The Future of Work – Understand how to build a better tomorrow What can we expect from the future?

Education, Innovation, Leadership, Philosophy, Policy, Technology / 9 minutes of reading

This topic has been done to death in recent years, yet we see no change in peoples’ planning or actions for their future working lives. Even policymakers remain in a stance that could be best defined as ‘inert’ in the face of the coming challenges. One must ask why.

From artificial intelligence, robots, and automation, to universal income and the inevitable new division of labor, this discussion is becoming more and more important; not just for the future of work, but for the future in general

“Labour was the first price, the original purchase-money that was paid for all things. It was not by gold or by silver, but by labour, that all wealth of the world was originally purchased.” — Adam Smith

Of course, Adam Smith was quite correct in his day. Today, however, we have an entirely different economic and monetary system in place, which, some might argue, has begun to undervalue labor as a concept as we approach this transition to a more automated and yes, labor-free future.

I always thought that the word “work” represented a desire for freedom and the ability to rise and create value. As such, ever since the first people used their skills to exchange value with each other, we can’t talk about the future of work without talking about the future of the economy. We originally designed the economy as a set of tools to help individuals to better manage their resources. While some will define “resources” as a stock or supply of money, materials, staff, and other assets that can be drawn on by a person or organization to function effectively, (Oxford English Dictionary). I tend to like the idea that resources are a set of actions and collaboration strategies we devise, adopt and used to better re-imagine ourselves and push the boundaries of productivity and efficiency.

Economic model

The economic model that we have been using is the deductive system we use to reward the inductive work of the body and mind to generate growth. The relationship between the system and the worker has traditionally been defined by the tools developed to improve the desired outcome of the task in hand. This is where change will be felt the most.

Since the invention of the axe, through Watt’s steam engine, sewage systems, elevators and shipping containers, to screens, smartphones, processing power and machine learning, it has always been actions that were reasoned in creativity, imagination, and invention. Human curiosity has literally designed and built the very world we live in. And now, when we enter a new era in human and societal evolution, it’s more crucial than ever that we do not lose this reasoning.

We live in a world where technology is augmenting almost every aspect of our lives and enabling us to enhance our virtual presence using code. Empathy, freedom, well-being, intelligence, education, governance, creativity, economics, and politics are primary benefactors of the exponential growth and impact of technology. 

For the first time in the history of mankind, natural evolution has reached the zenith of its potential. There is no place to go from a biological perspective. Yes, we might become a little faster and jump a bit higher, but we have reached a point where our organic structure just cannot evolve much more, or fast enough, to make any real difference to our lives. Even with genetic modifications – eventually – we will hit the limit of our evolutionary potential. 

Limited mental abilities

It is not only our organic structure that is facing evolutionary ends; our mental abilities are also severely limited. This is evident in the narratives through which we create the surrounding reality. From geopolitics and global c-suites, we have managed the world with a limited understanding of the challenges that lie ahead and thereby under-utilized our evolutionary potential in almost every arena.

It’s easy to jump to conclusions given the parade of tech celebrities and the list of studies, surveys, and op-eds that present us with apocalyptic scenarios for the future of work:

  • “AI will make jobs kind of pointless” – Elon Musk
  • 75 million jobs are going to disappear. Robots will take over our factories. Millions of truck drives will lose their jobs.
  • Oxford academics, Carl Benedikt Frey and Michael Osborne, estimated that 47% of American jobs are at high risk of automation by the mid-2030s.
  • McKinsey Global Institute: between 40 million and 160 million women worldwide may need to transition between occupations by 2030.
  • Oxford Economics: up to 20 million manufacturing jobs worldwide will be lost to robots by 2030.

Alternately, we can take a deep breath and understand that automation and algorithms will define the future of work. At the end of the day, machines are good at finding creative ways to perform better in human environments, and as the economy should be driven by growth. We shouldn’t fight technology – rather find a means to partner with it and together cross the Rubicon and define a new beginning.

