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- Herausgeber: Ullstein eBooks
- Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
- Sprache: Englisch
- Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2020
The Old Economy is dead. So is the New Economy Algorithms are increasingly becoming authorities and competing directly with humans. Recommendation engines have long taken control of our lives. We are threatened by a final narcissistic injury, and we are alienated by the fatal information society that we live in. But humans are still the 'gluons' that connect our perceived reality – the environment, society, and the economy – with our inner world: what it means to be a human being, a Mensch. If we want to ensure that the machines continue to serve us after the digital tsunami, then now is the time to leverage the full power of our reason to build a humanistic society. "A must-read for anyone who does not just want to see the future, but wants to be an active part of it." Marshall Goldsmith, Two-time Thinkers 50 #1 Leadership Thinker "Anders Indset's thought-provoking new book is a must-read, and one I wish I had read prior to the outbreak of the pandemic." Dorie Clark, author of "Reinventing You" and Member of Executive Education Faculty Duke University Fuqua School of Business. "The Quantum Economy is a highly timely and truly relevant book. This new world – with Covid-19 and all the panic following it – begs us all to redefine how we live and how we do business. A must read for anyone in search for meaning in how to run businesses." Martin Lindstrom, New York Times best-selling author of Small Data and Buyology "The Quantum Economy opens up new perspectives on the economy of today and tomorrow - and on how our economy affects society. An inspirational reading that stimulates discussion and leaves a lasting impression." Yves Pigneur, Professor of Management Information Systems, University of Lausanne
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The Book
Algorithms are increasingly becoming authorities and competing directly with humans. Recommendation engines have long taken control of our lives. We are threatened by a final narcissistic injury, and we are alienated by the fatal information society that we live in. But humans are still the ‘gluons’ that connect our perceived reality–the environment, society, and the economy–with our inner world: what it means to be a human being, a Mensch. If we want to ensure that the machines continue to serve us after the digital tsunami, then now is the time to leverage the full power of our reason to build a humanistic society.
The Author
Anders Indset is one of the world’s leading business philosophers and a trusted sparring partner to international CEOs and political leaders. Dubbed the “Rock’n’Roll Plato” by European media, his approach to practical philosophy has made him a sought-after speaker and thinker. His work on “The Quantum Economy” was a finalist for the Breakthrough Idea Award at the 2019 Thinkers50 Gala (“the Oscars of management thinking”), and he has been named among the Top 30 leadership visionaries of the coming decade.
Anders Indset
The Quantum Economy
Saving the Mensch with Humanistic Capitalism
Econ
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ISBN 978-3-8437-2495-1
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Translated from German by
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Introduction
If we want to understand society, we must rethink the economy.
The Old Economy is dead. So is the New Economy. The utopian promise of the 1980s and 1990s failed to materialize and 2019 might go down in human history as the high-water mark. The events of early 2020 have accelerated the evolutionary developments and systemic changes that were already poised to transform our lives. As we rebuild our economic, political, and social systems, we must prepare for other potentially catastrophic future events that pose an existential risk for our species. In order to ensure both organized human life and functioning social structures, we will have to rethink and rebuild the economy—the operating system of our society.
We are now at a crossroads. We have mastered many ‘unsolvable’ problems, but the worst may be yet to come. Paradoxically, we are living in an era of collapse, but are also at the dawn of a new age. Until now we have sworn by the Old Testament of capitalism and have defined prosperity solely based on materialism—through even more possessions, even more consumption, and thus even more environmental destruction. Will life move in the direction of totalitarian regimes, nationalist economic isolation, and more global distrust, or will we succeed in restarting our economies with a solidarity-based, environmentally friendly, and technology-driven humanistic capitalism?
It’s high time to formulate a New Testament of capitalism based on post-materialistic ideals that do not reduce wealth solely to one’s bank account, but rather strengthens our minds and vital energy and provides us with immaterial goods such as happiness and love. I call this post-materialist system—which will transcend our current economic model, leaving both the Old and the New Economy behind—the Quantum Economy, or the Q Economy.
We need a new Enlightenment; a renaissance of thinkers to lead us into the future. We need practical philosophy and a revolution of consciousness. We must move toward a unification of the natural and social sciences to create a society of understanding. But in order to develop society and make progress for humanity, the underlying force must remain economic motivation. In other words, what we need is a new operating system for our economy.
Capitalism is a functioning system that lacks compassion, something that has been expressed by the Dalai Lama many times over the years.1 And this is one of the core flaws of the capitalistic model. In Maslow’s famous hierarchy, material needs occupy the largest space at the lowest level of the pyramid.2 This is where most people, especially people in affluent parts of the world, get stuck. We hardly ever reach the higher levels of the pyramid—where we are fulfilled by non-materialistic needs—because our system fixates people on the materialistic level, where we try to define happiness based on what we consume and possess. Science has long proven that we do not become happier with more and more material possessions and consumption. On the contrary: a second home, a third car, or the very latest in digital fetishes does not increase our satisfaction, but rather only our dependence on material items.
The life cycle of any market economy begins with revolver capitalism—the Wild West, where quick draws on ideas generate quick money. When the engines of growth then ignite, regulation and taxation follow. The solution is growth, however and wherever. We call it globalization, but frankly speaking we never really made it that global. The public sector distributes the capital, rights and entitlements are acquired, prosperity expands into over-consumption, and the system finally collapses. Like a living being, the economy is full of vitality at birth, and when it has grown old and worn it dies and decays. Then smaller dynamic groups form and the cycle starts all over again, but with greater efficiency. This creates many baby economies whose vital energy we can use to create something essentially new: the Q Economy.
