Intro To My Series On “Creating the Future”: A Short Story About The Future

This essay is the intro to my metamodern thesis on the future of technological innovation and on the entrepreneurial mindset for success, purpose and spirituality.

For part 1: “Creating The Future Series (Part 1): Technologies Of Post-scarcity, Freedom and Ecology’, go here

For part 2: “Creating The Future Series (Part 2): A philosophy for Entrepreneurial Success, Purpose and Spirituality”, go here

“What did you do as a child that made the hours pass like minutes? Herein lies the key to your earthly pursuits.” — Carl Gustav Jung

20 years ago I was a kid that was always dreaming of tomorrow. I have always been fascinated with “the future”, a time where dreams came true and we became other people.

I could trace this hobby to a French children’s book I had at 11 years old called “Larousse Junior du Future” (translated to French from the original book “How the future began”). This book, which I still keep close to this day, portrayed futuristic products and their potential to impact the next hundred years — from telemedicine and virtual reality to autonomous cars.

It was a bit later in my life, by looking up to people such as Steve Jobs, when I realized the future is something people themselves envision and wholeheartedly go after. I learned that we are all creative, and we will all be creators. So I started striving to be part of this creative group of people that are steering the world to better places with the power of their imagination.

I found deep personal meaning in pursuing contributing to something that becomes a deep-seated part of our world. Every one of us is an expression of the creative universe and an embodiment of the novelty that it holds. Yet before creativity comes wonder, which opens up an awareness that connects us with the needs of others, and the problems of our world. Then, and only then, creativity takes over and we simply become it’s conduit.

The following essay was written out of a two-decades-long passion for peering over the horizon, and for synthesizing the big ideas of the future that I’ve come across in my lifelong journey of wonder— however paradoxical they can be. They touch on everything from societal changes, emerging paradigms, technological trends, creative entrepreneurship, cultural innovation, global problems, spiritual practice, and value creation.

I try here not to have any specific ideology, but instead to loosely integrate many things together into a systemic theory. I hope to constantly add new perspectives I come across, since knowledge continuously unfolds. Once you start to think systemically, anyway, you begin to grasp that everything connects, every one thing leads to another, sometimes to the point where nothing makes sense.

I hope that in sharing my thoughts — as well as the experience I gained through founding, operating and advising multiple technology startups across the last few years — I will inspire others to similarly make sense of long-term trends that drive modern life, to contemplate what may lie beyond what currently exists, to get involved in purposeful organizations, and to hold real conviction in building our world in any way they see as a “better way”.

I. It’s not about predicting the future but about creating it

The UK’s innovation foundation, Nesta, criticized in a report about futurology our very human belief in foreseeing the future. They cite Nassim Taleb’s research, which notes that “Black Swans” can come up at any time and screw our models up, together with Daniel Kahneman’s research, which indicates that human interaction is in itself unpredictable, and go so far to show that foreign affairs experts are not better at predicting results than random guesswork. An essay from the futurist Hardin Tibbs further notes that gaining knowledge about the future is in itself a paradox, because as the future becomes apparent this knowledge is no longer useful — making the scientific method of prediction an inappropriate framework for such an exercise.

It’s true that none of us can claim to predict the future, yet many can factfully claim to be shaping it through their actions. Human beings have learned to dream and tell stories to themselves, then convert their imagination into reality by applying it to everyday tasks. They observe changes, think of probable scenarios, they sense-make, they fail, they try different things, they make mistakes, they eliminate risk, they evolve, and out of this adaptive process we see new things emerging. The totality of human actions, in tandem with erratic changes in our environment, creates our society and develops it.

The only option, when it comes to action, especially in business, is to find conviction and make bets on probable futures. By not treating ourselves as prediction machines, the goal of strategy for us becomes to be more right than wrong across the total portfolio of bets made. Investors regularly do this, large corporation CEOs are learning to do this, and most importantly, entrepreneurs do this.

Steve Jobs, a perfect example of a man who had the will and courage to improve our world by bringing new technology products to billions of people, once said the oh-so-wise words, “Everything around you that you call life was made up by people that were no smarter than you and you can change it, you can influence it, you can build your own things that other people can use”. This quote is both life-changing and mind-expanding, and has since influenced thousands of entrepreneurs, including myself. Considering ourselves players and creators, rather than just watchers and consumers, is an essential mindset to creating the future.