A new beginning

“Change always comes in waves. While the wave itself carries uncertainty, the gaps in between are filled of hope.” – Unknown

I meet many entrepreneurs and often discuss the importance of curiosity in their journey, and with the same breath, I remind them that curiosity is not mastery. You can’t learn entrepreneurship: it’s an emotion more than anything. The trick is to harvest that emotion to drive your learning and experimentation. We are nothing without knowledge – it defines our ability to navigate life. And today, more than ever, knowledge determines our place alongside technology.

Our current education system was designed to take us from the school yard into factories. As such, it’s essential that we open-up the education system to the idea of knowledge through experience and experimentation.

No more gold watches

World renowned author and educationalist, Todd Rose has the right idea when it comes to the required adaptations our educational system faces: “It’s going to require that we have a focus on life-long learning because it is next to impossible to imagine that whatever we’re equipping you to do right now, that that skill set will be somewhat immune from disruption. You know, my grandfather literally worked for one company all his life and got a gold watch at the end. The odds of that happening for you are slim to none.”

There is a need to link business, academia, and policymakers, to establish a new playground; a sandbox where the next generation of teachers, engineers, businesspeople, political leaders, lawyers, artists, nurses, and doctors can find new ways to become better at what they do rather than simply being replaced by technology. A sandbox where we experiment with the idea that thus far we have used technology to upgrade ourselves – maybe it’s now time to use our humanity to upgrade technology. After all, what is the point of technology if it does not enable us to become better individuals and citizens?

The current generation of decision-makers base their values on the principles of efficiency. As such, they are locked in an endless loop of “thought fixation” regarding their views on the environment, sustainability, work-life balance, technology, and more. We live in a world that is continually being modified, yet rarely transformed. The questions we keep asking ourselves are questions that were relevant to a reality that obeyed the laws of physics. And we’re ignoring the fact that most of our economic interaction occurs in a reality that is anchored in code, where physics is obsolete.

We can easily list the skills that today’s children will need to successfully navigate the future:

  • Critical thinking
  • Analytical thinking
  • Creativity
  • Originally
  • The ability to solve complex problems
  • Emotion and passion

But why is that list different from the skills we have always needed to excel in life and rise to the apex of our potential? The truth is it’s not!

More innovation

Richard Gerver, another world-renowned educationalist, author, and speaker, understands this challenge more than most: “We no longer need a mass populace educated just to a certain technical level to function efficiently on factory floors. We now require a workforce that are more entrepreneurial, that are more dynamic, more creative, more innovative, more collaborative. To explore the spaces that have been created by the time-saving devices that robots and early AI have created in factory work spaces. But the challenge, the problem in a way, is that we’re still educating people en-masse to fill jobs in those factories and in those offices which are largely technical and about routine cognition. And so, we’re starting to see the early stages of a major clash between educated people and the jobs that are available for them. And we have to understand as a society, and therefore bleeding down into education, that we are no longer preparing people for a world that existed twenty, thirty, forty years ago. We’re living in a post-industrial age, and that means the number of jobs in large factories and large office floors is going to diminish.”

So, we know what the challenge is and that we cannot avert it. What should we do about it? How should our thinking differ as we search for more palatable pathways forward?

We need a set of new ideas:

  • We can’t use code the same way we use bricks
  • We need to move from managing for-profit, to managing for impact
  • Experience should be measured by the quality of choices and not by the number of its functions
  • Don’t confuse symptoms with the appearance and root cause
  • Assets need to build up into properties and capital to deliver value to society
  • Think of technology as a legal system. The legal system was designed to be used (and sometimes abused) by lawyers – entrepreneurs use technology – technology is never the end goal, but simply a path
  • Innovation is an ecosystem, not a job title
  • Engaging in iterative change ensures you follow the pack as opposed to reap the rewards of being a thought leader
  • You can never look into tomorrow using yesterday’s eyes

The intricacy of behaviors between humanity and reality is about to enter an unclear space. To navigate this space, we must remember that only when we face the unknowns can we excel beyond imagination; that fear is the spawn of ignorance. If we only consider what has already happened – or worse, what is currently happening – we can’t design our collective tomorrow. We must learn from the past, be present at the moment, and let those insights allow us to think differently about the future and its endless possibilities.

