THE GLOBAL CONTEXT WILL HAVE TO CHANGE, OTHERWISE…

"The actual form and function – of twenty-first-century capitalism is an extractive circuit which quite literally crisscrosses the world" Chaudhary (2021)

Humanity faces a massive dilemma about its future. In an extreme view, it occurs that it is heading towards extinction through exhaustion and the contamination of the ecosystem. In this context, Ajay Chaudhary (2021) wrote a devastating article about the prevalent social and capitalist system, which is still very extractive. At the other extreme, there is an optimistic view emerging that technology will allow us to overcome such obstacles as in the past, as defended by the futurist philosopher Gerd Leonhard (2021).

?Is the future reality somewhere between these extremes?

?The idea converges that the current socio-economic model, still with a very extractive ground, is no longer adequate to serve the enormous human population that craves a standard of living of consumption similar to that of the Western people. The present model has more than 200 years, conceived in a European context that expansion would be "infinite" due to colonial territories and benefited from slavery or over-exploited labor (cheap and without rights). It was also a period of significant technological expansion, especially in engineering and medicine, which allowed humanity to overcome the worst obstacles afterward.

The political-economic system has generated benefits through Wealth Growth (such as profit) and the Welfare State. But, it did not consider the limitations of the ecosystem it served. It explored the natural world without rules and at no cost to producers and consumers, except to natives and Nature. It regarded those third-party issues as externalities. They had not to be accountable to any political or business entity, even in the abstract. The attitude was like an anarchic use and destruction, in the case, of something afterward known as the Common Good of Nature.

Some western societies became very wealthy; their populations have themselves been accommodated to the torpor of easy and cheap consumption, as long as they didn't feel it on their skin or if it occurred far from their living region.

?Yet, more people in the world began to desire to benefit from the same high level of consumption. However, the world population has increased at such a rate, becoming incompatible with the planet that shelters it. Every people aims to be a consumer society equal to the American, but without self-sacrifice. But, to feed the increasing consumption, the economy has to grow continuously (by GDP) and produce without limits through the conventional model. After that, it has to continue extracting matter from Earth and contaminating it, despite its restricted physical size.

The exhaustion and contamination of the planet already seem very evident. And hundreds of climate summits, such as COP26, with beautiful words of intent but without major resolutions that demand some sacrifice, will not be enough. Likely, the squeeze in gas emissions is insufficient, and the inertia of the destruction process will hardly be stopped but delayed.

?Some make-up and superficial interventions will be insufficient. The rupture would be grander, implying an alternative way of living, consuming, and producing. Indeed, the future socio-economic model would have to be sustainable to preserve the ecosystem. The present model can't achieve that essential goal; instead, it configures to be a misfortune, especially for the current young future adults. And the poorest majority of people on the planet will die of thirst, hunger, heat, or drown in floods. Therefore, desperate millions would move to the wealthy North. Bloody conflicts between nations may arise.

The entire economic system will have to change. It does not serve the typical linear and simple value chain that starts with extraction (raw material, fossils, and humans). It then moves on to highly polluting production and distribution processes. It ends in wild consumption and then is thrown away, generating not valued but contaminated waste. The planet cannot handle the scale that the process has reached.

There is a model that humans may copy. There is an entity far more intelligent than humans to which they belong - Nature - that executes such a model. Hence, it is Nature that creates life and (human) intelligence. It is a system based on continuous cycles that makes more "infinite" solar energy from the regeneration of plenty of matter, soil, and sea nutrients. The future socio-economic model will have to fit into a bioeconomic model from which it expects more than the circular economy.

The value of the living human body (EVHL) exceeds thousands of times the cost of its materials. This value increase should be the goal for the product in a sustainable economy. And from here, it takes us to the Systems Theory, which links to new emerging engineering issues (genetics, nano, informatics, and systems). It is a non-linear model far beyond the current, a linear and extractive of the ecosystem.

We are all advancing in a context of technology that grows exponentially, as the next ten years will change more than the last hundred (Leonhard, 2021). The new model will depend more and more on science - or, on its practical arm, engineering. In previous centuries, intelligence, expressed in the technology created and applied by engineering and medicine, made it possible to solve the most severe problems of humanity, from eradicating diseases to increasing productivity by mechanization.

