The First Core Design Principle

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David Swinwilsen: I would love to make this more concrete for our listeners. We sort of quickly moved through the set of core design principles and it would be wonderful to see it in action. What's important about doing something together when you build up a common sense of purpose? And that can take place at the national scale or at the corporate scale just as easily as the, not just as easily.

It’s easy to tell ourselves we’re living in the world we want – one where Darwinian evolution drives competing technology platforms and capitalism pushes nations to maximize GDP regardless of externalities like carbon emissions. It can feel like evolution and competition are all there is.

If that’s a complete description of what’s driving the world and our collective destiny, that can feel pretty hopeless. But what if that’s not the whole story of evolution?

This is where evolutionary theorist, author, and professor David Sloan Wilson comes in. He has documented where an enlightened game, one of cooperation, rather than competition, is possible. His work shows that humans can and have chosen values like cooperation, altruism and group success – versus individual competition and selfishness – at key moments in our evolution, proving that evolution isn’t just genetic. It’s cultural, and it’s a choice.

In a world where our trajectory isn’t tracking in the direction we want, it's time to slow down and ask: is a different kind of conscious evolution possible?

On Your Undivided Attention, we’re going to update the Darwinian principles of evolution using a critical scientific lens that can help upgrade our ability to cooperate – ranging from the small community-level, all the way to entire technology companies that can cooperate in ways that allow everyone to succeed.

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Governing the Commons: The Evolution of Institutions for Collective Action by Elinor Ostrom

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Your Undivided Attention is produced by the Center for Humane Technology. Follow us on Twitter: @HumaneTech_