It is insane to me that we all have to shrug and admit that "well, we can't fix X problem because the money's not there" over and over again, when we have all of the labor hours and intellectual capital to do whatever we want as a collective species organism. With the right coordination, we could make every city look like a Miyazaki lake town. Or Disneyland. Or an exact copy of ancient Rome. We could scan every person alive every year and see whether or not they've got cancer. We could clean every river and every lake. We could send everyone a Nintendo Switch. That whole "bullshit jobs" memo gets circulated on HN all the time; how much of us could do actually cool shit if we didn't have to worry about paying for other people to help maintain society for us? I don't know, but it sure is frustrating watching Hertz sell off their fleet because their board is more worried about its share price than it is about whether or not Hertz, a car rental company, can rent out cars. (And I'm not blaming them for it- they're deadlocked in the same standoff everyone else is.)
One of my research interests is trying to make a contribution to what you call version 2.0, through better measures of subjective wellbeing.
More like worried about bankruptcy and going out of business.
I think quacked's point was that sometimes it's not a very good signaling system. Neither is TCP/IP in some cases, and sometimes neither are cytokines (to use a biology example). These are all evolved systems, to some degree; maybe they're the best we can hope for, but we should still keep an eye out for "version 2.0".