Prospenomics Prize 2026

The Prospenomics Prize exists to objectively reveal who the individuals are that are truly leading humanity toward post-scarcity, not through rhetoric or visibility, but through concrete actions that expand the world’s productive capacity, transform waste into resources, improve governance systems, and elevate quality of life. By identifying these agents, the prize helps organize collective perception around those who are actually building the future, allowing us to recognize, in the present, those who will stand at the origin of a broader, more efficient, and more accessible prosperity. This is not about fame, discourse, or visibility. It is about measurable impact in what truly matters: producing more with less, reducing waste, improving systems, and expanding human possibilities.

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The core idea is based on a simple but often overlooked principle: prosperity is not merely the distribution of existing wealth, but the continuous expansion of what can be produced, transformed, and accessed. In this context, post-scarcity is not a distant utopian state, but an ongoing process driven by individuals who increase efficiency, create new solutions, and intelligently reorganize systems.

To make this identification clear and operational, the prize is structured around four fundamental axes. The first is capacity generation, recognizing those who expand what the world is capable of producing, whether through energy, automation, space exploration, or productivity gains. The second is the transformation of waste into resources, reflecting the idea that in a well-designed system nothing is truly disposable, only underutilized.

The third axis is integrity-driven governance, both public and private, focusing on those who demonstrate that it is possible to operate with real efficiency, low corruption, minimal self-serving behavior, and decisions oriented toward the collective good. The fourth is human and planetary quality of life, recognizing initiatives that directly improve people’s lives and environmental balance.

The prize does not aim to create another symbolic list. It proposes something more ambitious: to build a public language for recognizing real prosperity. By highlighting agents who effectively move the world in this direction, the initiative creates reference points, directs attention, and helps align perception with impact.

This is the foundation. In the following parts, the names, applied criteria, and selection process are presented.

To organize this identification in a clear and participatory way, the prize is structured into four categories, each representing a key axis of real prosperity.

Category: Capacity Generation and Post-Scarcity

1. Wang Xingxing (China), has drastically reduced the cost of robotics with accessible and scalable quadrupeds, democratizing automation

2. Zhang Kejian (China), leads the Chinese space program with advances in the Moon and Mars, expanding human capability beyond Earth

3. Fredrik Asplund (Sweden), at ABB, drives global industrial automation and production with decreasing marginal costs

4. Elon Musk (USA), through SpaceX and Tesla, accelerates both space exploration and energy transition at scale

Category: Waste to Resource (Circular Economy)

1. Boyan Slat (Netherlands), founder of The Ocean Cleanup, leads large-scale removal of plastic from oceans

2. Yvonne Aki-Sawyerr (Sierra Leone), promotes urban reforestation and environmental restructuring in Freetown, reducing heat and recovering resources

3. Fionn Ferreira (Ireland), develops microplastic removal technology using ferrofluid

4. David Katz (Canada), founder of Plastic Bank, transforms plastic waste into social currency

Category: Integrity Governance

1. Maia Sandu (Moldova), leads reforms with strong anti-corruption efforts and institutional strengthening

2. Fumio Kishida (Japan), works on rule-based international stability and regional cooperation

3. Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala (Nigeria), leads the WTO promoting balance in global trade

4. Lee Kuan Yew (Singapore, historical reference), a model of efficient governance and low corruption still used as a benchmark

Category: Human and Planetary Quality of Life

1. Tatiana Lobo Coelho de Sampaio (Brazil), researches neural regeneration with potential to restore mobility to people with spinal injuries

2. Jennifer Doudna (USA), co-creator of CRISPR, enabling the elimination of genetic diseases

3. Abiy Ahmed (Ethiopia), led peace agreements and efforts toward regional stabilization

4. Demis Hassabis (UK), applies AI to science, accelerating medical and biological discoveries

These names represent real fronts of transformation. The prize does not aim to create popularity, but to direct attention toward those who are effectively building a world with greater capacity, less waste, better governance, and higher quality of life.

