks how I spend my time (both online and offline).

Thus, we have a broad range of automatically measured outcomes and potential causes behind these outcomes. Using such rich cause-and-effect data from millions of people, the SUM would then deploy machine learning to derive personalized recommendations on how each of us can optimize our health. A similar methodology could be followed for other key outcomes such as productivity, financial freedom, sustainability, and overall happiness.

Privacy and other important safeguards

Many would instinctively object to the collection of such rich data about their lives. But luckily, the SUM does not need to know who you are to use this data productively. The machine learning algorithm only needs to maintain connections between your demographic, cause, and effect data to do its job. It will make no difference if the connection to your identity is broken every time data is sent. If the SUM is created with this feature at its foundation, all users can rest assured that privacy risks are zero.

Furthermore, the core of the SUM algorithm must be written to make external manipulation impossible. At its full potential, the SUM will be able to accurately quantify the degree to which any product or service on the market makes our lives better (or worse), and this information will have a large impact on the sales of companies worldwide. Thus, there will be a large financial incentive for companies to influence the SUM’s outputs. However, if the SUM is correctly built to render external influence impossible, it will always return the pure unfiltered truth to its users.

As discussed later in Solution 8, it is also important that the SUM algorithm is never given any agency to enforce its recommendations. Neither must its use ever be legislated. Use of the SUM must always be voluntary, and its influence must grow from its usefulness, i.e., users seeing material improvements in their own lives and recommending their friends to join.

Potential impact

The trick to implementing the SUM will be to get across the tipping point where there are enough users to generate the data needed for the machine learning algorithm to generate decent-quality recommendations. Once this point is crossed, a virtuous cycle illustrated below will ensure exponential expansion. When the SUM eventually becomes as ubiquitous as Facebook, all sorts of interesting things can happen.

Millions of people making better choices every day will completely reshape the global marketplace. Companies will now need to produce products that genuinely make people’s lives better instead of just exploiting their primitive drive toward instant pleasure (Problem 2). In fact, the SUM will be able to directly quantify whether any product betters our lives. This trend will kickstart a new wave of innovation, yielding a plethora of new products and services that genuinely augment the experience of life.

Simultaneously, social mobility will rise dramatically as everyone born into poverty gains access to the best possible guidelines for rapidly improving their livelihoods, while governments further streamline the most effective upliftment pathways illuminated by the SUM. The education and economic inclusion of billions of currently excluded world citizens will reduce global inequality of opportunity (Problem 1), boost women’s rights in the Global South (Problem 3), reduce crime (Problem 6), and address the political inefficiencies (Problem 9) holding many underdeveloped nations back.

The SUM should also inspire many to get off the consumerist treadmill (Problem 7), escape from bullshit jobs (Problem 12), and make more sustainable choices to mitigate the environmental impacts of agriculture (Problem 10) and fossil fuel dependence (Problem 13).

Furthermore, improved Life Efficiency will address the spiraling complexity of modern society (Problem 4). Today, we’re still blindly adding layer upon layer of new technology and consumption, each trying to address problems created by the previous layer. In contrast, an efficient life typically solves problems by subtraction and simplification instead of addition and further complication. Millions of people simplifying their lives in this manner can also address the perceived scarcity driving geopolitical tensions (Problem 5).

By addressing all these major global problems, the SUM can create value dwarfing that of all today’s trillion-dollar companies, vastly improving global health, wellbeing, equality, and sustainability. If anyone is working on something like this, let me know. I would be an enthusiastic early adopter!

Solution 2: The Virtual Economy

• Virtual consumption is far more sustainable than physical consumption
• In many applications, it’s also becoming outright more attractive
• Virtual mobility can permanently reshape our cities for the better

The problem with physical consumption

It’s the Anthropocene, and humanity has reached such a scale that our environment now strains to replenish all the resources we consume and process all the waste we produce. For that reason, we’re having to spend an ever-growing fraction of our effort on extracting the resources we require and mitigating the harmful effects of the waste we produce. We’re also doing some serious and long-lasting damage to the $125 trillion worth of annual ecosystem services we receive from nature in the process.

Many environmentalists want us to scale back for the sake of the environment, but asking modern consumers to stop consuming because the planet is suffering is a fool’s errand. Ensuring that downscaling brings large and direct benefits as outlined in Solution 1 offers a far better way to get around this problem. But it’s still not enough.

Chasing infinity

If humans were rational creatures, all 8 billion of us would be living comfortable lives today, each working about one day per week and spending the rest of our time in free creative expression and enjoyment of each other’s company. Our godlike technology has already given us the power to build such a utopia by massively reducing the amount of time and effort required to produce basics like healthy food and comfortable shelter.

Unfortunately, that’s not how the human mind works. We live our lives on a hedonic treadmill where our life satisfaction quickly resets after the high of any significant advance, leaving us perpetually striving for more. The result is a long list of ridiculous excesses that fail to make us happy but succeed at causing a long list of serious environmental and societal problems.

Thus, we need a solution that can satisfy our need for infinite expansion on our distinctly finite planet, constrained only by the finite number of hours contained in each day. Luckily, this solution is already taking root.

Going virtual

The emerging virtual economy has the power to drastically reduce the environmental impact of our civilization. Obviously, doing something virtually is many times less resource-intensive than doing it physically.

