# Exponential Technologies Journal

Living document at: `https://hackmd.io/@carlb/exponential-technologies-journal`

## Week 5
*What affected you most during this week?*

*Can humans design our future?*

*How can you change the future?*

*Do you need any help developing your assessment idea?*

### Research & Development

The approach of building prototypes and running experiments really resonates with me. In my work, the things I enjoy most are research and development. I love discovering new ideas and concepts, trying to understand them, and then implement those learnings into a prototype.

The SquareVote experiment is one example (shared in week 4's journal). Another that comes to mind is: some years ago I discovered an article on Conviction Voting and I wanted to learn about how it works and what it could look like in practice. In short, Conviction Voting is a decision-making process where votes accumulate over time based on the strength of an individual's preference.

The article describes a mathematical expression of how this voting strength is calculated per participant and proposal. I found great enjoyment in learning how to translate this formula into code and building a user interface for it.
https://blog.ceramic.network/trust-minimized-off-chain-conviction-voting

#### Conviction Voting
Unlike traditional voting, Conviction Voting allows voters to continuously express support. Their influence increase the longer they maintain their conviction, creating a dynamic representation of collective preferences.

The conviction for a proposal can be visualized as a tank of water that gets filled up by voters signaling their commitment. It's more like a continuous proposal or a "dynamic average consensus". For example, the collective decides on amounts of UBI or tax rates and the value adjusts dynamically rather than as an effect of a vote.

### Designing and Changing Our Future
I believe every individual has the potential to change the world and our future. We can imagine and visualize potential futures and with intention and focus direct our work and energy to bring that into our world. When people come together and share the same vision, momentum starts to grow.

> “The people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world are the ones who do.” — Steve Jobs.

Perhaps what it takes is:
- A clear vision of the potential future
- A story to help spread the vision
- People who resonate with the story and vision and are engaged

### Progress on the idea

I've been working on crafting a mission statement for the idea that is starting to emerge and started to map out problem statement and solution proposal.

#### Mission Statement
We empower communities by harnessing exponential technologies — such as blockchain and AI — to enhance civic engagement, drive sustainable development, and fulfill fundamental human needs. Through transparent, decentralized digital infrastructure, we enable individuals to actively participate in decision-making, collaborate on regenerative community initiatives, and find purposeful engagement in shaping a better future. Our aim is a world where technology bridges rather than divides — where every individual has the tools and opportunities to contribute to a sustainable, equitable, and connected society, thriving through collaboration, shared purpose, and collective action for the betterment of all.

#### Problem Statement
By 2035, society faces significant challenges:

- **AI Displacement** - widespread automation and AI advancements have led to substantial job losses in traditional sectors, leaving many individuals searching for new income sources and a sense of purpose.
- **Civic Disengagement** - trust in traditional governance has eroded due to lack of transparency and ineffective decision-making processes, resulting in decreased civic participation.
- **Environmental Sustainability** - ongoing environmental degradation requires collective action and efficient allocation of resources to fund regenerative projects and public goods.

These issues highlight the need for a solution that not only addresses economic and environmental challenges but also revitalizes community engagement and fulfills fundamental human needs.

#### Solution Proposal
**Accord** is an open-source and blockchain-based platform that empowers citizens to actively participate in decision-making processes, propose and fund community initiatives, and engage in regenerative activities.

#### Business Model
- **Protocol Transaction Fees** - a minimal fee charged on transactions within the network (these can be reinvested into the platform and matching pools).
- **Grants, Donations, and Impact Investments** - partnerships with NGOs, governmental grants, and corporate social responsibility programs.
- **Premium Features** - provides municipalities and organizations with insights into community engagement and impact projects.

### Closing Thoughts

I've been thinking about what the prototype could look like. What are the key parts of the idea to demonstrate? I could salvage parts from SquareVote to make it work like this:
- Proposals can be created
- List all Proposals on a page
- Vote quadratically with 24 voice credits for the ones you want to support

I also thought about what if these proposals where actually projects in this course from the students? And the students vote for the ones they like best? An imaginary Matching Pool could be distributed according to the quadratic formula. It could be called HyperFund.