7 advices to build a better tomorrow

My advice for those who are willing to embrace that challenge to build a better tomorrow:

  • Your careers should be driven by an internal need and not the predefined expectations of your chosen career 
  • It’s okay to be unstructured. When you’re too structured and play defence by the book, you’ll lose
  • It’s okay to take time off. It’s in the gaps we often notice opportunities
  • The traditional education system can’t teach you everything (think how Apple, Microsoft, FB, and others were built)
  • Learning doesn’t end when you finish studying. It’s a constant journey of self-discovery that will last you a lifetime
  • Learning is a painful process. That is why most adults don’t do it anymore:

“He who learns must suffer. And even in our sleep, pain that cannot forget falls drop by drop upon the heart, and in our own despair, against our will, comes wisdom to us by the awful grace of God.”  Aeschylus

At the end of the day, it doesn’t matter what you choose to study. Let it be engineering, nursing, computer science, art, or teaching. Make sure you’re happy. Compensation for work is always an incentive – as long as you never compromise your moral values for money. The time you spend working is not as important as why you spend it working… And remember, life is short. At least until we can figure out how to transcend it.

Ode to Innovation – 5 Principles of Disruptive Innovation Environments

Innovation, Leadership, Policy / 4 minutes of reading

Thomas Edison once said: “Hell, there are no rules here – we’re trying to accomplish something.” In Europe, we are all about the rules. We have completely forgotten that progress is driven by creativity and inventions. I always like to think about laws (similar to language in many ways) in the context of dynamic movement rather than a stop sign. Unfortunately, the bright minds of politicians and public servants define our reality by focusing on everything that is not allowed, and ignoring the narrative that society is only great when allowing personal prosperity to flourish. You do that by enabling, not restricting, not by repeating the behaviors of the past.

Our decision-making process is designed on old assumptions that what already exists is right and should not be changed. The adaptation of technology is slow and driven by gaps of knowledge instead of understanding fractions, growth, and value. We are trying to feed old horses with paper money while expecting a free ride to a colonized Mars.

Rules should be designed to help you when you get into trouble, not to prevent you from getting there. Europe has lost its imagination, passion, and courage. The vision of past thinkers was way ahead of their time and gave us tools to push ourselves beyond anything we thought possible. We’re now closer than ever to a point where a sheer lack of creativity is defining our reality. We can’t continue to search for ‘the new’ by using patterns of the old. Furthermore, we can’t pave new roads, using old tools, and expect them to carry us into the future.

We know how to sponsor technological research. Yet when it comes to rethinking our policy infrastructure, we dare not challenge the status-quo. Yes, there are some experimentation here and there, but the majority of policy-based decision-making relies on fashion and trends rather than thinking. That is made clear when the outcome of public work is a report rather than a result. We use ethical reasoning to justify the judgement of individual moralism, and by doing that, we drive innovation and creativity to the fringe.

Joseph Schumpeter’s ‘creative destruction’ is the dissolution of “thought fixation” around old practices in favor of innovation that can drive new revenue streams. Instead of using resources to improve the past, leaders should pave the path to establish new routines of economic behaviors. You do so by continuously seeking new ways to divert organizational resources to capture and harness the data generated from consumer interactions with your outputs within the consumer ecosystem to rethink your input model. This is how you create innovation equilibrium – the managerial accumulation of creativity and invention in a competitive market that produces coherent results.