The example I always return to is the home office. The daily commute requires the construction and operation of an incredible array of physical infrastructure, including your car, an additional room (garage) in most homes, vast areas covered in roads and parking lots, complex value chains supplying energy to all our cars, large office buildings, and more. It also consumes a lot of time and energy and generates loads of stress and pollution. All these commute-related costs cancel out about a quarter of the production of the average employee, and virtual mobility via the home office can avoid the majority of this vast unnecessary cost.

Even better; exploiting virtual mobility to eliminate the car (Problem 8) from many of our neighborhoods can create a far more appealing city landscape. It’s a comforting realization that the possibility of spending all day plugged into our wonderful virtual worlds would also make the real world a far more attractive place. Indeed, if most roads were replaced by greenery and other enjoyable public spaces, a thriving virtual world could ironically get us to spend more time outdoors moving and interacting under the (real) sun.

The home office is just one aspect of the emerging virtual economy. In the future, virtual reality (VR) technology will offer a broad range of consumer options in the virtual space. For example, VR could allow someone living in a tiny physical apartment to explore extraordinary virtual worlds by physically walking in place on roller shoes. There goes the need for oversized suburban homes and the mountains of useless stuff that accumulate within their walls.

We could also teleport to any physical environment equipped with an array of cameras (e.g., a sports stadium or a concert hall) with the power to move freely among the performers and feel like we’re part of the action. Similarly, we could teleport into a drone equipped with a 3D camera in some exotic location (e.g., the Amazon rainforest) and explore at will. These emerging innovations could greatly reduce the impact of the events and tourism industries while bringing new dimensions to the experiences they offer. More importantly, they could occupy most of the free time of most consumers at a low environmental cost, displacing many of the unsustainable ways in which the contemporary consumer tries to buy happiness.

Ultimately, the virtual economy can allow people to produce and consume virtual experiences that match or exceed their physical equivalents at a small fraction of the cost and environmental impact. Yes, many unpredictable challenges will emerge as we build our virtual world, but the benefit of being able to satisfy the limitless desires of billions within the bounds of our planet cannot be overstated. We should give this trend our full support.

Solution 3: Human-Centered Economic Metrics

• GDP loses function beyond a relatively modest level of development
• One can find objective health and welfare metrics to track instead
• A better universal prosperity metric would greatly improve policy

Our gross domestic product (GDP) obsession

Ever since science and fossil fuels ignited our exponential economic development phase two centuries ago, we’ve been obsessed with GDP growth. There’s no doubt that GDP correlates with many things we value in life, including longevity and happiness, but it’s far from the perfect metric. As an example, a correlation is easy to observe in the graph below, but countries exceeding 50 happy life years (blue markers) are spread over a range from 20 all the way to 120 thousand dollars in GDP per capita.

How do some countries achieve high wellbeing with only 20% of the economic effort needed by others? That’s a complicated question without a clear answer, but if we measure the right things, we’ll find out soon enough.

Productive Life Years (PLY) instead of GDP

It’s easy to criticize GDP as the primary measure of the success of a society, but it’s a whole lot harder to come up with a viable alternative. There are certainly many possibilities out there, but none of them offer the objectively quantified all-in-one measure of prosperity given by GDP.

The happy life years metric graphed above is a tempting alternative, but basing policy on a metric that is partially comprised of subjective wellbeing scores collected in surveys is not prudent. We need objective metrics that can be accurately and reliably measured across all years and countries.

After lots of thinking and reading, my best suggestion is Productive Life Years (PLY), defined as the number of free, healthy, and self-sufficient years the average person gets to enjoy.

PLY begins with life expectancy. Naturally, longer lives are a highly desirable (and easily quantifiable) outcome in any society. But the quality of these years also matters, bringing more complexity to the metric.

That’s where the “productive” part of PLY comes in. Here, I want to suggest the fraction of the population that is not affected by crime, in poor health, or unable to live a self-sufficient life. As illustrated in the example below, all three of these states can be objectively quantified.

PLY policies

Policy priorities for maximizing PLY will look very different than today’s norms aiming to maximize GDP. First, preventative healthcare (lifestyle design and continuous monitoring) would boom. The current reactive healthcare system is a prolific GDP generator, but it’s notoriously inept at generating healthy life years.

Second, inequality would reduce. GDP can be high even if a large fraction of the population lives on welfare (e.g., the US), but a high PLY requires that the vast majority of the population be self-sufficient (defined as the fraction of households paying more in income taxes than they receive in benefits).

Third, crime would reduce. A headline societal success indicator that grows when we keep people out of prison and on the income tax roll will incentivize serious intervention in poor neighborhoods where people often turn to crime.

Meanwhile, PLY will ensure that economic output keeps growing as long as it offers meaningful benefits to health, self-sufficiency, and crime reduction. Society would also become more sustainable as the “grow at any cost” mindset fades and the implications of environmental issues, especially on poorer communities, gets better representation in the headline PLY metric.

These and other policy paradigm shifts created by prioritizing PLY over GDP can have major positive effects on the overall welfare of nations.

Solution 4: Internalized Externalities

• The free market is great at coordinating our actions for the public good
• But inaccurate price signals lead to counterproductive investments
• This problem can be solved by internalizing externalized costs

Flawed price signals

The free market is a wonderful thing, coordinating the actions of billions of people to maximize economic output. But there’s a catch: Price signals must be accurate, and in many cases, they’re not.

