Can technology help us create a joy economy?

Point of view paper, a living document

January 2022, Happiness Foundation

Summary

In the coming century, humanity will likely reach Technological Singularity^[1]. Exponential technological growth is both an existential risk and an existential opportunity. As a new economic paradigm emerge, much accelerated by the covid pandemic, this opinion paper discuss the hypothesis and possible approaches on how to leverage future technologies and our collective imagination to create a progressive economy built around what truly make human thrive and life worthwhile - happiness, joy, contentment, fulfillment and possibly, bliss. We invite you to join us for an exploration to discover what can be possible in our collective visions of the future.

In search for the right growth metric for human progress and empowerment in the coming century

The relationship between machines and human happiness

For the last 300 years, fueled by agricultural and industrial revolutions, productivity has been the single metric for measuring human progress and prosperity, very much grown out of the human need to survive and sustain a population. This success metric has led to a planet populated by 7.9 billion people, space expeditions and an environmental crisis. From steam engines to artificial intelligence, the invention of machines central to industrial revolutions has significantly improved efficiency and scale of production. Today we are at a historic crossroad to be outpowered by our own creation. Ironically, the tool - technology - we used to mitigate our existential risk has created an existential risk in itself.

The relationship between humans and machines will be a defining subject of the coming century. Today, “Big Tech” is often criticized for its negative influence on happiness and wellbeing due to phenomena such as social media addiction, “Big Fake”, and mass unemployment caused by automation.  But our view is that technology is a magnifier of who we are capable of becoming. If we set the right goals and success metric for technology and build underlying economics around happiness and fulfillment, technology can exist solely to maximize joy. The real problems are three:

1. Materialistic production as a single growth metric is ill-suited for sustained human development. Technology has been the center of industrial revolutions measured against production as the single success metric. Materialistic production has a positive influence on happiness up to a point then it becomes irrelevant or even counterproductive if we just keep producing more. New economic metric to measure human progress is needed to guide human development in our time.
2. Digitisation requires new valuation and revenue models. Current mainstream economics fail to be adapted to unique characteristics of digitisation, and the core of the challenge being the absence of appropriate valuation models for intangible digital assets. This gap in our economic value theory has encouraged limiting revenue generation models for technology companies, e.g., the ads model, that results in toxic objectives for product development.  
3. Multidisciplinary value engineering is needed to set right objectives for algorithmic optimisation.The one thing technology is good at and will continue to get exponentially better at is optimisation, but we are not good at the underlying value engineering that sets the objectives of such optimisation. Currently, algorithmic optimization is limited by ill-suited economic metrics (as outlined above) and targets primarily at maximizing attention, stickiness and profit. Looking ahead, philosophical failures pose more risk than technical failures, in which we pick the wrong problems to solve. Appropriate value engineering to set the right objectives for algorithmic optimisation requires multidisciplinary collaboration and thought-leadership much beyond technologists.

The new economic paradigm

There is no doubt we are in a new industrial revolution, much accelerated by the pandemic. However, a new economic paradigm is yet to emerge. Historically, major developments in our value theories have been driven by industrial revolutions, as shown in Table 1. Machines and factories were invented during the 1st industrial revolution, that’s when Adam Smith wrote the Wealth of Nations. Electric power and mass production were invented during the 2nd industrial revolution, that’s when the marginal revolution happened. Digitisation has played a central role in the 3rd and current industrial revolution, but we do not yet have a major economic breakthrough explaining the new ways how value is created, distributed and consumed,  which is the essence of economics. Compared to physical assets where we have international trading standards in place to the granularity of shoelaces, in the digital realm, there is no consistent definition of what digital assets mean, nor accounting standards for businesses to report their digital assets from the balance sheet. While this problem still needs to be solved, there is another thing called exponential growth.

