Lets begin with seven world-changing facts that will happen by 2030:
- By 2030, China will take the number one spot from USA as the largest economy in the world, solidifying its demonstration of power under a one-party system.
- By 2030, India should jump ranks and become the third-largest economy, with the largest population, the most college graduates, and a fantastic demographic dividend.
- By 2030, it is very likely that we didn’t make enough progress on climate change and we will be on our way to at least a 1,5 degrees increase in temperature
- By 2030, Space exploration will have all the necessary tools and technologies for us to build human settlements on Mars.
- By 2030, CRISP technology and genome sequencing, will give humanity a vast set of opportunities to eradicate disease, live healthier and increase longevity.
- By 2030, the number of robots in operation should reach 20 million units, a 10 times increase from what we have now, and they are here to work.
- And last one but perhaps the most significant. By 2029, is when futurist Ray Kurzweil expects AI to reach human-level intelligence.
All these world-changing events are just 8 years away…imagine the possibilities, and what we will be able to achieve! But of course, this is not all sunshine and rainbows, all these opportunities come with problems attached and large questions we need to answer:
- The Climate issues will affect the availability of resources, triggering massive migrations and at the same time causing a large loss in biodiversity.
- The Rise of Robotics and AI will change our expectations of works and professions, leading to large upskilling needs in the working population.
- The fast speed of changes at the society level will make the population unhappy, nobody wants to change on something they worked hard to achieve.
- Large political frictions will arise, and it will be even more difficult to make decisions at a country level.
- Combine this with the change in economic power coming from the east….. it will become really hard to find global cooperation, not only because of different visions of the world but because of countries selfish views on things. Even if we hate to admit it when in danger or scarcity it is common to be selfish.
What a crazy world will be by 2030! And I didn’t say all this to make you scared or concerned about what will happen to you. No, my friends, I am endlessly optimistic, I said all this to bring forward the question, how can we help? Knowing these challenges ahead, what kind of tools, technologies, methodologies, institutions, services, infrastructure, or processes are needed to face such problems? That has been the motivation for me to build the H-29 Project, to find a way to help in these upcoming challenges.
I have chosen to work on the basics, to place all my efforts in what could be classified in academia as “metaphysics”, but that it pretty much means working on the difficult questions of life:
- What is a good life?
- What is ethics?
- What should an ideal society be?
- What kind of government should we have?
- How much diversity is needed?
- What are the limits of freedom?
The argument is as follow, to decide how to solve the upcoming challenges ahead, we need a deeper understanding of the bigger questions. We are marvellously good at finding solutions so long we truly understand and feel the objective we aim to achieve, including a priority in the details involved.
“I believe the problems by 2030 will be in essence, problems of having too many directions, too many perspectives and contrasting objectives.”
As such in H-29 I will present to you an alternative answer to these questions. An answer in which you will find many well-known concepts coming from classical philosophy, anthropology, complexity science, biology, and sociology. But instead of being isolated noises that don’t work as a symphony, I will combine them into a single narrative; putting together the puzzle of how things are connected and with this offer a robust answer to these large questions.
To build this work I will take large inspiration from complexity theory, which presents the idea that society is a network of interconnected actors and behaves in similar logic as a physical system, with forces that move individuals and influence group behaviour.
Following the steps from philosopher Thomas Kuhn, I believe in the idea that we progress as we break current paradigms, ideas that are inconsistent and inefficient in application. With the work I present you I aim to break certain paradigms so that we can take the field forward.
I spent many months working on this idea and at one point I thought I would get nowhere. A few times I felt I was just walking in the dark, like a journey to the mouth of hell, but after walking different sides of the labyrinth I suddenly hit the spot, a bit of an eureka moment on how to interpret Ethics, to give an answer to the question, what does it mean to be ethical?
That is the work I present in season one, I provide a new interpretation of ethics, using a complexity theory lens of culture.
This theory not only provides a new definition of what is ethics but it addresses the current problem of using ethics in real-life problems: we currently don’t have any judgement logic that we can consistently apply to multiple types of ethical dilemmas; We know that we cannot have golden rules, because they are too inflexible and every now and then we end up breaking them; We know that we cannot have a quantifying method on benefits, because it lacks humanity and we end up doing atrocities for the sake of a larger good.
I present you a theory that first and foremost will remove the large expectations we have on ethics, rejecting the idea that ethics is the answer to right and wrong and making it a one metric focus. And with this, we will build a methodology, a process to judge situations that clearly define if something is ethical or not and how to use this information.
As I present this theory, many single ideas might seem odd, but the thesis works as a collective, it is once I connect it all that the method becomes robust. Not only in theory but especially in practice. I share this work with the objective to improve it or discard it if in the end it’s proven to be utterly wrong, so feel free to make any remarks you see valuable. I have been working in the dark too long building this beast and it has come to the time to test it in the wild.