The 5 Rules of D.I.E

  1. Think in terms of ecosystem and ecologies – not job titles. It seems the point here is that you can’t go it alone. And change, innovation and transformation are not conceived on command. They come from the bottom up or from the outside, in – not the top, down.
  2. Innovation without creativity and invention equals what you have now (i.e., not innovation) Are you allowing for true creativity and invention in your enterprise? If you internally smirked before you said, yes – you take my point. Admit that you’re simply fast-following (at best) if there just isn’t room for creativity and invention in your business at present (you may wish to freshen-up your resume).
  3. Focusing on increasing your core earning model – and forgetting how to entice and defend it – will never give you the tools and know-how to expand the pie of your business model. If you’re just focusing on how profitable your business is today, your business will not be profitable tomorrow.
  4. Engaging in iterative change ensures you follow the pack rather than reaping the rewards of being a market leader. — Hat-tip to lesson #2, but as far as I’m concerned, this goes beyond never receiving the glory. In essence, we deserve what we get out of the geopolitics, social and technological revolutions if we don’t truly disrupt ourselves.
  5. You can never look into tomorrow using yesterday’s eyes. — In a way, this sums up lesson #1 through lesson #4. Fear of the unknown, of change, is the spawn of ignorance. If you only consider what has happened – or worse, what is currently happening – you can’t help us with tomorrow. Learn from the past, be present at the moment, and let that insight allow you to think differently about the future.

When we are the data

Innovation, Philosophy, Technology / 4 minutes of reading

Today, 3.7 billion people live in urban areas and that number will double by 2050, but cities and industrial companies (such as the automotive players) still operate under the 17th to 18th-century mindset. Most of our eco-social constructs have expired and our urban, medical, educational, transportation systems serve the limited information input/output model of yesteryear’s society.

To be able to survive tomorrow, we have to step back and take a holistic approach. It is essential to recognize that this gap is not due to a lack of technology. Like in several other industries, technology has progressed leaps and bounds in the automotive domain as well. However, the supporting ecosystem has been lackadaisical at best.

A new narrative is emerging, one that enables us to break the barriers of one-dimensional interactions and dramatically change our perceptions of identity, ownership, and society. In this context, Facebook became the world’s largest media hub, and while it does not create any content, it allows people to consume as much of the media as they can without owning it. People do not buy CDs; they pay to access music on Spotify. All of Alibaba, Uber, Airbnb, Netflix, and Amazon are operating under the access-based economic model. We are moving from a world of ownership to one of ‘access-ship’, and in that case, people do not need things in the traditional manner. They require practical solutions that fit their digital flow, i.e., they require a touch-point.

The time is ripe to take responsibility for the fields of potential that lie beyond the digital obvious. We need to cease the silo-thinking mindset in terms of software, hardware, human, technology and commence on the path to become the machine before the machine becomes us.

The era of digital augmentation is not in-front of us, but rather surrounding us. The enhancement of presence and perception through the use of coded driven content pushed our communication and languages to new heights and exposed us to new sets of awareness.

Augmentation of : Empathy. Freedom. Well-being. Intelligence. Education, Governess. Creativity. Economics, Politics, and more—gives us the ability to observe ourselves from parallel vantage points. To understand our genetic heritage and structure, design our cognitive process and social identities, we can isolate our internal mechanisms and create interactions that are customized by our intention and personalized for our needs and wishes.

For the first time, we are not simply interacting with data, but rather became part of the data that set our potential trajectories into the future.

In Areas such as artificial Intelligence, robotics, genomics, biotechnology, neurotechnology, adjustable reality and the codification (of value interactions) will let us re-imagine every aspect of our lives. We will be able to design spaces that are not governed by a fixed physical architecture, but dynamically adjusting to the wishes of the users. We can build cities that focus on experience rather than on productivity. And the visual elements of the city will be a personalized experience (Graffiti/ Street art/ Architecture and Advertisement will no longer necessarily be a social experience, but can be personalized to include or exclude based on your preferences.)

The time of “every device is an island” is certainly over, and the focus on ecosystems should be a thing of the past. Creation of products going forward is one of ecosystems, where collaborative and interconnected solutions with multiple expandable and inter-exchangeable business cases will flourish. Several key factors play a major part in the creation of such infrastructure, and every key element is a small piece of the larger puzzle that makes up the ongoing disruptive shift. The focus on creation of a whole solution is not one of a singular company, companies with the ability to see the whole picture from their place in the puzzle to best position for the future will flourish. Having a complete oversight of the customer journey, ability to forge alliances and strategic partnerships thereby enabling creation of infrastructure to package complete 360 solutions tailored for the mapped customer will be key to grow the core business.