II. The future is uncertain and continuously emerging

The true risk-takers provoke change themselves, and are determined to catch the uncertain future by the hand and bring it closer to the present. Nesta UK continues their report writing that “By articulating the changes needed to bring a preferred future to life, we can fix the shape of the future in a previously uncertain landscape. Revolutionary inventors, from Nikola Tesla to Elon Musk, have had strong visions of the future. Faith in their particular view creates the irrational persistence needed to push through transformative technological change.” They turn their minds inside-out and spray their own thoughts onto the world not just in the form of products, but of media, art, language and cultural innovation. Then, out of the uncertainty, they create their own certain truth.

We must note, on top of that, that the future is interesting because it is inherently an open-ended question, prone to constant re-writing and adherent to the process of trial and error. The future is constantly emerging, with no end point, like in an infinite wave where the edge goes back into the sea and forms another, and so on. From today’s solutions, we have new problems arising — there is hence no utopia to reach, but a multitude of momentary utopias we can relish in until human values change and new windows of opportunity open.

“Utopia is on the horizon. I move two steps closer; it moves two steps further away. I walk another ten steps and the horizon runs ten steps further away. As much as I may walk, I’ll never reach it. So what’s the point of utopia? The point is this: to keep walking.”- Eduardo Galeano, Uruguayan journalist, writer and novelist

The future, in conclusion, is much promising yet unpredictable, so it must be created iteratively like everything else. Thus, as shapers of our world, we must — like the famous innovators above — focus our efforts and rely on our own persistence to make it happen.

III. The future is full of human potential

Carl Sagan, another hero for many people, said that “For all of our failings, despite our limitations and fallibility, we humans are capable of greatness.” We have the ability to create a wonderful world we inhabit and shape it as our own masterpiece. I personally repulse, for example, when materialist scientists tell us that humans are just talking monkeys with a distinguished ability to use tools, but I’d rather see it as a species with an ability to imagine making new tools to make their existence more meaningful.

Imagine showing our current technology to someone living in the 1800s; they would only think we’re dark magicians or advanced alchemists. By just looking around at our creations, we can feel that humanity’s role is increasingly and simultaneously gaining the ability, and the responsibility, for shaping the whole of the planet’s ecosystems. We have already created so much novelty in the world, and we’re on the brinks of creating much more. Our creative potential turned our reality into cities, machines, products, and economic systems — which are all but imagined ideals by people who lived before us and who were asking the question of “how to live better”. Creativity is really the deepest expression of human individuality.

I now believe that our goal today is to create in the next 20 years, a new world that is unrecognizable to us today, just as our world is to people 200 years ago. As technological creativity increased our access to scarce resources, it allowed us to coordinate better among ourselves to achieve sociological goals. Our material abundance increased so much since the industrial revolution, due to enlightenment ideas of science and innovation. These two paradigms worked in parallel to satisfy our basic daily needs and automate major economic functions, at the same time increasing the compression of change and churning innovation through shorter and faster cycles.

This finally led to a peak in our freedom to think in more abstract ways about the future. Sci-fi writers wrote about time travel machines and aliens with technologies more advanced from ours. Philosophers in Europe start thinking long-term about how new positive narratives can guide humanity forward. Designers in Silicon Valley start to think about how to upgrade and augment our bodies with wearables. Technologists in China start to think about conquering Mars, and then the whole universe. Society moves beyond being a collective race towards meeting basic daily needs, and becomes a vehicle for further expanding human potential and existential depth.

We can hence now start to look more forward in time towards creating new tools, and towards more improvement to our current lives. We somehow get today the feeling that nothing is impossible with our current technologies, and it’s contagious.

IV. A “creating the future” mindset has to be about progress and optimism

Seeing a future full of potentialities, I personally chose to always run with it seeking novel insights and patterns. I closely followed the evolution of “creative industries” like music, technology, and philosophy. I have gotten involved with as much as five technology startups who are redefining industries, and dug deep into researching and writing about new areas of growth.

