The Evaluated World

Now we step away from the technical side of the emergent economy and take a look at the human contribution. Futurists looking for some new capacity that is destined to become a near-universal necessity sometimes frame the question as: “What is the new literacy of the 21st Century?” My answer is that is that the new literacy is “evaluation”.

Already we are watching the emergence of the importance of this capacity. Amazon, Yelp, Uber, Quora, StackExchange, etc. all use human evaluation of experience (books, restaurants, rides, etc.) to substantially improve their ability to assess the quality of the experiences that they are providing and to provide more and more satisfying experiences.

This kind of information is gold, but hard to get. Today only a small fraction (typically less than 5%) of people take the time to rate or review most of their experiences and of these even a smaller fraction are any good at it. But this capacity is so useful that I expect the science, technology and art of evaluation to ultimately become as ubiquitous, effortless and satisfying as reading this sentence.

It is my proposition that the ability to provide honest and discerning evaluation of your experiences is going to become a primary economic contribution in the 21st Century.

Let me emphasize that — having the ability to discern the difference between a bad (or superficially good) experience and an experience that really was “time well spent” and actively taking the time to provide that information back into the collective economy for everyone’s benefit is going to be as important a piece of human value creation as, say, design is today or engineering was fifty years ago. In fact, as the pace of automation and machine intelligence continues to accelerate, it might ultimately become the principal contribution that human beings make to the economy. But more on that some other time.

For now the key point is this: I expect to see more and more of our time spent carefully evaluating our experiences and providing this information back into the big database in the sky. Every song, every meal, every car ride, every front yard, every conversation, every sunset. Naturally, there is both a physical and aesthetic limit to this “Evaluated World,” but you get the point. In the future, the careful evaluation of experience by everyone and for everyone is going to be like reading and writing today.

The Personal Autonomous Organization

OK, now we are ready to talk about something that I’m calling a Personal Autonomous Organization. I’m stealing this phrase from a new concept that is the darling of the blockchain community: the Decentralized Autonomous Organization. A DAO is a mix of software, AI, digital contracts, decentralized ledgers, and digital currencies that is anticipated to be the future of how we go about organizing much of our activities in the future. In other words, it is the Internet’s replacement for the old fashioned economic tool called “The Corporation”.

The PAO, by contrast is what happens when you start to apply these kinds of concepts to what it means to be you. Follow me down the rabbit hole. You are a highly decentralized system consisting of tens of trillions of cells (most of which don’t share your DNA) and hundreds of trillions of various molecules that all co-ordinate to keep your soul enshrouded in corporeal manifestation. But, of course, you are much more than that. You are constantly in relation. You relate to the food that goes into your body and the space that your body goes through. You relate to your enviroment, to technologies,to ideas and, most importantly, to other people.

From this point of view, you are best understood to be a semi-coherent flux of relations moving through time and space to destinations unknown. And in this context, your PAO is the technical support system that uses all of the stuff we’ve been talking about above to help you be the best flux of relations that you can (possibly) be.

How might this work? Lets take a very simple example to start. Say you are hungry. Lets be more precise. Say that your body-system has begun to run short of certain molecules that are necessary for its wellbeing. And that this fact is beginning to manifest itself in various ways.

Your blood sugar is low. You are showing signs of fatigue and stress — both in your blood chemistry and in measurable behaviour like your voice and facial expressions. A statistical assessment of your behavior, state and recent history, compared with both your long term history and the best current understanding of human metabolism indicates that you likely need to refuel.

In other words, you are hungry — and your PAO knows it. It knows it in ways that you can’t really begin to know it. It knows exactly what you need. It knows what kind of nutrition would simultaneously be most metabolically useful and — since you’ve been dutifully evaluating every food experience of the past ten years with increasing nuance and care — what kind of food experience would be the most delightful. It can bring to bear your entire history of food and biochemistry, your stated values and your actual evaluations. And over time it has come to know you much better than you know yourself.

And your PAO is plugged into the cloud. Remember the Internet of Things? Your PAO has the ability (mediated by DAOs out there in the virtual space) to locate, secure and connect you with what you need. It doesn’t need to read the box or respond to advertisements of beautiful people being implausibly happy. It can quickly and (from your point of view) effortlessly connect what you actually need with what out there in the world will actually satisfy those needs.

Lets say that it really happens to be a bacon cheeseburger that is called for. No problem, it is a matter of milliseconds for this fact to be assessed and for an appropriate query to discover that a chef is ready and able to provide the needed victuals just when you will need it. Just the way you like it and with ingredients sourced in just the way you prefer.

A PAO to PAO transaction is made and the logistics kick into action. A local drone is routed to pick up the burger and zips it hot and ready to your waiting maw. Your Quantified Self rig watches carefully as your biochemistry changes and can tell by the noises you make and the change in your demeanor that the burger has hit the spot. Of course, if it turns out that you get indigestion somewhere down the road; or that you later feel it necessary to suggest that it would have been better with slightly less aioli; or that you’ve decided that even permaculture beef is not as good for the world as the new lab-grown beef; this data will be added to the record to continuously improve the total performance of the economy for for self and or everyone else.