Externalized costs (or externalities) are at the root of most market failures. Climate change is the most publicized example: Without a CO2 tax, the act of dumping greenhouse gases into the atmosphere costs companies nothing, but the cost to society and nature is very real. Regulations like CO2 taxation internalize these externalized costs, meaning that climate damages are now included in the cost of the product. This makes carbon-intensive products more expensive, sending the correct market signals to consumers to buy less of these and shift to cleaner alternatives.

Although society has made significant strides with internalizing externalities, many big ones remain unaddressed. Here’s my list in order of priority:

1. Empty calories. The amount of economic damage and unnecessary suffering caused by refined sugar, saturated fat, and excess salt is astronomical (Problem 2), and it goes almost completely unaddressed today. I estimate that proper internalization of the empty-calorie externality will quadruple the price of most ultra-processed foods.
2. Cars. The personal automobile (Problem 8) brings a wide range of externalized costs including air pollution, climate change, time lost in traffic, health impacts from sedentary living, accidents, energy insecurity, high-value real estate occupied by roads and parking, depressing car-centered city landscapes, and urban sprawl that magnifies all the above-mentioned costs.
3. Meat. Animal products supply 18% of global calories but occupy 77% of agricultural land and emit 66% of agricultural greenhouse gases (Problem 10). Aside from these disproportionate environmental impacts, human health impacts and animal cruelty add to the externality of meat.
4. Pollutants and greenhouse gases. We have come a long way with regulating industrial pollution, but measures remain inadequate in many developing nations. Greenhouse gases are considerably more difficult because they inflict no immediate damage on the local population, causing long-term global impacts instead (Problem 13).
5. Addictive media. The amount of human potential that is lost during the seven daily hours the average internet user spends watching TV/streams, scrolling social media, or gaming is tremendous (Problem 2). There are also other serious externalities like the physical health impacts of sedentary living and mental health problems from social isolation, information overwhelm, and exposure to the darker corners of the internet.
6. Tobacco and alcohol. Although the world is making good progress with taxing these well-known health destroyers, there is still plenty of room for improvement (Problem 2).

Resistance to intervention

Even though correcting these market failures is a total no-brainer for massive gains in global welfare, there are strong forces resisting reform.

First, most of the products causing the externalities listed above are designed for addiction by the Instant Pleasure Industry (Problem 2). And most addicts will vehemently oppose any measure that makes their drug of choice more expensive, even though it’s clearly in their best interest.

Second, many people make loads of money from selling these destructive products. The Instant Pleasure Industry also generates plenty of jobs. Thus, there are powerful special interest groups that will fight any policy that may cause their market to shrink.

Third, the value of these externalities is often difficult to assess accurately. Uncertainty bounds can be quite wide and assessments can be influenced by powerful special interest groups.

Practical solutions to internalizing externalities

Advances in digital technology are creating exciting possibilities to overcome these serious barriers to the internalization of major externalities. Thanks to digitalization, it’s becoming increasingly feasible to accurately quantify externalized costs and distribute these costs fairly among the population.

Once more, health serves as a good example. Wearables capable of accurately measuring key health metrics can send data to a public healthcare system or private insurance providers for determining the health risks involved in each individual’s lifestyle. All this data (potentially collected through the SUM) will enable a much more accurate quantification of the externalized costs of several health-destroying products and services.

In a public system, such information can be deployed to offer individuals direct financial rewards for making lifestyle choices that will boost public health (paying for itself via tax revenue growth and lower welfare spending). In a private system, insurance providers would be able to accurately link their premiums to these measurable health metrics to offer the most competitive rates to customers, creating strong incentives for healthy living.

I purposefully left both the public and private options open because the world will never agree on which option is best. Thus, the only rational solution is to give individuals a free choice between the “nanny state” and the “heartless free market” (more about this in Solution 5).

Such freedom will make it politically feasible to internalize externalities. Individuals who want the automatic protection of a strong social safety net must pay the sin taxes set by the government, and anyone who is strongly opposed to such taxes will have the freedom not to pay high taxes and instead take full responsibility for setting up their own private safety net.

The same philosophy can be followed for various other externalities, with the exception of climate change. Here, public and international agreements are the only option because there is such a poor correlation between those causing the damages and those suffering the consequences.

Finally, resistance from special interest groups must be minimized by giving these actors financial support during the inevitable downturn of their business. Innovation to develop socially beneficial alternative products and services should be particularly strongly encouraged.

Solution 5: Individualized Government

• There is no form of government that will satisfy everyone
• Instead, everyone should be able to choose how they are governed
• Technology and political migration can facilitate such a system

The never-ending debate

Today, more than five millennia after the dawn of civilization, we’re about as far from deciding about the best form of governance as we’ve ever been. Large groups of people still regularly congregate around polar opposite extremes of each dimension of the political spectrum:

1. Individual responsibility. The capitalism vs. socialism debate is as hot as ever, with the same arguments being rehashed time and time again. Capitalistic societies give individuals stronger incentives to produce value, but they also enhance inequality and all the problems associated with it.
2. Individual liberty. The constraints conservative ideals place on individual action can make societies resistant to change and even support dangerously nationalistic notions. On the other hand, liberal ideals can also spiral out of control, as currently observed in trends of divisive identity politics and woke extremism.
3. Collective decision-making. The one-person-one-vote democracy is rife with inefficiency caused by an underinformed and gullible electorate and coalition governments paralyzed by conflicting priorities. On the other end of the spectrum, meritocracies are far more efficient but can quickly turn tragic when corruption infiltrates the governing elite.