During the 2010s, the economies of Western and some affluent Asian regions developed to the penultimate stage of their life cycle. Long before the COVID-19 pandemic, addictive overconsumption had led many of these economies to the brink of collapse. We have already plundered so many of our planet’s resources with uninhibited consumerism. With a world population of almost eight billion people, it is simply impossible to fulfill the material desires of all people—villas on the Mediterranean and Ferraris for everyone can never and will never exist. But most of these desirable objects are really just physical surrogates for immaterial needs that cannot be satisfied by luxury consumption. Emotional and spiritual goods—social recognition and contentment, meaning in life, and individual self-realization—are not available in the shopping malls of materialistic, capitalist societies any more than Western consumer goods were once available in the shopping malls of Soviet socialist economies of scarcity. “You can’t buy happiness and meaning in life,” one might argue. But in the Q Economy, we will move toward a perfectly circular economy and learn about singular infinity, become conscious about material consumption, and strive to find new business models that capitalize on vital energies and immaterial goods to the benefit of everyone.
Why do I call this post-materialist, humanistic, and holistic economy the Q Economy? Here’s a short answer: in the Q Economy, the apparent opposition between the material and the immaterial, between the physical and the spiritual, will be overcome, just as in quantum physics, in which every subatomic particle is at the same time both energy and matter—and vice versa. Quantum physics also suggests that our reality manifests itself less in physical matter than in the void between matter and energy, or in the collective momentum of a single wave function that is but one possibility in a multiverse of realities.
The world—and therefore the economy—cannot be rationally understood. It’s a world of interdependencies and interstices. Because of this, we will only be able to find new paths and solutions through these spaces in between with an interdisciplinary approach. As the sciences are increasingly realizing, we already live in a quantum reality, even though most of us haven’t noticed it yet. At the same time, a global movement of enlightened youth has set out on a journey. These young people put consciousness above everything else and strive for a higher level of energy. If we listen carefully, the pioneers of a variety of disciplines are all talking about the same things, even if they use different semantics. It all boils down to potentiality, consciousness, and relationships.
I have sat down with physicists and mathematicians as well as with gurus and monks, with Nobel Prize winners, and with theologians and religious scholars. The concepts of quantum mechanics are confusing, even (and especially) for classical scientists. But they are not speculation; they are scientifically verified descriptions of reality. Surprisingly, quantum physics overlaps with the visions and intuitive insights of spiritually enlightened people from many cultures and eras. Gurus and shamans have often preached that energy is matter, and matter is energy. In quantum terms, we are all part of one universal wave function.
The basic formula of the universe is not one or the other, but rather both at the same time. Spiritual and material concepts are thus not incompatible opposites, but rather two paths that lead to the same place from opposite directions: to the space between mind and body, matter and energy, or to the universal wave function underlying our reality. Some of the most interesting theoretical approaches of our time focus on these gaps between seemingly incompatible disciplines: where quantum physics meets spirituality, and where phenomenology meets neuroscience and psychoanalysis.
Quantum reality—and thus also the Q Economy—is a world in which scientific disciplines and other seemingly irreconcilable ways of experiencing the world converge. Spirituality might just be a part of physics that we have not yet understood. The possible synthesis of supposedly insurmountable opposites is a radically new philosophical approach. At the economic level, this leads to my concept of the Q Economy because we need economic motivation to achieve progress in our society, and indeed, to save our planet and our humanistic foundations.
The Q Economy will change our society
The Q Economy will not only satisfy our material needs, it will also enable us to develop our talents and live our dreams. Just another utopian dream? No, the economy of the future will structure every fundamental element of society: our material needs; our social relationships (online as well as offline); our politics, education, and culture; and our spiritual development and self-realization. It will no longer be about the end state, but about the journey.
The past few decades in particular have been marked by materialistic hypercapitalism and addictive hyper-consumption. The lower levels of Maslow’s pyramid of needs—the more basic needs—have grown larger, and the satisfaction we get from meeting our need for personal security has also increased. It’s as if we can only live if we have an SUV, at least one sports car, and a vacation home—as if these count as basic needs, or even as individual rights. But in the Q Economy, we will realize that such a resource-consuming and materialistically narrow definition of basic needs cannot work for everyone—not even in the world’s most prosperous regions, let alone worldwide.
At the same time, the solution to the dilemma is not to limit the capitalist model but rather to expand it. This is already laid out in Maslow’s pyramid. The U. S. scientist is known as the founder of humanistic psychology, a concept designed to help people find personal fulfillment and to develop their creative potential. But overextending the lower levels of Maslow’s pyramid suffocates all the other higher needs and possibilities.
Among other things, the Q Economy is thus about creating new opportunities that promote creative development and healthy self-realization, and that allow us to develop a humanistic capitalism. We must invent new business models to capitalize on happiness and optimism, security, trust, individual strengths, empathy, and solidarity. I don’t mean that we need to find new materialistic surrogates—luxury products in our current economic system that only deceive or comfort us and hold us back from achieving any real happiness or trust. The challenge is rather to develop valuable services that help us develop our individual potentials and strengths. The Q Economy will finally help humanity reach higher levels of Maslow’s pyramid. And this shift is critical because we can only master the immense challenges of the very near future by working together.
Is the Q Economy the answer to the most pressing problems of our current system? Will it correct the unjust distribution of wealth, finally deliver on the capitalist promise of happiness, and help us to overcome ecological destruction? Of course, there is no such magic formula that can balance all the antagonisms. But it’s also true that the market alone certainly won’t fix the situation. In my first semester economics course, I learned that “the free market ensures the distribution of scarce resources.” Oh, really? Contrary to the promises of Adam Smith and his disciples, the “perfect equilibrium” has turned out to be an illusion of neoclassical capitalism. Without a doubt, it is important to embrace the lessons of the Enlightenment, and to carry the torch of the late Swedish professor Hans Rosling, who showed us that, as a species, we are actually doing better than ever before. At the same time, we need to bury the myth of the perfect equilibrium and any invisible hand of the market.3 The self-stabilizing machine that is supposed to maximize benefits for individual players—and thereby also for the common good—simply does not exist.