I know many others in the world are like me. They can be found in big numbers among artists, entrepreneurs, theorists, and social activists. The world, for them, is a canvas they feel obliged to fill. They are progressives and have a weird loving relationship with uncertainty. They accept this uncertainty as the new business logic and define it from a positive perspective. It fuels them and appears to them as an opportunity instead of a hardship.

These people I look up to are comfortable with ambiguity and are themselves change agents. They are constant learners with a “growth mindset”. They are idealists, yet optimistic based solely on reason and evidence (a.k.a “intelligent optimists”), always challenging and questioning, even when it comes to their own decisions. They are able to see the limitations in current ways of thinking, to step back from the deeply entrenched systems in society, deconstruct them and reconstruct it back again into something better. Their defining feature is hope and optimism. When we add some flexibility, as well as some resilience against hardships — one will be ready to confront the future, adapt to all kinds of environmental changes and come up with novel solutions.

I am, on the opposite side, repelled by people for whom the increasing rate of change only causes confusion and anxiety around the future. Their reaction to increasing novelty is a comeback to the comfortable known instead of the fearful unknown. Their answer is hence to put the future aside and live more in the present, randomly satisfying compulsive urges and seeking instant gratification. They struggle under rapid change because it brings along with it a feeling that what’s coming is unpredictable. They fear the new and have much personal doubts regarding their creative capabilities and the impact they can have on society.

They are also primitive in that they look only to the recent past, saying things like “This is how it’s always been”, and sometimes prematurely judge new concepts saying “This new thing is never going to work”. Most importantly, they cannot foresee how we can evolve from the current societal systems towards even better ones. In evolutionary terms, these people are out of sync with the times and are not willing to change with their environment. Those people, I believe, will always be left behind by society.

“A society that loses a positive image of the future can’t deal with present problems” — Kenneth Boulding, American economist and interdisciplinary philosopher

As CEO of Forum for the Future Sally Uren observes, we each should be asking then ourselves if we are “locking in an existing and unsustainable system” or “designing new patterns for transformational change”. For progress to happen, we have to accept that the current systems the world runs on have limits that should be overcome. We have to see that a present however full of problems can easily be turned into a thriving, brighter future.

My favorite FastCompany article, written in February 2012 discusses “Generation Flux”, a generation that is living in a chaotic, unpredictable but who can continuously adjust and adapt to constant change, as well as pursue a multitude of learning opportunities in their lives. The right move for our generation, it seems, is not to cling to the present, but unlearn the old and turn confusion into energy that builds something new.

At the moment, it’s not entirely clear what our future will look like, but that’s part of humanity’s journey of gaining more wisdom and stewarding of the universe. This generation is responsible for fixing the big problems of our time, like excessive inequality, climate change, soil erosion, dogmatism, modern-day anxiety. These are both longstanding and newly created challenges we have only started to question, and they will only become worse if we don’t continuously aim for change and improvement. Unfortunately, the magnitude of these problems makes creating the future hard.

V. “I” should participate in creating the future

We’re nevertheless long past the point where we have to ponder over the question of “should we do it or not”. It has become imperative to participate, not just because we get pulled out of bed everyday into an economic system that increasingly revolves around “innovate or die”, but also because we are under mounting pressure of societal collapse. An even bigger change factor is the critical mass of people who internally feel the need for impact and are founding new startup organizations with both a plan to disrupt and 5-year visions and save humanity.

To an individual, the feeling should be “The world is being built with or without me, so I might as well participate and reap the rewards”. It almost feels like there’s something pulling our society forward instead of it progressing naturally from the past. Times are changing, and this ever-changing world we designed is turning back on us and forcing us to adapt our ways to it. We can’t curl up in our own box — separate ourselves from culture and the world — and watch time go by, because we will either be socially left out or our careers will suffer.

Today, we have look at one of the biggest problems of our age, and start to think how can technology reverse their blow, and how we can automate more economic functions for those who are not so privileged. We have to look at inequality and how a major percentage of the earth’s population still can’t meet their basic needs, let alone their psychological wellbeing. We have to ponder on issues of sustainability, so that our species doesn’t create disequilibriums in society and doesn’t increase existential threats to the natural world we are part of. We have both the need and the ability to save the world.

