Table of Contents
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| author | role | team | topic | public | title | date |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| robbert | 4_1_1 | 3_1_leadership_team | ethos | true | What Serves Humanity | 2025-10-01 |
'What Serves Humanity'
Smartups are founded on the ethos that technology should only serve the needs of humanity. Not the other way around. We should never serve the needs of technology. In our current state we are evolving to become the slaves of our technology. After all, it looks like we are building something that can take over from us. Building a better version of us so it can help. Maybe it can fix this dangerous mess we created. . Obviously, we have to break with this mother of self-destructive habits and replace it with a healthy one. At least try.
Let’s start with what most people would consider the hardest part of creating technology that serves humanity: to define ‘what serves humanity’. Although philosophical by nature, it is not as hard as you would think. We, the people of this world, already created, through the most cohesive, unilateral and scientific-sound framework humanity has ever puth forth, a treaty between 195 countries that defined our humanity for future generation to study: the Paris Agreement. That year we came to a blueprint that recorded who we are, why we should do it, what we can do and how can we make it so. It was designed to tackle our critical global challenges as a team of nations that all have a part to play if we want to win the game: our survival as a species without costing it millions of other species. It was signed, ratified and send to all. Of course hopelessly naive, the 17 United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) gave a piece of paper that we all signed, the means to actually deliver on our commitment. That was in 2015 at the hight of hope and momentum. Now, ten years later and five year before the deadline, it all feels as a great week of selling cookies for girlsscout. Who could have imagined that the same year, while we were going up, someone came down the escalator and then everything escalated quickly and messy.