In the current economy, we are confronted by several dilemmas. Today, the twenty-six richest people in the world possess about as much wealth as the poorer half of the global population—about 3.8 billion people. But instead of blaming capitalism, we need to develop the economy in such a way that the capitalist engine is not stalled, but rather can be used to drive a more equitable distribution. We need a new perspective so that we can rethink and optimize existing structures and models. In this way, the Q Economy will become the heart of a global revolution.
The same thing applies to the existential threat posed by the ecological collapse we face. When we rethink the economy, we will develop a better understanding of our environment. The Q Economy is based on the realization that everything is connected to everything: we must learn to holistically see the economy, society, and ecology as one interdependent and connected wave (function). An economic system that really meets our needs will help us develop a society that also considers the needs of the natural environment, because we will finally recognize that we are also part of nature.
And what about happiness, and the blissful society that classical liberal theory tells us should materialize if we all just follow the compass of our own selfish interests? As we now know, it’s not that simple. The invisible hand of the market is a model from the pre-Q Economy era. Market liberalism, according to Adam Smith,4 only considers individuals who are independent of each other and act of their own accord. What remains largely unresolved in such primordial capitalist theories, however, is how the sum of countless selfish individual actions is supposed to generate social happiness.
How can we integrate well-being into the economy? This question is the starting point for the creation of a Q Economy, and thus also a quantum society. In the Q Economy, our identity will no longer be defined by what we possess and are able to achieve. This will give us back the freedom to focus our attention on who we are and what we can become. By becoming aware of the different roles we each play in this world, we will discover that we are not indivisible individuals, but rather ‘multividuals.’ “Know thyself” still applies today, but the quantopian motto is: “understand your roles, develop them further, strip them off, and try new ones.”
By following this quantopian motto, we will also develop a better understanding of our spiritual dimensions and those of the world in which we live. We are visitors on this planet with limited time and resources, but (in principle) unlimited knowledge. We are interdependent, connected beings in an infinite universe of potentiality, and we are each, ourselves, universes of potentiality. We are all on a wonderful journey to nowhere, driven by the search for plausible explanations to our basic questions of where we are coming from and where we are going. As observers, we can gain knowledge that changes our perceptions, thus influencing both our own perceived realities as well as the realities of others. This is how we can develop the Q Economy while at the same time developing a better understanding of our society.
Q Economy Compact
What is the Q Economy?
− It is a way of rethinking the economy in order to better understand society.
− It will unleash an economy that goes beyond satisfying the obvious physical needs of food, shelter, and safety to include deeper psychological needs such as a sense of belonging, self-esteem, and self-realization.
− It reduces the distance between creators (artisans) and consumers, enabling direct relationships between them.
− It seems as strange and unpredictable as the quantum world but is as real as quantum physics.
− It is an interdependent system that is not linear, but rather circular. Everything is interconnected (including humans and machines) and is thus potentially infinite as a genuine circular-flow economy: a singular infinity.
− It brings together the natural and human sciences by overcoming disciplinary boundaries.
− It is characterized by decentralized and interconnected units instead of centralized and hierarchical structures.
− It is algorithmic, technical, and exponential.
− It is connected to consciousness, our understanding of consumption, and our ability to come up with new immaterial ways to thrive, innovate, and do business.
The Q Economy will emerge from the development of a society of understanding, the advancement of a consciousness revolution, the acceptance of circular infinity, and the learning and practice of philosophical contemplation.
Part I:
A New Weltanschauung—Attempt or Temptation
How much time do you need to save the world? Before you answer, ask yourself: How much time do we have left?
The world is going under. Doomsday is approaching. The end is near. How many times have you heard this? How many times has the Apocalypse been prophesied and then everything turned out to be just fine?
We live in a parallel society that is marked by the simultaneous trends of collapse and prosperity. Western industrial regions are at the pinnacle of their historical affluence but are also confronted by an equally unprecedented crisis. The collapse of the climate, wars, waves of refugees, plus the smoldering financial and debt crises. It all feels like old systems are breaking down.
What are the most critical structures in our social, political, and economic systems that are preventing change? The core problems are ultimately the overall system itself and the widespread misconception that our theories and models correspond to reality. Researchers who conceptualize the structure and function of the human brain as a conventional computer sometimes forget that this is just a radically simplified model that can’t hope to describe what is really going on. The same problem applies to the models of economists and social and political scientists as well. And even as we face a number of existential dangers, many of our fundamental societal constructs—including politics, education, and capitalism—are coming under scrutiny today. A radical rethinking is needed, and the simple fact is, we need both more stability and more chaos at the same time.
1. A Revolution of Consciousness or the Collapse: It’s Up to You!
I’ve talked to leading scientists, read a myriad of studies, and above all, I’ve traveled to places where things are already on fire. To Africa, where the once-believed uninhabitable desert regions are growing. To Antarctica, where icebergs the size of entire cities are melting and causing rising sea levels. To China, where not only is there environmental destruction, but also the automation of entire industries. To Indonesia, where the sea glitters romantically in the sunlight—only this glitter comes mainly from plastic garbage that floats in the waves and suffocates millions of sea dwellers.
Over the next ten years, humanity will be confronted with two existential challenges: how can we avoid the threat of ecological collapse, and how can we deal with, and even harness, exponential technologies such as artificial intelligence (AI), biotechnology, and nanotechnology to help us make this world a truly human paradise, and not a post-human hell in which our descendants are either zoo animals or vegetative zombies?