Table 1. Industrial revolutions and value theory

There is a famous chart in both the 2nd Machine Age^[2] and Super Intelligence^[3] showing the trajectory of human progress through time, roughly as shown in Figure 1. We are currently faced with a close-to-90-degree trajectory, mostly powered by Moore’s Law. The curve is so steep that it is beyond human comprehension if we continue to measure “progress” on the human scale.  We can reverse the Moore’s Law to put things in perspective^[4]: the progress of productivity in computing in 2018 is 4096 times the progress in 2000. This means 18 years in human time is equivalent to 4096 years in “machine time”. This 90-degree growth curve is clearly out of control or even cognitively destructive for humans. It may also indicate that the current growth metric is ill-suited to measure progress of a new area of human development. If human progress is not measured by materialistic production, what can be the success metric for the coming century?

Figure 1. Human progress through time

A joy economy

Our hypothesis is that future technologies can help us create a joy economy.

We believe in the coming century value creation can and will shift from external materialistic production to inward intangible human fulfillment. And as we build new growth metrics around human happiness, wellbeing and fulfillment, technology can be guided into optimizing for them.

 If we think like researchers, we are figuring out the origin of the universe, detecting gravitational waves, going to Mars, but how much do we understand the complex internal and external conditions for happiness and fulfillment? If we think like philosophers, is there a deeper meaning or purpose than how to live, sustain and scale a joyful life? If we think like economists, can we all go and make a list of 10 things that bring us joy and then create a circular regenerative economy based on those things?

Technology is a magnifier of who we are capable of becoming. We influence technology not the other way around. The only way forward is human empowerment inspired by millennia of human development (compared with merely 300 years of industrial revolution). We must find the core values that should be in the center of this new economic paradigm so that technology can help us amply them.

The urgency and importance of reimagining new Utopian visions  

Throughout human history we’ve been surviving from existential risks, our objective is not to die. But the risk mitigation mindset will not lead us to live the fullest lives. Absence from suffering is different from unleashing human potential. It is equally important to leverage existential opportunities of our time, and the most important tool is collective imagination.

The Harvard Grant Study has tracked human happiness for 83 years^[5]. In the coming 80 years we are likely to reach Singularity. Our generations are faced with an unprecedented spectrum of fundamental choices that will influence happiness, from the possibility to reverse aging with a longevity breakthrough, to facing an existential crisis from climate change. In the digital space, we are faced with the possibilities from a digital dark age where cybercrime or systemic design error can result in the entire digital civilization being deleted by mistake or crime, to a digital renaissance where many new schools of thoughts may flourish and fundamentally move civilisations forward in unprecedented directions. With labor costs reducing to negligible levels from automation, we may be able to tackle problems and find solutions in brand new ways unimaginable before.

Oscar Wilde defines progress as the realization of Utopia, which is a “North Star” never fully realized. Today, there is a proliferation of dystopian scenarios of risks and concerns, compared to emergence of promising models of a new Utopia, or a proliferation of diverse Utopian visions which can co-exist in harmony (e.g., in the form of diverse worlds in virtual reality), representing the 6000 living cultures and their wisdom on this planet^[6]. Maslow’s pyramid places dreams and actualization at the peak of our needs only to be fulfilled once all other needs are met, but many would argue having dreams are more fundamental than mere survival. Striving for dreams and ideals have powered counteless systemic changes in human history - the Greeks created the Olympics - what are we going to create?

How future systems can prioritize and amplify happiness

Our current economic metric, Gross Domestic Product (GDP), has led to consumerism that is not only causing decision fatigue, a proliferation of products that respond to minor (or non-existent) needs, but also an ever-alarming global environmental crisis. In contrast, many people don’t have a go-to list of activities at hand that will bring them joy^[7], not to mention building our daily schedules around those activities. We are not taught at school the tools to give and receive love, or to have a quality conversation. Career advancement and achievement chasing more often end up as a rat race, leading to midlife crises instead of a sense of true bliss and contentment. It is possible to build an implementable path towards a new economic metric that focuses on primary human needs - happiness, wellbeing, fulfillment, and with the help of technology, we can make lightspeed jumps to progress against these goals. With the right success metric, technology may help us become the best versions of ourselves. Instead of drowning in the ever-expanding universe of short-lived, “skin-deep” data, technology may even help us become wiser.

