“Future Human” — Are Elon Musk and Donald Trump the Prototypes?

The “Institute of Creative Solutions”

For a hot minute a few years ago, I was part of naming the future, and defining the “Future Human.”

I was to design an “Institute” which would give students from Kindergarten through High School experiences they would likely face in the future. The jobs they may have do not exist today. Where we had been teaching students to read a map, they now had to create their own map.

We wanted to be sure our plans could accommodate a post-millennial mindset. We had not yet heard of Artificial Intelligence. We had no examples to work from, no people who embodied the “Future Human.”

In the 1995 film Waterworld Kevin Costner grew gills behind his ears as an evolutionary adaptation to living on a water-dominant planet. Is someone developing the equivalent of gills that will give them advantages over competitors as we advance toward technology-dominant life? 

Naming the Future I

To convince parents that the investment in an “Institute” was going to prepare their kids for the future, we proposed work that included science, technology, engineering, the arts, and math: the STEAM movement brought to life, and we took a few steps beyond that into other fields:

• a United Nations-type international body tasked with designing, collaborating and implementing solutions to global conflicts
• an environmental research center studying the effects of recycling, producing hard data on its benefits, drawbacks and false promises
• choosing a planet to colonize and working through the plans to ensure health, safety, governance, population selection (Elon Musk-inspired)
• a Disaster and Emergency team that studies historical environmental dangers and offers insights into prevention, response, causation
• create a new international sport, complete with rules, scoring, championship determination; include the economic model, the geographic placement of teams, international factors, labor relations and profit sharing
• create a separatist nation of international citizens who want to “opt out” of their current countries, find suitable land, negotiate for borders with current sovereignty. Elaborate on governance plan and how it’s different.
• curate an art gallery of global excellence; rotating exhibits representing all corners of the world; engage local artists from varied cultures to contribute; make room for social justice and historical themes.

STEAM Night

In late May 2017 a large crowd gathered at a middle school for its third annual STEAM night. A cohort of formally dressed 11-13 year-olds greeted us in the common areas. A lively group explained their biomass project to visitors in two languages. Where’s your teacher? someone asked. The kids looked to each other. Anyone seen Ms. Lara? 

‘There’s more to this than what we’ve put together for tonight,’ explained 8th grader Estrella, taking the lead, ‘so the goal for next year’s group — I’ll be in high school —  is to find out what they don’t know, and either learn it, or team up with groups that already have it.’ Estrella was a confident girl self-described as a lazy student until about the middle of 7th grade when her art teacher, Ms. Lara, spent a semester on scientific illustration and Estrella uncovered a talent drawing skeletons and internal organs. 

Ms. Lara appeared within the half-hour, a lively, wise 27 year-old teacher with credentials in Science and Art.

‘Estrella wanted to see inside of things — a pencil sharpener, a solar light, a frog — ’ Ms. Lara told the crowd. ‘Once she learned how things work, it jump-started pattern recognition, and now she figures out unfamiliar things quickly.’

‘Science and art,’ Estrella added. ‘Who knew?’

In a different part of the school, a few kids were nudging a small, studious boy to take a bow. He sat in a makeshift tech booth, equipment on cafeteria tables piled before him, his face only partially visible. It was time for music, and he was fully immersed in lighting effects and sound quality, turning dials and sliding sound board controls, eyes locked on to a computer monitor displaying oscillating curves of sound frequency and color clouds to measure light balance.

‘That’s Javier,’ a teacher told us. ‘7th grader from from Nicaragua, been in the U.S. about 18 months — Javier, tell the guests what award you won.’

Javier looked stricken. But once he realized there was no way out, he rolled himself out of the enclosed space on the wheels of an office chair. Javier announced, ‘I am El Cientifico Loco. The Mad Scientist winner.’ 

‘It’s the school’s signature award, for the geniuses who are a little bit, well, loco,’ Mr. Jennings explained. He was the guitar teacher and supervised the music show. 

Javier had designated himself as the school’s technology superintendent and insisted that every piece of equipment be in working order. He grudgingly accepted that a waste materiel box would be placed in a far end of the parking lot to house broken machines. When District personnel came to install and secure the storage box, Mr. Jennings told us: ‘I look out the window, it’s 10AM recess, and there’s Javier, in a lab coat three sizes too big, holding a clipboard, consulting with the specialists, and they’re back the next day placing shelving and installing a complex power system. Javier, I’m over my head here. You tell the rest.’ 

