Vision

“We want to build a better world: a world where all humans, present and future, are free from basic needs and can flourish.”

We want to live in a better world, and work to build it. For us a better world is one where all humans, present and future, are free of basic needs and can flourish. 

The world suffers from many problems that need to be solved. A good view of such problems is given by the United Nations with the 17 Sustainable Development Goals (https://sustainabledevelopment.un.org/) directed to face those problems (the “humanity problems”): hunger, insufficient water and igene, poverty, lack of medical care, lack of instruction, genre disequality, lack of clean energy, lack and poor jobs, inadequate public infrastructure, economic disequality, unsustainable growth, unsustainable production and consumption, climate change, marine life disruption, earth life disruption, war and weak institutions, lack of integrated solutions for the integrated pursuit of all goals. The solution of these problems is urgent for their scale, rate of worsening, and impact, such as climate change and inequality. We hence strongly believe that some radical actions have to be taken to face them now.

Now humanity has the opportunity to flourish. Flourishing is a term coined by the scientists studying human happiness in a scientific way. The term was proposed to go beyond the expression “happiness” that is often generic and possibly not capturing deep aspects of what gives sense to life. In general, flourishing means to fully realise one's own life. Some specific aspects of this fulfillment have been identified and they involve: positive emotions (pleasure and joy: those feelings and emotions are commonly referred to “happiness”), achievement (the ability to accomplish own goals), engagement (the engagement in activities where we feel fully immersed, successful, and rewarded), relatedness (the enjoyment of parental, friendship, and romantic social relations), and meaning (feeling to be part, and to act for, a “whole” bigger than oneself).

We aim to understand in depth, through methods of science and technology, the deep causes of human problems and of human flourishing; we aim to use the best technology and best economic practices to design and implement innovative projects to satisfy human needs and support human flourishing. We will use the scientific method and scientific mental attitude to identify and understand the deep problems that prevents the satisfaction of humanity needs and flourishing. We will use the best science and technology to envisage and design breakthrough solutions having a high impact on human needs and flourishing. We will work to understand how to use, and use, the best science, technology knowledge, and company good practices to carry on projects fostering human well-being. We will support the development of innovative startups and initiatives directed to implement such solutions.

Mission

“Science and technology are the best means humans have ever found to produce knowledge and solve problems. Market economy and company good practices are the most powerful means humans have ever created to produce material wealth. Nations, institutions, companies, and people mostly use science, technology, and market to pursue power and money as an ultimate goal; often with the damage to others seen as enemies, competitors, adversaries. We instead want to employ science, technology, and market as the means to pursue the ultimate most important things for humanity: allow all humans to be free from basic needs and to flourish. We want to find innovative ways to do so, leveraging the discovery of the deep important causes of problems and the identification and implementation of ingenious solutions with the high impact.”

Science and technology are the best means humans have ever found to produce knowledge and solve problems. Knowledge allows humans to understand things, and to solve problems and accomplish desired goals. Knowledge can be produced with direct observation of reality and intuitive thinking, reasoning, planning, and problem solving. Philosophy has elaborated a methodology to makes these thought processes more rigorous (till formal logic). These processes have become a central part of the method of science and technology, which however go well beyond them. In particular, science and technology are based on three pillars: formal/mathematical models (artifacts outside our mind, e.g. on paper or the computer); rigorous systematic experiments on reality; quantitative measurements to link reality and models. Science and technology use the same methodology but have different objectives: science is directed to understand natural phenomena; technology is directed to create new artifacts that are useful for humans. The method of science and technology is the most powerful thing humans have ever created to produce knowledge.

Market economy and company good practices are the most powerful means humans have ever created to produce material wealth. The specialised and highly organised realisation of products and services, their exchange through money, the organisation of companies of different size, financial products and institutions, and public bodies rule all these activities represent fundamental means humanity has found to produce material and immaterial wealth. They can achieve high levels of effectiveness and efficiency by strongly moving profound human innate motivations. They allow high levels of specialisation and productivity. They can coordinate a huge amount of behaviours in a decentralised way. They create work and allow the expression of human energy, ingenuity, and creativity. The produce objects and services, from simple to highly sophisticated ones, that have a marvellous potential to satisfy human needs and support human flourishing.

Nations, institutions, companies, and people mostly use science, technology, and market to pursue power and money as an ultimate goal. Science and technology and market are now often used to gain power and economic wealth per se. For example, information technology and artificial intelligence are bringing much power and wealth to highly innovative companies. In general, there is nothing wrong with this as empowerment and resources are important to achieve any goal. However, we believe that pursuing the maximisation of power and economic wealth (e.g. the Gross Domestic Product) as the ultimate goal for humanity, both individually and as groups, can lead to strong distortions with respect to other more desirable goals such as human flourishing. Two crucial examples of this are the damages humanity is inferting to earth, which might threaten our future existence, and the current material growth of humanity, not paralleled by a substantial increase of subjective well-being.