VI. To change the world, we need first to change ourselves and our perspectives

The great scientist Albert Einstein thought that “The world as we have created it is a process of our thinking, and cannot be changed without changing our thinking”. This is very relevant to our topic and is being repeated widely in many forms. Others, like the scientist Robert Lewin and developmental psychologist Birute Regine write, “You can’t figure out what to do in the future by looking at how you did things in the past.”

Alongside the technological paradigms are cultural paradigms that are worth exploring — our modes of thinking have to develop. Technology cannot be separated from the morals and ideology of its founder, nor it can be separated from the social context and cultural environment of its time — it springs from society as much as it becomes part of society when it creates pre-built solutions to human problems. To transition into sustainable societies, there must be a change in both our worldview and our design of economic systems — This goes in parallel with innovation and scientific discovery. Progress is as much in social evolution than it is in material abundance — we have shifts in scientific thinking, into new values and towards progressive worldviews.

Even the tools we use to model our world are increasingly becoming non-useful, knowing that many more modern behavioural economists have stated that the mathematical equilibriums of standard economic theory might be the wrong tool for the job of designing complex systems. While economists warn us that we are in a stagnation period and that technology is not really improving GDP growth, they seem to be just looking at numbers that reflect the past, have not seen how the communication-based internet has brought more people together than it pushed them apart. These experts fail to see that metrics they put in place for growth may not be the right ones. Very few of them talk about the early signs of the persistent lowering of prices induced by technology, and without really considerating this inherent deflationary nature of innovation.

As a reaction, the polymaths of our age — whose passions and callings may continuously change — are digging beyond the obvious to change hidden conventions, and in tandem accepting that our knowledge and understanding can always improve as we go. Our limited modeling ability and smaller perception keep us restricted in the current framing of issues, yet we should know there are levels of awareness that we still haven’t reached.

We must learn to get out of our subjective experiences, which limit the scope of wisdom, and rather aim to understand the world in new ways and discover the unknown unknowns. We must embrace possibilities of the new and look at things from all viewpoints. To solve the paradoxes of our age, we will have to perfect the ability to integrate what were separate perspectives in the past and to oscillate between opposite ideas to find the non-obvious synergies from which emergence arises.

“Idealism is the leadership recipe du jour. The grand oscillation of culture signals a return to spirituality and Romanticism. The grand narratives of truth, justice, and freedom are finally truly open to everyone. With the millennial generation, human consciousness has finally expanded beyond fragmentation. We have the opportunity to truly universalize the grand narratives.” — James Surwillo, Metamodern Leadership: A History of the Seven Values That Will Change the World

VII. We live in a paradoxical, metamodern society with major problems yet infinite possibilities.

Metamodernism is described as the stage that comes after postmodernism, which is about both deconstructing and bringing down prior modernist thought and the scientific enlightenment. The biggest criticism of postmodernist thought is that it is cynical, nihilistic and skeptical of the narratives of progress and development. Never the less, metamodernists preach that we must turn this crisis into opportunity, and see some good in postmodern thought. Two of the greatest insights that postmodernism brought with it, through the deconstruction of everything we believe in, is on one hand that everything we know as “real” is actually relative and contextual, and on another hand that modern science with its reductionist, dualistic, approach is not enough to really understand the world.

This opens up new opportunities for the individual to express themselves and take advantage of their freedom from ideology in new ways. The implosion of meaning, values and guiding traditions, means that people can now truly create their own meaning. My favourite description of this new worldview is this: “Metamodernism is an evolution of postmodernism, and it comes from people who acknowledge how terrible and fractured everything and everyone is …but who also still see the internet as a place of boundless self-creation, unfettered problem-solving, limitless invention, and more opportunities for collaboration than humans have ever had. To be a metamodernist is to adopt what’s called a romantic response to crisis”. Again, we see here the notion that technology is supposed to enhance personal freedom and material abundance.

However, metamodernism is not a comeback to modernity’s values and narratives, but looks to the past and the future simultaneously to build an imagination of how current world problems are solved. Complexity theory and Systems thinking spring from postmodernism and become the metamodernists’ new way of thinking about living and natural systems. A metamodernist is again idealistically optimistic about the future, yet at the same time understands that there is no absolute truth to reality and that pragmatism — as an approach to building the future — is a must.

