The Practical Implications of the Transformation

The World is about to fundamentally, radically and rapidly change. We call it The Transformation. It actually began around 1980, however, it will reach its peak rate of change between 2010 and 2030. Here, we will primarily discuss the impending Income Explosion. Between 1875 and 2010, what we refer to as the High Industrial Age, GDP per capita in constant dollars increased between twelve and fifteen times throughout most of the developed world. Over the next few decades, through the implementation of robotics and artificial intelligence, the same will take place during the early Information Age. Because of accelerating change, it will require thirty to forty years, instead of 135 years. Because of globalization, the income explosion will encompass the whole world, not just a portion of it. Consequently, Gross World Product will likely increase thirty to forty fold, from $70 trillion to between $2,100 and $2,800 trillion.

One measure used to gauge the degree of automation is Robot Density or the number of installed robots per 10,000 workers. This measure is currently between 150 and 300 throughout most of the developed world. It has not been growing quickly, but rather at a very lackadaisical rate of 5%-10% per year. This has more to do with cultural inertia and restricted R&D funding than any underlying technological or economic limitations. As the cost of computing power has been halving every three years or so, the gap between automation and AI capability and implementation has been growing. Soon, we will reach a critical differential and a kind of ‘Moore’s Law of Robotics’ will take hold. If we experience a doubling every two years in Robot Density, within twelve years, there will be more robots in the workplace than people. Within twenty years, there will be twenty robots for every human worker.

Actually, by that time, the concept of Human Productive Equivalent (HPE) will probably replace Robot Density. The reason is that not all robots are equal and the disparity between a simple housecleaning robot and a complex surgical robot or bespoke auto making robot will be immense. We would interpret HPE to be a rather hypothetical quantity of ‘value added’ based upon late high Industrial Age machine multipliers. We would expect it to be approximately equal to current Robot Density measures, but substantially more accurate. As such, by 2030 or 2035 the world economy could have 20 HPE’s for every person on the planet.

This is all very fascinating, as are many of the other ideas put forth in the The Future 101 and on the Institute site. However, it really seems that it should be more much than just a provocative idea. Clearly, two quadrillion dollars is a lot of Gross World Product to be created and it sure would be nice to get a piece of it. It would be particularly nice if we did so doing something worthwhile. While hardly the only function of The Polymathic Institute, one of our objectives is to bring together extraordinary polymathic intellectuals, visionary entrepreneurs and aggressive, risk tolerant investors to do just that. You are cordially invited to consider such an involvement to your personal benefit.

Membership is similar to 'talk and blog' sites at $54.95 per year or $6.95 per month. Membership is a true bargain. It is a meaningful opportunity for early entrance into what we refer to as the ‘Knowledge Class’ and the characteristic Information Age lifestyles and incomes. What does that mean? A $50K per year Industrial Age professional will earn between $600K and $750K in the Information Age. They will be engaged primarily in gathering information, processing into knowledge and/or disseminating the result.

However, this transformation to Information Age income levels will not happen by all of us, lockstep, getting raises of 10% per year plus inflation. Rather some people will move to highly compensated Knowledge Professions quickly. We recently learned that when NPR analyst, Juan Williams was fired, he signed on to Fox News for around $650K per year. He is a typical Knowledge Professional. Not someday, but now. The number of people so engaged has been increasing rapidly and will continue to do so.

Most people, however, will follow a less positive path. They will be victims of technological unemployment, move to another Industrial Age profession. Find that, again, their job disappears as well. Eventually, they will understand that they need to become a Knowledge Professional. By becoming a Member of The Polymathic Institute, you are choosing to be in the first group, not the latter.

Your Membership will also provide you with access to a growing global community of extraordinary people. Our goal is to have 25,000 Members and Fellows within two or three years. In addition to benefiting you professionally, it will also benefit you intellectually and socially.

Please visit the Institute site or The Future 101. If, upon reflection, you think you may be interested in becoming a Member, simply press the 'Subscribe' button. If you are interested in exploring Institute Fellowship or certification as a Polymath, contact your sponsor or e-mail Fellows@polymathica.com.

Polymathicans as Transformationalists

In a prior post we touched upon our skepticism with regard to ‘The Singularity.’ Since the purpose of the post was to introduce the idea of the Information Age Income Explosion, we did not deal comprehensively with the problems inherent in Singularitarianism. We will discuss The Singularity in more detail in future posts. Again, it is only tangentially related to this post. Presently, we will discuss Information Age Transformationalism. In other words, because we believe that the near future will be characterized by a cascade of endogenously related S-Curves, we incorporate into our vision of Polymathica the notion that a transformational global Information Age civilization is emerging.

Polymathica is about creating a global community of refinement and erudition. Our analysis suggests that a universal awareness of Polymathica and a robust selection of refined and/or erudite content, networks, products and services, will result in between 2.0 and 3.0 million Polymathicans. So, while a small percentage of the population from which it is drawn, Polymathica is potentially significant in absolute terms. However, its growth and development needs to be considered within the context of the profound global transformation that will reach its greatest rate of change between today and 2030. In this article we will summarize the major points of that transformation and its significance to Polymathicans.

As we discussed in our prior post, implementation of state of the art robotics and business related AI software will lead, over the next twenty years, to an explosion in incomes. At a minimum the GDP per capita in the developed world will double by 2020 and quadruple by 2030. At the same time, the majority of current job descriptions will disappear. We will likely find ourselves in the peculiar situation where income will be increasing at an unprecedented rate while, simultaneously, unemployment will be skyrocketing. We cannot overemphasize the importance of our constituency staying ahead of this curve by entering an Information Age knowledge profession as soon as possible.

