“I think civilization is fundamentally breaking down today.” These were the opening words of Salim Ismail’s talk at Singularity University’s Global Summit in San Francisco this week.
Ismail is the best-selling author of Exponential Organizations and a sought-after strategist and tech entrepreneur who built and sold his company to Google. He was founding executive director at Singularity University and has been the company’s global ambassador for the last seven years.
While technology has helped civilization, according to Ismail, it’s also partly to blame for widespread discontent that’s manifesting in the form of armed conflicts, terrorism, extremism, and nationalism.
A lot of the technological changes going on may seem like they’re confined to specific places, people, or groups. But the truth is they’re affecting us all.
Anyone with an internet connection has an unprecedented amount of information at their fingertips. Computers are not just learning to do tasks only humans used to do, they’re doing those tasks much better than us. Huge sums of wealth are concentrated in the hands of a few (thankfully, often philanthropic) entrepreneurs. Physical goods that used to cost hundreds or thousands of dollars have demonetized to the point that they’re practically free.
And it’s not just physical goods whose cost is dropping. Renewable energy, DNA sequencing, and services like rides and accommodations have seen plummeting cost curves too.
The same goes for capitalism. “There’s a massive deflationary dynamic because the money leaves the system as you move from scarcity to abundance,” Ismail said.
The distribution of all that wealth, though, is far from equal. Though abundance is growing, scarcity is still very real—and people are reacting.
“If you look at the rise of fundamentalism around the world, this is civilization saying ‘I’m freaking out, I can’t take this pace of change, let’s go back to an older time,’ ” Ismail said.
Even the institutions that were set up to deal with these kinds of conflicts have become somewhat irrelevant. The UN Security Council, for example, was set up to navigate conflicts between countries—but many modern armed conflicts are civil wars. Updating institutions that have been around for decades if not centuries is a project of dizzying scale and complexity.
Ismail then took the conversation in an unexpected direction, saying the best way he’s found to frame why this is happening is that we have two fundamental polarities in our archetypes as a civilization—male and female.
Despite the fact that many societies today are based on this democratic ideology, large swaths of those societies run on a set of top-down male archetypal structures. Ismail noted traditional corporations as a prime example: they’re pyramidic structures usually with a man at the top. Judeo-Christian religions are built around male archetypal qualities, as is the military-industrial complex.
What’s happening now, though, is the rise of the female archetype. Examples Ismail gave that embody the female archetype are open-sourcing, the maker movement, and hugely popular festivals like Burning Man.
“The stress we’re seeing in the world is that transition from the male-centric archetype to the female-centric archetype,” he said.
“The male archetype is really good at managing scarcity, command and control, search and destroy, go, grab, bring it back, designed for that world that we’ve been in for thousands and thousands of years around scarcity,” Ismail said.
For starters, Ismail said, “We need to architect our organizations and institutions for flexibility and adaptability.” Existing incentive models in business focus heavily on short-term indicators like quarterly earnings and are not set up for long-term changes. But the most successful companies have turned these models on their heads, with leaders like Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg, and Larry Page refusing to steer their companies in the status-quo direction.
The Fastrack Institute, which Ismail co-founded, is a non-profit organization that’s helping cities do just that. The Institute takes on a specific problem facing a city, like education or corruption, and analyzes it using a four-layer system.
Technology: What technologies may dramatically impact the problem?
Design-thinking: What innovative solutions can we see using these new technologies?
Business model: How do you fund it? Raise taxes, pay per use, privatize, etc.
Policy: What are the legal and policy changes you need to make to adopt the technology?