## Week 4
*What affected you most this week and what have you learned?*

*What new insights have you gained about predicting the future?*

*What source of content inspires you this week for new business opportunities?*

*What can you do to maximize your learning in the weeks ahead?*

### Sustainable Development Goals
I have been looking into the UN Sustainability Goals to see what they say about civic engagement and governance. Here's what I found:

#### Goal 16: Peace, Justice, and Strong Institutions
- **Target 16.6** - Develop effective, accountable, and transparent institutions at all levels.
- **Target 16.7** - Ensure responsive, inclusive, participatory, and representative decision-making at all levels.
- **Target 16.10** - Ensure public access to information and protect fundamental freedoms, in accordance with national legislation and international agreements.

#### Goal 11: Sustainable Cities and Communities
- **Target 11.3** - Enhance inclusive and sustainable urbanization and capacity for participatory, integrated, and sustainable human settlement planning and management in all countries.
- **Target 11.a** - Support positive economic, social, and environmental links between urban, peri-urban, and rural areas by strengthening national and regional development planning

This tells me there's an alignment in these goals and targets coming from the UN with some of the fundamental human needs (protection, participation, understanding, and freedom). There's also a technological overlap that enables this.

I have been reading a post by Vitalik Buterin about Plurality:
https://vitalik.eth.limo/general/2024/08/21/plurality.html

It brings up many interesting topics and ideas related to this.
- The rise of digital communication demands new democratic tools that address large-scale coordination issues without centralizing power or restricting freedom.
- Mitigating risks of exponential technologies by designing systems that distribute benefits and avoid concentration of power
- Using technology (AI) to find alignment on issues for citizens. Taiwan is experimenting with this.
- Quadratic voting and funding for coordination, decision-making, and public goods funding.

#### Quadratic voting
Quadratic voting is a democratic system that aims to provide a more nuanced view of public opinion by measuring not just what people want but how strongly they feel bout it. Voters are given a certain number of voice credits that they can spend to cast votes on issues. The cost of casting votes increases by the vote count multiplied by itself (quadratically). For example, one vote cost one credit, two votes cost 4, three votes 9, etc.

In traditional voting systems the option with the most votes wins, regardless of how strongly the voters feel about it. This can lead to "tyranny of the majority" or "democracy is two wolves and one sheep voting on what's for dinner".

By allowing voters to express the intensity of their preferences, quadratic voting can promote a more balanced and fair decision-making process.

Earlier this year I built a proof of concept for a quadratic voting app where anyone can create simple polls and share with their friends:
https://squarevote.app

Perhaps parts of that app could be salvaged to build something new.

#### Quadratic Funding
The quadratic formula can also be applied to funding. A matching pool is first created with funds that will be distributed to projects or initiatives. Voters then vote by donating to the projects they wish to support. At the end of the round the matching funds are distributed to the projects according to the quadratic formula. This means projects that receive donations from many voters will receive a larger share of the matching pool than projects with few supporters, even if their donations add up to a higher total. The projects receive both the matching funds as well as the donations.

### Funding Public Goods and Regenerative Activities

The blockchain networks have for years experimented in how to incentivize and encourage participants in their ecosystems.

The economic incentives in these networks usually work like this: There is a transaction fee to send data to the network. When a new block is mined a reward is sent to the miners. Transaction fees and block rewards are mechanisms to incentivize network participants to secure the network and maintain its integrity

So in a simplistic way, the for-profit (not all of them are) networks generate revenue by people using the network and the revenue is shared among participants (miners, validators, stakers, network developers and foundations).

One way to encourage more transactions is to provide useful apps on the network. Uniswap and Aave are popular markets and lending protocols. These provide financial utility to its users.

So to encourage people to innovate and build the next popular apps, these networks reward builders (and other providing value to the networks in various ways).

This has led to platforms where people can register their projects to receive grants and funding. Some of these projects are public goods rather than revenue generating apps such as Aave and Uniswap.

Different mechanisms exist for this:
- **Direct Grants** - a panel of experts decide what projects should receive funding
- **Quadratic Funding with matching pools** - the collective decides on what projects are valuable to them. The mechanism of quadratic funding rewards projects that have utility to many.
- **Retroactive Funding** - projects receive funding based on the impact they have already made because it's easier to agree on what *was* useful than what *will* be useful.

What could this look like if applied to projects and initiatives in our local communities?