Being observed

Philosophy, Policy, Technology / 1 minute of reading

We live in a world where technology is observing us more than we are observing it, and it is reality, the information doesn’t exist behind the screen anymore – we are the information. Every aspect of our existence is being quantified, stored, and monetized. This has already fundamentally changed the narratives of work, travel, mobility, finance and more. Yet, we keep driving our economic models based on buzzwords that force our resources to focus on technology rather on the development of humankind, individuals and strategic thinking.
When we keep building “smart” things (smartphones, smart cities, smart cars) the word smart means Technology.

We keep surrounding ourselves with technology and forgetting that our entire infrastructure, that may be cities, legal, educational, political and economic models can be traced all the way back to the Roman Empire. Moving forward, we need to rethink the fundamental building blocks of societal development and evolution, or we are simply building a house of cards.

Falling apart

4th industrial revolution, Innovation, Leadership, Policy, Technology / 7 minutes of reading

Humanity is facing an unprecedented change in its perception of reality and in the narratives that defined its existence. Much as significant extinctions that pushed the reset button for the entire planet, thus enabling rejuvenation and new creation, humanity is but a whisper away from such a reset. Since the invention of the axe, technology was always the force that paved the way for better and smarter social constructs. From Watt’s steam engine in 1775, Sewage Systems, elevators, and shipping containers to screens, smartphones, processing power, and machine learning, it is technology that helps us to push the berries and build our world. It’s the one function that never stops, it continually changes itself, reinventing and defining new horizons most, unfortunately, are now beyond our ability to understand.

The industrial revolution wasn’t just a buzzword, it was the cumulative impact of humanity’s maturity and acceptance that met with technology on the same field of understanding and mutual benefits—values. Yes. It bolstered urbanization, innovation, and creativity for many years, yet it is fast approaching a critical peak and is about to leave us facing the unknown, naked from knowledge.

For the past few years, a new breed of technologies is stepping into our arena. Areas such as Artificial Intelligence, robotics, genomics, biotechnology, neurotechnology, adjustable reality and the codification of value interactions enable us to re-examine and repurpose every aspect of our existence. From our digital-selves to the cities we live in, from mobility, energy, and communication to new financial models; the idea of our future is now anchored in code.

The future always required strategic, patient thinking and to be honest, before the 50s, these are qualities we possessed. Most books, art, or movies; written and produced had a holistic view of things. They describe a point when the world was dominated and powered by technological gadgets, body enhancements, artificial intelligence, autonomous cars, flying cars, cities in the clouds or underwater but most importantly they investigated the impact of these ideas on society. Sometime around 1983 – 1984 computation power shifted humanity’s focus from imagining to engineering. Suddenly, we had machines that could do the things we always did, but better and faster. We became addicted to them, we enslaved our mind, innovation and creativity, we outsourced our potentials and started to build technology for technology. We replaced our strategic vision with a tactical search for answers, we have surrounded ourselves with buzzwords like “the 4th industrial revolution”, “IoT,” “smart cities” and more, all while forgetting that technology was meant to be nothing but a means to an end.

Focusing on the means, we are now left behind and unable to see the end.

Maybe it’s time to rethink life by imagining the potentials and the desired impacts not only from a technological perspective but also incorporating ethics, morality, trust, and education into this equation.

 Without a point of reference that is anchored in experiences, it’s hard to tell the future

Hawking dismissed the idea that the existence of the universe can be attributed to a single point, in which everything that happened before is meaningless. Yet, we cannot ignore the fact that we did evolve from that point of the big bang, and we do not carry the heritage of things that existed before that peak. Throughout the years we have struggled to understand intelligence, and even so that organic and inorganic matters are both made from the same building blocks we call atoms, we still cannot breathe life to silicon. Maybe, intelligence is the narrative that manifests itself via the bonds and reciprocal relationships in the creation of a self-contained universe. Perhaps it is not a stand-alone “brain” but the fact that that brain is derived from the complexity and context that pushed that brain into existence. We have created beautiful technologies, but as we cannot break our “anchored in historical chains” perspectives while searching for life on other planets, we cannot “build” intelligence by merely copying existence into a code, and we are left with machines that operate in the realm of life yet are not alive.