Nothing less than the existence of the human species is at stake. That’s why I think it’s so important to eliminate trivializing terms such as climate change or global warming from our vocabulary. What is happening is not a simple “change” that is just going to let us enjoy a little more of the sun’s heat. The climate is in imminent danger of collapse. Still, the actual greatest threat of our time is the belief that someone else will come and save us. While new technologies can help us avert ecological collapse, they will not do so on their own—we must make a conscious decision about what we want to achieve with their help.
If we do not make this decision, we risk falling victim to a second existential challenge that may be even greater than the coming ecological crash: the disempowerment of humanity by hyper-intelligent machines. The problem is even more threatening because the danger is present in everyone’s minds, but mostly as a fantasy of computer nerds and science fiction stories from Hollywood. But this threat is just as real as climate collapse; we just don’t feel it as immediately. In fact, we have no emotional reaction to it whatsoever. This is one reason why we need a global revolution of consciousness: if we all understand and accept that these challenges are existential, we still have time to save our planet, to ensure the survival of our species, and to extend our humanistic foundations.
In ten years, large parts of Africa will be uninhabitable as a result of climate collapse, precisely on the continent where the population is growing the fastest—from 1.3 billion today to an expected 4 billion by the end of the century. Millions of people will flee to Europe and hundreds of thousands will drown in the Mediterranean and die of thirst in the deserts if we don’t act now.
In ten years, robots with superhuman intelligence will dominate our everyday lives. We will no longer be the most intelligent species on this planet.
In ten years, production and logistics will largely be automated, and millions of blue-collar jobs will be cut worldwide. Among those affected will be low-wage industries in Asia, which have become moderately prosperous as extended workbenches for Western industrialized countries and are now under threat of falling back into unemployment and poverty. The manufacturing of smartphones, tablets, toys, and textiles will largely be shifted back to Europe and America, where the buyers of the products live. Because robots are equally cost-effective regardless of where they are located, and fully automated local processes can minimize the costs of the last mile of the supply chain.
The Chinese e-commerce company JD.com, also known as Jingdong, is almost there already. Within the next two to three years, the multibillion-dollar company—little known in the West—aims to become 100 percent automated, including delivering their products using drones and facial recognition. Google invested $550 million in JD.com in 2018, and it almost went unnoticed because around the same time President Trump ramped up his trade war with China. The investment is evidence of the strategic cross-border collaboration that continues to take place, even at a time of growing political distance between the two countries.
In ten years, millions of jobs will be lost in Europe and America. Companies still talk about human resources and human capital, but we urgently need to rethink our models and what we want to achieve. Because if the algorithms are capable of one thing, it’s the efficient use of resources. Bus and taxi drivers, accountants and clerks, salespeople and agents, managers and factory workers will simply no longer be needed in the automated world.
What will happen to all these people who suddenly become superfluous? How will they live? Will they somehow accept their fate of suddenly being irrelevant, or will we face unrest, uprisings, and the collapse of our society? Right-wing populist parties already enjoy an increasing amount of support from voters; how many more concerned citizens will follow them when the economy really goes downhill?
“It won’t be that bad,” you might argue. “And new jobs will be created, too—programmers, software developers, and others will certainly be needed on a massive scale.” Unfortunately, this won’t happen to the large extent you may think. The robots of the future will be controlled by self-learning algorithms that will develop themselves on their own, and even write their own new software. And a bus driver or an accountant can’t turn into a software developer overnight. In any case, most of the jobs that will be lost simply won’t be replaced.
Robot doctors with computer chip brains will provide us with medical care and, if necessary, prescribe drugs. Robots will care for us—not sometime in the distant future, but in ten years or less. They’ll build our houses, do our housework, and oversee our factories. Cars, trains, buses, airplanes, and helicopters will drive and fly autonomously. Translators and editors, composers and screenwriters are already being replaced by machine successors, and soon we won’t notice any qualitative differences. If anything, we’ll see improvements. Machine-generated works will entertain us more imaginatively and touch us more deeply and emotionally. Diagnoses and prescriptions from algorithmic doctors will be more precise and effective than those of their biological predecessors. And the rate of accidents caused by automated road and air traffic will fall to a fraction of today’s numbers.
Artificial intelligence will be superior to us in almost every respect. It will also be better in terms of focus and priority setting. Algorithms will be able to precisely stimulate and perfectly simulate human emotions. Although they will not have human-like consciousness, most artificially intelligent machines will likely have some form of self-awareness. But their cold, logical calculations will prevent them from being triggered by stress and running blindly in circles, as humans often do.
This is why we need new models and a new definition of work. And when it comes to artificial intelligence, we need some kind of a global referee, a higher-level instance of control that we don’t yet have today. It is certainly possible for us to find new solutions, and the Q Economy is my first attempt to create such a new approach. But the task ahead requires you to get involved as well: together we will improvise the future.
Put on your quantum glasses
When you start to see the world from a quantum perspective, you’ll be surprised by how much already exists on the subject. In the new branch of quantum cognition, for instance, attempts are being made to model cognitive phenomena such as information processing in the human brain using the mathematical formulas of quantum theory. In the media, a wide range of fields are becoming associated with the word quantum—from “quantum behavior” to “quantum medicine,” from “quantum creativity” to “quantum capital.” A myriad of short videos, models, and examples have been used to try and make the bizarre effects of quantum mechanics comprehensible to non-physicists as well.
The German-American political scientist Alexander Wendt has established himself as a “quantum sociologist” by predicting that science will have to fundamentally rethink its relationship to human beings and nature. In his book Quantum Mind and Social Science,1 Wendt writes that the social sciences are all based on a fundamental error. Since their early days around 150 years ago, social scientists have taken it for granted that human societies obey the laws of classical physics. This assumption seems reasonable at first glance; after all, we are macroscopic objects just like tables and chairs, so we should also be subject to the same laws. But the same rules don’t apply to our consciousness, or to our social processes. Instead, they are characterized by the principles of quantum physics, such as nonlocality and entanglement.