In the way I understand it, Metamodernism is hence about writing a new story for humanity, one of meaning and transcendence, while knowing fully well that whatever we will write is complex, flawed, and really hard to execute.

VIII. We are all to become systems thinkers because complexity is intensifying

Robert Louis Flood, a British systems and organizations scientist, argues that when focused on human existence, “Systemic thinking helps people to sense a deep holistic or spiritual quality.” As noticed by many ecologists and systemic thinkers, the problem with the modern human narrative is that we keep thinking too much of ourselves as separate from the ecosystem of diverse lifeforms, whereas we should see ourselves as the most conscious lifeform with a duty to do no harm to the whole and to make sure it’s sustainable. The worldview of separation between man and the mechanical universe is, in many intellectual circles, being dropped and replaced by the participatory worldview as a metaphor of humanity within a vast ecological nature, in which everything is connected to everything else.

Whereas current society puts nature under human domination and man under other man’s control, the future is about seeing all things in unity and complementarity. We go from a worldview perspective of an “Observer” to a relational “Exchange of consciousness” between the human and the universe, and know that there are unseen forces between all things in the system. Believing in the interconnectedness of everything and in a participatory worldview, we start to see individual creation and complementarity of all things as the ultimate goal of natural expression.

“Almost four hundred years ago René Descartes described a method for tackling problems by dividing them into smaller parts, his method of reductionism became the template for how we think about everything, it has enabled us to be so collectively intelligent, to build an advanced civilization but also so collectively stupid to bring that civilization ever closer to the point of collapse. It shows us for example how to grow food by focusing on parts, like fertilizers and pesticides, but it can’t show us how to grow food by caring for the soil as an ecology, so soils are depleted worldwide. The problems that are caused by reductionism can’t be solved by this same way of thinking.” — James Greyson, Founder and CEO of BlindSpot Think Tank

This new kind of narrative requires empathy towards all of the world’s species and its environment, all without losing individual uniqueness. The individual is to expand their moral horizons beyond kinship, tribe and nation, to care for all of humanity — without preference for in-groups and without an us-vs-them mentality — and sees the other’s selfhood as the same expression of natural creativity than his/her own.

IX. The future is where symbiotic relationships with the environment thrive

At the same time, our mission when we see ourselves as an integral part of nature is to improve this symbiotic relationship and increase nature’s liveliness, creativity, as well as its fecundity as the social ecologist Murray Bookchin labels it. We must hence participate in the regenerative nature of organic systems to preserve beauty and nature, and implement things like permaculture, circular economies, renewable energy, community regeneration etc.

To put the above idea more philosophically, when we experience the beauty of a flower in nature we have to realize that the beauty of the flower is the same beauty that made us. It is really all the same beauty, it is all interconnected. Nature, people, animals the stars are made of the same “stuff” and animated by the same consciousness.

It is by taking care of the earth’s ecosystem, like through cleaning the oceans, that we also take care of ourselves and inner health. And we are, in that way, as compelled to water the flower, as a bee is compelled to pollinate it. A flower relies on humans to grow and live, as much as it relies on pollination to reproduce. We even have new stories coming from the field of physics about a quantum world from which universal consciousness emerge. This new metaphor of interconnectedness makes complete sense to many people longing for new age spirituality. We increasingly feel this on a cultural and natural level, as things get more complex and as we are more exposed to the world through media and travel.

I do believe that this “new” narrative, although springing from ancient organic and eastern wisdom, would give new meaning to our lives and new kinds of impact to our work.

Meanwhile, this interconnectedness of the ecological-societal-psychological-economical system (to borrow the term from the popular Donella Meadows), brings its own challenges. It is incrementally difficult to understand how the world works, and to see the hidden relationships between all things.

According to Except Integrated Sustainability, a consulting and design firm focused on sustainability in The Netherlands, “Using system thinking as a way to understand the world around us suddenly opens up a myriad of opportunities that allows you to see things that you wouldn’t otherwise see, this methodology allows for moving with the change”. One-topic specialists with no understanding of how systems work, who follow old forms of management and strategy, and who are used to thinking in a linear way, will fail to have effective results.

