One of the ways humanity will need to build wisdom worthy of the name of our species will be to build a global wisdom and sense of connectedness that has not been with us in the past.
In the opening of his 2008 book Common Wealth, Jeffrey Sachs made clear how important the development of that kind of wisdom is to success in the 21st Century:
The defining challenge of the 21st century will be to face the reality that humanity shares a common fate on a crowded planet. Our common fate will require new forms of global cooperation, a fundamental point of blinding simplicity that many world leaders have yet to understand or embrace.
In the twenty-first century, our global society will flourish or perish according to our ability to find common ground across the world on a set of shared objectives and on the practical means to achieve them.
We believe we face an urgent need to develop new forms of global cooperation both in order to address today’s civilizational challenges as well as to achieve the world of Sustainable Super Abundance now available to us.
To that end, we are looking to create a Global Coalition for Sustainable Super Abundance whose first goal will be to promote a multi-level, global conversation on the future of humanity.
There is no way humanity can achieve Global Super Abundance or avoid World War III without improved global unity. None of the problems faced by humanity today can be solved by any single nation-state acting alone. There is an even greater need for unity today than there was when Sachs issued his call for global unity in 2008.
In fact, achieving global unity is the key to solving all of our challenges as well as realizing our full potential as Yuval Noah Hararai made clear at his inaugural talk at CSER (Centre for the Study of Existential Risk) shortly after joining his new colleagues at Cambridge. Professor Harari explained that achieving global cooperation is critical not only to avoiding war, but to solving the challenges of climate change and AI. Harari explains that bringing humanity together is essential to solving existential risk:
“In this brief talk, I want to focus on the third existential threat that we are facing— global war— because in many ways it is the key to dealing with the other two. If humanity unites, we definitely have the resources and the wisdom to deal with both the ecological crisis and with the AI revolution. It is within our power. But if humanity is torn apart by war, that would probably doom us. Given the weapons we now possess, a third world war could directly destroy human civilization, of course, but even if we avoid blowing ourselves to pieces the third world war would destroy us indirectly because it would focus our attention on fighting each other and would prevent us from dealing effectively with the ecological crisis and the AI revolution.”
Harari is exactly correct, the only way we overcome our civilizational challenges or achieve the Sustainable Super Abundance now available to us is to find ways to urgently achieve global unity.
(You can access the complete Harari talk here.)
Twenty global leaders working with the Oxford Martin School of the 21st Century issued a similar call for unity in a 2013 Report: Now for the Long Term. At the beginning of the report, they quoted the school’s founder, Dr. James Martin, who highlighted that “humanity is at a crossroads” and that this “could be our best century ever, or our worst.” They then went on to define five principles for long-term success. The fifth principle they cited was as follows:
Establish a Common Platform of Understanding: The ability to address today’s global challenges is undermined by the absence of a collective vision for society. To remedy this, the Commission urges renewed dialogue on an updated set of shared global values around which a unified and enduring pathway for society can be built. The entire document may be found here.
Perhaps the most urgent call for the need for global unity came from UNESCO, beseeching educators from around the world to reimagine our futures together and create a new social contract for education.
UNESCO is the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization. It is a specialized agency of the UN that promotes international cooperation in the fields of education, science, culture, and communication to contribute to peace and global security. Founded in 1945, UNESCO aims to foster dialogue and mutual understanding among cultures and peoples through its various programs and initiatives.
In November 2021, UNESCO published only the third global report on education in its 75-year history. The report, entitled Reimagining our Futures Together: A New Social Contract for Education calls for a fundamental transformation of education systems worldwide to address the challenges facing humanity and the planet. The report proposes a new social contract for education that aims to unite us around collective endeavors and provide the knowledge and innovation needed to shape sustainable and peaceful futures for all.