Game theory is just another example of the current influence of quantum theory. In the classical approach, the strategic interaction between two or more actors (players) is modeled on a situation with defined rules and results—an approach that is particularly popular in economics. Quantum game theory represents a further refinement: among other things, it assumes that humans are inextricably linked to one another, and that our economic systems and our struggle for happiness must thus also be seen as linked to one another. In other words: everything is connected to everything.
One of the central challenges in shaping the Q Economy is that most people think quantum physics is incomprehensible, and that it is something that only experts can hope to talk about. Even a scientist like the venerable quantum physicist and game theorist John von Neumann once confessed, “in mathematics you don’t understand things. You just get used to them.”2 When it came to quantum mechanics, even Albert Einstein once noted “this theory reminds me a little of the system of delusions of an exceedingly intelligent paranoiac, concocted of incoherent elements of thought.”3
One of the best attempts at coherency in the field is Hugh Everett III’s many-worlds interpretation (MWI) from 1957, which is able to describe both the mathematics of quantum mechanics and the appearance of our perceived reality. But in doing so, it creates another dilemma: an incredibly large—perhaps even infinite—set of different worlds that are themselves constantly splitting into new branches. Worlds that are not accessible to us through any conscious experience.
Quantum physics and quantum mechanics are real. The question is how they operate and manifest themselves in the world, and what theory we choose to explain them. Which side do you believe in? The curiosities and “cat states” of Schrödinger, Einstein, and Heisenberg (among others), which are still taught widely today as the “Copenhagen interpretation”? Or in a reality in which there are an infinite number of copies of each of us living in other worlds? There are, of course, other theoretical attempts at explaining quantum phenomena, but what they all illustrate is that we still have a lot to explore in order to truly understand the nature of our reality.
But why should we accept quantum mechanics if even the most brilliant minds can’t explain what’s going on in our quantum world? Quite simply because it’s the best, and perhaps only, approach we have to help us solve the problems with which we are confronted. In my understanding of the world, consciousness is fundamental, and an essential point of distinction between man and machine. Classical physics has simply no hope of explaining how matter can develop consciousness, to say nothing of the mysteries of human consciousness, or our individual instances of subjective conscious experience. What is it like to be us? Why are certain behavioral functions accompanied by consciousness at all? In what ways do physical processes in the brain evoke subjective experiences? Not only do we not have answers to these questions, to some extent we don’t even know how to articulate them. In principle, the same goes for our poor understanding of social and economic processes.
It is becoming increasingly clear that we can make significant progress in many fields of scientific research if we look at things through quantum glasses. At the same time, these glasses give us a better understanding of the bizarre world of quantum physics itself. Looking at the economy from a quantum perspective can help us understand the peculiarities of economic processes more clearly, and quantum economists’ mathematical formulas can also be useful for quantum physicists who are still looking for the fundamental principles behind confusing quantum effects. In any case, it is becoming increasingly accepted in both the natural and social sciences that researchers in all fields must open up to a new perspective: to quantum interpretations of our world, and thus of our economy.
Everything is connected to everything, and everything interdependently influences everything else. The world is not a sum of its parts, because it is not made only of atoms. Over the centuries, scientists have been able to describe individual pieces of the world more precisely, but this has only produced countless puzzle pieces that don’t fit together. And while each piece they have described is quite close to reality, it is not identical to it. Instead, as we are coming to see ever-more clearly, reality is quantum, and we can’t fully understand it. Or as Nobel Prize winner Richard Feynman put it: “I think I can safely say that nobody understands quantum mechanics.”4
Back to the ’30s?
The world’s current situation resembles that of the explosive 1930s, shortly before the Nazi rise to power and Stalinism, before genocide and world war.
Even if history never repeats itself exactly, there are alarming parallels. Investment banking is still generating huge profits by using money to make money. But this is very different from producing real value. Only a few people—primarily in the West—are benefiting from the artificial boom. At the same time, even in traditionally affluent regions, many countries and tens of millions of people are in the stranglehold of austerity policies that have impoverished broad sections of the population and have dangerously deepened societal divisions.
Corrupt regimes, civil wars, and increasing environmental devastation are making large parts of Africa uninhabitable and forcing millions of people to flee. But instead of increasing aid and helping to coordinate migration, the regions most of these people are trying to get to—primarily Europe and North America—are reacting with isolationism and racism. Less than a hundred years ago, a comparable conflict triggered globe-spanning wars, genocides, and other atrocities. When will we finally realize that we’re on a fatal course and turn the tide?
What we need is a new Enlightenment, a revolution of consciousness. Right now, our democracies are far from enlightened. At the same time, we need to decide how to deal with exponential technologies, artificial intelligence, and automation—while we still have the ability to decide. We need to determine which political and economic models can help us meet the huge challenges of our globalized world.
There are a number of factors that are contributing to the situation so many people find themselves in today, in which an increasingly hectic pace of life leads to internal paralysis: our unenlightened societies, the unclear future of exponential technologies, the state of party-based democratic political systems, the state of education systems, the current state of the capitalistic model, and systems that are unsuitable for the coming era. Almost everyone I talk to about this admits they are afraid of this constellation of diffuse mega-problems. But hardly anyone is acting appropriately. Internally frustrated, externally armored by luxury and hubris, we try to convince ourselves that “something like that” couldn’t possibly happen to us. After all, we’re enlightened and well-informed. And with our great technical capabilities, we will surely be able to solve the problems!