‘I wanted clean tech everywhere,’ the serious boy began. ‘All the broken pieces, they would be a problem inside the school. Nobody wants to look at — moton inútil ……

‘Useless pile,’ Estrella translated, twisting her face. ‘I think.’

Javier scooted back to his tech perch. The first musical act was ready and it was time to go to work.

‘Now the kids can tell us what they want to be when they grow up,’ the principal announced at the finale in the auditorium. He was interviewing kids on stage. This was the part my team contributed to. We hadn’t launched The Institute yet, but we were making inroads by enriching some already robust programs and designating “prototype schools.” This particular school had a lot going for it, not the least of which was a fearless principal who never let a good idea walk out the door.

Naming the Future II

Design Team - outliers count.

Study the list of words used in job titles from the past decade and it seems like the future is already here:

Coordinator, Liaison, Strategist, Analyst, Advisor, Designer, Engineer, Facilitator, Convener, Synthesizer, Partner, Architect, Ethicist, Mediator, Specialist, Creative Manager, Innovation Chief, Concept Generator …….

A design team: multiple perspectives, outliers count

Design firms often assign personnel by project. A fluid cohort works in groups of between 6 and 12, the exact make-up of each team dependent upon project needs. In the “Institute” project, the following team was organized for us:

Lead Strategist, specialty: Organizational Structure
Relationship Manager/Outlier Monitor, specialty: Org. Psychology
Lead Designer, specialty: Toy Design
Lead Designer, specialty: Aberrant Psychology
Finance and Resources, specialty: Game Theory
Cultural Relevance Monitor, specialty: Sociology
Education Coordinator, specialty: Child Development
Process Monitor, specialty: Game Design
Devil’s Advocate :(rotating with occasional unknown persons joining to poke holes and ask questions)

Over four months we met 2–3x weekly and we eased into the flow of their work process, although sometimes it was more tidal wave than flow: after one intense midweek session, the Friday session was rescheduled as a subset of the team caught a redeye to Chicago to observe programs that might be relevant to us. 

A week later, I was in Los Angeles to see how an arts program handled transportation challenges similar to ours, and at 10AM the Relationship Manager and Finance lead showed up unannounced; they had booked a last minute flight after concluding that the L.A. visit would be more valuable than their unspectacular Thursday schedule.

With toy designers, game designers and aberrant psychologists filling key positions on design crews, and with someone watching out for the outliers, the environment was wildly dynamic. Parents may be a bit nervous reading this, and students who declare they want to borrow a quarter-million dollars to major in Toy Design may face active resistance, but in a few years we may see ecstatic families celebrating their students’ acceptance into highly competitive Toy Design or Video Game Design majors at established universities. Current graduates of Game Theory programs are heralded as the best social science and finance minds of a generation; the actual major is a branch of Economics, but the “Game” title having prestige attached to it indicates a trend toward the rigorous application of the whimsical and the off-beat. And the role of “Outlier Monitor” tells us something valuable — every idea counts. Weirdness is the new genius.

Does “Future Man” have a future?

Elon Musk is the richest person in the history of our species. He must possess some skill, aptitude, esoteric knowledge, unique genius, and/or technical know-how that gives us a blueprint for how to succeed in the world of tomorrow. And he does have sort of an ethereal quality, as if he’s not 100% in the moment with us, his consciousness partially off in another dimension, formulating the next breakthrough. He’s the Mad Scientist of the tech entrepreneur cohort. But what does he do?

Is he an engineer, designing the Tesla vehicles? No, he doesn’t design the cars at all, nor the spacecraft in his Space X program.

He holds a BA in Economics and a BS in Physics, did no advanced study in engineering or product design, and dropped out of a Stanford PhD. program after two days to work in Silicon Valley. 

Is he a business savant, with the Midas touch, able to organize and create structure that multiplies wealth? He certainly didn’t show that aptitude in DOGE. Is he an otherworldly judge of talent, able to pluck gifted strategists from obscure places and add them to his Empire? Perhaps, but we haven’t seen evidence of that either.

Does he possess a smattering of knowledge and abilities in many domains that he puts together with extraordinary qualities of empathy and warmth to inspire people to do their very best? Personal warmth is probably not the driving force behind his success. 

