Dear One World Friends,
Please join us this Saturday, February 28th at 8 am EST for the most important conversation we have generated in our 12-year history.
You can register for what we hope will be a transformative series of talks here:
THE FUTURE OF HUMANITY – One World United & Virtuous
Over the last 12 years, we have worked hard to live up to our foundational principles as we seek to bring K12 educators and students from around the world together to learn with and from one another. This Saturday, we will launch the most important global conversation we have created in the last 12 years.
Our thesis is simple yet dramatic: humanity is at a crossroads, the cumulative advances in technology that began 250 years ago with the Scientific and Industrial Revolutions have reached a critical point, as the speed at which our tools transform our world continues to accelerate, creating a widening gap between our capacity to absorb and manage the ever more powerful technological tools heading our way.
MIT Professor Seymour Papert highlighted this growing gap at a speech given at Imperial College, London, where he explained:
“Now, given that picture of a rapid change of society, one would expect to see a rapid evolution of the institutions charged with preparing the young for it. We do not see this. We see a much slower rate of evolution of the school, and that means we’re seeing a bigger and bigger gap between school and society. This gap is what I believe is responsible for the deterioration of performance in our schools and our educational systems. Because children can see this; they can see that school is irrelevant. They feel that the pace of school and the mood of the school culture is out of sync with the society in which they live.”
We recommend reading the full text of his speech, which was given on June 2, 1998: Here
If the gap between the educational response and accelerating technological change was true some 28 years ago, no one should have any doubt that this gap has continued to widen and that the time we have to guide these transformative technologies is fast closing. Indeed, yesterday we shared Emad Mostaque’s book The Last Economy, where he tells us that we have 1,000 days to respond to the challenge brought forward by the AI challenge.
Our goal in generating this Global Conversation is to encourage participants to develop a roadmap or pathways from where we are today to the future of Sustainable Super Abundance envisioned by the futurists. We hope that this kind of conversation can help humanity bridge the gap between exponential technological change and our capacity to manage that change. ‘
Nowhere is the gap greater than between the post-scarcity, solved world of Sustainable Super Abundance, envisioned by the futurists, and the world we see on television with the nightly news.
The Futurists are Predicting An End to Poverty, Disease, and the Need to Work
No Need to Work!!! Elon Musk tells us in this short video that we can bring an end to poverty and make work optional in the next 10 to 20 years, given the potential for AI and robotics to do everything for us: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NiJIpcrgEA0
Demi Hassibis, the Co-Founder of Google DeepMind, tells us that he believes we can bring an end to disease over the next decade: https://www.youtube.com/shorts/aXyxsIMOtTg
But How Do We Get From Here to There?
While Lord Hassibis and Elon Musk have a clear vision of the extraordinary possibilities in front of us, neither one tells us how we get from today’s divided world of 193 competing nation-states to the world of Radical Abundance they envision. The goal of One World’s global conversation on the future of humanity is to fill the void left by the futurists and begin to think about how we build the roadmaps and pathways to a post-scarcity, solved world of abundance.
As far as we know, this is the first global conversation of its kind. Our expectation in the end is to gather the views and ideas exchanged over the course of the next 16 weeks and include them in a new book on the Great Transition in front of us.
I hope you can join us for what we hope will be an enlightening and eventually transformative adventure. Please do not hesitate to reach out to us with any questions or suggestions as to how to take this project forward at info@oneworlduv.com
Sincerely,
Joe