The way we collectively stagger between the extreme ends of this three-dimensional spectrum would be genuinely comical if it did not damage so many lives. As an example, the United States regularly flips between ideological extremes. Each time, the new government spends much of its time and resources undoing the efforts of the previous government, while the electorate gradually realizes that the grass was not so green on this side after all, setting up the inevitable pivot back to the other side of the spectrum.

This debate will never be settled. Every ideology has its drawbacks, and, in our complex and ever-evolving world, accurately weighing the pros and cons is impossible, no matter how loudly the left and right scream at each other.

Trying to please everyone pleases no-one

We need a paradigm shift: Instead of working to force our subjective political ideologies onto others, we should strive to ensure that the vast majority of people support the way they are governed. A society where everyone feels that the system governing their lives allows them to become the best versions of themselves will be successful, whatever it might be called.

In contrast, when large portions of the electorate become dissatisfied (as is the case across the world today), they will soon shift much of their efforts from contributing to society to opposing the system, sometimes via destructive means. And that’s the core problem: It’s impossible to satisfy everyone. In fact, all the compromises inherent to governing complex societies (Problem 9) leave almost everyone dissatisfied to some extent.

The result is a society of frustrated individuals who spend a disproportionate amount of their time and energy fighting each other or, when the situation becomes hopelessly overwhelming, zoning out on the addictive products of the Instant Pleasure Industry (Problem 2). The level of inefficiency this dynamic brings to our societies is incredible, and it urgently needs a solution.

Personalized governance regarding personal responsibility

When considering the first political dimension of personal responsibility, the advancement of digital technology already mentioned in Solution 4 is creating the opportunity to individualize government. Such a solution will render ideologically entrenched argumentation irrelevant, allowing every individual to live in a system that closely matches his/her preferences.

In practice, individuals should have a choice between 1) paying high taxes and never having to worry about healthcare bills, college debt, or poverty in retirement/unemployment and 2) paying low taxes and taking full responsibility for their own health, education, and long-term financial stability. However, there must always be a publicly funded safety net for individuals who are in dire circumstances through no fault of their own (e.g., children from failed households and people with serious genetic disorders).

Transitions between these two options should be carefully regulated so that individuals cannot just exploit the safety net when they need it and not pay the high taxes it requires when they don’t. One solution would be to start everyone off on the socialist model, but give people the choice to take the capitalist option on the condition that they must pay back all the taxes they avoid in this move if they ever want to switch back.

Voting with our feet

For the political dimensions of personal liberty and collective decision-making, individualized governance within a population of diverse views becomes problematic. In this case, encouraging populations to segregate according to their political preferences would be the best solution.

I should immediately clarify that I’m not advocating for separation according to categorizations like race or religion. On the contrary, one of the main reasons I would like us to live in communities of shared political values is to stop these group identities from inflaming the discourse as they always seem to do in a politically divided population. This will finally allow us to move past these purposeless characterizations and live together as fellow humans.

Aside from the peace and productivity that may be expected from communities with shared values, another major benefit of such societal organization is that it provides real-world data on the performance of different ideologies. In effect, it gives proponents of each ideology a fair chance to prove the efficacy of their preferred mode of organizing society.

In contrast, today’s system where we seem determined to force people with polar opposite political views to coexist peacefully and productively never gives us this chance. Instead, we end up with a hopelessly inefficient concoction of contradictory policies that only get different sides to blame each other more vehemently when things inevitably go wrong.

Encouraging people to vote with their feet will address these problems. The next two sections will discuss how it could be practically implemented.

National mobility for personal liberty preferences

When it comes to personal liberty, like-minded communities can be formed on a provincial or even city level. This is already happening to a certain extent with some districts clearly being more liberal and others more conservative.

Still, far greater benefits await if we can actively encourage people to move to cities where collective values align with their personal preferences. Ideally, there would be subsidies covering the costs of moving and state support during the time required to find a job in the new city. The economic efficiency of politically aligned communities will easily pay back this investment.

Broader mobility for collective decision-making preferences

Structures for collective decision-making require implementation on provincial and national levels. Naturally, encouraging people to vote with their feet within a given country is much easier than between different countries. The administrative and cost burden for international relocation is far higher, and multiple cultural and language barriers may come into play.

Even so, international relocation is already common today, and a global understanding of the benefits and global importance of voting with our feet can further enhance this trend. There may even be some international agreements that countries must welcome up to 1% of their population in immigrants each year (if the demand is there) to speed up the process.

The international military force

Encouraging people to vote with their feet will create highly effective incentives for political systems to perform optimally. Every nation must understand that the one and only way to keep its most productive people is to create an environment where they feel they can live their best lives. Similarly, the only way to spread any political ideology must be a long-term real-world demonstration that it creates more wellbeing and prosperity than any other model.

However, history warns us of a major threat to this promising idea: international conflict arising from certain nations seeking to force their political and cultural ideologies onto others (Problem 5). To prevent this potentially tragic outcome, we require a potent international military force with the single objective of quashing this tendency. Similar military pressure must be applied to any nation that strives to prevent its citizens from leaving if they are dissatisfied with the performance of its political system. To reiterate, excellent real-world socioeconomic outcomes must be the only way to spread political ideologies and attract highly productive citizens.