...often with the damage to others seen as enemies, competitors, adversaries. In addition, power and material wealth are often pursued without caring about the consequences of this on other people, present and future. Even worse, some other times they are pursued against the others, being these other individuals seen as adversaries, other companies seen as competitors, other human groups or nations seen as enemies. Competition is a useful mechanism that foster efficiency and improvement, and is also an integral part of natural evolution and hence of human nature. However, science shows how in many cases wild competition leads to largely sub-optimal solutions at the system level. Optimal solutions are instead possible with proper levels of competition/cooperation.

We instead want to employ science, technology, and market as the means to pursue the ultimate goal of allowing all humans to get free from basic needs and flourish. Contrary to what is often done, we want to use the best science, technology and market practices to directly target what ultimately counts the most for humanity, current and future: freedom from basic needs and flourishing. Many organisations and companies claim a humanity-oriented mission, but their ultimate goal is actually to gain power and money. For us, science, technology, and economic activities are means while our ultimate goal is people’s well-being: this is a core value of the organisation, not just a means to gain economic consensus and success.

We instead want to employ science, technology, and market as the means to pursue the ultimate most important things for humanity: allow all humans to be free from basic needs and to flourish. Society is an evolving complex system formed by multiple ecological, economic, technical, and social factors interacting in multiple ways at multiple levels. Yet we believe that the multitude of problems afflicting humanity are possibly caused by relatively few underlying big causes, and that the realisation of relatively few conditions could lead humanity to flourish. We thus seek to identify these causes and conditions, namely general important principles to support humanity basic-need freedom and flourishing. The solutions to humanity's problems and the actions leading to humanity flourishing are not easy as they involve the complexity of society. We thus seek innovative, deviant, creative ideas to support solutions that take into account such complexity. In particular, we intend to use the best science, technology and economic/corporate good practices to seek solutions that are self-sustaining and self-amplifying so to have the highest positive impact on humanity’s well-being.

We want to find innovative ways to do so, leveraging the discovery of the deep important causes of problems and the identification and implementation of ingenious solutions with high impact.

Insights

"Few key causes generate most humanity problems: we seek to find them.
Few key elements can strongly increase humanity flourishing: we seek to find them.
Few actions would be sufficient to act upon those causes and elements:
we seek to find them and implement them."

The insights. The insights reported here are at the core of the organisation mission and activities. They represent a deep understanding of how our society works, and so are posed at the basis of the organisation's investigations and actions.

Society is a complex system. The insights rely upon the idea that our society is a complex system. A complex system is formed by several elements (e.g., persons and groups) each acting with its own behaviour and being relatively simple with respect to the whole system (the society). Each element has a partial knowledge of the whole system and acts on the basis of local information. Moreover, it performs actions that have a local limited effect. The behaviour exhibited by the whole system depends on the dynamical interactions of all its elements and is said to be "emergent", i.e. to depend on the several interactions of the many constituent elements of the system operating in parallel and interdependently.

Few causes generate most humanity problems: we seek to find them. Complex systems tend to behave on the basis of relatively few rules/mechanisms that once combined give rise to all the complexity of the system, e.g. due to "combinatorial explosion" (the possible states of the system and its sub-parts can give rise to exponentially many combinations of the mechanisms). Moreover, few causes tend to determine much of the behaviour of the whole system. This is also due to the organisation of many aspects of social systems as networks of linked elements where few elements ("hubs") have a strong effect on other elements as they have many links with other elements. We think that as an effect of these features, problems affecting humanity tend to be generated by few causes. For this reason, ST&M4Humanity seeks to actively search for those important causes.

Few elements strongly increase humanity flourishing: we seek to find them. The same holds for the elements that could increase humanity flouurishing. Also here, we think that few elements could increase humanity flourishing if acted upon. For this reason, ST&M4Humanity seeks to actively search for those most important elements. 

Few actions could be sufficient to act upon those causes and elements: we seek to find them and implement them. Once we have identified the major few causes that generate humanity problems, and the major few elements that could increase humanity flourishing, we could act on them to have a strong impact on humanity problems and flourishing. Again, due to the nature of complex systems, the idea is that few actions could do a lot on those causes and elements. 

Effects of the insights on ST&M4Humanity mission. The overall idea that few things can do much is a key guiding principle of the mission of ST&M4Humanity. ST&M4Humanity in particular aims to systematically isolate the possible causes of humanity problems and the elements affecting humanity flourishing, in particular those few that cause the most. These important causes might be hidden, not immediately visible, couterintuitive. ST&M4Humanity actively works to uncover them. Morerover, M4Humanity seeks to find new effective ways, based on science and technology, to establish the actual importance of the isolated causes and elements with the aim to lead the most imporatnt ones to be isolated. ST&M4Humanity thus stronlgy aims to systetematically search important ideas that might support the improvement of the society, to become a catalizer of important solutions, and to foster synthesis within the current overwelming proliferation of information.