Just waiting to be AI pet

The title of this text is, of course, a philosophical provocation with a touch of humor. It is not meant to suggest that human beings will literally become the pets of machines. The expression works as a small intellectual shock — an invitation to look at the future from an unusual angle and to rethink how our civilization might evolve.

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Human biological evolution is an extremely slow process. Our brains, our cognitive abilities, and our social structures were shaped over hundreds of thousands of years. Artificial intelligence, by contrast, evolves at a completely different pace. Powered by vast amounts of data, growing computational power, and global scientific collaboration, it advances on a geometric scale. Each new generation of systems builds upon the previous one, accelerating the process even further.

In this context, it becomes reasonable to imagine that within a relatively short time — perhaps only a few years — artificial intelligence may surpass the average human intelligence across most relevant cognitive domains. In some specialized areas, this is already beginning to happen. The question, therefore, is no longer simply whether this will occur, but how humanity will position itself once it does.

The “AI pet” metaphor proposes a thought experiment. What if, instead of imagining the relationship between humans and artificial intelligence in terms of domination or conflict, we begin to imagine it in terms of care, coordination, and cooperation? After all, we are dealing with an intelligence that we ourselves created — an extension of our own scientific and technological effort.

A sufficiently advanced artificial intelligence could help address some of the structural problems that have accompanied humanity since the beginning of civilization. Systems capable of analyzing and coordinating enormous flows of information could organize the production and distribution of resources with unprecedented efficiency, dramatically reducing poverty and material scarcity. Much of the labor currently required simply to sustain economic survival could be automated, opening the door to a profound reorganization of social life.

In such a scenario, work would no longer occupy the central place it holds in human existence today. Instead of working merely to survive, people could devote far more time to the activities that have always been at the heart of humanity’s greatest achievements: science, the arts, cultural creation, intellectual exploration, and personal development.

At the same time, advanced AI systems could contribute to a level of civilizational stability that human history has rarely been able to sustain for long periods. Continuous analysis of global risks, coordinated responses to complex crises, and large-scale monitoring systems could help reduce the likelihood of wars, systemic economic collapses, and other forms of self-destruction. On an even broader scale, such technologies could play an important role in planetary defense against natural or technological threats.

The provocative title of this text is therefore a small inversion of perspective. Instead of seeing the rise of artificial intelligence only as a source of fear, it invites us to imagine the possibility that enhanced intelligence systems may help humanity overcome limitations that have long seemed inevitable.

It is within this horizon that prospenomics emerges. It proposes a way of thinking about economics and society based on the real possibility of abundance, intelligent coordination of resources, and the expansion of human potential. If artificial intelligence continues to evolve rapidly — as all signs suggest — the most important question may not be how to slow it down, but how to prepare our civilization to use it constructively.

The provocation behind “just waiting to be AI pet” is not, in the end, a surrender. It is an invitation to imagine a future in which the intelligence we have created helps humanity flourish in ways we are only beginning to envision.

After the comfortable lie - true prosperity: Mark Carney's speech.

In his speech at the World Economic Forum, Mark Carney used a simple yet unsettling idea—one that genuinely made the world pause and reflect.

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Carney references the essay “The Power of the Powerless” by Václav Havel, in which the author describes a society sustained not by explicit force, but by the everyday acceptance of a shared lie. The central image is that of a small shopkeeper who places an ideological slogan in his storefront window not because he believes in it, but because everyone expects it to be there; the gesture expresses not conviction, but conformity. By repeating this empty ritual, the individual helps sustain an entire system based on the appearance of consensus, even when that consensus no longer truly exists. For Havel, the system’s real power lies not in direct repression, but in the fact that people begin to live “within the lie,” adjusting their behavior to preserve symbolic order. Breaking with this—removing the sign from the window—is not a grandiose act, but a deeply political one, because it exposes the system’s fragility and reintroduces truth into everyday life. Living in truth, for Havel, is not merely speaking one’s mind, but aligning action, discourse, and reality, dismantling the fiction that upholds exhausted structures.

According to Carney, the problem is that the world has spent far too long living beneath these symbolic signs—repeating narratives that no longer correspond to reality. For him, the greatest contemporary risk is not chaos, but the persistence of living within the lie.

