The better system we intend to build will not manifest itself so much in the physical world. It doesn’t require new buildings or infrastructure to exist. All the hardware it needs has already been invented and built. When you boil it right down, the system we are creating is really just an online communications platform, the civic technology we use to run our society. The platform connects all willing citizens and organizations into a single network where they can interact and seamlessly coordinate their activity across the globe.

From the perspective of an individual, the system will be an electronic dashboard that helps us optimize our life on this planet. To work, this dashboard has to be easily used on every mobile device.

When we set out to organize all the information around us into a personalized dashboard, what every citizen needs first and foremost is a firm sense of control. When we steer right, we turn right; when we press gas, we go faster; when we hit the brakes, we come to a full stop without hitting the object in front of us. And more to the point: when we set our mind on something, it happens.

Our actions have to produce the intended results. Our money, when we spend it, has to produce results. The choices we make have to have an impact. For us to flourish, our system needs to be responsive. This is how every political and economic system should work. Everybody should be able to contribute their share and see their work and choices bear fruit.

The first challenge such an information system faces is separating clear signals from mere noise. We can use the development of the human brain as an example. When a baby is born, its brain is still unable to process most of the signals its nervous system feeds it. While the baby’s nervous system already connects every body part with the brain, it is incapable of delineating one signal from another. A signal from the foot is indistinguishable from one received from the arm, so they’re still perceived as mere noise.

The child is also unable to control its motor functions and can’t send basic commands to its limbs. Instead, the brain is awash in random electrical activity, noise, that results only in arbitrary twitches in the body. Over time the baby is capable of distinguishing more and more signals from this noise. Once a signal is established one way, the child can learn to send commands with less noise to its limbs. After thousands of dropped objects, the child learns eye–hand coordination and the fine motor skills required to manipulate objects with their hands.

With daily training the child will eventually gain full control of its motor functions. The noise will eventually be replaced by clear signals going both ways. Our ability to control our bodies can be perfected by repeated training. The training will insulate the neural pathways with myelin, making the signals clearer and faster.

By undergoing repeated training in sports or the use of musical instruments, this insulation grows even thicker, rendering the neural pathways even more effective. The signals we send and receive become more precise, which allows us to gain even better control over our bodies and perform amazing physical feats.

To expand our ability to control not just our bodies, but our community and even the planet, we need to create clear signal pathways between our dashboard and the world around us. By learning to turn the flood of information we receive each day into clear, actionable signals, we hope that we can react much more appropriately to our environment despite the amount of information we receive increasing overall.

To accomplish this, we first have to connect the everyday lives of citizens directly to the physical reality of our planet and to the lives of their fellow citizens. Only by having a direct connection to the consequences of our actions can we reduce our material footprint and learn to do more with less. The dashboard allows us to respond to changing circumstances as rapidly as systems in nature. When we are knocked off balance by outside forces, we need a system that brings us back to our optimum state.

Our most important design challenge is how to specifically wire all the information pathways so that the system becomes responsive to each individual citizen. How we wire the machine-readable reputation system is our biggest individual challenge. A system’s ability to maintain its homeostasis is built on an intricate web of feedback loops that in a blink of an eye transmit only relevant information to exactly where it is needed.

Only the correct wiring guarantees that we can react intelligently and return to the virtuous circle that elevates our quality of life. The AI and the incentive system we create should help gently steer us towards the best answers by virtually transposing our individual value systems onto the world we inhabit.

When it comes to the rapid and reliable flow of information, we humans are the weakest link. This means our communication cannot be based on human language. The production, transmission and uptake of human language is simply too slow and complex to be effective. Our brain and nervous system communicate with electrical signals, which allow our body to respond to new stimuli in mere milliseconds. The internet is also based on electronic signals that can transmit information across the planet in seconds.

The real bottleneck in communication occurs when human language is added to the mix. As every bureaucracy on the planet can attest, communication based on human language moves at a crawl. Our reliance on complex languages with vast vocabularies makes rapid responses and unambiguous communication next to impossible.