But that’s wishful thinking. Until we deal with these factors, we will be unable to find any solutions.
A high time for mutiny
Now time for the good news: the current form of capitalism and technological progress are not inextricably linked to one another. When technologies develop in destructive directions, it often has a lot to do with profit maximization, but little or nothing to do with the technology itself. At the beginning of modern times, we didn’t have capitalism or even the Enlightenment, but rather the technical genius of inventors who built presses, geared clocks, telescopes, and microscopes. Natural scientists such as Isaac Newton, Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, and Galileo Galilei discovered and formulated the laws of classical physics. It was based on such work that Enlightenment philosophers like Immanuel Kant and Voltaire realized that man can use his “light of reason” to enlighten the darkness—ignorance, errors, and prejudices—that had surrounded him until then. “Reason” as Kant defined it in his Critique of Pure Reason, thus not only refers to empirical perception and logical-causal thinking, but to our critical control of these capabilities as well.5
Capitalism is not the driving force of technological progress, even if this is a widespread misconception. For a century and a half, from the Industrial Revolution to the first manifestations of massive environmental destruction around 1970, materialist capitalism à la Adam Smith seemed to be a necessary evil that brought us a never-before-seen prosperity, at least to Western industrialized countries. But even the first report from the Club of Rome in 1972, titled The Limits to Growth, highlighted the fundamental flaws of a system that rewards those who ruthlessly maximize growth and profit.6
Our economic system is still based on the belief that everything will turn out okay in the end, and that even the dirtiest of villains with the greatest egos and the most cynical intentions are still ultimately working for the good of us all. But this rule of thumb from the early days of the Industrial Revolution no longer holds true. In the hypercapitalist era in which we find ourselves today, the shareholders of algorithm-based megacorporations reap the lion’s share of global wealth while everyone else pays the price. We’re left with division, confusion, and destabilization, with ecological collapse, and the impending domination of artificial super intelligences developed in the labs of the new technocrats.
We need to abandon the misconception that technological progress will automatically lead us to utopia. That is not going to happen, and we are not going to be suddenly freed from right-wing populist, rollback movements, from despots and egomaniacs like Vladimir Putin, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, and Donald Trump. Quite the contrary: as long as exponential technologies remain hostage to the current form of hypercapitalism, nationalist and xenophobic movements—as well as radical parties and groups from both the right and the left—will increasingly unsettle the world and make rational, coordinated action almost impossible.
But we don’t have time for such hysteria and madness. When it was created in 1947 by the journal Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, the “Doomsday Clock” was set to seven minutes to midnight. Based on the idea that we face an impending disaster when it’s “five minutes to midnight,” the clock has since been moved forward or backward depending on the level of global danger as assessed by a committee of scholars that includes numerous Nobel Prize winners. Right now, the clock is at 100 seconds to midnight.7 We have only been this close to catastrophe once before: when the United States and the Soviet Union tested hydrogen bombs shortly after one another during the Cold War, and the thermonuclear destruction of mankind seemed imminent.
Why are we outraged by a U. S. president who tramples on our values, denies scientifically proven facts, and sympathizes with autocrats, but yet we aren’t doing anything about it? Why is it so hard to collectively stand up and stop this madness? Where is the Bastille of our time, and where are the leaders of change who will storm it?
On both the right and the left, more and more people agree that our current political and economic systems are deeply flawed. How do we start changing things? One potential starting point might be the “Intellectual Dark Web” that has arisen in the United States and Canada, driven by U. S. philosopher and neuroscientist Sam Harris, psychology professor Jordan Peterson, mathematician Eric Weinstein, and biologist and evolutionary theorist Bret Weinstein. With its heterogeneous collection of political opinions posted by popular thinkers, podcast moderators, YouTube stars, and bestselling authors, the community is now attracting attention from all corners of the world. Podcasts such as the “Joe Rogan Experience,” which has millions of subscribers across the globe, feature interviews and honest conversations that often go for three or four hours, with participants discussing topics in a sometimes controversial but always engaging way. This illustrates the fact that—contrary to the idea that people’s attention spans are constantly getting shorter—people are hungry for depth, debate, and real engagement.
Why sixteen Louis(es) are at least one too many
Louis XVI was the last king of France; he was executed by the Jacobins in January 1793, four years after the storming of the Bastille. Some historians today still discuss whether a stronger and less fickle regent would have been able to save the monarchy in France.
But this debate misses the point. The very fact that fifteen kings with the same name had sat on the throne before the last Louis was already a strong indication that a radical change was overdue. The “Louis model”—the traditional, outdated monarchy—was simply no longer compatible with turn-of-the-eighteenth-century French society. To be sure, Louis the XVI had depleted the country’s finances by massively building up the navy and going to war with Great Britain in support of the revolutionaries in the United States. But by helping the Americans with their struggle for independence, he also unintentionally helped popularize democracy and human rights, in whose name he was eventually executed. The wastefulness of his wife Marie-Antoinette, the Archduchess of Austria, also contributed to undermining Louis the XVI’s popularity among the sans-culottes, the lawless and impoverished lower class.
The king’s unsuccessful escape attempt in June 1791 to Metz (in what was then the Austrian Netherlands) is regarded as striking proof of Louis’ cluelessness about the world around him. Even though Louis officially remained in office for some time after his capture, he was in fact a prisoner of the Jacobins until his death. The First French Republic was established in September 1792, and shortly thereafter, the king was publicly beheaded for conspiracy against public freedom and the security of the state.
Could Louis XVI have saved the monarchy by acting smarter and more decisively? I don’t think so. The problem was the feudal system, not the monarchy’s weak character. Feudalism meant that members of the nobility had privileges on the basis of their name and origin and received income without having to do any work.