In the long term, this international military force can completely replace the national military forces of all countries. This will save the world trillions of dollars and facilitate higher degrees of mutual trust between nations.

Solution 6: A Controlled Northward Migration

• The Global North will need more people and the Global South less
• A policy that strongly incentivizes adoption is a great place to start
• Skills investments in the developing world can avoid a brain-drain

An unbalanced world

Political relocation is not the only reason why we might see large-scale migrations in the future. Better alignment of population density with ecological carrying capacity and alleviation of demographic pressures will also contribute. Today, these imbalances are just extraordinary (e.g., carrying capacity, population concentration, and median population age).

Our badly unbalanced world can be broadly categorized into the Global North and the Global South with polar opposite problems:

1. The North has rising dependency ratios due to a lack of young people to support its aging population (Problem 11), whereas the South has too many young people leading to broad unemployment.
2. The North consumes too much (Problem 7), leading to a broad range of lifestyle diseases (Problem 2), whereas the South consumes too little leading to a broad range of diseases of poverty (Problem 1).
3. Driving this imbalance, we have declining birth rates in the North and unsustainably high birth rates in the South, especially Africa (Problem 3).
4. The North is disproportionately responsible for climate change (Problem 13), but its northern latitude will in some cases even turn climate change into a benefit. On the other hand, the South is broadly innocent, but its more central location makes it far more vulnerable to climate effects (augmented by its low level of economic development).

Clear collaboration opportunities

These extreme imbalances present great collaboration opportunities. Indeed, with some simple coordination, North and South can work together to solve each other’s problems.

A steady, century-long northward migration is the most obvious solution. Youthful workers from the South can work in the North, helping to support its aging population and lessening population pressures in their home countries. Such migrants also often send some of their earnings back to their families, giving further economic support to their home countries. Of course, there are groups that strongly resist immigration, but these objections will lessen as dependency ratios keep climbing and we get more skilled at integrating immigrants.

Another highly effective enabler of a northward migration would be strong incentives for rich-world families to adopt rather than procreate. Today, many rich countries essentially pay people to have babies in an attempt to keep fertility rates from plummeting. Such policy can only be justified from a deeply nationalistic mindset. If we think globally instead, it makes way more sense to incentivize those same people to adopt babies out of extreme poverty in the Global South. If the adoption happens early enough, adopted children will be shaped by local culture as if they were born there. This will lessen many serious problems (e.g., Problems 1, 3, 6, and 11) without adding more people to an already overburdened planet (Problems 10 and 13). Of course, such an arrangement must be carefully designed to eliminate any incentives for poor women to have children for the purpose of “selling” them to rich families.

One key challenge with a Northward migration is the potential of a “brain drain” where the most productive individuals produced by the Global South leave for the Global North. Focusing the migration on the adoption of young children instead of the migration of adults will inherently prevent this problem, but the North will also need to invest generously in education in the South. Access to more skilled migrants will surely lead to great returns on investment, while faster development in the South will benefit everyone.

Solution 7: Humanitarian Conscription

• Most people born into a developed society lack perspective on poverty
• If enough people care, we can easily find the resources to eradicate it
• Ensuring that everyone sees poverty firsthand can provide a solution

The lottery of birth

My articles often show the following graph to illustrate the incredible injustice involved in the lottery of birth. By far the biggest reason why you and I get to live on the right of the income mountain shown below is that we were lucky enough to be born into a developed society. Meanwhile, half the world’s population needs to live on less than 10% of what we get to consume with almost no prospect for improvement due to very low social mobility.

Poverty causes more unnecessary suffering and wastes more human potential than any other factor (Problem 1). And yes, it’s worth restating: in the vast majority of cases, this fate is almost 100% down to bad luck.

Our shameful indifference

Unfortunately, graphs like the one shown above don’t move those of us who got lucky at the lottery of birth to real action. Sure, we feel bad for a while, but within a couple of minutes, we’re back to complaining about our trivial first-world problems, distracted by our sensationalist and ad-filled social media feeds, or swept up in our self-created and highly divisive culture wars.

This indifference becomes even more embarrassing when we realize how little of our (largely wasteful) consumption it will take to eradicate extreme poverty. For example, lifting every global citizen beyond $5 a day by giving 3 billion people a daily $3 in life-enhancing services like healthy food, clean water and electricity access, and basic education will cost the world only 3% of GDP (well below current military spending). Moreover, the required annual investment would rapidly reduce over time as communities utilize these services to further their own economic prospects. Soon enough, the vast productive capacity of billions of previously economically excluded individuals will repay this investment many times over.

If we had the motivation, abject poverty would be eradicated within a decade.

Finding the motivation

For decades, young people had to complete mandatory military service. Obviously, such large investments in the military were always controversial and have now been phased out in most countries.

Implementing something similar for an unquestionably virtuous cause like poverty alleviation makes a lot of sense. Directly exposing young people raised in the rich world to the day-to-day realities of living on the opposite side of the birth-luck spectrum will do wonders for their perspective on life, instilling a sense of gratitude, selflessness, and purpose.

More importantly, it will rocket poverty alleviation up the priority list of the rich world. Seeing real poverty first-hand is a transformative experience. Having grown up in South Africa, I saw it many times and in many forms, but I can understand that people born in the rich world simply lack the necessary perspective to give abject poverty the priority it deserves.

