Human Organization 4.0, part two

Poor Henrik Hybertsson, his vision was doomed to fail from the start.  Master Henrik was in charge of constructing one of the greatest war ships of his time, the Vasa.  It would be a marvelous achievement and one that would turn the tide of the war between what are now Sweden and Poland.  The ship was massive and its armaments were at least a decade ahead of their time.  It was a modern wonder for its time and the pride of the Swedish people.  The ship set sail on its maiden voyage from the ports in Stockholm on August 10th, 1628, sailed a few miles, tipped over and sank in the Stockholm harbor.  The Vasa was recovered (in remarkably good shape) in 1961 and is currently on display in the Vasa Museum in Stockholm… it’s a must-see for anyone visiting Stockholm in my opinion.

The Vasa is exactly the type of project that probably would not have been possible a century before its time.  It started as a joint partnership between Swedish entrepreneurs and the Swedish monarch and ended up encompassing much of the Swedish economy during its construction.  It was a big risk, one that failed, but also one whose risks were distributed amongst enough parties to minimize the impact of its failure.  Shortly after its failure, five other ships were constructed in its image, albeit with lessons learned from the Vasa.

Let’s take a walk through human history to see how this plays out.

Human Organization 1.0

Travel 10,000 years back in time and humans were mostly organized in family-centric tribes.  They were mostly hunters and gathers, but some permanent settlements were starting to form as humans learned agriculture.  Risk distribution was limited primarily to the tribe and incentive structures were focused primarily on survival and societal hierarchy within the tribe.  Technology was limited and information sharing was restricted to the tribes in the surrounding areas.

Human Organization 2.0

Human organization took a leap forward over the course of the next few millennia as humans began to organize in bigger groups, often united by religion, nation or trade.  Some large groups of people were able to organize and engage in massive projects like the pyramids in Egypt, the Great Wall in China or the Colosseum in Rome.  These projects were made possible not by the distribution of risk, but rather by the creation of persons powerful enough to accumulate significant risk.  Through this accumulation of power, large-scale war was possible for the first time.  During this time improvements in transportation, like roads, allowed information to travel much larger distances, sometimes even continental.  Incentive structures varied during this time, ranging from slavery to representative republics.  The 2.0 era of human organization showed that hums were able to coordinate on a large scale, sometimes involving up to millions of people.  But, the ability to enact large scale organization was still limited to a small handful of people at any given time and most humans during this time lacked the ability or capacity to enact meaningful change on their lives or surroundings.  It wouldn’t be until the 3.0 era until significantly more humans had the ability to finance, plan and execute large changes.

Human Organization 3.0

You’ve lived your whole life in the 3.0 era.  This era, kicked off in the late 1500s with the creation of the joint venture, has been defined by ever increasing spheres of “change agents”.  That is, the percentage of the population that can enact significant change through human organization has been and continues to grow.  In the 2.0 era a person needed significant political power, whether through military, nation or religion, in order to be a change agent.  In the 3.0 era a person needs either political power, financial wealth, or perhaps more impactful in recent times, societal influence.  The joint venture opened the door for persons with large wealth to undertake large projects through the pooling of their resources and provided an incentive structure for organizing other people, like tradesmen, merchants and government employees, into that endeavor.  Later evolutions in economic theory, like capitalism, and evolutions in governing systems, like democracy, amplified those effects.  Technology led to the ability of information to travel worldwide early in the 3.0 era and has since grown to the ability of information to travel instantly at the end of the 3.0 era.

However, the 3.0 era can not be the final destination for human organization, because it is still limited in so many ways.  Throughout much of the world, income inequality and government regulations limit who is able to partake in public and private endeavors.  Information may be able to travel in an instant, but access to that information is still limited and not all humans have the ability to contribute to that information.  Incentive structures are strongly aligned in monetary ventures, but ecological and societal innovation still lacks proper incentive structures.  The arc of history is towards more inclusion and thus the fourth era of human organization will open up access to change and participation in large ventures to all of the world’s population.

Welcome to Human Organization 4.0

The 4.0 era will be defined by the following trends:

• Access to financial, political, ecological and societal endeavors for all humans, regardless of wealth and geographical location.
• The ability for humans to efficiently express preference and the ability to weigh that preference in decision-making.
• The ability to undergo projects in which the risk is born by most or all humans.

In the next few posts I’ll explain how DAOs, tokenization and liquid democracy will be the driving force for the above trends.  The final few posts in this series will speculate on the good and bad effects these trends will have and what further societal and technological changes might evolve as the 4.0 era evolves.

Before then, a final note about poor Henrik Hybertsson… he died prior to the maiden voyage of the Vasa and never got to see its completion or its failure.  However, it’s clear that while his endeavor failed, it led to a better understanding of ship-making and of management that led to the success of the five ships that followed and contributed to the general body of knowledge for ship-making.  That’s the key to the 3.0 era… early failures led to later successes.  I believe that’s also the key to the 4.0 era and we will see rapid failures in the coming years and decades that lead to learning, evolution and, ultimately, a success that will speed up the pace of human development.  See you in the next post.

By Kyle Langham, Director of Data & Analytics @ DFINITY Foundation