Increasing complexity means that our universal-scale problems have neither one root cause nor will be resolved with piecemeal solutions. Inadequate concepts and models cannot see complexity and chaos for what it is. Innovation that sees things as single products that come as a consequence of a 200-year-old industrial model, will need to be replaced by systems innovation, one that is more in line with a complex, globalized and networked world.

Deep innovation in smart cities, energy grids, integrated transport services, political governance, financial systems, and holistic health require a quantum leap in thinking. Decision-makers may only be looking at separated parts or individual agents, when they should rather instead try to understand global issues holistically. In this new world, generalists with a systems thinking approach will be called for systems innovation. We will need leaders who can govern with a larger, more intelligent, perspective that includes the intangible flows and relationships within and between systems. To be diffused, the new technologies and new paradigms we create have to embedded in both the ecosystems of economics and the web of culture to have any impact whatsoever, and so the innovator him/herself will have to explore new possibilities and venture to new territories by making connections across scientific fields and uncovering connections.

“Generation Flux” must see the limitations of how our reigning scientific paradigm dissects everything, and instead strive to understand nature — including human beings as a part of it — in its full diversity and texture. By doing so, our generation will enter a new age of systemic wisdom, which brings with it the resolution of many of today’s problems in ways that were never imagined.

“The business model of the future is to serve individuals, because individuals are now relatively smarter. That’s not correlated with education, by the way — they are smarter because they have access to tons more information. And so we are all more connected, we are all more engaged, and as a result we are all more cynical. And we all see that the emperor has no clothes. That’s true of banking, that is true of people who run educational institutions, and it’s true of healthcare. So the model of the future is to basically deconstruct all of that and empower the edges. That is the way you build a multi-gajillion-dollar company. Give people individual power.” — Chamath Palihapitiya, Partner at Social Capital and Ex-growth lead at Facebook

X. Technology is a force that will save the world and build a more sustainable future

To come back a bit to the topic of technology, we understand today that innovation has always been about improving information flow, as well as empowerment in the form of augmentation or increased access to resources.

As I am writing this on Medium.com, there are terabytes of news, science papers, software creations, and cultural memes simultaneously being uploaded into the rest of the internet. For less than $50 per month, we use our smartphones for 6–8 hours per day to talk with other people and browse through news and entertainment content on applications like Skype, Whatsapp, Spotify, Netflix, Facebook, Google, Youtube and many free(mium) news magazines. Both the price of connecting with other people and that of consuming content have gone down to near-zero levels in the last 10 years.

Cyberspace is becoming an otherworldly dimension where both Andy Clark’s “Extended Mind” and Carl Jung’s “Collective Unconscious” flourish. Humanity has actually created a virtual place that enables our digital selves to have a life of their own and represent us when we’re not around, a place that is carefully designed to ongoingly beam data — in any form or shape — across the world to whoever’s listening or searching.

After creating hundreds of online marketplaces and giant players of the gig economy, we now have communication technology poised to build new organizational structures. This offers the potential to innovate in all spheres of human activity. A quote I read somewhere that has been stuck in my head for a while says that “Tomorrow’s firm can be made of 10 million people working together for 10 minutes”. Blockchain DAOs are heading in this direction, and I believe we will soon see the centralized organizations of today evolve into decentralized, scalable and open networks. Blockchain, the decentralized public ledger of transactions that fuels every digital cryptocurrency, enables instant transfer of value and improved auditability.

We are just today witnessing the spillover effect into other industries. As computing becomes ubiquitous and pervasive, industries — like transportation, finance and healthcare — will follow the disruption examples of media and retail. The story of technology will continue, and consumers would be served better, cheaper and in a more personalized way. Marc Andreessen, prominent investor, explains it in this way: “When you apply software you can do it in a very cost-effective way… we now for the first time can basically go field by field, category by category, industry by industry, product by product, and we can say, ‘what would they be like if they were all software.” Technology introduces innovative business models that take away the cost for end consumers and remove all sorts of friction from any customer experience.

