Riding Tomorrow’s X-Curves
RethinkX has had me, once again, pondering how to put the X in sustainability
I visited RethinkX in London this week—and my most recent post was on their work on the humanoid robot prospect. As a result, I suspect you will be hearing a lot more here about their notion of “X-curves.” For me, though, the “X” story began in the late 1950s and early 1960s.
As an Air Force child, I adored experimental aircraft, from Schneider Trophy planes to the X-15, flown by the likes of Chuck Yeager. This rocket-with-wings went where no aircraft should go, to the point where there was so little atmosphere that it lost traction and span out of control.
The quintessence of Tom Wolfe’s 1979 space race book, The Right Stuff.
Later, the story rebooted when I visited Wired Senior Maverick Kevin Kelly in Pacifica, California, on April 13, 2005. His books Out of Control and New Rules for the New Economy had already had a huge influence on my thinking.
Before long I was visiting a number of X-factor hubs, among them Singularity University (now plain Singularity), GoogleX (now known as X, or “the moonshot factory”) and the XPRIZE Foundation.
I distilled some of this into the 2016’s X-themed Volans report for the Business & Sustainable Development Commission, Breakthrough Business Models. It showed how various forms of positive change were going exponential. This then fed into our Project Breakthrough work with the UN Global Compact.
From S-curves to X-curves
Another ongoing link with the X-world, meanwhile, has been via RethinkX, whose co-founder Tony Seba I first visited in California in 2016 as part of Project Breakthrough. Ever since, I have been inspired by—and promoted—their work.
It suggests we must increasingly focus not only on innovation’s traditional “S-curves” but also on tomorrow’s “X-curves,” with their crossover points heralding the arrival of profound, systemic change.
For me, the most dramatic example of an X-curve was the replacement of horses by cars, as shown in RethinkX’s mapping below.
It followed a pattern that RethinkX concludes that “we have seen throughout history. Adoption of the new technology follows an S-shaped growth curve, while abandonment of the older technology collapses accordingly. Together, these form what RethinkX calls a disruption X-curve.”
For anyone imagining that this was a one-off, the next diagram shows how it applied to nine different crossovers, from transatlantic travel to US production of crystal meth. In fact, disruptions of all kinds seem to follow this same pattern.
And there is more to come: the diagrams are scooped from RethinkX’s latest report, showing how human labor will be substituted by the activity of humanoid robots.
Just as internal combustion engines gave automobiles the capability to disrupt horses, RethinkX notes, “a convergence of technologies that together create what we call a labor engine is what gives humanoid robots the capability to disrupt human labor.
“The critical disruptive components of the new labor engine include:
· Sensors (cameras, tilt sensors, pressure sensors, microphones, accelerometers, etc.) to take in sensory data
· Computer hardware and software to process sensory data with powerful AI
· Actuators to move and interact with objects in the environment
· Batteries and power electronics to provide energy for hours of sensing, computing, and moving.”
Each of these technologies has become radically cheaper and more powerful in recent years. “Over the next 15-20 years,” as a result, “humanoid robots will disrupt human labor throughout hundreds of industries across every major sector of the global economy. The disruption of labor will be among the most profound transformations in human history...”
Putting the X in sustainability
Handled well, such disruptions could help us power and steer the necessary sustainability transformations.
But you have to wonder how much of the sustainability agenda is making its way into the front lines of the relevant tech revolutions, particularly now that the lunatics have taken over the asylum in America—and Elon Musk and DOGE are setting out to do to public service in the country what he has already done to Twitter.
And as if that were not enough, we have another problem.
As the sustainability agenda has mainstreamed in recent years, many business champions have increasingly come to think of it as an incremental change agenda. They assume that we can reach that endpoint through a bit more transparency, a bit more accountability, a little less greenwashing.
Not so.
Indeed, the RethinkX work underscores the inconvenient truth that true sustainability will require convulsive change—and, whether or not we choose to see it, it is now happening all around us.
It’s time to dive into these new sectors of the economy, looking for ways to steer it in more sustainable directions. And, whether or not today’s White House likes it, that will often mean pushing for greater inclusivity (including the inter-generational variety) and climate-friendliness.
The real choice now is not whether the global economy will transform. It will. Rather, it is a question of who will end up in charge of the commanding heights of tomorrow’s economic landscape.
For the moment, whether you look at rare earth minerals, the solar-wind-battery nexus, electric vehicles, AI, drones or stealth fighters, the answer to that question looks set to be China.
We risk ceding the future to others—and others with very different priorities and value sets.
Big mistake, as Julia Roberts put it in the film Pretty Woman. Huge!
John Elkington is Founder & Chief Pollinator at Volans. His personal website can be accessed here.
Available on Amazon and through good bookshops.
Also noteworthy that RethinkX has deliberately (and wisely?) avoided using the S-word, let alone the R-word (regeneration), even though they are mainly tracking and promoting technology disruptions that can create a better future