The formula of the feudal system was to keep people in their place. The guiding principle of Enlightenment democracy, however, was the exact opposite: that all people are equal, and that everyone has the same rights and freedoms. As a result of the technical revolution that began with Johannes Gutenberg’s introduction of the printing press, the masses had become more informed and educated than ever before in human history. The majority of Enlightenment thinkers themselves were not aristocrats either, but belonged to the Third Estate as scientists, inventors, and philosophers. But they were all still almost as underprivileged as their illiterate ancestors in the Middle Ages.
This was the powder keg that blew up the feudal system and its seemingly heaven-ordained system of inequality—not only in France, but also in countries like Britain and Sweden. Although the royal houses have survived there, they serve only as decorations of the republic and symbolic representatives of their nations.
What is the point of this story? The ideas and demands of the Enlightenment thinkers could only be realized after the Ancien Régime—the old system—had been destroyed. And part of the necessary destruction was to overthrow the king. We find ourselves in a very similar situation today. The old system is no longer compatible with new technologies. Power and wealth are again concentrated in the hands of a small, privileged group. Again, heads must roll (if only in the figurative sense, of course) and an outdated system must be destroyed so that a better, more sustainable one can take its place. Individualism is dead. Neither a belief in Cartesian individualism (as still prevails in the United States) nor in an algorithmically controlled subject (as in the Chinese model) seem to be a universal solution.
Instead, Europe should develop a new model based on its own traditions and values—a European-model—that bridges the East and the West in a new synthesis. Instead of “I think, therefore I am,” we must exploit the essence of how human beings operate, namely “I am, therefore I think”—in the pursuit of knowledge in an interdependent world, and according to our current understanding of quantum reality, in which everything is connected to everything else. In the Q Economy, materialism will be overcome by new, post-materialist ideals. Egotism and unrestrained greed for profit will be overcome by compassion and mindfulness. The overconsumption of resources will decline to a level that ensures the ecological recovery of our planet and thus the survival of mankind. But we can only master these challenges together.
Taming exponential technologies—it’s now or never!
Let’s stop talking about digital transformation and disruptive technologies. Technology itself doesn’t tear anything apart—it all depends on what we use it for. And digital transformation isn’t some natural phenomenon that we can only watch in awe: we can and must decide for ourselves what we want to transform and where.
It is important to understand that digital has not really happened yet. What we have been doing for the past thirty years is to merely live out our fantasies and play around with social media—a phenomenon that, in retrospect, will only have shaped human history for a brief amount of time. We have produced a lot of data and a lot of chaos, and we will spend at least the next ten years trying to repair the damage. Remember, 2020 is just as far away from 1990 as it is from 2050. But the next thirty years will see a much more radical shift than the last thirty as technology matures and machines become more intelligent.
The digital tsunami is actually still ahead of us, but we have no emotional reaction to all these developments, and therefore no sense of how to deal with what is coming. In just a few years, it will be possible to work productively with quantum computers. And as works like Yuval Noah Harari’s 2016 bestseller Homo Deus8 illustrate, artificial intelligence has gone mainstream. Harari offers a good start, but technological development is already much further along than it was when he wrote his book. The changes coming over the next ten years will be more extreme than any upheavals from the past thirty years. The theoretical implications of exponential acceleration are clear to everyone, especially after #flattenthecurve: with thirty linear steps you can travel one hundred feet in a straight line, but if we could walk thirty exponential steps, we could go around the earth twenty-six times. Still, very few people are considering the concrete effects of exponential technologies. This is exactly what the Q Economy is all about: in tomorrow’s economy, yesterday’s formulas—and even today’s formulas—will no longer be valid.
At the same time, we shouldn’t hold out hope for new formulas or mathematical models to replace the old ones; the Q Economy is not calculable, and its core is as strange as the subatomic quantum world. It is thus not a fixed, previously defined goal that can only be achieved step by step—the Q Economy is rather the path into the future. No one can stop us from going down this road unless we allow our society to be taken over by technology. But the price of that would be catastrophically high: we would completely lose control over ourselves and our world. We would stop being human.
The challenge we face is enormous: as a species, humans have never been fully able to control the ways technology has developed. But this time we have to control the development of exponential technologies because unlike in all previous eras, we will not get a second chance to tame them and correct undesirable developments.
After technical revolutions such as the invention of the printing press, the combustion engine, or industrial mass production, the amount of time that cultures and political systems had to react was measured in decades or even centuries. But today we only have months, or at most years, to react to similarly important revolutions. In the future, we will have even less time. In addition, complexity is only going to increase. The connections between technologies, disciplines, and events are so interwoven that people can no longer see through them. After the first atomic bombs claimed hundreds of thousands of lives in Hiroshima and Nagasaki and made entire regions uninhabitable, the international community struggled to reach agreements and take disarmament measures to prevent the impending apocalypse. Our ability to correct course after similarly dire emergencies will no longer exist once we create digital super intelligence.
Some of the people who know the most about the subject have been warning us that we’re about to breed a monster that could devour us all. In the final years of his life, Stephen Hawking increasingly urged caution: “The development of full artificial intelligence could spell the end of the human race.”9 Tech pioneer Elon Musk has compared uncontrolled artificial intelligence (AI) development with a Faustian “summoning of the demon,” and Microsoft founder Bill Gates is simply surprised that “some people are not afraid of AI.”10
To allow AI to control itself and its own development would be fatal. But as long as the development of artificial intelligence remains in the hands of a few megacorporations, moguls, and technocrats, there is little hope that these new intelligent beings will be tamed in time. That is why we must radically change course now, at all relevant levels of politics, business, and society. Everyone can and must contribute to ensuring that the solution succeeds in time by thinking about the potential futures and impacts of technological development.