Having said that, technologies of the next two decade hold much promise in using big data to understand more of the physical world, and hence to improve it. We are poised to apply artificial intelligence to scientific inquiry and discover more about the world we live in. Intelligent software, otherwise known as Artificial Intelligence, is able to make sense of huge amounts of data coming not only from human input but also from smart sensors we are adding to the physical world. We will get even better at futurology with better data and systemic models. Not only will we gain more knowledge and wisdom, but we will also get better at scenario planning, and develop new fields of real-time full systems accounting. Only then, we will be able to create real abundance and sustainability.

Clean energy will become more available and cheaper at an increasing rate, and we might even change our perception of nuclear power to a positive one. Natural resources will become unlimited because of synthetic biology’s ability to create more biofuels and more food with less environmental impact, and because of our ability to send intelligent robots to mine space for raw materials. The circular economy will also help make our communities self-sufficient and waste-free. While 3D printing will democratize manufacturing and change retail models, the mix of spatial computing and headsets will also be a tool that digitalizes products and move more things from the physical to the virtual. We will live in a world without waste and move towards neutralizing climate change by 2050.

Through their intelligent technology, humans will themselves change what it means to be human. Concepts like health, intelligence and connection will be dramatically different from what they are today. Because of the progress in genetic understanding and engineering in parallel with AI, we are able to know about diseases and cure them to increase our lifespan. Our smart digital assistants will plan around the complexity of our lives, and execute tasks for us — as if they were us. The human project we are just venturing on is to increase choice, freedom and hence selfhood.

Humans will go back to being human, and will be free to engage in conscious self-development, without being under the claws of forced economic labor and mindless consumerism — as Murray Bookchin elaborates in his book “The Ecology Of Freedom”.

XI. Technologists are the creative artists of the future

From the earlier Steve Jobs quote, we have already established that we should not just accept this random world as other people gave it to us. Instead, we have to shape it — and it’s not only about waking up every day and exchanging mere “labor”, but also about thinking about what we are really offering on the social level, and how we are improving people’s lives.

I consider today’s entrepreneurs and designers as artists, with an objective to create software and hardware that have the same impact awe-inspiring impact as art. I have previously written a post saying that our customers are always on a quest of self-realization and that it’s up to the entrepreneur’s product, and brand, to join the customer’s journey of becoming their ideal self.

The similarity between creating digital products and making art is only increasing. An experience with an art piece invades the observer’s emotions and then makes him/her see everything in new ways. Artists have always had an objective to provide both personal meaning and pleasure, to alter the emotional states of people that we interact with, and breed radiance. That’s what people expect from technology products too, and that’s why entrepreneurs are now building more interactive apps, interactive robots and virtual 3D objects that people can engage with and love.

The best thing about it is that those products, like art, are a projection of their creators’ mindsets and values. The products they design become extensions of themselves in the world, which everyone else can experience. So then, it is best to create our businesses as platforms for cultural innovation and societal change.

Technology empowers everyone, including non-hackers, to create important and scalable products in little time. In recent times, the technology startup emerged as a business vehicle for innovation, and to make huge amounts of money while doing it. Everyone can become an entrepreneur in the new digital economy, if they set their minds to it of course.

Unlike some ancient industries where existing wealth is neither looking to change hands nor do its possessors want to share it, every person should realize that entrepreneurship white spaces do exist and that the tools for starting up are abundantly available for them to forge a new path. Technological advances do create a world full of potential high-growth opportunities — and as new value is up for grabs, exemplified by companies like Facebook, Twitter, Microsoft and Google, people are scrambling to catch a piece of the pie by becoming tech founders — most of these companies have transferred wealth and created new markets that have never existed before.

Vinod Khosla, billionaire investor and founder of Sun Microsystems, notes that it’s almost always the entrepreneurs, not institutions, that drive large innovations. The courageous among us must look at what is changing, try to understand the big picture, take risks and make bets — there is no other way than creating the future ourselves and going for the excess rewards of success. The new billionaire is someone that helps a billion people, as the philosopher Jason Silva redefines it.

“Live in the future, then build what’s missing.” –Paul Graham, founder of Y combinator

To continue to Part 1, click here