STAGE TWO: HINDSIGHT 2020
Building new institutional constructs.
Stage Two could begin before year 2040, but after enterprise, economics, and governance models break due to a global scale catastrophe such as a pandemic, pervasive environmental disasters, inequalities reaching critical mass, automations eliminating more jobs than creating new ones, or a combination of massive disruptions.
Year 2020 was the year everyone in the world felt the cracks in our institutional constructs. It’s a natural entropy; these systems will continue to breakdown, but new solutions will gain traction. Particularly, Virtual Nations (V.N.) will arise offering guaranteed basic needs. These V.N.s will essentially be online groups utilizing currencies such as “Proof of Stake blockchain” for greater Social Capital (or smart phone distributed blockchain social capital). Many of the major social media platforms are positioned to evolve into effective V.N. systems. True V.N.s must be not-for-profit. Its governance can be augmented with artificial intelligence and includes ways to participate as a citizen, such as voting tokens for establishing policies and rules. Some current day V.N.s include: Bitnation, Asgardia, Sovereign Peace, The Good Country, and Republic of Estonia.
The general ethos for this Stage Two rebuilding period must be biomimicry, digital security and ethical automation. This is a time to increase technology usage, meanwhile taking the time to audit everything to ensure things like implicit bias, cyber threats and profit-as-purpose motives are removed from any system. A.I. with quantum computing power will be available to assist.
Toward the end of Stage Two, extreme poverty will be eliminated. Democracies will emerge where people truly have the power (rather than plutocracies or corporatocracies in which wealth and businesses hold the power). Some countries will be governed by technology as in a A.I. noocracy or technocracy.
A key component in the transition to Stage Three is an agreement between nation states to congruously and multilaterally reduce military might. The purpose will be to transition those funds to ensure maintainable health, education and infrastructure improvements at home, and afar in places prone to crime, suffering or war.
The only way to transition to Stage Three is a general higher level of empathy and consciousness brought about by medical breakthroughs, along with noninvasive brain-computer-interface technology. These technologies will have to be as globally acceptable, inexpensive and widely used as smartphones. Altering the human condition with technology has never been an ideal solution, but we will reach the point when we must choose to evolve, hide, or die.