A Lego? Set for our Planet

Many of you will have watched one of those disaster movies in which the Earth faces an impending meteorite impact, a deadly plague, an alien invasion or some other existential threat, and the plot line is all about individuals and nations collaborating on solutions to save the day. Well fact is indeed stranger than fiction. We are facing an existential threat but the jury is still out on whether we can get our act together as a species to save our planetary bacon.

Our human brains really struggle with exponential change - deceptively slow at first but by the time you wake up to it, you are overwhelmed. Like the proverbial lobster, we are slowly being boiled alive but unlike the lobster, we turned up the gas and jumped into the pot ourselves! Switching analogies, the longer we bury our heads in the rapidly setting “climate concrete”, the harder it will be to pull them out; the cost, complexity and difficulty of the solutions will grow exponentially too.

Whilst in the Tolkein sense, climate change really is the “one to rule them all”, there is a growing list of other wicked exponential challenges that we face as a country, a planet and a species, such as resilience to future exogenous shocks (including pandemics), food, water and energy security, ageing populations, planetary levelling-up and so on. Solving these mega-challenges will require moonshots, or rather earthshots, so what lessons can we learn from the original mission to put a man on the moon?

As you may recall, it started with a random group of individuals who got together to solve this challenge. They had no driving vision for what they wanted to achieve, no leadership, no agreed strategies and no concrete plan. They decided individually on the right solution and which parts of that solution they wanted to work on, based upon what they were interested in or had done before. They decided not to invest in tools to help them work more effectively, including the data and models that might help derisk the mission. They never agreed on a launch date but over a period of time, individuals turned up at the Kennedy Space Centre with their parts of the Saturn V rocket, the command module and the lunar lander. As anticipated, all the components magically fitted together without duplication and with no missing parts. It all just worked perfectly at the first attempt, and the rest as they say is history…

Obviously not! The reason this first moonshot was successful was down to an alchemical blend of vision, courage, creativity, planning, agility, passion, collaboration, discipline, the leadership and engineering excellence exhibited by NASA, JPL and many contractors, and of course a huge amount of luck. In contrast, our planetary strategies for tackling climate change appear uncoordinated and verging on random - planetary scale leadership powered by Brownian Motion.

Yes, we are indulging in a technology futures game, betting that technologies we have not yet invented will save the day, but technology is not the biggest obstacle to our salvation:

• We lack big, bold, holistic and long term visions for the future of our countries, our planet and our species.
• We lack the political and ethical frameworks to drive decisions and actions on behalf of our planet, our species and indeed the ecosystems of species we coexist with, both now and on behalf of future generations; new ways of thinking, acting, collaborating, governing and regulating that can transcend national borders.
• We need to find new ways to drive innovation on behalf of our planet and our species rather than just the vested interests of nations, companies and their shareholders; a new form of planetary scale matrix management to get the best brains on the right problems regardless of their home nations.
• We need to transform our horribly linear knowledge based education systems into ones based upon a set of enduring meta-skills, to produce many more big off-piste thinkers, inventors, innovators and engineers; to prepare future generations for the much more complex, challenging and frankly dangerous worlds they will inherit.
• We need to equip ourselves with new tools and platforms to enable us to innovate smarter, faster and with less cost and risk, or to quote the marooned astronaut Mark Watney in the film The Martian, we are going to have to “science the shit out of this”.
• And we need to do much much more…

So what’s the answer? Well doing more of what we have done before and hoping for a different outcome, is not the answer. Nonlinear challenges demand nonlinear responses that can bend space time, or to put it another way, the human race needs to find itself some innovation wormholes...

Some of you may be wondering if the metaverse could be a powerful example of such a wormhole. Unfortunately the emerging visions for the metaverse are an amalgam of immersive virtual worlds, predominantly focused on things like gaming, meeting people, transacting for unnecessary products and services, watching immersive cat videos, having your data fleeced and so on; these visions lack both purpose and substance.

Solving those wicked exponential challenges will require harnessing the creative and intellectual power of the human race in new ways that can transcend cultural, political and geographic boundaries, in order to maximise diversity of thought, experience and expertise. Other than for gaming, most of the virtual worlds that have been built or envisaged for the metaverse are about recreating virtual replicas of our physical world, which is frankly missing the point. Instead we need to build virtual worlds based on their intended purpose - the challenges and opportunities they can help us tackle.