As incomes explode, work weeks will shorten. This will happen because nearly all jobs will become robotically or AI assisted. At the same time domestic chores will become robotically or AI assisted as well. Robots will clean our house, wash our clothes, tend our yards and cook our meals. This dramatic increase in leisure time will precipitate an existential crisis for many people. However, for Polymathicans, it will enable their pursuit of refinement and erudition – what we refer to as A Finely Crafted Life. We have likened the sociology of the coming age of automation to the Antebellum South of the U.S. What we mean by this is that the cultural emphasis will move away from productivity and toward self-actualization. We understand that many will consider the Antebellum culture to have been effete and we don't disagree that it was immediately prior to the Civil War. However, it also spawned Thomas Jefferson and James Madison.

Aubrey de Grey has been soundly, and unfairly, criticized for his SENS.org. While detractors are correct that he is not engaging in science, they are incorrect in using the pejorative, pseudoscience. He is engaging in a systematic metascientific inquiry into the essential nature of the problem of aging and death. He is rejecting the fantastical claims of simple solutions in favor of the more realistic expectations of incremental improvements in life expectancy. Over the next twenty years society will be fundamentally transformed by the growing expectations that life spans will routinely exceed one hundred years. We can expect that people will more readily accept the notion of evolving careers. The portion of life dedicated to rearing children will dramatically decrease. Preparation for retirement will be de-emphasized. Continuing adult education will become normative and, parenthetically, one of the lifestyle changes enabled by the increase in leisure time inherent in The Transformation.

The transformation of the Internet into a multi-media, global communication system that will support the market demands of smaller, more diffuse communities will also transform civilization. From a theoretical viewpoint, memic propagators are decoupling from geographically defined communities and thereby decoupling culture from geography in general. In other words, in the past people absorbed their culture from local sources such as schools, churches, parents, neighbors, etc. Now, culture is being absorbed from remote, often globally distributed sources. We discussed a theoretical structure of analysis in our article, ‘The Cultural Calculus.’ Because culture informs one as to morality and morality informs one as to the justness of laws, we are entering a period when geographically defined institutions of governance will become progressively less effective. A full exploration of what will replace them is beyond the scope of this article and will be addressed in future articles. However, generally, governance will be bicameral, with one legislative institution granted geographic sovereignty and the other cultural sovereignty.

Each year, approximately ½ of 1% of the population finds that they can live anywhere. In tandem with the decoupling of culture from geography, this will dramatically transform the demographics of civilization. New, culturally defined, communities will form in locales chosen for purely environmental and lifestyle reasons. Each ‘live anywhere’ person who chooses to move to such a community will create five or six other residents, primarily by creating demand in the service sector. It appears that this process will take place over about one generation and follow an S-Curve development. Over the next 30 years, we expect that Industrial Age cities will lose approximately 30% of their population to new communities comprehensively designed to facilitate the lifestyles idiosyncratic to specific values and cultures. EcoVillages and CoHousing are the beginning, not the culmination, of this process.

This blog is currently being read by people in over 40 countries. When we described Polymathica as a global community, we chose the words carefully. Polymathica is part of an overall trend toward a growing transnational intellectual elite. We are seeing in Polymathican profiles many people who are currently living far from where they were born and raised. Polymathicans are not only polymathic, they are, of necessity, polyglots. Assuming that future communities facilitative of polymathic values and lifestyles mirror the Membership in Polymathica, we can expect that these communities will have a distinctly international flavor. This is part of an overall process by which cultural and community identification slowly supplants national identity.

The next twenty years are best considered using the analogical model of a system of endogenously related time series equations where the individual equations without the effects of other equations would describe S-Curves. Each of the transformations described here would be one of those equations. However, because they are endogenously related, the system, as a whole, can experience periods of profound discontinuity. For those readers who prefer non-mathematical analogies, we would simply state that these imminent transformations will result in what historians will consider to be the core of the Information Revolution. While we believe that The Singularity is a flawed prediction, we do believe in The Transformation.

The observation made on the pages of Project Polymath that we may be entering a second Renaissance is not without validity. However, it is not a renaissance; it is a nascence. The emergence of an international community of polymaths, will be similar to the Renaissance in its intellectual energy. However, it will be unlike anything that preceded it in fundamental ways. In the Industrial Age, the civilization did not well utilize its most exceptional members. This was partially due to the social dynamics of organizational structures and partially due to the rejection of the Polymath model that we discuss in our articles, ‘The Polymathic Method and the Research Polymath’ and ‘The Enterprise Polymath.’ One of the characteristics of the Transformation will be the emergence of polymathic knowledge professions. While a footnote for future historians, this eventuality portends profound intellectual, social and lifestyle transformations for Polymathicans.

Consequently, the concept of Polymathica as a global community, is inextricably entwined with the considerations of the emergent knowledge professions, a rigorous development of a superior understanding of futurity and the Transformation that we believe is far more likely than the Singularity. We understand that for most Polymathicans, the fraternal associations and the intellectual stimulation derived through Member interaction is a sufficient level of involvement for them at this time. However, for some, the pursuit of polymathic research, education, enterprise and/or lifestyles are matters of significant, if not primary, lifestyle concern. Consequently, we have, on several occasions attempted to bifurcate the organization into two levels of interest. To this end, we will be establishing a Polymathica Institute that will have among its parts, an Academy, a professional network similar to LinkedIn.com and an enterprise development and financing organization. At its core, its purpose is to participate, on behalf of Polymaths, in the imminent Transformation.