According to John Maynard Smith, the invention of spoken language ushered in the first uniquely human major evolutionary transition, and the invention of written language ushered in the second. Digitalization represents the third major evolutionary transition, which we are undergoing at this very moment. Digitalization will forever change the way we cooperate, but as this transition is still in progress, we have not yet figured out what form this cooperation will ultimately take.

As the situation is still fluid, we can use the opportunity to make sure that the way we cooperate in the future also solves the existential threats we are faced with. This is perhaps our last and best hope, because the threats we face are so intractable that they cannot be solved separately. To provide a solution, we have to go up in cooperative scale and complexity. Evolutionary scientists have predicted that eventually human cooperation will span the globe and form an intelligent superorganism. They call this outcome the Omega Point.

Problems are solved with added complexity, but complexity invariably requires more energy. If the problem is a river that prevents us from getting from point A to point B, a bridge will solve this problem. Building a bridge adds complexity and requires more energy than not building a bridge. This creates a conundrum in our current situation. Since we are already using too much of our existing energy resources, for the first time we have to solve our problems with less energy than before. This means that at the same time as we are taking a step up in complexity, we also need to take a step down in complexity. How can we thread this needle?

The most obvious answer is that we have to learn to solve the problems we have already solved at a lower level of complexity than before. This would then release energy we can use to solve the problems we have yet to solve. At the same time as we go up in organizational scale, we would also reduce the organizational complexity by getting rid of unnecessary and wasteful practices. Digitalization offers just the right tools that can help us with this.

To properly understand the transition we are in, it’s useful to understand the previous major transition in evolution, when human cooperation was transformed by written language. For a hundred thousand years, spoken language had set a hard limit on the size of effective organizations. It also defined how those organizations functioned. Until this point, hunter-gatherer bands and tribes were the largest permanent organizations humanity had seen, and they were usually organized as direct democracies, where everybody in the community had an equal say.

Written language upended this order. When humans transitioned to farming during the Neolithic Revolution, larger populations concentrated around the river valleys of the Fertile Crescent, the Indus Valley and the Yellow River, creating the first civilizations. These flood plains could feed an unprecedented amount of people and written language was an innovation that made managing larger and more complex societies possible. But due to the specific properties of written language at this time, the transition helped concentrate power in the hands of kings, emperors and other autocrats.

With an illiterate population, reading and writing were specialized skills that were delegated to scribes in the royal courts in ancient Egypt and Sumer. And since written language was analog information stored on clay tablets and papyrus scrolls that needed to be physically transported, this created new institutions and bureaucracies that were in charge of information. The people who oversaw these institutions gained a monopoly position on the flow of written information, and using this position, they concentrated their power for over five thousand years
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With digitalization, this tide is turning. Digitalization has connected all of humanity electronically, and the entire planet can now communicate instantaneously. What makes this particular evolutionary transition so exciting is that cultural evolution is finally catching up with biological evolution. Where biological life developed a way of transmitting information within the organism instantaneously using electricity, digitalization now allows us to do this around the whole planet. This has enormous democratizing potential.

Digitalization allows us to transcend the constraints imposed on us by the physical world. In the virtual realm, all of humanity, in theory at least, can simultaneously interact with each other. We now have the means to bypass all the unnecessary middlemen, monopolists and organizational hierarchies with a few clicks of a button. Digitalization also offers great promise in its ability to simplify our lives. The ability to coordinate in real time on a global scale is essential since only together can we overcome the insurmountable problems we now face.

What has hampered this process is the fact that our societies are still very much dependent on the pre-digital logic of the past. Instead of forging native digital solutions to solve our problems, we have merely created digital versions of the obsolete cooperative practices from the past. Needless to say, the benefits offered by digitalization have yet to be fully realized.

For a young person who has grown up with the direct connections offered by social media platforms and other digital tools, this must be especially frustrating. For them, it’s not difficult to imagine a much more efficient system. The problem is that the old guard is still in charge, and they not only benefit from the old system but also cannot imagine any alternative to it. The problem is also that the social media services we do have, have become monopolies and don’t serve the interest of their users.

Our parliaments and our banks are prime examples of pre-digital institutions that monopolized power in the hands of very few people. One reason modern states are governed by representative democracies and not by direct democracies is that it has been impractical and downright impossible to fit every citizen under one roof to make decisions. In ancient Athens, the largest political assemblies filled the 6000-seat Dionysos amphitheater. Today, direct democracies would require assemblies of millions, depending on the nation-state in question. These problems vanish when we move online.