In practice, humanitarian conscription might entail a 6-month period of service in a developing world community where most people live below $5 a day. Duties could include basic teaching or food distribution or, for technically skilled people, engineering projects like the construction of decent housing and the provision of basic services like water and modern energy. Conscripts should function in relatively large groups with experienced leaders to create a constructive team environment and ensure personal safety.

Overall, humanitarian conscription will be a big win both for the rich and the poor participants, going a long way toward solving Problem #1.

Solution 8: Embrace Automation

• Machines are brilliant at our most soul-killing jobs
• This will leave only inspiring and varied jobs to humans
• Wealth redistribution policies will be required to avoid resistance

Rise of the machines

Artificial intelligence (AI) and automation are among the hottest topics in modern technology conversations. And for good reason; these technologies have the potential to take over a substantial fraction of the work humans do today and do this work far more efficiently.

Many people are concerned that their jobs will soon be lost to machines. Although change will not be as sudden as many imagine, it’s already happening, and lower-income workers are most at risk. As always, technology will create new types of jobs as it destroys old ones, but this also leads to additional costs and discomfort from reskilling.

Big benefits

From a global perspective, the increase in efficiency promised by automation will clearly be a big win. We can produce more with less time, effort, and resources. Thus, the average world citizen will become considerably richer.

Another crucially important point is that the types of jobs machines are especially good at are also the types of jobs that are the most soul-killing to humans. Machines are fantastic at boring, repetitive jobs. They also do not mind harsh working conditions in dangerous environments.

On the other hand, the types of jobs that are uniquely human — those requiring emotional intelligence, adaptability, and creativity — will be safe for the long term. In fact, smart coupling with artificial intelligence and automation can make these jobs even more fulfilling and stimulating.

Enabling a smooth transition

Even though automation promises great benefits to humanity as a whole, the transition will be difficult. Automation is massively scalable and gives individuals who control the machines disproportionate power. Thus, we will require strong wealth redistribution policies to ensure that all the prosperity resulting from automation does not get concentrated within a tiny elite.

Eventually, automation will make society productive enough to enable the practical implementation of a universal basic income. But we still have a long way to go before this ideal is feasible, and navigating this transition period presents a key challenge. The gains in economic efficiency from some of the solutions discussed previously can greatly accelerate this transition.

Proactive action to limit cybercrime (Problem 6) is another key factor in gaining broad social acceptance of the technology. Just like automation can give business tycoons excessive power, it can also give excessive power to cybercriminals. This threat must be taken very seriously by, for example, accurately reflecting the societal impact of delaying the proliferation of life-enhancing automation technology in the sentencing of convicted cybercriminals.

If the benefits are successfully socialized and cybersecurity threats are successfully neutralized, we can get everybody on board the automation train and strongly accelerate societal progress. We could certainly use the big boost in productivity to uplift the world to decent living standards more rapidly, address our pressing environmental concerns more effectively, and allow everyone to enjoy a job that is inherently human.

Pandora’s box

Finally, a key element in the responsible application of AI is to prevent the outcome of all those machines-take-over-the-world movies. Uncontrollably expanding complexity (Problem 4) is a major concern today, and an irresponsible rollout of AI can make us lose all understanding (and control) of the forces governing our lives with totally unpredictable consequences.

In practice, we should have strict legislation that governs the degree of sophistication of AI research and development. Convergent AI capable of completing a focussed, inherently confined task with ever-increasing sophistication should be safe. The SUM proposed in Solution 1 is a good example. Its machine learning algorithm will only ever be capable of recognizing patterns in the demographic, cause, and effect data it receives and making associated recommendations, which users will be free to implement or ignore. Thus, the SUM can never gain agency to enforce its recommendations. Other examples of convergent AI like self-driving vehicles, domestic appliances like smart thermostats and vacuum cleaners, and instant language translation services are also safe.

The AI we need to keep inside Pandora’s box is divergent AI that would have the potential to expand and gain agency to enforce its rapidly evolving will, mainly via direct control over other convergent AIs. For example, while self-driving cars are a good idea, giving a single AI control over millions of self-driving cars is a step too far. In another example, allowing the SUM to make personalized lifestyle recommendations is safe, but allowing it to implement legislation or control other AIs to enforce these recommendations is not.

Truly intelligent AI can spiral out of our control in the blink of an eye. We simply don’t need to take a risk with such a lopsided risk/reward ratio.

Solution 9: Incentivize Creative Freedom

• We can pursue happiness through creation instead of consumption
• Life satisfaction and productivity will both benefit greatly
• Simple and cheap tax incentives can catalyze this vital transition

Creative beings

One of the most important considerations in global sustainability is the distinction between creation and consumption. Naturally, we need both in any functional society, but it matters greatly which one we prioritize. Are we consumers who only create to earn the money we need to consume even more, or are we creators who only consume what is needed to keep us in top creative shape?

Humans are inherently creative creatures. The act of creation in itself makes us happy and seeing our creations benefit others adds another layer on top. In addition, pursuing happiness through creation ensures we do inspiring things that truly benefit society. Millions of people making the shift from a consumer to a creator mindset will enable the world to solve its biggest problems far more effectively.

The vicious consumer cycle

Unfortunately, the creative process can be uncomfortable, especially in the initial stages before momentum and flow are established. This discomfort in combination with ubiquitous access to instant pleasure consumption (Problem 2) keeps most people from ever experiencing the true joy of creative flow.

