A Future Inspired By Nature

Imagine you wake up in the future and you look out of your window. What would you see, feel, and experience? Well, first of all, I believe that everything we do will be sustainable and circular. Nature never wastes anything, and all material moves through a lifecycle of usefulness.

I’m feeling confident that the technology and communications systems we are developing right now are going to help us do the same. Our technology (inspired, in many cases, by Nature herself) is going to help us work out how to do it, and the communication networks (already proven to mirror nature) and the virtual elimination of language barriers will allow us to communicate the critical importance of the changes right across the planet. What’s going to make the changes stick is our fundamental willingness to do it, and that can only happen if we share the ideas in every language.

An era of hyper-local and recycling

So, welcome to the future. We have stepped into an era of hyper-local and recycling.

A focused realm where your own personal 3D printer to your local production hub can produce everything you need, from the clothes that you wear to the electronic devices you use.

Even the vehicle that you drive (or fly!) will probably be produced in your own local town. Many of the products in your home have been designed and co-created by open-source communities. That’s why they are so good, and why they get even better at lightning speed. Gone are the days from the early twenty-first century where millions of versions of the same product were released to great fanfare on the same day. Remember that? When smartphone batteries caught fire and millions of expensive centrally produced valuable products became virtually worthless overnight?

The products you use today are constantly evolving and improving in digital form, so you request the changes you need, and hey presto, the adaptation is done. The things you need are now downloaded from the web as an intelligent design file and can be 3D-printed on demand. 3D printers (these days more accurately called ‘materialisers’) are now a mature technology and are able to print all kinds of materials, including your food!

Image: 3D printer of the company 3D Printers Online Store

The ‘ink’ in your printer comes in many different forms and you can load cartridges that contain almost everything – from transparent and fragile glass to super-strength titanium. Even flexible, synthetic plastics, rubber, or biodegradable organic materials can be loaded up. Materialisers (currently know as 3D printers) are able to 3D-materialise or 'grow' a wide range of materials on a molecular level, like metals, wood, plastics, carbon, and even entire electronic circuits and families of newly engineered super materials like graphene. When we 3D-materialise a biodegradable material or product, we can already even program on a molecular level when the material or product starts to deteriorate and returns to its natural form. We have struck a perfect balance of recycling and materials reuse at last.

Products and materials can now be grown on a molecular level and with molecular precision. Every material structure we can imagine can be created with a 3D materialiser. 3D materialisers can materialise almost every product you can imagine: electronic devices like smartphones and wearables, clothes, furniture, food, spare parts, bikes, and even entire transportation vehicles like cars and drones, including all the electronic circuits that are necessary for these to function. The packaging, where needed, can also be materialised – but we don’t need much packaging anymore because most of what we need doesn’t have to be transported over long distances.

Nearly all the things you need day-to-day, even new internal electronics for your smart devices, can be printed entirely at home (or at a local hub). If you aren’t sure how to assemble the printed parts, you don’t need to worry because minifactory robots can do it for you. Or, if it’s something that was printed in a local hub in your village or town rather than at home, there’s a smart network of drones or autonomous vehicles that will drop it to your door. It might even deliver itself! There’s very little waste either because old products are recycled by robots locally and ground materials are extracted and reused as printing filament for 3D printers. Missing or unique ground materials for 3D printers are shipped in by drones, and autonomous transport vehicles form other production hubs.

Image: Example of Amazon's autonomous transport

In addition, technology has transformed from hard, cold, and often unnatural-feeling devices to more natural-feeling devices that perfectly adapt to human needs. Advanced machine learning tools have helped us to unravel many of the mysteries of nature, allowing us understand and mimic nature on a deeper level, ensuring two key things: We will be able to create a new generation of technology that is more organic and feels more natural to us, and because we can see what a miracle we have been blessed with, we are looking after it better every year.

Innovate like Nature Does

Nature does her experiments on a monumental scale. You could describe her efforts as massive parallel experimenting. Some of her experiments succeed and others fail.

The experiments that succeed get more energy and focus and the experiments that fail are killed. Nature proves that this is a very efficient way to innovate, and she tries many new things at the same time and perseveres with the successful ones. Successful disruptive companies mimic nature and experiment on a massive scale all the time.

Every idea is built on assumptions, and big ideas are based on a big stack of assumptions. So how do you prove if the initial assumptions are right? What disruptive companies do is that they start by creating a small prototype, and that prototype represents or proves the biggest assumptions or risks in their initial idea. Then they show the prototype to employees and customers at a really early stage and ask them for feedback. That way they get to prove their assumptions are right (or wrong!) at a really early stage. From there they can develop and improve their prototype based on actual facts from their target audience. After a while, it’s possible to become so comfortable with the process itself that it becomes easier to increase the number of experiments, which is exactly what Nature does. Successful disruptive companies already work like this (for example, Google’s holding company Alphabet has a massive number of start-up companies in play at any one time, with each of those running many experiments, product tests, and market tests). That’s a far cry from what many companies do right now, which is building things based on their own assumptions.

If you’re able to learn that quickly from your target audience, you can gather massive amounts of factual feedback and that helps you to adapt to the needs of your environment (your target audience).

When you have the fundamental structures in place to manage this process well, then your company starts to behave more as an organism does. Organisms learn fast and adapt to their environment, and as you probably know, organisms that can adapt quickly to their environment have a much higher chance of survival than organisms that don’t.

The Future of Production: 'old-fashioned' factories are past time

Remember the days when things used to be produced in large, centralized production facilities called factories?

These days, they are almost a thing of the past. The only large production facilities that are built brand new are built in a way that is more like the organs in our body; they are sustainable, self-sufficient, and fully support a circular ecosystem. We are the most incredible machines, and thankfully we learned a few years ago how to replicate Nature’s processes in ourselves, and scale it to do other things. We learned the precise processes that the organs in our body use to serve the community of cells that makes up ‘us’. We discovered how our body breaks down raw building materials into nutrients that can be used as building material by the individual cells.

What is left of ‘old-fashioned’ factories are now run almost entirely by robots powered by artificial intelligence and are mainly responsible for the heavy industry tasks and breaking down the raw building materials so that they are ready for use as filament material for our advanced 3D printers. The focus is now on small, localized production hubs that are able to produce a wide range of products. We can program materials to fall apart after a certain period of time or after a specific trigger signal, so these products or materials are easier to recycle. Every new product will be designed and built following the cradle-to-cradle principle. Advanced product design tools that use smart machine learning technology are able to design very complex products with optimal strength and with the minimal use of materials, just like Nature does with bone structures. Because we are now able to create products and materials on a molecular level and in batches of just one, waste has been reduced to an absolute minimum. Almost every product you ever use is created on-demand.

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You were reading a chapter of my best selling book Humanification, I hope you enjoyed it. For more info check: https://christiankromme.com/the-book/

About the author

Christian Kromme was an innovative tech-entrepreneur for 15 years until he discovered the DNA code behind disruptive innovation and how to use this to predict the next big wave of technological disruption. Now Christian is one of the most in-demand global futurist keynote speakers, speaking in front of tens of thousands of entrepreneurs, business leaders and policymakers about the radical impact of disruptive technologies on humans and organisations. Over the years Christian Kromme has inspired many companies with his keynotes and his bestseller book Humanification.