So a compelling purpose for the metaverse would be to create virtual worlds and immersive environments for collaboration, coordination, communication and problem solving at a planetary scale, to work smarter, faster and with less cost and risk, to ideate, innovate, design and test solutions, and so on. Virtual worlds to empower a diverse ‘hive mind’ of passion and creativity; virtual worlds as the force for good that social media could and should have been.

The lack of substance within these metaverse visions relates to the fact that they are almost entirely focused on the digital, despite the fact that we live in a cyber-physical world. Where our physical and digital worlds collide live magical technological beasts such as digital twins, smart machines and living labs, and it is at this intersection the most important and exciting things happen.

For example, tackling climate change will require harnessing data, AIs and digital twins to increase our understanding of our natural world and to reduce the impact of our man-made systems upon it. As citizens and businesses we are stuck like rabbits in the headlights, either not knowing what to do or paralysed by a lack of first mover advantage. For those old enough to remember games like SimCity, we need to break this deadlock by gamifying climate change with SimEarth games. We need to use dashboarding and modelling to visualise the impact of the personal decisions we make as citizens, to nudge our behaviours, to educate, to drive coordinated actions, and to foster healthy competition.

However, given that it is now arguably 30 seconds to midnight, our interventions will need to be massively reproducible, scalable and resilient. For example, orchestrating swarms of clean energy powered smart machines, on and under the ground, on and under the sea, in the air and even in space, to help us scalably measure, monitor, clean-up, re-plant and repair our planet.

So the vision for the metaverse needs to embrace both the digital and the physical - it needs to be a cyber-physical metaverse. This is a key strand within the vision for Cyber-Physical Infrastructure authored by the UK Robotics Growth Partnership and published by the UK government last year.

One way to express this vision is that it is about creating a cyber-physical Lego? set, to drive greater innovation, collaboration and interoperability across companies, industries, sectors and even countries. The base board and initial pieces of this Lego? set would be assembled incrementally, piece by piece, by piggy-backing on existing public sector missions, creating the shared foundations to support further innovation and investment by the private sector.

We need this Cyber-Physical Infrastructure not just to foster greater agility in the face of growing uncertainty and to build resilience to future exogenous shocks, but also to power greater prosperity, efficiency, diversity and sustainability during normal times. We need to make the money that we will be spending go further, by reducing inefficiency and waste, and increasing sharing, interoperability and reuse, especially when it comes to re-engineering our public services and national infrastructure.

For example, we will need clean-energy autonomous logistics for our healthcare system, for defence, for supply chain resilience and for our public transport, and we need these solutions to be able to collaborate and interoperate. Yet we currently lack the systems thinking and joined up approach required to develop such infrastructure once for shared cross-sector deployment. Like great cooking, transformative innovation is all about the ingredients (e.g. technologies, competencies, talent), utensils (e.g. tools, infrastructure, building blocks) and recipes (e.g. ways of thinking/ doing, culture, leadership, vision); for the alchemy to work, you need to work at all three levels.

Someone recently shared a powerful analogy with me. Karl Benz patented the car in 1886 and over the next 100 years there were continual improvements to the designs of cars and engines, until these eventually started to plateau. The next big leap in efficiency and performance came from embedding intelligence into cars, and a modern car now contains maybe 100 embedded computers. They made the point that the same is true of our cities, because there is only so much we can do to improve existing (often ancient) streets and buildings but by embedding intelligence into them, we can transform how they behave.

I believe this analogy is very relevant to tackling climate change. We can help to make our world more sustainable by embedding connected smartness, collaboration and optimisation at every level - into our products and services, our homes and offices, our cities, our public services and national infrastructure, our countries and our planet.

But we need to go further. The digital twins of our planet and our man made systems mentioned earlier could be a stepping stone towards something even bigger, namely building a federated planetary operating system to help us optimise how we run our planet for the benefit of all its inhabitants.

In summary, we need to stop behaving like a bunch of squabbling tenants, who haven’t been looking after the building properly and who are now surprised they are facing eviction. Instead we need to turn that building into a smart, self-managing, self-optimising and self-maintaining sustainable ecosystem, and to do that we need a new Lego? set!

Paul Clarke CBE FREng

Paul is an independent advisor, working on a portfolio of government, industry and startup advisory roles, including being a member of the AI Council and co-chair of the Robotics Growth Partnership. He was an advisor to the National Food Strategy and on the Innovation Expert Group that contributed to the UK’s Innovation Strategy published by the UK government. He was previously CTO of Ocado, where he led the sharp end of their innovation factory for many years.