Compiled over two years, the report was surprisingly honest and clear in terms of the need for education to transform itself to meet the needs of our modern 21st-century world. The following are some excerpts from the report:
“If anything brought us together over the last year and a half, it is our feeling of vulnerability about the present and uncertainty about the future. We now know more than ever that urgent action is needed to change humanity’s course and save the planet from further disruptions. But this action must be long-term and combined with strategic thinking.”
“If the report teaches us one thing, it is this: We need to take urgent action to change course, because the future of people depends on the future of the planet, and both are at risk. The report proposes a new social contract for education—one that aims to rebuild our relationships with each other, with the planet, and with technology.”
“As a species, we are at the point in our collective history where we have the greatest access ever to knowledge and to tools that enable us to collaborate. The potential for engaging humanity in creating better futures together has never been greater. “
“The choices we collectively make today will determine our shared futures. Whether we survive or perish, whether we live in peace or we allow violence to define our lives, whether we relate to the Earth in ways that are sustainable or not, are questions that will be profoundly shaped and decided by choices we make today and by our capabilities to achieve common goals.”
“We face an existential choice: either continue down an unsustainable path or radically change course.
Everyone today has a heavy obligation to both current and future generations to ensure that our world is one of abundance and scarcity, and that everyone enjoys the same rights to the fullest. Despite the urgency of action and in conditions of great uncertainty, we have reason to be full of hope.
Education—the way we organize teaching and learning throughout life— has long played a foundational role in the transformation of human societies. It connects you with the world and to each other, exposes new possibilities, and strengthens our capacities for dialogue and action. But to shape peaceful, just, and sustainable futures, education itself must be transformed.
Informed by a global consultation process that engaged one million people from around the world, the goal of the report has been “to forge a new social contract for education that will help build a peaceful, just, and sustainable future for all.”
The authors of the report understood “that the visions, principles, and proposals presented by the report were simply meant as a starting point” and that “translating and contextualizing” these principles would require a “collective effort.” They therefore worked hard to clarify that the report is “neither a manual nor blueprint but the opening up of a vital conversation.”
In view of the fact that the report was published before the Russian invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 and the seismic changes launched by Chat GPT later that year, or the tragic events of October 7, we believe the vital conversation called for by UNESCO is more urgent today, in 2025, than ever before.
Indeed, we are of the view that UNESCO’s call for a vital global conversation on education needs to be taken up across all levels of our global civil society. As we will see below, education is a function of the needs of our now global society.
It is precisely these kinds of conversations relative to the future of humanity that we intend to generate from now until the year 2050 using this book as a launching pad. We believe that if, if, if, we can keep our global civilization intact until then, and if we can find ways to cooperate on the best ways to use dramatic advances in technology to advance humanity, we can create a world where by 2050 every human being alive then will have the potential to live better than the billionaires of today.
From Educating for the Fourth Industrial Revolution to Humanity 2050
“Any education is, in its forms and methods, an outgrowth of the needs of the society in which it exists.” —John Dewey, Individual Psychology and Education, The Philosopher, 12, 1934
In our view, as UNESCO makes clear, the educational needs and challenges of today’s 21st Century world. The needs of today’s global society are to prepare K12 youth for a rapidly globalizing world of exponential technological change.
We believe no educational leader has done more to prepare educators and students for this twin challenge than Fernando Reimers, who is the Ford Foundation Professor of the Practice of International Education and Director of the Global Education Innovation Initiative at Harvard. The reason Reimers has been so successful is that he understands that the twin challenges are, in truth, one and the same.
As Dr. Reimers explains in this essay, the best way to prepare global youth for the Fourth Industrial Revolution, or the world of exponential technological change, is to start with the end in mind—global citizenship—and provide students with an opportunity to collaborate in diverse groups. We have outlined each of the five steps proposed by Dr. Reimers because we have worked with him to deliver these to schools in the past and will use them as an important part of our Project 2050.