### Closing Thoughts
So have I come any closer to any ideas I wish to create a business case for during these 4 weeks? The common themes for these past weeks has mainly been:
- 9 fundamental human needs and synergistic satisfiers
- governance and civic engagement
- funding public goods and regenerative activities
- blockchain technology and digital infrastructure

#### What is the problem or need in 2035 I wish to solve?
I think it something connected to one or many of these:

- Finding purpose and meaning
- Participation and community (+ health and well-being)
- Clean up our cities, lakes, rivers, oceans (graffiti, plastics, ...)
- Stewardship and shared ownership
- Income opportunities for AI displacement

#### What's the solution?

Some ideas:
- A platform where people can receive grants, funding, and financial stability to doing what they are passionate about and that is aligned with sustainability and human needs.
- A digital place where individuals and communities can come together to coordinate around issues that are important to them. An upgraded civic governance platform using modern technology for decentralization, verifiability, integrity, trust, and privacy while being open-source and built in public.

#### How will it generate revenue?
- Protocol fee for transactions through the blockchain network
- Grants and donations

## Week 3
*What affected you most this week and what have you learned?*

*What new insights have you gained about predicting the future?*

*What source of content inspires you this week for new business opportunities?*

*What can you do to maximize your learning in the weeks ahead?*

I've been listening to Walter Isacson's book The Innovators: How a Group of Hackers, Geniuses and Geeks Created the Digital Revolution. It starts from Ada Lovelace who pioneered computer programming in 1840s and continues to explore inventors such as Alan Turing, John von Neumann, Alan Kay, Bill Gates, Steve Wozniak, Steve Jobs, Tim Berners-Lee, and Larry Page.

It's inspiring to read how many of them came up with ideas by tinkering and being in a mode of play while learning from experimentation and trial and error.

Another interesting book I read recently is Read, Write, Own by Chris Dixon. It describes the next era of the internet and the potential of blockchains and web3 to drive innovation and unlock new opportunities.

The book describes protocol networks and company networks and how they operate:
- **Protocol networks** - web and email, open systems controlled by communities of developers and other stakeholders. These networks are democratic, permissionless, and egalitarian. They are open and free for anyone to access. Money and power tend to flow to the edges and encouraging systems to grow around them.
- **Corporate networks** - centralized, walled gardens, and owned by companies. In these systems, money and power flow to the network center to the companies that own the networks and away from the users and developers at the edges.

It also describes the three eras of the internet:
- **Read** (1995-2005) - browse the web and read information
- **Read-write** (2006-2020) - interactivity where users can publish content
- **Read-write-own** (2020-) - data can be owned and transferred to others and anyone can become a network stakeholder

New technologies are often controversial and tech-driven financial manias have been seen before in the railroad boom of the 1830s to the dot-com bubble of the 1990s.

There are speculators and there are builders.

The speculators are often louder and this is what we see being reported in the media. The builders are motivated by a long-term vision and see the real potential of the emerging technologies.

### Importance of Infrastructure

When we think of infrastructure we often think about roads, bridges, railways, and perhaps water and electricity. We usually take these for granted and rarely think about the people involved in the innovation or construction of it. Good infrastructure becomes almost invisible. We just expect it to be there.

Although the lightbulb revolutionized lighting, its true potential was only realized once the electrical grid infrastructure was established.

How incredible is it that we can buy an electronic device and easily plug it into the wall and it magically works? Even more incredible, we can use these all across the world. There are 15 standards in total but 2-3 common ones and adapters can convert between them. This means any inventor can build a device that can be connected to this infrastructure.

Similarly for the internet, a set of standards has been agreed upon. Some of them are:
- **TCP** for how data is transferred across the network
- **SMTP** for sending and receiving email
- **HTTP** for communicating data between devices.

These standards or protocols enable all computers to talk to each other.

This foundation has enabled apps like Spotify and Uber. Creative minds come up with ideas and utilize the infrastructure that already exist. They don't need to figure out how your mobile understands the stream of 0 and 1s being sent to it and how to translate it into music. They don't need to figure out the steps of how to know what street your mobile is at. This is already provided by the infrastructure, protocols, and API's.

We also have "soft" infrastructure made up by our institutions and services that provide services and ensure the efficient functioning of society. For example:
- **Governance** - legal systems, law enforcement, and emergency services
- **Economic systems** - financial institutions, markets, and regulatory bodies
- **Social systems** - education, healthcare, and social services

### Infrastructure and Human Needs

We see that our infrastructure has been created to fulfill our fundamental needs (subsistence, protection, affection, understanding, participation, creation, identity, and freedom).