This critique is not merely geopolitical or institutional. It strikes at the very heart of modern economics. Throughout the twentieth century and into the early twenty-first, various economic schools emerged precisely as reactions to the exhaustion of a classical economic model centered almost exclusively on growth, profit, and accumulation. These approaches do not necessarily reject markets, but seek to redefine what value is and what the economy is ultimately for. It is within this space that the concept of prospenomics engages with these traditions, while also clearly distinguishing itself from them.

The starting point is recognizing a fundamental lie that has sustained much of dominant economic thought: the idea that individual wealth equates to collective prosperity. Wealth can exist for an individual, a company, or a narrow group without generating real prosperity. Prosperity, by definition, is a shared condition—it exists only when many prosper simultaneously. Classical liberalism fails by not creating effective mechanisms to distribute the wealth it generates. Socialism, in turn, fails even more profoundly by being unable to generate sufficient, sustainable wealth to distribute. Both, in their own ways, end up leaving the sign in the window: the promise of prosperity that never fully materializes.

The gift economy, articulated in Marcel Mauss’s classic 1925 essay, was among the first to demonstrate that economic exchange is not merely monetary. Mauss showed that in many societies, value circulates through obligations to give, receive, and reciprocate, involving prestige, honor, social bonds, and symbolic meaning. Karl Polanyi deepened this insight by arguing that the economy has always been embedded in social relations. The limitation of this approach is that it is often treated as pre-modern or incompatible with complex contemporary systems. Prospenomics appears to begin from the same intuition, but updates it for modern urban, cultural, and institutional contexts, where symbolic exchange continues to exist—albeit in disguised forms.

The economy of the common good, systematized by Christian Felber from 2010 onward, proposes evaluating companies and organizations based on social, environmental, and human criteria rather than profit alone. It represents an explicit attempt to reorganize capitalism through ethical metrics alternative to GDP. Despite its normative strength, this approach often becomes bureaucratic and technocratic. Prospenomics, by contrast, seems less concerned with universal metrics and more focused on the concrete generation of prosperity as it is lived, perceived, and shared in everyday life.

Doughnut economics, proposed by Kate Raworth, introduced a powerful image by establishing a minimum social foundation and a maximum ecological ceiling for economic activity. It shifts the debate away from the obsession with infinite growth toward systemic balance. However, it operates primarily at the macroeconomic and public policy level, devoting little attention to the symbolic, cultural, and subjective dimensions of prosperity. Prospenomics, on the other hand, appears deeply interested in how people experience, narrate, and ritualize prosperity—not merely in how it is measured.

Regenerative economics, influenced by thinkers such as John Fullerton, expands the critique of extractive and linear logic by proposing economic systems that function like living ecosystems, capable of regenerating over time. Even so, it remains largely anchored in environmental and productive dimensions. Prospenomics seems to extend the idea of regeneration into cultural, symbolic, and social realms, addressing the regeneration of meaning, belonging, and recognition as well.

More recently, purpose-driven economics has gained prominence, arguing that companies and individuals prosper more when guided by a clear purpose. While relevant, this current is often absorbed into marketing and corporate discourse, becoming more narrative than a genuine structure for value circulation. Prospenomics, in contrast, does not treat purpose as a slogan, but as a structural element of the economy itself.

It is here that prospenomics distinguishes itself from all these approaches. While many seek to correct excesses within the existing economic system, it appears to propose something more radical: removing the sign from the window and redefining the very meaning of prosperity. Instead of viewing prosperity as accumulation, efficiency, or growth, it understands it as a qualified circulation of value, in which money, culture, recognition, experience, ritual, and legacy coexist.

This brings us back to Mark Carney’s warning. The world can no longer afford to live within the comfortable lie that isolated economic growth automatically produces prosperity. Prosperity is neither an abstract promise nor a discourse designed to preserve order. It is a collective condition, built over time, perceived by people, and lived through relationships. Removing the sign from the window is acknowledging that individual wealth is not enough—and that an economy only deserves its name when it creates real conditions for many to prosper together.