Dr. Reimers concludes his essay explaining that: “Global citizenship is essential for seizing the enormous possibilities and addressing the great challenges of our times. While cultivating it is the task of educators, the global community is equally responsible for supporting and encouraging, in a collaborative manner, the education of global citizens to whom nothing human is foreign.”
Building a Global Coalition for Sustainable Super Abundance – Humanity 2050
This last point made by Dr. Reimers is critical to the success of Project 2050. The kind of global unity needed will need to be society-wide. We cannot rely on educators alone to build global unity. They have a role to play, as we will see in Chapter 12, but they cannot do it alone.
Moreover, as John Dewey pointed out, educational needs are an outgrowth of the needs of the society in which they exist. If we are going to succeed, the need for global unity will need to be taken up at all levels of society.
The need, or a call for global unity at all levels of society, is not new, as we have seen throughout this book and in this chapter. However, it seems that all too often, the call is made without giving sufficient thought to how that call is implemented. Thought leaders from across the world often call for the establishment of a common platform for understanding to generate a collective vision for society but make no provision as to how that is supposed to happen. As a result, the kind of platforms needed to effect fundamental change are too few and far between.
If in the twenty-first century, “our global society will flourish or perish according to our ability to find common ground across the world on a set of shared objectives and on the practical means to achieve them,” don’t we need to urgently develop new global platforms to build the needed consensus.
If today’s young people “will collectively determine whether civilization survives or not” don’t we urgently need to provide them with the foundation for making wise choices to understand humankind’s likely possible, probable, and preferred futures? To understand what humanity can become?
Unfortunately, as we read through the literature, too many calls to build the platforms for global understanding go unheeded. All too often, they are calls for action without any follow-up. As we will explain more fully below and in Chapter 14, the One World team is committed to building the Global Coalition for Sustainable Super Abundance. Our first project will be to generate a global conversation on the future of humanity on as many levels, in as many places as possible, however we are going to need help.
There are of course, stand-out exceptions to the lack of follow-up. Following the publication of his book, Our Final Century, Sir Martin Rees created The Centre for the Study of Existential Risk (CSER) at Cambridge University at a time when there were more academic studies on snowboarding than there were on existential risk. Sir Martin Rees also worked with James Martin, who contributed $150 million to Oxford University to create the Oxford Martin School of the 21st Century, effectively supporting much of the work that has been conducted relative to Long Termism and effective altruism.
Indeed, we would argue that the creation of CSER by Sir Martin Rees and his colleagues has catalyzed the development of a global X-Risk ecosystem that now includes the Future of Life Institute at MIT and many more institutions of higher learning and think tanks. Here is a link to the first catalogue of that ecosystem: https://oneworlduv.com/ wp-content/uploads/2023/05/Annexe-The-X-Risk-Ecosystem-.pdf
A Multi-Level Conversation on the Future of Humanity
Our hope is that we can encourage this emerging ecosystem to come together and generate a global conversation on the future of humanity. A conversation that we hope will lead to a new story that generates a wisdom commensurate with our technology.
The universities highlighted in the catalogue above are a great start. However, every university in the world should have a class on civilizational risks and the potential for Super Abundance. We need to go beyond the emerging ecosystem we have identified. The feedback we are getting from university students is that none of the issues raised in this book are being discussed in any meaningful way, with the possible exception of climate change.
This global conversation needs not only to expand to the rest of academia, it also needs to go beyond the walls of our universities. This conversation needs to be expanded to include K12 students and educators, as will be seen clearly in Chapter 12.
It also needs to be expanded to civil society. Municipal, state and governmental leaders all have a role to play in terms of climate change, creating a more peaceful and fairer world as well as responsibly using AI.
The Global Business Community Needs to Get Serious about Human Survival and Sustainable Super Abundance
Perhaps most importantly, all segments of the business community need to engage in this conversation. The global leaders involved in AI need to do more than complain about the lack of regulation. They need to come together and insist on the kind of regulation that makes sense for all of us. They have the resources and knowledge needed to make this happen. They do not need to wait for governments to act. They should form a global coalition and make clear the rules of the game that need to be abided by everyone across the globe. They can and should take the lead on the regulation conversation. They clearly have a special, outsized responsibility to all of us.