Infrastructure are public goods - services that every member of society can use without reducing its availability to others. Usually funded through taxes or grants but new innovative funding mechanisms are emerging.

How can we upgrade our infrastructure to keep up with the technological changes?

#### Civic Engagement and Governance
We need governance systems where any citizen can create a proposal and share it with other citizens. Any citizen can comment, vote, and even participate in funding these proposals.

The proposal author and the voters must also be verified citizens but still remain anonymous. This can be solved by using BankID and Zero-knowledge proofs. BankID verifies the citizenship and the zk proof ensures the anonymity. This proof can be verified by anyone yet the identity remains hidden. We can build a system where the votes are verifiable and open to the public. A fully transparent and verifiable governance system.

We also need to be able to fund and coordinate ways to clean our environment (cities, parks, rivers, lakes, oceans, etc) so everyone who wants to can participate. It's not enough to simply educate, provide bins, or let governments handle all of it. If we can fund the goverment to do this job, we can make it more efficient by making it permissionless where anyone can fund, participate, and receive funding.

Can citizens find meaning and purpose in participating in such regenerative activities? Can it be an opportunity for income for those displaced by an AI workforce? Could value generated by machines be used to fund these initiatives?

Citizen governance can affect the following areas that are all connected to human needs:
- **Transparency** - increases trust and satisfies the need for understanding
- **Accountability** - more efficient use of public resources supports the need for protection by safeguarding citizens against the misuse of power and ensuring the rights are upheld
- **Inclusiveness** - increases participation and cohesiveness
- **Problem-solving** - crowd-sourcing creative ideas and supports understanding by learning about our communities
- **Policy outcomes** - better satisfiers for the needs and reflects the needs of the people
- **Social well-being** - generates a sense of community and enhances social cohesion

It's also important that these systems are fully open-source so the public can audit, verify, learn from, and contribute to. It should be owned by the citizens and it should probably be built by the citizens rather than the government (who might want to maintain power and status quo, avoid scrutinty and accountability, are resistant to change, have ideological reasons, or are open to external influence).

### Jevons Paradox
Jevons Paradox is an economic theory that suggests when technological improvements increase the efficiency of resource use, the overall consumption of that resource can increase rather than decrease. This counterintuitive effect occurs because increased efficiency lowers the effective cost of using a resource and thereby encouraging greater overall use.

In other words, when the efficiency of a technology increases, the demand increases.

It was discussed in class that the rise of mobile phones made everybody a photographer and started taking a lot more photos than before.

What would happen if we:
- Make it easier to participate in governance
- Make it easier to fund and support projects

Will the engagement increase?

### Closing Thoughts
In 20 years, our fundamental needs will still be the same, only the satisfiers will change. I think we have an opportunity to choose how we wish to fulfill these needs. Many can be fulfilled by choosing environments we thrive in and being around people we love. We can discover the activities and ways of being that gives us meaning and purpose. We can come together to collaborate on building our shared infrastructure - our public goods.

## Week 2
*What affected you most this week and what have you learned?*

*What new insights have you gained about the people's needs?*

I've been further exploring the [Max-Neef's 9 Fundamental Human Needs](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manfred_Max-Neef%27s_Fundamental_human_needs) and how sustainable businesses can target these needs.

The framework describes how these needs are satisfied through "satisfiers", which are the means by which needs are fulfilled. These can vary between cultures and contexts, but the underlying needs remin constant. Max-Neef differentiates between different types of satisfiers:
- **Synergistic:** Fulfill multiple needs simultaneously
- **Singular:** Fulfill one specific need
- **Pseudo:** Seem to fulfill needs but actually inhibit their fulfillment
- **Inhibiting:** Meet one need while obstructing others
- **Violators:** Appear to satisfy a need but actually lead to its destruction

### Synergy-Driven Design for Sustainable Business
How can we create products and services that address multiple needs and are synergistic while being aware of the pseudo, inhibiting, and violators satisfiers?