That’s why the vast majority of workers today only create (if we can call “doing the bare minimum in a standard 9–to-5 job” creation) to earn the right to consume. This gets them stuck in a tragic vicious cycle:

The effect of this cycle is billions of people spending most of their waking lives forcing themselves to do things they dislike (often intensely). Furthermore, all the wasteful (and often self-destructive) consumption triggered by this vicious cycle demands a huge amount of additional soul-killing work to produce all sorts of junk we would never need if we led creative lives.

In short, the consumerist treadmill (Problem 7) most people find themselves on today hampers happiness, supercharges stress, harms health, and endangers the environment. It must be stopped.

A life of creative freedom

The goal of this proposed solution is to transform the orange vicious cycle above into the blue virtuous cycle below. In my experience, this cycle can maximize life satisfaction and strongly boost productivity, all while cutting environmental impacts to within sustainable limits.

From a societal viewpoint, this cycle is key to building the world of our dreams. Lifting 10 billion people to a high standard of living within the sustainable bounds of our planet will require a truly gargantuan amount of investment. And investment can only originate from the difference between what we produce and what we consume.

That’s exactly what the virtuous cycle of creation does. Productivity grows (because it becomes a lot more fun) whereas consumption shrinks (because it becomes largely irrelevant for happiness and steals time from more rewarding creative expression). If this cycle can be scaled up, we’ll gain access to all the surplus productive capacity we could ever need.

A creative catalyst

Working on solving societal problems, big or small, is highly engaging and brings a huge amount of meaning to life. Once the cycle is up and running, it becomes self-sustaining. The problem, however, is getting it started. Indeed, someone with low job satisfaction and no financial freedom will find it near-impossible to escape the vicious orange cycle presented earlier.

What we need is a catalyst — a powerful incentive to kickstart this paradigm shift. In my mind, it might look something like this:

• Governments and companies provide any employee who wants to trade some salary for more creative freedom a juicy incentive.
• For example, if an employee earning $60,000 a year chooses to ramp down employment by 20% to free up more time for unconstrained creativity, they will earn $12,000 less. In exchange, they should receive double or triple this amount in funds to invest in the creative project of their choice within their company.
• In essence, the employee will lose the ability to spend about $10,000 per year (depending on tax codes) on consumption in exchange for receiving about $30,000 (and 20% additional time) for free creative expression.

Employees who take this deal won’t miss the income they lose because they will be far too occupied with their creative projects. In addition, their greatly increased productivity will soon lead to raises that erase the amount they originally sacrificed (which they can reinvest in more creative freedom).

From the point of view of the companies and governments sponsoring this incentive, the increased creativity, productivity, job satisfaction, and health of workers will ensure huge returns on investment. Before long, everyone will be on this program, naturally creating massive productive surpluses to build up their local, national, and global communities.

Solution 10: Smarter Technology Development

• We need more R&D and technology-neutral incentives for scale-up
• Technology for accelerating advances in the soft sciences is a priority
• Band-aid technologies must make way for fundamental advances

Hard and soft sciences

As an engineer-turned-researcher, my life is firmly based in the hard sciences. Surprisingly though, I believe that the soft sciences (politics, sociology, psychology) have a larger role to play in humanity’s future than the constant technological progress delivered by the hard sciences.

The introduction already outlined the basic issue: Technological progress can easily create more problems than it solves when our culture cannot keep up with our rapidly changing environment. The majority of the world’s 13 greatest problems arise from our inability to effectively adapt to the astonishing technological progress over the last 0.03% of human history.

But that doesn’t mean technological progress should be suppressed. It just means we need to manage the development and deployment of new technologies more intelligently. Let’s see how this could be done.

Bringing new technologies to market

Making a success of the 21st century will require a wide array of technological solutions, many of which are not yet available for deployment. That’s why efficient structures for technology development and scale-up are so important.

From my experience working in low-carbon energy research, it takes in the order of $100 million to take a novel idea from conception, through the “valley of death” to technology readiness level 7 (system prototype). This is the point where private investment, perhaps incentivized by public subsidy schemes, can take over if the idea is any good.

While $100 million might sound like a lot, it’s nothing next to the hundreds of billions being spent each year subsidizing already mature technologies. Taking the example of clean energy, wind and solar power have enjoyed trillions in public subsidization, the initial part of which created great value by driving sharp cost reductions. However, these technologies reached maturity years ago, characterized by slowing cost declines and growing headwinds. Continued support to force wind and solar deployment in uneconomical regions and sectors comes with great opportunity costs.

These opportunity costs take the form of all the novel solutions we could be developing with all that subsidy money instead. In my opinion, we should spend at least as much money developing novel ideas as we spend subsidizing mature technologies. Unfortunately, direct spending on RD&D of all forms of clean energy is about 7x less than direct subsidies for wind and solar alone (excluding all the indirect support in the form of deployment mandates, cheap financing, fixed-price contracts protecting against value declines, and free network expansions). Quadrupling global RD&D spending will give us a much greater chance of developing solutions capable of solving key issues without the need for perpetual subsidization.

Taking one step back, we also need more “research about research,” i.e., what we should be spending our RD&D budgets on and how to spend these budgets most efficiently. Working in this sector, I frequently observe tremendous inefficiencies, both regarding what is being researched and the process by which funds are allocated and used. The potential gains from fixing these issues and greatly increasing the quality and quantity of novel solutions brought to scale are astronomical.