For many, happiness is a journey that may manifest as both inward and outward.

The inward journey of self-discovery and self-knowledge

The pandemic has definitely taught all of us to seek happiness from within. Technology can certainly help us understand ourselves better and serve as a reflection tool. The quantified-self movement is a valuable direction if guided with the right goals. Today, we already have precision trackers for sleep, nutrition, exercise, blood chemistry and physiology. We have AI therapists like Woebot^[8]. New AI advances are capable of predicting illness before it occurs. A combined field of AI and biotech can help us achieve our dream of preventive and personalised precision medicine. If guided with the right goals, Affective Computing^[9] can help us optimise decisions not only based on cost and efficiency,  but also emotional impact.

If one’s life can be seen as a finite set of resources and opportunities, technology can help us optimise the ultimate “bucket list”. We can create virtual reality games and simulated experiences to help us choose the most satisfying career path, hobbies, holiday destinations, and home locations before we invest any significant time. If fulfillment is to achieve life’s ultimate needs and dreams, technology can help us aggregate a dataset of all existing needs and dreams from all cultures on the planet, so that we can find a path to meet them sooner and better. If happiness is about scaling those “extraordinary moments” in life (e.g., from a pilgrimage, an awe-inspiring encounter, to a breathtaking adventure), virtual reality and advancement in psychedelics can bring those conditions to our doorsteps^[10].

As wise people say, “happiness is a decision”. We can also have access to tools much beyond meditation. The operating systems and technical systems that we use today probably already influence our daily decision making more than political systems. If a life well-lived is built on a set of key life decisions, technology can help us optimise those decisions to be future-adaptive for sustainable happiness and long-term fulfillment.

The question is rather, which aspects of ourselves that we should discover more to unleash life’s greatest potential?

The outward journey of better connection with loved ones, communities and the living planet

The common thread from state-of-art happiness research is that quality of our relationships is the number one factor influencing happiness. However, today’s “Big Tech” is being criticized for being such an attention drain that distracts us from meaningful connections (see artwork in Figure 2). The root cause of this is not technology itself, but the revenue model and underlying economic metric that it is limited to. If guided with the right goals, we can build technology for better connections. While LinkedIn has already revolutionized career discovery, tribe discovery is a relatively green market.  Can we build platforms to help us find our best friends and communities? Many have experienced the often serendipitous great human connections, best described in Ori Brafman book “Click”^[11],  can we systematically scale the likelihood of meeting people whom we instantly clicked to in our finite lifetime? Can we build smart cities to encourage quality connections and serendipity? Can we build systems that encourage a calm mind, clear thinking, flow^[12], and creative expression?

The question is rather, which aspects of how we connect with each other and with nature, should we discover / reimagine in order to unleash our greatest collective potential?

Figure 2: Smartphone Addiction, by Erin Pollock

Conclusion

It is clear that we are at the historical turning point of human history, defined by our relationships with the technological tools that we have invented. It is a time to use our collective imagination to reflect and reinvent our growth metric from external materialistic production to human fulfillment from within. The value theory of this new industrial revolution is about human empowerment, and technology is a tool to help us optimize for that.

About Happiness Foundation 

The Happiness Foundation is a registered UK-based charity and think tank on a mission to create a future where happiness, wellbeing and fulfillment are at the center of society. We bring the world’s best minds together from multidisciplinary fields to advance the science of happiness. We leverage economic, design and technological tools to re-align societal growth metric with fundamental human values in order to enable human happiness, at scale.

Appendix: List of Speakers at Happiness Festival 2020 in collaboration with Talks@Google 

YouTube Channel  | Talks@Google Playlist

In 2020 we launched the virtual and global Happiness Festival with 50+ speakers from a wide range of backgrounds to share their insights and advice on happiness and wellbeing. The festival was in collaboration with Talks@Google with a match donation for Covid Relief fund.

Table 2: Happiness Festival 2020 Speakers