We can identify practical examples of activities for each need. For example:
- **Subsistence:** Growing food, providing clean water, building housing
- **Protection:** Caring for the environment, soil health, clean water, financial savings, insurance and microfinance, health-care
- **Affection:** Mental wellness, community, sharing circles, taking care of animals, relationships with nature
- **Understanding:** Teaching, learning, research, experiment, book clubs, yoga and meditation
- **Participation:** Local governance, share ideas, funding, collaboration, community innovation labs, cooperative business models
- **Idleness:** Games, casual meeting spaces, "third places"
- **Creation:** Maker studios for writing, building, designing, coding, composing, etc
- **Identity:** Voting, digital identity tools, self-development
- **Freedom:** Community-owned renewable energy, local food sovereignty, decentralized water systems, local community currencies

### Barefoot Doctors & Decentralized Healthcare

In China in the 60s and 70s, the goverment created rural cooperative medical systems to provide basic medical training to farmers, healers, and school graduates. Their purpose was to bring healthcare to rural areas where urban-trained doctors would not settle. They were called the barefoot doctors.

The program had big impact on public health as well as reducing healthcare costs. Life expectancy increased from 35 to 68 years. Infant mortality dropped from 20% to 3.4%.

The income of the barefoot doctors was calculated as if it were agricultural work. They were paid roughly half of what a trained doctor made.

Barefoot doctors were primarily compensated by the villages in which they worked. This funding came from collective welfare funds as well as from local farmer contributions.

The initial pool of barefoot doctors required no education or training as they were sourced from healthcare providers already working in rural areas as well as urban doctors.

Barefoot doctors acted as a primary healthcare provider at the grass-roots level. An important feature of the barefoot doctor was that they were still involved in farm work. They often spent as much as 50 percent of their time on farming.

### Project Ideas

In parallel to exploring the 9 Fundamental Human Needs some ideas have come to mind.

#### Parking-Funded Urban Improvements
What if parking meters directly funded projects close to their location, for example bike stands or parks. What if I could see all the transactions for each parking meter, and where the funds go? Citizens could even create their own proposals for what they see is needed from the funding.

It's a way to crowdsource funding for initiatives and intelligence for what needs to be done. Parkings could just be the first step because it could be fairly easy to implement by collaborating with Municipality and Q-park.

BankID could be used as sybil resistance for creating and voting for proposals. The payments would be sent on a blockchain ledger instead of the closed and opaque system of today.

##### Example
Scan QR code on Parking machine to view website:

---
Address: Park Avenue 1, Göteborg
Funds: 37 123 kr

###### Incoming payments

| Vehicle | Duration | Amount | Date |
| ------- | -------- | ------ | ---------------- |
| 4d156d7 | 90m | 180 | 2024-08-19 16:11 |
| e4d6cc3 | 180m | 360 | 2024-08-19 11:11 |
| ... | ... | ... | ... |

*(vehicle IDs are hashed registration plates to ensure privacy yet being able to see the total funding per vehicle)*

###### Outgoing

| Amount | Account | Proposal link | Date |
| ------ | ----------- | ------------- | ---------------- |
| 10 000 | Park care | https://... | 2024-08-01 00:00 |
| 20 000 | Bike stands | https://... | 2024-08-01 00:00 |
| ... | ... | ... | ... |

*(each outgoing payment has a link to a proposal describing the initiative and funds needed)*

[ Create Proposal ] [ View All Proposals ]

---

### Trustless Ticket Marketplace
Another idea is a marketplace for tickets. For example, in entertainment, Ticketmaster / Live Nation is more or less a monopoly. They control both first hand sales and periphery ticket scalping businesses for second hand markets. There is little to be done to verify the authenticity (until you get to the event to have your ticket scanned).

What if the ownership of a ticket is put on a public blockchain ledger as a non-fungible token (NFT). An NFT is simply a smart contract that describes logic for who owns it and methods for transferring it to others. Due to the nature of blockchains with their immutable ledgers and consensus mechanisms that ensure all parties agree on the state of the data (in this example, who owns what ticket and since when).

This means I can send my ticket to a friend and she (and the event) can verify that it's valid. I could also sell it on a marketplace which also have smart contracts containing logic for bids, asks, and trades and automatically transfers the resale earnings to where they need to go without middlemen. Fees can also be coded to send a fraction to the event organizers, artists, venue, or whoever might want to claim it.

### Watching Iron Man
- Tony builds his own technology by salvaging his previous creations. It reminds me of the sense of empowerment of coding and realizing previous functions and pieces of code fits like lego bricks in new projects.
- He uses a voice assistant, Jarvis, that is connected to his home, suit, workshop with robots. There are also holographic interfaces that he can interact with. It's inspiring to see the creative way of working alongside an AI the way he does.
- I remember when the movie was released that kind of AI seemed so far away. Now with LLMs and voice synthesis it seems we're nearly there.