The constraints imposed by the physical world have had a direct impact also on our financial logic for millennia. Physical money, meaning coins and bills, posed numerous practical problems that impacted the kinds of economic systems that were possible. While the analog world is governed by the laws of physics, virtual money only requires a secure database. In the virtual realm, we can also simulate any property and create any rule that serves our larger purpose. The only boundaries online are set by our imagination.

When it comes to information, the transition from analog to digital has turned physical scarcity into digital abundance. Analog and digital versions of newspapers and music are a great example of this. Every copy of a physical newspaper needs to first get printed and individually delivered to every subscriber’s door. A physical record also requires a similar logistical feat, taking them from the factory through various distribution channels to the store and finally into our homes.

But digital versions can transcend these hurdles altogether. Digital media is instantly available to millions of people with a click of a button. In the digital realm, marginal costs, which are the total production costs of one additional unit, approach zero. Such an equation is an alchemistic formula for abundance. In their digital form, we can today share endless copies of texts, audio and images with little additional cost. When it comes to information, at least, the internet is already a functioning horn of plenty.

But what about the physical resources and services we still need in the real world? Food, housing, clothes and transportation can’t be digitized the way information can. They still have to be provided in the physical world.

Digital technology allows us to allocate our resources much more effectively. Collecting the data about our actual needs takes out all the guesswork of who needs what and when. Switching from a supply-driven economy to a demand-driven economy, in which we first seek to cover basic human needs instead of having to create artificial needs with advertising, is an important part of this. By actively coordinating the use of all of our physical resources, no resource remains idle and we can reduce unnecessary redundancies to a minimum. All this helps redirect our economy and optimize the use of our scarce resources
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The way we should approach the virtual world is to use game theory to craft a win-win scenario that benefits everybody. We need to create digital tools that allow us to steer and coordinate our lives. Ideally, these would allow us to abolish physical scarcity and create an age of abundance out of the finite resources we have available. They should radically simplify the way this world works, allowing us to simultaneously take a step down in organizational complexity just as we go up in organizational scale at the same time. The challenge, which I think we can meet, is to satisfy everybody’s basic physical needs within the planetary boundaries.

For most people struggling to pay their bills, such a future seems impossible to fathom. The idea of universal prosperity and abundance doesn’t only seem to violate the laws of physics; it seems to defy the very order of the universe. Despite seeming impossible, the idea of a technology capable of producing abundance is a very old idea. The ancient Finnish national epic Kalevala, originally transmitted only by song and rhyme, tells a story of a magical machine, the Sampo, which can produce an endless supply of salt, grain and money out of thin air
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For the people of the north, struggling to grow their crops in suboptimum growing conditions, their physical reality was defined by a crushing scarcity. Where ancient Jews told stories of a messiah who would liberate them from Egypt’s bondage, for ancient Finns, their liberator was a magical machine that could produce abundance and well-being. Forged by blacksmith Seppo Ilmarinen, Sampo brings the village that possesses it prosperity and happiness. The epic tells the story of how the Sampo is forged and how two villages fight for its control until it is destroyed and lost at sea.

Like a perpetual motion machine, the mythical Sampo is considered to defy the laws of physics. As we know, energy can neither be created nor destroyed: it can only be transformed from one state to another. In the virtual world, however, the laws of physics don’t apply. In fact, money is already created out of nothing. When banks practice fractional reserve banking and abandon the gold standard, money is created out of nothing, just like the Sampo. But unlike with the Sampo, its benefits aren’t shared with the whole village.

In the win-win game we create, we can mold our monetary system to take on all the beneficial properties we can conceive of and have it serve the purpose we want. We can thus design a monetary system that creates abundance and well-being and that expands our liberty.

Solving our problems with digital organization doesn’t require us to break the old system. We just need to invent a better one. We need a functioning parallel system before we can consider abandoning the old system. To reach the Omega Point of cooperative singularity, we first need to craft the necessary software. The institutions that our society is built on should be seen as a tool or a technology that can be abandoned once better institutions are created. This is how a managed process of cultural evolution works. This is how a major transition in evolution is created.

Now that we know how we can meet the challenge we’ve set for ourselves, it’s time to start the design process.