Introduction: The Problems We Face

There’s no shortage of daunting problems to solve today. Problems like poverty, wealth inequality, and climate change can seem scary to even think about, let alone try to solve. We’re making headway, but we could always go faster. Let's take a look at these problems, and then look at 10 improvements we as innovators could make to improve the human experience.





The Problem of Automation

As more and more jobs become automated, the situation will become dire for large portions of the population. In the Oxford study titled: The Future of Employment: How Susceptible Are Jobs to Computerisation? an estimated 47 percent of jobs in the US are “at risk” of being automated in the next 20 years.

McKinsey Global Institute estimates that 32% of all US workers will be unemployed by 2030.





The Problem of Wealth Inequality

On January 11th, 1944, Franklin D. Roosevelt proposed a Second Bill of Rights dubbed, 'The Economic Bill of Rights.' His idea was radical, even by today's standards:

"We cannot be content, no matter how high that general standard of living may be, if some fraction of our people—whether it be one-third or one-fifth or one-tenth—is ill-fed, ill-clothed, ill-housed, and insecure."

-Franklin D. Roosevelt (source)

Today, nearly half of the world's population survives on less than $5.50 per day, and 77% of the world's population lives in multidimensional poverty. All things considered, progress is slow.

While automation has created an economic boom that has lowered the cost of production and increased manufacturing output, many in the world do not feel this growth in their daily lives. These profits are not going back into the economy like they do when lower income earners make money.

As the Panama Papers demonstrated, the billionaire class is doing everything it can to hide their profits away in tax havens. The problem boils down to corporate greed and corruption—companies and executives that care more about profits than people.





The Problem of the Climate Change Window

Expert projections for climate change give us till 2030 to get to net zero emissions to avoid permanent changes to the habitability of the planet. The sooner we can collaborate and act on this, the better.





"There's one issue that will define the contours of this century more dramatically than any other, and that is the urgent and growing threat of a changing climate."

-Barack Obama (source)





The Problem of Disease

The Corona Virus took center stage during the first quarter of 2020, and through the emergence of widespread travel, future similar outbreaks are more than likely. We can always move faster when it comes to curing diseases, and the technology to give relief to those who are suffering can always be taken to the next level.





The Human Experience Could Use a Lot of Improvement

If we want to see punctuated equilibrium, the solution will have to come from technology innovations. But we need to know what to think about in the first place. Let's look at 10 human experience improvements to think about in the 2020's as we innovate.









#1 We Should All Get Paid For Our Data

As the saying goes, "If you aren't paying for the product, you ARE the product." Since the 1970's we have been consuming free entertainment complete with commercial ads and product placements designed to monetize our viewership. In the internet age, we browse web content for free with our attention being drawn to text links, banner ads, affiliate marketing, and our favorite Youtubers sprinkle personalized ad pitches throughout their videos. On social media websites like Facebook, our personal data is sold to the highest bidder and we see nary a cent. What if things were different? What if we actually got paid for our data?

There are all kinds of monetization models currently in play: freemium, subscriptions, microtransactions, ads, selling virtual currency, and other approaches that ultimately cost us money or are at best, free to use.

The market opportunity here should be obvious. People would much rather participate in an ecosystem that pays them to participate. Let people get a cut of the value of their data or better yet, give them full ownership to monetize their data as they see fit.









#2 Information Should Become More Decentralized (And Trustworthy)

While disinformation is nothing new, Fake News has become the mantra of the Trump era, and propaganda has begun to grip the masses in a vice of confusion and fear. We have an opportunity to change this by creating new forms of decentralized communication that take the power away from big money interests.

More than ever, we need countermeasures to brainwashing and disinformation campaigns. Thanks to blockchain technology, it is now possible to share information in a decentralized way- and to validate its authenticity. What will the communication platforms of the future look like, and will they have solved the problems caused by propagandists?









#3 Games Should Come to the Workplace

You don't need a chart to know that most people aren't very engaged with their jobs. But here's one anyways:

Work conditions have improved generally—at least fewer of us are doing backbreaking physical labor. But we've almost gone to the other extreme now with most jobs being fairly boring. We want the kind of stimulation that comes from playing games.

Forbes wrote an article called Boost Productivity 20%: The Surprising Power Of Play in which they said:

"In a new study by Brigham Young University, teams that played a collaborative (video) game together for just 45 minutes were able to increase their productivity on a task by 20%.





Company cultures that allow for play are better able to tap into the best in their employees, and employees themselves can bring more effectiveness into their work.





Play fosters innovation, it unites team members, it lets us bring more of ourselves to work, it helps us blow off steam, and it’s an antidote to a high-pressure work environment."









#4 AI Should Make it Easy for Anyone to Become an Entrepreneur

In the movie Her, a man buys a superintelligent operating system that can do it all—help him organize his life, assist him in the world of online dating, and even support his work at his day job. We may not get quite that far within the 2020's but we could certainly make advances in AI assisted entrepreneuership.

The entrepreneur of the future will consult with an AI every day to understand new market opportunities, setup new products and offerings, and stay in tune with the ever changing digital landscape.

"AI has the ability to remove the less pleasant aspects of our working lives. Most of the AI products, tools and applications will automate the many standardized processes and procedures we must deal with in our modern work environment."

Innovators of the 2020's could bring entrepreneurs more powerful AI-driven assistants that, while not as robust as the fictional Samantha, will still give them the power to exceed their potential. Look forward to it!