He doesn’t project a super-star persona— he has no Trump Tower through which he can prance and preen and show the world how he shines. His campuses near Houston are dusty top-secret enclaves guarded by massive security systems, with even fly-overs by commercial airlines restricted. Wander off a public tour and prosecution is swift and fierce. 

Elon Musk doesn’t seem to want or need anyone’s approval, other than for his tax deductions. He seems most interested in colonizing Mars, which will assuredly be a no-tax enterprise zone, like a duty-free area in an international airport.

He’s not the team-building, paradigm-breaking, new consciousness prophet that we saw in Steve Jobs. The Apple Revolution brought us new ways of working: the open floor plan to encourage collaboration, a lean, elegant aesthetic, fluid work teams, genius nerds finally getting their due, salsa dance classes at lunch, the earning of shares by teenagers who join a start-up and can’t legally drink to celebrate their first million. 

Elon Musk is a pale, slightly flabby middle-aged guy in a T-Shirt and baseball cap, whose speech patterns include quite a bit of mumbling and trailing off. He is more introverted than Jobs, although they share many anti-social traits. His latest title is Product Architect, not to be confused with drafting blueprints for buildings. Like engineer and designer, architect is used metaphorically, to lend a technical feel to roles that would more accurately be titled coordinator or analyst. Elon Musk has ideas and he puts things together. 

He thinks, and his thoughts become products. He talks, people listen, and try to give him what he asks for.

He’s an idea guy, which implies he can get ideas off the ground and into production through motivation and salesmanship, yet his presence is not very inspiring. And he’s no romantic, in any sense of the word: his “family” relationships have the transactional feel of deposed royalty casting around for someone to carry on the lineage. He has 14 children by four different women; the mother of his latest offspring has rejected his offer of $2.5 million and $100,000 monthly. He is new-money royalty, a one-off tin can aristocrat without a tradition to ground him.

It has recently come out that Elon may be self-medicating with the dreamy narcotic ketamine, a combo pain suppressant and mood elevator that has some psychedelic properties; he may have walked the corridors of Congress and had open access to the White House while under the influence of a consciousness-altering substance. 

Consider this equation: right-wing conspiracy theorist and political performance artist Laura Loomer is a phone call away, and has shown she can get the President to act on preposterous scenarios she has conjured; on his other shoulder, an obscenely rich science fiction- and narcotics-addled provocateur carries his own set of theories and beliefs — in a perfect/ imperfect storm of dramatic events, natural disasters, emotional turmoil, strategic rumor and joint political and economic interests fired up by aggressive statements of perceived enemies, can anyone feel comfortable? A few trigger decisions— tariffs, annexation, rumors of interference in Taiwan and Pakistan, the elimination of friendship programs like US Aid, Iranian air strikes — have left us with hot spots ready to ignite. 

If a crisis is sparked, do we have diplomats who can negotiate us off the precipice? Are there any sober adults in the room? 

JD Vance is an intellectual bully of the highest order, ready to enact the hillbilly’s revenge against European elitists and their American sympathizers. Donald Trump’s persona is so large, has anyone heard from Lindsay Graham lately? The Senate has gone into a witness protection program. Elon Musk has managed to be more than relevant, he’s …… well, that’s what I’m trying to figure out.

The Qualities of “Future Human”

Thinking back to Waterworld, have Elon Musk and Donald Trump mutated in a way that prepares the species for the future? 

• Imagination Manifest: Musk has little lag in his system: an idea arises, he makes it happen. He wants to colonize Mars, he produces 14 children to populate the first colony. 
• Building Empire: He chooses reproductive partners with clinical detachment. Having that many children reeks of a master race concept where the privileged keep having babies to solidify their monopoly on power and resources, or is evidence of an extreme narcissistic compulsion to see more of himself. 
• Fearless Entitlement: “Future Human,” in order to make a difference, has to bulldoze bureaucracy, dominate social media, control subordinates, ignore barriers both human and material, and treat simple entitlement like a baseline that can be surpassed through money, coercion and refusal to accept limits on anything. If Saturn is a better option than Mars, it can be figured out, but getting past those rings is going to cost.
• Product Control: Is it the environmental benefits that made the Tesla product attractive? His boss in the White House seemed attached to drilling for oil and eliminating any regulation on auto emissions, and of course most environmental protection advocates would say overpopulation is a threat, so trying to find a “Future Human” core value here is confusing.
• Agenda Implementation. Does “Future Human” ruthlessly pursue their personal agenda to amass power? It probably isn’t coincidence that 18 Inspectors General, who provide Executive Branch oversight and can audit the President’s actions, were fired 4 days after Trump took office.
• Historical Hyperbole. “Future Human” masters hyperbole: the largest crowds ….. , never before in history ….. , they love me like they never loved anybody …… 
• Expressing and/or Inspiring Loyalty. Has any president had so much direct praise heaped upon them the way Donald Trump has? Karoline Leavitt and Pete Hegseth credit him in every sentence; Elon Musk, even before the falling out, was less of a worshiper. In fact it may be that the President was deferential to Elon more than the other way around.