### Closing Thoughts
Some questions I have found myself thinking about:

Do you feel like you participate in the decision-making in your local community / municipality / nation or is it more like picking a soccer team and voting for your favorite player in hopes they will score some goals?

During the course of your day, what products and services do you use that are synergetic satisfiers? Which might be pseudo, inhibiting, or violators?

## Week 1

*What affected you most this week and what have you learned?*

*What new insights have you gained about the business world?*

The topic of Exponential Technologies is highly interesting to me. I grew up with the early days of personal computers and access to the internet via dial-up. For those who don't remember, dial-up was a way to make the computer connect with the telephone land lines using a modem. It was neither fast nor user friendly, but it opened a new world. We could suddenly access new information, communicate with people via online forums, play games with people from South Korea for example.

### The Evolution of the Internet and its Impact

The internet was created on the principles of being decentralized and permissionless. Anyone can write some html, host on a server, and publish to anyone in the world, without permission. Creators of different kinds could now share their writings, art, music, code, etc with others without having to ask someone to publish it for them.

The traditional gatekeepers, such as newspapers, book publishers, and broadcast media, once held significant power over what information and content reached the public, serving as the primary filters for news, culture, and ideas. With the advent of the internet, their influence was diminished as individuals and independent creators gained direct access to a global audience. However, as the internet has evolved, new gatekeepers have emerged, and the balance of power has shifted, raising questions about how information is controlled and who has the authority to curate or restrict access to content in the digital age.

### Technological S-Curves and Emerging Innovations
Technology moves in S-curves. Slow at the beginning followed by rapid growth and innovation, and then a slowing down. Each S-curve often build on top of a previous one. The internet seemed to come from nowhere for those who weren't paying attention. Smart phones were enbled by high-speed internet connections.

For example, mobile phones where slow to reach adoption from the 1980s until the iPhone launced in 2007 and AppStore in 2008. Popular mobile apps like Uber, Airbnb, Instagram etc then seemed to arrive at almost the same time. Now there's barely any novelty in this space. Other technologies form new S-curves like Blockchain technology, Generative AI (LLMs and Diffusion Models for example).

Blockchain networks enable permisionless transfer of value. We can send money to each other without going through banks (traditional gatekeepers). We can invent new currencies and monetary policies within our communities. We can codify governance processes that allows people to cooperate without having to trust each other (immutable smart contracts defining the rules).

Perhaps most importantly, the ledgers are publicly available, tamper-proof databases, that can be audited and verified. It's fully open-source so we can be sure it behaves the way it's said to. Once data has been written to a block it cannot be changed (similar to the soft rules of accounting but here as hard rules enforced with code).

### Businesses in 2035

The final deliverable in the module is to prototype a solution to a human need in 2035.

1) What's the problem in the year 2035 that you are solving?
2) What's your solution to that problem?
3) How will you make money from this?
4) Potential intended and unintended consequences of your idea and make a recommendation about whether we should build it or not.
5) Present a prototype of your idea in your submission

I've read that innovation of new products and services cannot be successfully done by starting with the technology and working backwards. It's said that it must start with a customer need and the technology is simply a tool to get there.

I'm not sure if I agree. The technologies are like pieces that we can combine and remix in different ways. Similar to lego blocks. If I give you a handful of blocks and ask you to build something. You're more likely to come up with something than if I tell you to build something specific with an infinite number of pieces. It might be a lower resolution shape of a boat (for example), but the form and the expression is there. Creativity thrive in constraints.

What technological lego blocks can we identify and how can we combine them? What are the emerging blocks still taking shape?