Technology neutrality

Our inherent human biases are problematic when it comes to the allocation of our limited available RD&D funds and subsidies. As an example, wind, solar, and electric cars are ideologically highly attractive. Their benefits (perpetual, locally produced clean energy) are simple to understand and market, whereas their drawbacks (spatial and temporal variability, non-dispatchability, area and material intensity, lack of versatility) are much more complex. The resulting simplicity and desirability biases, strengthened by the confirmation bias generated by the green marketing machine, stand behind the highly inefficient perpetual subsidization enjoyed by these long-since mature technologies.

Instead, we need technology-neutral policies, mainly implemented as the internalization of externalities as outlined in Solution 4. For clean energy, this includes a CO2 tax, taxes on other pollutants, and, if relevant, energy import taxes. Such a scheme will allow all options to compete on an equal footing to solve our problems, allowing the free market to deploy the most economical set of solutions, which will vary strongly from one region to another.

Key development priorities

My experience made clean energy a convenient example for illustrating some key points about technology management. But there is another valuable insight in this example: We should first learn to responsibly wield the mighty double-edged sword of technology before sharpening it even further.

Let’s say we get a fantastic breakthrough in fusion technology tomorrow, and the world gains the potential to generate unlimited and reliable clean energy at 20 $/MWh anywhere on the planet. For all the good such a breakthrough can do, I fear our society is not yet at a point where we can handle such power. Most likely, we’ll mindlessly double down on our infinite material expansion philosophy, worsening more of our major problems than we mitigate.

That’s why other technological developments, especially in the soft sciences, are more important. Luckily, every major solution advocated in this article can benefit from better technology development practices.

Let’s go down the list:

• Solution 1: The SUM is a large technology project that will only become self-sustaining once a critical mass of users is reached. Reaching that point quickly and efficiently will require plenty of support.
• Solution 2: A wide array of VR technologies are being developed, but support for technologies aiming specifically to displace physical consumption can strongly accelerate progress. The field of human-centered urban design enabled by virtual mobility also deserves plenty of support.
• Solutions 3 and 4: Accurate and automated data collection and processing technologies are essential for reliably quantifying the PLY metric and a wide range of externalized costs.
• Solutions 5: The sophisticated IT solutions for enabling personalized governance and facilitating effective political mobility will require careful development and testing.
• Solutions 6 and 7: Billions of poor people can benefit from technological advances in digital education, automated translation, and microgrids for universal energy, water, and internet access. Smart incentives for innovative humanitarian conscripts can accelerate these developments.
• Solution 8: Clearly, automation is all about technological development.
• Solution 9: An environment of support for novel ideas will make it much more attractive to choose creative freedom over wasteful consumption.

Avoid band-aid technologies

In general, we should develop technologies that offer fundamental solutions to society’s greatest problems instead of sticking technological band-aids on whatever problem is most pressing. Once more, the healthcare sector offers a great example. Massive funds are flowing into the treatment of lifestyle diseases, while preventative solutions that can eradicate the primary causes of these diseases receive far less attention. Electric cars offer another classic example of a band-aid technology siphoning focus and funds from the far more holistic solution offered by VR-enabled human-oriented cities.

Technology is a double-edged sword. Today, we’re still cutting ourselves so frequently that we end up spending most of our time sticking on band-aids and bleeding out our potential (investment capital). But when we finally learn to skillfully wield this mighty sword, the sky’s the limit.

Final Thoughts

Humanity spends a crazy amount of its time, energy, and resources on activities that fail to improve our long-term wellbeing. As shown below, I estimate that about two-thirds of all our “productive” effort (GDP) goes into things that create negligible or negative societal value (or attempt to mitigate damages from negative-value activities). And this does not even count any of the value creation potential we lose from economically excluding billions of people by maintaining extreme inequality of opportunity, tremendous losses from absenteeism and presenteeism caused by unhealthy living, and millions of annual premature deaths of productive workers due to preventable lifestyle diseases, pollution, traffic accidents, and violence.

Ironically, this tremendous inefficiency is the one thing that gives me the greatest hope for the future. It implies that we have huge headroom available for future improvement. Capitalizing on just a small fraction of this latent potential will be enough to build a sustainable and equitable global society, securing the long-term future of Homo sapiens and the millions of other species sharing our unique planet.

It’s worth reiterating that the root of all our major global problems is the incompatibility of our primitive instincts to gain instant pleasure and avoid discomfort with the high-tech society that popped up over the last 0.03% of human history. The result is a long list of self-and-society-destroying actions that lead directly to the 13 great global problems and all the wasted effort depicted in the pie chart above.

Every suggestion in this article is built around the theme of a world where our natural human instincts can benefit instead of hurt us. Whether it is short-term gains from boosting Life Efficiency together with a rapidly growing community through the SUM, limitless virtual consumption via VR, strong political incentives to boost wellbeing by replacing GDP with PLY, direct price incentives from internalized externalities, the drive to build up our local community to prove our chosen political ideology most effective, financial and social rewards for child-rearing instincts directed at adoption, stimulating natural empathy via humanitarian conscription, enjoying more fulfilling work and greater prosperity thanks to automation, or unlocking limitless motivation and purpose from true creative freedom, every solution describes a world where just being human will bring success.

Thank you for taking the time to read this long article! I hope the proposed solutions make sense, and I would be very much interested in hearing ideas and commentary from informed readers. I plan to update this article on an annual basis, so any suggestions will be much appreciated.