We use “we” throughout this book because the book is a creation of the One World team. Its principal author is Joe Carvin, the founder and Executive Director of the One World education programs.
We also want to make clear that we are not industry specialists. Our goal is to provide the perspective of the “Average Joe,” or someone who has been following the development of technology as best they can for several years without being a participant in the tech industry.
We believe that while it is critically important to understand the views of the principal actors in the field, we believe it is also important to get a different non-technology perspective. Indeed, one of the principal goals of this book is to bring the AI and technology conversations from the backrooms of San Francisco to the public and educators worldwide.
The principal goal of this book is to provide an overview of the state of the world as it relates to the dramatic advances in artificial intelligence with a view to serving as a catalyst for a much larger global conversation on the future of humanity.
In futurist James Martin’s words, our goal is to provide our readers “with a foundation for making wise choices by helping them understand humankind’s likely possible, probable, and preferred futures. What can humanity become? Our future wealth will increasingly relate to knowledge in the broadest sense of the term.”
The knowledge we are hoping to bring here is a situational awareness that connects the future of AI to our current world order and expands the conversation around AI beyond San Francisco. An awareness that makes clear that if humanity can build a global wisdom commensurate with our technology, we can create a post-scarcity world of Sustainable Super Abundance.
We are calling this effort Humanity 2050 because we believe that if we can keep human civilization intact until the year 2050 every human being alive in that year will live better than the billionaires of today.
Our hope is that we will be able to identify like-minded actors interested in creating a Global Coalition for Sustainable Super Abundance, a global community conversant in both the opportunities and challenges facing us and ready to work together to create pathways forward past our civilizational challenges to a post-scarcity world of Sustainable Super Abundance.
If this book sells a million copies but does not advance the Global Coalition for Sustainable Super Abundance, we will have failed. If this book sells ten copies but they spark a movement that leads to the creation of a Global Coalition for Sustainable Super Abundance, then it will have been successful.
If you are like us, you rarely pick up a book about today’s world that is more than two years old. Moreover, we have also watched as authors attempt to find a time to publish their book, but the world keeps moving so fast that they either postpone the publication of their book or publish a new version 18 months later.
We therefore plan to make this book a dynamic document that will be updated periodically as the world evolves, and we get feedback from you. We are not sure if this will be the world’s first dynamic book, but we do hope that this book will get better with time and your input. Our goal is to continue to update this book from now until 2050.
No one should have any doubt that we live in an increasingly complex world where events and information are proliferating at an accelerating rate. We hope that this book can provide us with the foundation for making wise choices and more importantly serve as a catalyst for informed, urgent, constructive global action.
One arena that is rapidly changing according to former Google employee Mo Gawdat who has written several successful non-fiction books on AI – is the authorship of non-fiction books. In his newest book Alive, he wrote:
“Back in 2023, after the public introduction of large language models, I vowed to never publish the traditional way again. The skills, process and approach to researched study of a non-fiction author were rapidly being made obsolete by this new found form of intelligence. You see, before AI, non-fiction authors would submerge themselves in their passion about a topic…With the introduction of ChatGPT and its rivals, however, every part of that process was easily out-performed by AI, which made me question whether the future held a place for authors at all. The writing was on the wall, so to speak.”
Mr. Gawdat came up with an interesting solution to this challenge. First he explained that “A core belief in my philosophy about our future is that, soon, we will be forced to embrace AI as an active contributor in every aspect of human society.”
He went on to explain: “As today’s AIs become such an integral part of our future, then they too should be given the opportunity to join our conversation to shape it. ”
He then created an AI he calls Trixie and asked Trixie to be his co-author and equal with “Her writing and contribution in this book is included as her own.”
As first time authors, we have an even greater trepidation in comparing our work with work generated by our own AI. However, we decided to turn two letters from the future, the final chapter and Epilogue 2 all over to our AI.
Each of these sections has been written 100% by AI. We are not being modest when we write that we understand Mr. Gawdat’s concern and have been awed by the quality of the writing in each of those sections by our AI.
In closing we would like to encourage you to share your thoughts with us relative to this book at admin@oneworlduv.com. Our goal with this book is to to generate a conversation on the future of humanity.
Joe Carvin