It was not long ago that innovation boomed from the ideas of individualism, self-interest, logic, reputation, and honesty and by all accounts, life was good. It seemed that we had found the formula for economic growth and while the White House was busy with extracurricular activities in the Oval Office, a strange thing happened. Alan Greenspan, in the aftermath of the collapse, said: “I made a mistake in presuming that the self-interest of organizations, specifically banks and others, was such that they were the best capable of protecting their shareholders.”  The bigger mistake was that even so, all data showed almost no growth in productivity, the government sided with the 0’s and 1’s that continued to push numbers to new, unimaginable heights. We assumed that the “room can speak Chinese,” we were dazzled by the output. We had a perfect “distance economy,” and we missed the fact that John Searle’s “Chinese room” experiment created the illusion of intelligence to disprove that producing output that is identical to the product of understanding is equal to intelligence. Let us examine this for a second, in history, the success of intelligence systems depended on the idea that situations should be driven by their potentials and value is determined via the beneficial reciprocal relationships between the actors who make the system. In Searle’s demonstration, even so, that we defined the wished outcome, there is a disconnect between the actors. In the model of the economy, we took this yet one more step further, we placed a singular actor to define the inputs, outputs, and the value creation mechanisms—the banks. To make things worse, at each point of action there was a different view on the model. 

Why is that important? Because It was not the model itself that failed, it was the way we implemented it, and we are about to repeat the same mistakes just on a much larger scale. The internet did not create itself, it was humans who created the framework, and it is this framework which now defines our evolutionary path.

 The most significant risk we have as a society is not from the unknown, but for the known to fall apart.

For the first time in history, (at least the one we can trace back to the big bang) natural evolution had peaked its potential, there is no place to go from a biology perspective. Yes, we might be a bit faster and jump a bit higher, but we have reached a point where our organic structure just cannot evolve more. Even with genetic modifications, eventually, we will hit a potential limit. It is not only our organic structure that is facing an evolutionary stop, our mental abilities are also limited by their maturity peaks. This is also translated to the narratives in which we create the surrounding reality from geopolitics and global C-Suites. We manage the world with a limited understanding of the challenges ahead, and thereby underutilizing our evolutionary potentials in almost every area. The fundamental building blocks of society can be folded into three domains, mobility, energy, and communication. Traditionally, they always operated with degrees of freedom yet, they never applied that to the reciprocal relationships between them. Today, and because of technological development, these connections can manifest themselves via the codification of the logistic systems that carry the societal interaction models, yet instead of letting this natural process evolve itself, we are confining it to the limited information input/output model of yesterday’s society, and are therefore leaving us with output patterns from days gone by.

When the sovereign knows about the needs of a free market less than the players who are supposed to compete in that market, the value creation is twisted by bias. The role of the sovereign is to create a set of societal API’s that will define its own operating boundaries and at the same time will be open, so the market can repurpose them to its benefits.

Navigating the future

BRICS, Europe, Geopolitics, Leadership, Russia, USA / 3 minutes of reading

In recent years, the world has seen an increasing number of transformation-triggered events, from climate and other natural disasters, to epidemics, pandemics and a pending global war. The accumulated impact of these events will disrupt (yes, there are still systems that can be disrupted more) every aspect of our societal and economical landscapes. Managing these events as they come will strain our capacity. While facing the aftermath of the global Corona pandemic crisis and the upcoming energy and economic challenges, we need to realize that it is just a matter of time before the next event, one with potentially even greater catastrophic consequences. A severe event, which becomes an Opportunity for Change (OfC) Event, requires substantial cooperation among industries, civil authorities, and key international organizations.

To be able and brace the unknown, organizations, and governments must first accept that fact that they can’t escape the impact—evolution in driven by disruptions. Even if the result of the upcoming event will be half of what some predict them to be, it’s obvious that it’s going to be enough of a disruption to affect our political, societal, economical and technological landscape.

