10x MOONSHOTS: the Bannister effect?

Troubled times are periods of anguish and despair. Sometimes, they are also periods of miracles.  A moment when the pressure of circumstances helps us to achieve things that we could not have imagined doing in normal times. When the impossible suddenly becomes possible

Indeed, we live in troubled times today. At this very moment, when world economies falter, when long-anticipated resource depletions materialize, when conflicts rise everywhere, couldn't miracles happen that may help us reverse the depressing odds of decline? (1)

If we look at history, there have already been times when the pace of chaos has been reversed. When changes in paradigm have broken seemingly insurmountable limits, enabling a major leap forward.

It was the case 10.000 years ago with the discovery of agriculture. It happened again 300 years ago with the emergence of modern technologies and the industrial revolution. Couldn’t there be new miracles that would help us overcome the crisis?

50 years ago, the progressive advent of digital technologies has already begun to dramatically transform our society. Are there still new waves of disruptive progress to expect?

If digital technologies are recognized as a revolution today, there has been for decades a controversy over their actual contribution to economic growth. This has been coined as the ‘paradox of Solow’, an economist who observed in the 1980s that computers were appearing everywhere, except in the statistics of productivity.

A thesis widely highlighted by some media, keen to mock early statistics from any emerging revolution, but harshly demented since then with the dramatic economic impact of mobile, robotic process automation, artificial intelligence, and cloud.

Can we imagine what would be our life today without digital? If the car industry had experienced since the 1970th the rate of progress of digital technologies, cars would be today less than 1 millimeter long, could run at trillions of miles per hour, and would cost less than 1 cent!

But are we at the end of this journey, or just at its beginning?

Aren’t we reaching a new tipping point today?

Indeed, digital has not just reinforced our mastery of the physical world, as the previous agricultural or industrial revolutions did. It has added to our world a new virtual data layer. A new information space that has been first leveraged to manage our environment. Then used to simulate many of our physical business and personal activities. Then exploited to deeply optimize our world, with the revolution of Social, Mobile, Cloud, and Analytics. A still young revolution: let’s remember that the iPhone was just launched 15 years ago.

With the generalization of new exponential technologies such as the Internet of Things, Artificial Intelligence, Virtual Reality, or Blockchain, aren’t we going much further than just managing, simulating, or even optimizing our environment?

Aren’t we now truly EXTENDING it with virtual capabilities that are free from all the Malthusian limitations of our physical world?

Opening therefore to us an infinite range of possibilities, such as creating or managing:
⁃ limitless virtual resources and assets, from virtual territories to virtual goods and virtual currencies
⁃ limitless virtual personas: humans, digital twins, replicas or AI bots
⁃ limitless virtual organizations and even ‘nations’

Creating exponential impacts on people, businesses, and societies.

With a strong growth perspective still ahead of us, with metaverse, General Artificial Intelligence (GAI), and Quantum computing. Enabling us to reach maybe tomorrow the “singularity”, the supremacy of AI over human intelligence.
Boosting also innovation in other industries. Helping us to reach with GeneTech the Holy Grail of healthcare: personalized medicine. Supporting human augmentation capabilities with NeuroTech. Favoring the invention of new energies such as nuclear fusion. Promising to open a new era of space conquest.

Allowing therefore to create new moonshots; like the Apollo program that made it possible to reach the moon.

The new Cliodynamics (2) science has shown how the development of societies is structured by demographics, resources, and the way they are governed. It has shown how agriculture and industries have broken previous Malthusian limits.

At the very time when we reach once again a worrying gap between demographics and resources, may the digital revolution and its impact on other technologies change once again all the parameters of the equation to enable a new leap forward?
⁃ May nuclear fusion solve the fossil energy resources limitations humanity is deemed to encounter in the next decades?
⁃ May cognitive technology, AI, and genetic engineering deeply transform population demographic dynamics, creating huge risks of radical population divergence, but also creating incredible perspectives for human progress?
⁃ May blockchain and DAO technologies enable us to create new organization and governance models (3)?

So will new moonshots be made possible by the next waves of Digital technologies? Enabling to envision progress on a 10x exponential scale?

We are probably still unconscious of it. As it is deeply ingrained in human psychology, our beliefs tend to deeply limit our perception of the possible.

In the early 50s, for example, it was believed to be impossible to run a mile in under four minutes. This limit had been considered unbreakable based on a decade of unsuccessful attempts by all athletes. Until on May 6, 1954, an amateur athlete, Roger Bannister, broke this 4-minute mile barrier in an Oxford race. And the interesting phenomenon is that, in the following 3 years, not less than 16 athletes, in turn, succeeded in breaking this barrier.

This phenomenon has been coined as the ‘Bannister effect’: the effect of belief on success.

A barrier believed to be insurmountable is rarely challenged. Once it has been broken, general performance follows. The bar is set higher. And the previously unreachable limit becomes a common performance.

Are the effects of belief deemed to have the same impact on us? What will be made possible in the years to come? Will a whole new world open to us? A world where what would have been deemed impossible in previous decades may become a common reality? Traveling much further into outer space. Mastering the energy of stars. Transcending ourselves with new realities. And extending our reach to new digital multiverses. An infinity of virtual dimensions that may deeply augment, extend our physical world, and open up new horizons?

Humanity has always been in search of new frontiers. We often thought that we had reached the limits of the planet, in a world becoming ‘flat’, after the discovery of newfound land America and the progressive conquest of all the blank regions of the world.

The infinite digital universe and its virtual dimensions open a new space to conquer. May it be the 21st century’s ‘new world’ with its multiverses, its pioneers, its natives (bots and digital humans), its utopians (i.e. libertarians) and its colonists, its new empires (the mega digital corporations), the willingness of traditional powers to take control of it (i.e. US/China willingness to control the cyberspace…) or be a safe haven (i.e. Estonia), its gold (i.e. cryptos), its pirates (i.e. hackers),…?

This creates of course new risks for humans:
⁃ Risk of disconnect and manipulation between the map and the territory, risks of fake news, deep fakes, alternative realities, …
⁃ Risk of getting lost in illusionary back-worlds. We killed God and heaven in the 19th century. May we create virtual digital new ones in the 21st century?
⁃ Risk of creating IA golems such as in the Singularity forecasts.

The human mind is used to linear thinking, not to exponential thinking, creating therefore unforeseen dangers.

But this also opens extraordinary opportunities for people, businesses, and states.

Despite the multiple uncertainties of the time, doesn't digital open up impossible worlds for us to conquer?

The next post in this initial 'Global Transition Crisis' series will be published in a few weeks. Click here to subscribe >

'10x Moonshots' is the eighth post of our 'Global Transition Crisis' series. The previous posts of this series, 'ANTI-PREDICTIONS 202x+", "ESCAPE VELOCITY", "GREAT RESET", "DEJA VU", "HISTORY'S FORMULA", "UNCHARTED TERRITORY" and "ESCAPING FROM ZOMBIELAND" can be found here >   

_{(1) See the previous posts in our "GLOBAL TRANSITION CRISIS" series >}  

_{(2) See our previous post "HISTORY'S FORMULA" >}

_{(3) Decentralized autonomous organizations (DAOs) are a new form of governance structure popularized through cryptocurrency enthusiasts and blockchain technology, and that allows members to work collectively without trusting a leader. With DAOs, blockchain-based rules baked into the code define how the organization operates. Decisions are governed by proposals and voting to ensure everyone in the organization has a voice, and everything happens transparently on-chain. As Internet-native organizations, DAOs are considered to have the potential to deeply change the way corporate governance may work in the future.}