Human saving will depend on open and effective collaboration between the most diversified specialties, and not the same practices that dominated the actual power for 200 years; or, when repeated the same old formulas, only with new outward clothes, often only illusory.

Sure, it will not be easy to change the economic model.

Democratic capitalism should continue to be the most successful system compared to autocracies, dependent on the single brain that may go wrong. It thrives on the multiplicity of interactions and processes that must be fluid. Therefore, its advantage lies in the ability to adapt and reinvent itself to successive new contexts, operating through the interaction of all agents in the market. It is such as billions of producers and consumers who assess and readjust themselves to everyone's needs and realize value created from creativity and intelligence. In this context, the capitalism of many agents may imitate Nature, such as the infinite bacteria and living cells that regenerate and create value through their various interacting flows.

It is necessary to understand how to assess wealth to create a more sustainable world.

The concept of wealth has not always been the same throughout Human History. In the first human societies of rudimentary technology, the main concern was survival. The value of wealth lay in possession of agricultural land and enslaved people to work on it. Agricultural surpluses due to technology allowed to creation and development of cities, which have been the effective hubs of information exchange, such as commerce, and the centers of power for the elites that controlled the remaining society. This environment created even more sophisticated contexts with the emergence of art and writing that, in its turn, stimulated more knowledge. The concept of wealth was evolving to more immaterial levels due to social interaction, such as the status or possession of rare minerals (gold) used in commerce.

Transactions stimulated human interaction, demanded institutions for regulation and order, and induced trust. Societies consolidated in continuous cycles of rupture and progress, with increasingly complex and sophisticated processes supported by more effective information technology. Competencies and attitudes grew to new contexts based on more intangible attributes dependent on codes (writing, mathematics) and on patterns of social behavior, which further accelerated mutual trust, creating abstract concepts of wealth such as the current money.

The production of goods and services still depends too much on matter extracted from the bowels of the finite planet to serve more and more billions of humans eager for consumption but who contaminate (almost) without conscience. The current economy appears to be sophisticated, but from the perspective of the natural world that sustains it, it is millions of times more predatory than the practice of primitive hunter-gatherers.

The current model is at the heart of the destruction of the humanity that it should serve. The material expression of the product and the scale of production will have to wane. The planet does not receive material from the outside, but it will have to preserve the existing one. In this context, great opportunities will arise for biotechnology, genetic engineering, and nanotechnology applied to new materials to be continuously recycled.

The modern world benefits from an attribute that was less current in the past - the intelligence applied to processes and expressed by technology, a unique product of science and engineering, which has become the leading accelerator of the modern economy. Technology should be a facilitator of flows that dynamize the economic system that operates between humans or between them and the material world. It is no accident that economies that value STEM activities tend to be the richest.

But, the pinnacle of wealth creation will be in more immaterial attributes. The added value should come from intelligence, creativity, ethics, cooperation, empathy, conscience, and human behavior (which should prefer to share use rather than selfishly possess that good). Today, everyone can observe the emergence of a more dematerialized wealth expressed in issues like securities, cryptocurrencies, or tokens.

In the few countries that have reached the highest levels of protection and comfort, their inhabitants tend to benefit from good technical and human training. There, the pattern of wealth tends to be less materialistic. They prioritize self-satisfaction, personal relationships, happiness, and good life experiences. Most of the remaining world countries are still extra predatory with relevance to China and Russia. In a somehow ideal future, the concept of wealth may rise to a sublime level of interpersonal cooperation and sharing. That context may not be relevant for owning goods exclusively but rather preserving such environments where everyone can enjoy, experience life, and use shared spaces and goods.

?The creation of wealth in modern society or the value of a business should depend more and more on the combination of three platforms -?Hardware, Software, Humanware." That is the issue to develop in the following article.

?The original article, in Portuguese, was published in the online magazine Engenho & Arte

?Lisbon, May 25th, 2022

?Jo?o Correia Gomes (Ph.D., MSc, Engineer)