Second, it’s obvious that the emergence of a new economic landscape will drive the majority of changes. The dominance of the Dollar empire is fading away—and the more we try to fight the inevitable, the more the noose will tighten against our necks. This process didn’t start with the current war in Ukraine, or it’s a carry on from the days of Covid. The stage was set already in 2001 when Jim O’Neill coins the term BRIC. Jim O’Neill didn’t design BRIC, but rather simply gave it a name. The design itself was the result of the USA and Europe thought-fixations that they are of immune from disruption.

The emergence of a new economic landscape will not eliminate the current one, as it’s even set on the same playing filed—there lies the current system problem. While the leaders of the USA and Europe try to drive new values to their systems, The BRIC model is creating a new impact. Think about it this way—the iPhone is a direct decedent of the impact line created by the Gutenberg press (i.e., giving society access to information) and Tesla is a direct decedent of the Roman horse and carriage impact line. The new model is a result of an entirely new impact line.

This disruption is not the end as the media and some leaders like to portray it, but rather an Opportunity for Change. It’s not a bout choosing a side, but about figuring out what is the best next move for your organization, your government. It’s about cooperation rather than dictation. Situation are driven by their potentials. What we need to understand that there is a big difference between fighting the future and navigating it.

What should the Biden administration learn from the Voyager mission.

China, Geopolitics, Innovation, USA / 3 minutes of reading

The Biden administration move to cut China off from certain semiconductor chips made anywhere in the world with U.S. equipment is nothing more than a declaration of war not just on China, but on technological progress in general.

According to U.S. the rule is the latest in a series of moves aimed at slowing China’s technological advances, which the U.S. sees as a national security threat. I will not argue with Biden administration concerns for U.S. national security, as I wrote in the past, the interpretation of any topic is always subjective. Yet, the requirement by firms to obtain a license before using U.S. chip-making equipment to produce semiconductors for Chinese needs, will introduce a bureaucratic layer that will stop innovation and invention. While this move is mainly aimed at China’s military and intelligence services, its impact will echo all around the world.

Let’s look at the immediate implications. It’s easy to imagine how China would react—invade Taiwan and take over its chip infrastructure. That will immediately would be a major blow to the U.S. economy. What would U.S. do? Try to drive China back into the technological landscape of the 90th the same way it’s trying to do to Russia? How will China react? 

While the official story keep evolving around the narratives of the semiconductor industry, this battle between U.S. and China goes deeper than that and threaten society on a much deeper level.

The advancement of technology and science is already defining the geopolitical landscape, and its applications are poised to bring forward game-changing solutions in agriculture, health, energy and more. At the end of the day, it’s technological progress that will enable us to achieve leap-ahead breakthroughs, creating new industries, driving societal prosperity and eventually, expanding humanity to the stars.

I seam to me that the Biden administration forgot the story of one of humanity’s greatest achievement—the story of the Voyager. I know that NASA is proud of “owning” the Voyager mission. Yet if you take a closer look, you will find out that it was the international collaboration, the collective minds of scientist, engineers, and thinkers from all over the world, that made this project possible. This message in a bottle object, was deigned for a five-year mission to explore the outer solar system and were not expected to last more than a few decades. But here they are, still going strong after 40 years. The Voyagers have transformed our understanding of the solar system. They have made discoveries that have rewritten the textbooks. And they have shown us that there is so much more to explore. None of it would have happened without cooperation and collaboration.

Now that humanity is facing its greatest challenges yet, the Voyager collaborative narrative is more important than ever before.

U.S. focus on an outdated economic and innovation model is counterproductive. It will drive its economy and society to the days before World War I when the U.S. was able to look only inward (in a sense, it’s already there). The Biden administration need to remember that we are born into culture, we are not born with culture. It is something we learn through the interaction set by our environment. To instill a culture of creativity and risk-taking, you must have an assertive leadership team’s commitment to set the example. There must be a willingness to embrace new approaches and challenge the existing state of affairs.

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