Everything can be engineered.
By: Jo Bhakdi
Tags: Startup, Pioneers, Future, Future Of Society, Innovation

A central premise of my model of the future is that everything can be engineered and that any future we can imagine can be created in a short period of time.

To make this more than an empty statement, I want to explain why I believe that everything — including every future reality — can be engineered.

First, I want to make an important distinction. There are certain future realities that we will not be able to rapidly engineer, because we are lacking certain modules of fundamental knowledge about how the universe works that would be required to engineer them. For example, traveling at Warp speed. To travel at Warp speed, we would have to develop new, currently unknown modules that explain physics in more advanced ways than our current theories do.

Of course, missing fundamental knowledge is in itself not more than a class of engineering problems — but it is the most difficult class of engineering problems that exist. And currently, we don’t have the scientific and wisdom infrastructure to rapidly generate new fundamental knowledge modules on demand. To change this, we are working on the Lean Science Framework, one of the 12 core missions of the Federation. But we are not there.

Generating new fundamental knowledge is very, very hard because by definition, we can’t rely much on our current knowledge, which makes the task pretty much an imagination and logic freestyle exercise. And even if we succeed, the entire conventional reality engineering task still lays before us.

Fortunately, the vast majority of great human problems can be pretty easily solved with existing fundamental knowledge modules. Space Colonization, Nation Building, Preventive Medicine, Rapid Drug Development and even Nuclear Fusion are very much understood or don’t require step change in theoretic knowledge.

In this cases, reality engineering is easy; and the reason our society currently fails so impressively in doing so are of purely organizational nature.

This log entry has the objective to shed light on how to organize progress from a technical perspective, and bring together in one place what we know about the process of lean reality engineering.

This knowledge falls into three parts:

1. The process how to engineer any future we want in the shortest period of time. We call it the “engineering cycle”.

2. The people capable of executing this engineering cycle successfully.

3. The resources allocation logic required to empower these people.

1. The process to engineer any future we want (The Engineering cycle)

At any given point in time, humans are exposed to a current reality, A. We experience this reality and don’t like certain aspects about it, based on our basic emotional frameworks. We use our imagination to envision a more desirable reality, B, in that these problems are removed. We now have a current reality A, and a target reality, B, which represent the two basic reference points of progress.

As a next step, a reality engineer uses their creativity and knowledge about the universe to imagine a possible pathway that transforms the current reality A into the target reality B.

Once sufficiently designed, the reality engineer starts to build this pathway, or a prototype of it. It is of no importance if this pathway is of physical mechanical, procedural or theoretic nature. Once the prototype or first component is build, the engineer deploys it into the current reality.

In the third step, the engineer observes how the prototype interacts with the current reality, compares these data points with their projected data points, identifies the deltas, derives new theoretic knowledge and learns more about reality and their mission.

As a final step, the engineer than moves back to the first step. They re-imagine, re-build, re-learn and re-repeat.

This is the engineering cycle: an iterative process that can never fail and always eventually leads to the successful transformation of reality into a desired future.

The resources required to transform reality through the application of the engineering cycle can vary vastly, depending on how efficient the engineering cycle is being applied: The faster an engineering team can move through the cycle, and the more progress they make per iteration, the faster and cheaper the transformation will be achieved.

Designing and executing the engineering cycle in the leanest, most efficient way is the key lever of progress efficiency.

2. The People who can execute the engineering cycle successful (The Pioneers)

To executive the engineering cycle successfully, the engineers have to bring a set of attributes to the table. The engineers who are capable of successfully applying the engineering cycle, and therefore successfully engineering the future, are called “Pioneers”.

The attributes of a pioneer are the following:

a) A pioneer has rapid accesses to sufficient knowledge about the areas of reality they want to transform.

b) A pioneer has a very powerful imagination that allows them to re-arrange any knowledge component in new ways, and do so following the rules of first principles and holistic logics. Neither narrow logical reasoning without imagination nor imagination without accurate logical modeling are sufficient.

c) A pioneer is an effective builder of prototypes, and knows how to assemble physical, social or theoretic prototypes quickly, cheaply and effectively.

d) A pioneer is a sharp, unbiased observer, rapid learner and sufficient theorists in that they can generate new knowledge and theories with high accuracy and in short periods of time.

To find, create and refine pioneers and pioneering mindsets is a key lever of all progress, because it determines how many engineering cycles can be active at any given point in time. This is one of the core missions of the Wisdom Federation and the Pioneer Academies, which are currently part of Federation mission #1 (Federation CORE).

3. The resource allocation logic required to empower the pioneers (The Innovation Capital Infrastructure)

While the engineering cycle and pioneering mindset are optimized for lean operations and efficiency, they still require resources to operate. In our current reality, one of the greatest obstacles to progress is the near-complete absence of innovation capital: resources that are efficiently allocated into empowering pioneers. We currently don’t have an Innovation Capital infrastructure.

The lack of this infrastructure has vastly negative consequences of capital returns, economic growth, human survival and the pace of progress. There is no good reason to not build it, and its absence is mostly attributable to unnerving levels of dullness on the side of capital allocators.

The Innovation Capital Infrastructure would deploy capital into the best pioneers as defined above (rapid knowledge access and processing; imagination; building capabilities), and done in the form of risk-mitigating pioneer matrices. By spreading investments across larger numbers of pioneering teams, aiming at the greatest, most profitable challenges, investing at the earliest possible, cheapest stage and controlling for leanness and efficiency, the Innovation Capital Framework could fund vast numbers of pioneers, generate massively outsized returns and reduce investment risk to near-zero.

In accordance with its outsized importance for the future of human progress, the Innovation Capital Infrastructure has been declared an official core mission of the Federation (#2, Innovation Capital Infrastructure).

In combination, these three parts provide a comprehensive picture of how we can engineer any future we want. We need to finance the best pioneers to apply the engineering cycle to the greatest human challenges.

If we do so, all human problems could be solved in short periods of time. To do so means to Organize Human Progress; and this is the official mission of the Wisdom Federation.