In order to create a seamless and instant system of communication, we need a signal language that can replace our slow and cumbersome language-based commands. The commands we use need to be unambiguous and immune from any attempt to distort them. Only with the use of machine-readable signals can our marketplace and decision-making platform work as intended.

Traffic signs are a perfect example of the efficiency we are looking for. Imagine if at every intersection we had to stop and read an intricate explanation of how we should navigate this particular crossing. Instead of using language-based explanations, we use simple color-coded symbols and signs that allows everybody to behave as intended without ever having to slow down to do so.

In electronic systems, our command signals will ultimately take the form of computer code that can be executed instantaneously. The signal language we use needs to correspond to the underlying computer code that executes the commands in practice. In the dashboard’s user interface these commands will be represented by visual icons and the commands will be executed in an instant.

An additional design challenge is to render the complexity of our economy and the way we make decisions into a simple and understandable visual system. Too much complexity and the platform becomes unusable in practice. Too simplistic and it stops corresponding to the underlying reality. This is why designing the visual interface will require almost as much ingenuity as the underlying system itself.

Since our system is really just a communications platform, all standards need a visual representation. Conversely, standards that can’t be effectively visualized probably need to be amended or abandoned altogether. Since humans and machines meet on the dashboard’s visual interface, its importance should not be underestimated. At times, the design of the interface should even take precedence and drive the development of the underlying system and its logic. Usability is a primary requirement of the system and its interface. Otherwise, our effort is for naught.

The ability to control our lives and the world around us with a simple dashboard will be reminiscent of playing a video game. Our hope is to create a reality that is as responsive to our commands as video games are. While it is an enormous simplification to equate our lives with a game, as a mental exercise it can be quite useful. By understanding how great games are built, perhaps we can learn to implement some of their principles in real life.

A highly advanced version of this dashboard would employ virtual reality to replicate our physical reality in detail. We could start this replication with the visual world and by creating 3D scans of everything we own. When we are done, we would have a collection of virtual objects stored on our account.

From now on, if we purchase anything new, instead of a receipt, the store would also forward us a virtual copy of the object. This way our virtual reality would accurately reflect the fact we have purchased the item in question and that we are its new owner.

Let’s say that our neighbor wanted to borrow a specific book from us and she sends us an online request for it. When we hand her the book, we update the status of the book to reflect the fact that it is in our neighbor’s possession. Six months later when we’ve totally forgotten about the whole thing, we search for the book but can’t find it anywhere. We check online and are reminded that our neighbor has it. A book that would have otherwise gone missing is now returned.

Now, once everybody has created virtual replications of all the things they own, we can turn this into a functioning online system that accurately tracks what is going on in our physical reality. By including ways to represent services and all the other elements our public life consists of, we have a fairly accurate virtual representation of our lives.

This provides us with insights into the bigger picture, the small details and the cumulative patterns of how we collectively behave. The data we generate can be used to create forecasts, simulations and risk calculations, which in turn help us to adjust and optimize our behavior.

Control is perhaps the most valuable thing this virtual reality can give us. But how exactly is this control gained? Mirroring reality by itself doesn’t add much control. Control is gained by performing a clever little switcheroo. 

We can essentially turn the sequence of events around so that the real world starts to track what has already transpired online. The online world can become the true and legally binding reality since all transactions and contracts are approved and implemented there first. The physical reality will then just become the place where these transactions and contracts are executed in practice. The online reality can thus be seen as pre reality, because it will be the first to tell us what will happen next in our reality.

When we reach the stage where our physical reality follows the command we execute on our smart phone dashboard, our ability to control our lives increases greatly. We can set long-term goals and backtrack the steps we need to take today to get there. We can identify and block out toxic financial relationships and replace them with healthy ones. We can cut out unnecessary middlemen. We can make sure that we get the maximum use and value of the resources we already have.

Our ability to live according to better principles hinges on our ability to craft these principles into a dashboard we use in our daily lives. The internet’s ability to connect humanity provides us with an unrivaled opportunity to reorganize our planet, transcend the analog world’s limitations and solve the existential challenges we are faced with. The design of our civic technology will play a critical role in how successful we ultimately are.