We need thinkers, not just computers
In order to prevent CEOs in corporate headquarters from determining our future, we urgently need a wide-ranging and intensive cooperation between natural scientists and thinkers from other disciplines, including philosophy. In a recent article in the Atlantic magazine that is as knowledgeable as it is passionate, ninety-five-year-old Henry Kissinger summed up the challenge in a nutshell:
If AI learns exponentially faster than humans, we must expect it to accelerate, also exponentially, the trial-and-error process by which human decisions are generally made: to make mistakes faster and of greater magnitude than humans do. It may be impossible to temper those mistakes, as researchers in AI often suggest, by including in a program caveats requiring ethical or reasonable outcomes. Entire academic disciplines have arisen out of humanity’s inability to agree upon how to define these terms. Should AI therefore become their arbiter?11
This is a nightmarish scenario, and the elder statesman recommends that we set up a philosophical council to prevent it: “AI developers, as inexperienced in politics and philosophy as I am in technology, should ask themselves some of the questions I have raised here in order to build answers into their engineering efforts. The U. S. government should consider a presidential commission of eminent thinkers to help develop a national vision. This much is certain: If we do not start this effort soon, before long we shall discover that we started too late.”
So where are the leaders of change? Where are countries in which farsighted politicians and innovative companies are trying out new, post-materialist models? Where are the politicians who do not rely on outdated analyses, but open their eyes, trust their senses, and use their intellect?
What we need is a renaissance of thinkers. We need a new, interdisciplinary definition of progress that combines approaches and insights from mathematics, social sciences, technology, and philosophy. We need a revolution of consciousness. We need to rethink the economy and create a Q Economy that will utilize new technologies to create meaningful jobs in a sustainable and humanistic economy, and in a stable democracy on an ecologically intact planet. And all of it has to happen right now.
2. Major Defects in the System—or the Wrong System?
A fundamental tenet of many current theoretical systems is that opposing forces of action achieve some sort of ideal equilibrium. For theorists of liberal capitalism from Adam Smith to Milton Friedman, the free interaction of market forces are supposed to ensure a balance between self-interest and the common good, an economic equilibrium that ensures prosperity for the highest number of people. In practice, however, real-world systems look very different: equilibriums and natural balances of forces only exist in models. The real world is much more bizarre—and quantum-like. The following five systemic defects impact how our political, economic, and social systems are shaped today.
First defect: dogmatism prevents change
What is the biggest social problem we face today, particularly in Western societies? Certainly not Islamic terrorism. While the Islamic state and other terror organizations are still active, the real risks posed by Islamic terrorism is and always has been exaggerated. Despite Donald Trump’s recent attempts to inflame the situation, and as terrible as politically motivated attacks around the world have been, the fact remains that the number of casualties in Western countries attributable to Islamic terrorism are orders of magnitude less than the number of victims of firearms in the United States or traffic accidents in Germany. If the politicians in these countries really wanted to protect their citizens from deadly risks, it would be far more effective to change weapons laws in the United States or to introduce speed limits on German highways.
So, what is our most pressing social problem today? Materialist hypercapitalism, which has led to our era of all-encompassing mass consumerism, is obviously one central issue. But I am convinced that there is another, even bigger problem that we must address first because it makes it impossible for us to deal constructively with the challenges that lie ahead. The problem I am talking about is dogmatism.
Dogmas (from the Greek word for “that which one thinks is true”) are statements and principles whose truths are not allowed to be doubted by a certain group or community. In religious circles, dogmas are the set of beliefs that all believers must agree with. A central dogma of Christian theology, for instance, is that Jesus Christ is the son of God, and that he died as a martyr for his beliefs, was resurrected, and ascended to heaven. As bizarre as such revelations may sound to non-Christians, this ‘truth’ forms the core of the Christian faith and can neither be disproven nor refuted in any way. If you want to be a Christian, you have to accept this dogma. If you don’t, you can’t be considered part of the religious community.
Long after the Middle Ages, the Vatican “thought police” tolerated only scientific findings that fit the precise worldview of the Catholic Church. One result was that the sun had to rotate around the earth, which in turn was immovably anchored at the center of the universe. Astronomers and mathematicians who came to differing results had to bow to church censorship or pay with their lives for their love of truth and science. In 1600, for instance, the Italian philosopher and astronomer Giordano Bruno was executed for declaring that the universe was infinitely vast and of infinite duration.1 Therefore, the universe could not have been created and there could be no afterlife. Bruno even anticipated space travel and conducted thought experiments about traveling to the moon and beyond. “Fake News!,” judged the inquisitors, and burned the heretic at the stake.
Thankfully, today the Catholic Church has become somewhat more accepting of science and its discoveries about the universe we live in. Based on their dogmatic beliefs, many Christians still question, or flatly deny, fundamental scientific discoveries such as the theory of evolution. And even the Catholic Church still claims that divine miracles exist in the world. But today its followers are not forced to deny the normal functioning of physical and biochemical laws.
The fact is, however, that the distinction between religious and secular dogmas is fluid. Perhaps religions are nothing more than powerful bad ideas that have been elevated by their authors to religious revelations. But the willingness of many people to follow even secular dogmas, no matter what damage they may cause and how convincingly their ideas have been refuted, cannot be explained purely rationally. Perhaps a part of being human simply means acting irrationally; being guided not simply by logic and causality, but at least as much by emotions and beliefs.
Thankfully, in most Western countries today we are relatively free to devote our lives to any religious dogma we choose, as long as we do not harm other people. But the situation is different when economic and political dogmatism block overdue and critically necessary systemic changes. The hypercapitalist belief that the greatest amount of deregulation will ultimately bring prosperity for all is one such dogma that has long been refuted by the existence of ecological collapse and oligarchic cartels. But so many people still hold fast to it.
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