Ultimately, the only promising qualities in this were the Imagination Manifest and Fearless Entitlement, and those are marginal and idiosyncratic, not scalable to the future. 

I didn’t think we would find anything as dramatic as a man growing gills. When we look at the first six months of this regime, it seems to have more parallels with Caligula’s bloody reign than anything else: vainglorious self-absorption, leading to dangerous excess, economic arrogance and military aggression. 

So Elon Musk and Donald Trump are not biologically mutated “Future Man.” With Elon’s dispersed and indifferent harem, brood of children, with his reported ketamine usage, blatant attempts at manipulating policy for his own advantage, his schoolyard taunts of Trump’s involvement with Jeffrey Epstein debauchery, with his large public feud with the President, both guilty of vindictive and erratic behavior, we may very well have two men closer to Caligula than Ronald Reagan. That reign didn’t end very well.

The Future of the Future

The “Institute” I mentioned at the top did not come to fruition, but don’t write off its potential because we have only cloudy visions of the future. Estrella and Javier are out there carving a path, and there will surely be some believers to join them on it. Perhaps the best we can do is clear as many barriers as possible for them, let them develop their skills and follow their consciences, and grow into the adults we so badly need in the halls of power and privilege. 

The qualities of “Future Human” are still to be decided. In our current genetic make-up, we have evolved across 10,000 generations, give or take a few millennia. After the human population reached 2 billion in 1927 (the year Babe Ruth hit 60 home runs, if that provides context for anyone) and 3 billion in 1960 (the year we elected John Kennedy as President in this American-centric history), the Baby Boom really took off. We started gaining a billion souls every dozen years or so. 

In the first 250,000 years of homo sapien’s existence we outlasted our competitors, struggled to maintain a foothold on this shallow shelf of rock and forest and ice, hit our reproductive stride with the Industrial Revolution and critical medical advances. We added 7 billion people in 1/1000 of the time it took us to gain the first billion.

Growing pains are to be expected, severe ones at that. We have suffered enormous horrors. Perhaps we have seen enough to understand how these horrors come to be; less certain is if we understand how to stop them past a certain point. 

Maybe some of us are thinking now, Elon Musk is gone, we’re out of the woods. Let’s coast the next 3 1/2 years. Elon will be busy trying to start his Martian Colony, once his Tesla profits begin to soar again. If he remains estranged from Donald Trump, there are a few places he can go for support, Vladimir Putin high on the list. 

That’s OK, didn’t we build a Star Wars defense in the 1980s to prevent this very threat? I know it was fiction, but isn’t that why the Cold War ended and we were the victors? I read a scholarly piece that credited the idea of Star Wars with hastening the break-up of the Soviet Union and giving the impression of American military superiority. 

With the Elon Musk experiment set aside, another chapter closes, but there’s little time for a break. There are trade wars to fight and the courts are jammed with immigrant rights attorneys and DOGE victims trying to get their jobs back.

What the hell just happened these past few months? We’re going to have to figure it out. It’s going to be a heavy lift. We’ve got to leave something besides the I-Phone and AI for the next generation. Yet we’re now the third party in a third war, just dropped the first bombs of Trump 2.0. 

I hope somewhere a new version of “The Institute” is being planned, the seeds transplanted and the new growth nurtured to life. The task at hand is to find fertile ground. Maybe start looking at some middle schools. Find me a teacher with credentials in Science and Art, and I’ll give it another try. I’m still holding on to the blueprint put together by the Toy Designer, perhaps the most influential college major currently being offered. Maybe he’s the one with the millennial mutation.