#5 Everyone Should Get Access to the Internet

As of the writing of this article, 4.4 billion people still have no internet access. They're not benefitting from innovations to communication, they can't use GPS, they don't have search engines and web browsers, they can't order a car or a meal to be delivered, and they can't stay up to the minute on local news. They also can't collaborate on research, share their wisdom with the rest of humanity, or give the world all the art they're creating.

“In terms of the Internet, it's like humanity acquiring a collective nervous system. Whereas previously we were more like a collection of cells that communicated by diffusion. With the advent of the Internet, it was suddenly like we got a nervous system. It's a hugely impactful thing.”

The internet has been, perhaps, mankinds greatest invention alongside giants like electricity, antiseptics, and telecommunication. Yet the majority of humans still don't have it. There are innovations like Alphabet's Loon—a global network of balloons that float through wind channels higher than planes fly. Elon Musk is working on a different strategy by launching 30,000 satellites into orbit. Then there's the question of phones as 37% of the world's population does not own a smart phone.

We will surely see these numbers improve in the 2020's but when lives are at stake, we can always move faster.









#6 Workplaces Should Transform From Fascist Hierarchies Into Hive Minds

Traditional organization structures have become a burden to humanity where an elite ruling class makes 'my way or the highway' judgments and information sharing is siloed. In a time where information flow is accellerating, we will need to decentralize our organizations to keep up.

"As the drumbeat of business disruption grows, organizations can become more adaptable by unlocking the power of networked teams. Today’s global operating environment is too unpredictable to rely on organizational structures devised over a century ago in order to adapt and respond to new challenges."

-"Unlocking the flexible organization" by Deloitte

Companies are starting to wake up to the fact that they can no longer reach peak efficiency as an organization if all of their brainpower is sectioned off into silos.

It's time to rethink org structure and build tools that foster decentralized communication and management.









#7 Software Should Create New Revenue Streams For Us

When we think of software today, we typically think of something that we pay for or is free (with conditions). It's almost unfathomable that we might have software that is designed specifically to help us generate more streams of revenue, but that's the kind of future we should be dreaming of.

Conventional wisdom from Really Rich People is that you must have 7 sources of income to become a millionaire. These Really Rich People also know that the way to become rich is to have money working for you passively, rather than direclty working for every single dollar.

Thanks to advances in blockchain technology, it is now possible to generate hundreds or even thousands of new sources of revenue through monetizing owned data. We need new approaches to software design that factor in this way of thinking—allowing end users to build up a high volume of valuable data that can be monetized to bring in an ever-increasing mountain of wealth.









#8 Superintelligence Should Become Widely Available

The concept of "Superintelligence in your Pocket" may be a bit foreign, but consider all the improvements to your life that have come from having a search engine anytime you need it. It will be an even more impressive advancement when we all have access to superintelligence 24/7.

Perhaps this will not come from AI strictly speaking, but superintelligent human swarms like the ones built by Louis Rosenberg at Unanimous A.I. Human swarms are great at solving ambiguous problems that no AI can understand, and they can serve up the kinds of answers no search engine can provide.

Imagine having such a thing at your fingertips! Problems that used to take weeks or months to conquer could be solved in hours or minutes thanks to a little bit of collaborative human brain power. Long meetings to reach consensus will become a thing of the past. All we need are the tools to accomplish this. Innovators, are you ready?









#9 Personalized Accessibility Should be Available for Everyone

Like a pair of corrective eyeglasses that come with you everywhere, accessibility should be something portable that anyone can take with them to help them interpret the interfaces and context of their surroundings.

Part of the solution looks to be coming from the world of Augmented Reality (AR), a digital lens that adds a layer of context to everything the user sees. AR combined with AI image recognition will bring us a whole new level of accessibility for those with visual impairments.

“We need more tools to help automate accessibility. People with disabilities want to have fun and do the stuff that everyone else can do, [and] we’re starting to see the benefits of inclusive design. More companies are beginning to come on board.”

-Jennison Asuncion, accessibility engineering manager at LinkedIn

The world of IOT (Internet of Things) will also dramatically improve accessibility as devices will be able to audibly tell us what state they're in and show us important information via high quality digital displays.

Robotics has a part to play in this as well helping the elderly walk and those without limbs return to day to day tasks.









#10 Corporate Greed Should be Pushed to Extinction

The root cause of the climate crisis comes down to corporations that value profits over human life. Solving this problem may very well be the dividing line between humanity thriving or going extinct.

"As the nation at last confronts global warming, it is no time for denial, greed, cynicism or pessimism."

It's time to relegate corporate greed to the dustbin of the past.

But how can we end it? The answer may lie in giving the humans in each corporation more say in what the company does. This can only happen if the workplace becomes more democratic, and companies start to operate like hive minds. They will also need to open up ownership to their employees. The more human a company becomes, the more aligned that company will be with the goals of humanity.









Conclusion: An Exciting Time for Innovators

If you're a creative thinker who likes solving hard problems, this is quite a time to be alive. So many new convergent technologies have emerged in the past few decades, we are left facing a dizzying number of possibilities.

Hopefully this article has gotten you thinking about specific ways to improve the human experience. We've only got one planet and one shot at this. Please share this post with the innovators you're connected with. Thanks for reading!





About the Author

My name is Daniel Allen.

I'm from the Chicago area, pushing 40, and I enjoy creative innovation. I've worn hats like ux director, creative director, game designer, writer, and perhaps obsessive futurist.

I have a couple of middle school kids, a stocky brown dog, and I spend my free time working on the problems in this article. If you're curious to know about my Big Idealistic Project, feel free to message me directly through Linkedin or reply to this article.