### Reflections, Thoughts, and Ideas
- What happens to the value created by machines? Is it captured by the companies who own the robots and the AI models? Can individuals own a part of them and receive the value (money) they create? Or will it be distributed according to some governance process?
- Evolution of funding mechanisms for businesses? The most popular today might be Venture Capitalist funding. They seek a multiplied return of the investment they put in. This can be extractive because it doesn't take earth and humanity into consideration. Government taxation is another form. This is not always an efficient use of resources and the citizens need to trust their taxes are put to good use. It doesn't have the same accountability as the VC funded or bootstrapped businesses do. What about impact funding/outcome-based?
- What is truly important for humanity?
- Manfred Max-Neef's 9 Fundamental Human Needs (subsistence, protection, affection, understanding, participation, idleness, creation, identity, freedom)
- Blue Zones and it's "Power 9". It's grouped by: move, right outlook, eat wisely, connect.
- What happens when we are no longer able to tell machines from humans on the internet? Turing tests, proof of humanity, sybil resistance etc
- Will over-consumption (continue to?) shift from a symbol of wealth, status, success, and abundance into a symbol of greed, egotism, un-sustainability, superficiality, carelessness, and wastefulness?
- What will humans do once machines have been built to replace most of the jobs? Can new ones be created at the same rate as they are automated? What about those who don't want to keep up with the rate of technological change? What about those who just want to care for a garden or a plot of land? Or cook healthy and nutritious food to share with others? Or teach and facilitate yoga or dance classes? If food tastes better when it's cooked with love, could machines ever infuse that?
- What becomes valuable when intelligence and information is cheap and easily accessible?
- What if machines show us what's uniquely humans by negativa? If a machine can do something, it's not unique to humans. So what qualities and activities will be left for humans?

### Areas of Importance

Some areas I think will become even more important in the coming 10 years.

- Farming and clean food production (sustainable techniques, care of post-harvest, distribution, etc)
- Access to nutritious food (living food over processed factory items, clean and conscious cooking)
- Access to clean water
- Community, sense of belonging, mental health
- Finding purpose and meaning
- Stewardship for our nature
- Stewardship for our local communities and neighborhoods with a sense of participation and co-ownership
- Alternative ways of living (communities, co-living collectives, pop-up villages, network states etc.)

What happens if we start with these problems and look at what lego pieces we have available?

What could we build by combining these blocks:
- Ubiquitous mobile phones and high-speed internet
- Transparent and verifiable ways to send money to devices instantly at a low cost without gatekeepers
- Auditable digital attestations that can contain proof of impact
- Decentralized governance where proposals can be funded and voted for by the communities (and supporting actors such as companies, municipalities, governments)
- Programmable currencies for local communities (decide on inflation, tax, yield, etc)
- Machine intelligence to find patterns in data (text, audio, images, video, etc), expand and compress texts, sentiment analysis, generate apps and UI on the fly, dispatching agents to perform monotonous tasks etc.
- The use of robotics in a similar way that animals and tools helped bring about the agricultural and industrial revolution.

How can there be deserts in the world when it rains so much in Sweden? Money is abundant like rain but does it fall where its needed? Funding exist but is it allocated and directed where it's needed without over-saturation?

### Watching WALL-E

Some thoughts that came up after watching the movie:
- Everybody is enchanted by the plant when they see it. There's a sense of reverence for it maybe because it represents life, regeneration, and home. It's hope for regaining what has been lost. WALL-E and Eve show great care for it and protect it. Eve both has the plant as a directive and develops an emotional connection to it. Eve is in alignment.
- It shows how the robots have "directives" and they won't deviate from these. The captain eventually overrides it with manual control after a battle with Auto (the automated system of the ship).
- Humanity have been drifting in space for 700 years and become enslaved by pleasure and comfort. All they do is glide around in their chairs, watching screens, and eating fast food. They seem to have forgotten the nature of being a human (movement, connection, purpose, creativity, resilience). Some characters in the movie is literally pushed out of their comfort zones and into movement, connection, and purpose (crawling, walking, talking, forming a net to catch sliding babies, and they form a resistance against the robots and help bring the plant so they can return to earth)
- The humans choose the unknown, uncertainty, exploration, adventure, etc over comfort and pleasure when they exit the Axiom spaceship. Axiom is an interesting choice of name for the ship with its connection to math, logic, and its definition: "a statement everybody believes to be true".
- In the end credits it's revealed that they create a new paradise on earth by learning how to restore nature, farming, building houses, creating wells, and more. They do this with the help from the robots who have retained all humanity's knowledge, by providing machine power, and by being in alignment with the importance of the plant.
- It's a story about the importance of alignment in AI and to return to a more natural state of being. Perhaps even the cycles of civilizations.

### Closing Thoughts

As we look toward the future shaped by exponential technologies, the challenge isn't just about what we can build, but ensuring it aligns with the deeper needs of humanity - our connection to nature, each other, and our sense of purpose.

The business world of 2035 will be defined by our ability to innovate not just for the sake of innovation, but to address real human needs. Our task is to use these powerful tools to create a future where technology enhances our humanity, ensuring that the values we hold today are reflected in the world we build tomorrow.