The conversation needs to go beyond the tech companies. We are old enough to remember Harvard Professor Raymond Vernon’s books published in the 1970s, criticizing the practices of multinational corporations or MNCs. At the time that Vernon was writing, there were about 400 MNCs, today, there are over 100,000 MNCs. In recent years, we have wondered what the real nationality of today’s top companies is, as they all operate in numerous jurisdictions with the requirement that they be good citizens of each.
(One of the highest levels of praise we received at One World came from a senior executive in the financial sector who told us that the time he has spent with One World was more beneficial to him than any professional development he had experienced in his 3 decades in the corporate world. He felt that being a part of One World transformed the way he worked with and collaborated with his team members from across the globe.)
Multinational corporations should be encouraged to talk about how they attempt to promote human connectedness within their organizations and beyond. They should decide to be important, authentic players in building communities across the world and in emphasizing our human connectedness and the fact that we are all in this together.
Humanity Needs to Focus on Human Survival & Sustainable Super Abundance
We very much support the fight against climate change and have developed award winning, K12 programs to take action in the fight against climate change. Indeed, we worked with the secretariat of the UNFCCC (United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change) for a number of years to engage K12 schools in the fight against climate change as you see from this article:
https://www.lohud.com/story/news/education/2019/12/10/portchester-schools-first-us-neutralize-carbon-un-program/4320063002/
To date the fight against climate change is the principal existential risk that has gained traction across the global in terms of media attention, academic articles and student participation which is understandable given the fact that the first Earth Day was held on April 22, 1970 and the first Conference of Party (COP) meeting organized by the UNFCCC was held in Berlin in 1995.
It has taken time to understand and prepare for the challenges emanating from climate change. As a result, news and academia are currently far more focused on climate change than they are on AI or even nuclear threats: Climate News vs AI News vs Nuclear News
However, we are now living at the precipice of self-destruction as the threats to our species increase. The ChatGPT moment has accelerated the threat arising from AI to the point where the leading participants in the field are telling us that there is a 15% to 20% probability of existential risk emanating from Autonomous Superintelligence which is expected in a “few thousand days”. At the same time, the threats arising from nuclear warfare have dramatically increased in recent years.
The number one skill set everyone agrees needs to be taught in schools across the world today is critical thinking. We need to urgently apply critical thinking to the emerging challenges and opportunities facing humanity today. We cannot continue to focus solely on one of the three civilizational challenges facing us.
The reason climate change has rightfully gained so much attention is because climate change threatens all of us. Given the dramatic and accelerating advances in AI brought on by the ChatGPT moment we definitely need to include the risk of AI in our existential risk conversation because once again we are all threatened. There is no sustainability for our species if AI takes over and decides to get rid of us.
The proliferation of nuclear threats in recent years also needs increased attention. What good is climate change if we only destroy our environment with the sudden outbreak of nuclear war ?
Yuval Noah Harari could not have been clearer: there is no solution to climate change or AI without global unity.
As we have been explaining, AI is different in that it brings with it 80% to 85% probability that we can achieve a world of Sustainable Super Abundance if we manage to align this new powerful digital species with the right kinds of humanist goals. And while AI will put greater pressure on our global environment in the near term, the expectation is that the emerging superintelligence will help us find the technical solutions needed to resolve climate change.
We need to urgently expand our global conversation on climate change to one focused on human survival and Sustainable Super Abundance. It won’t be easy to redirect the thinking that has accumulated over more than three decades. However, the ChatGPT moment has left us with no choice but to find ways to urgently respond to the challenges and opportunities of our day.
To get a sense of the change that needs to take place we conducted two relatively extensive surveys using the various AI tools or foundational models available to us. We first looked at student participation and academic engagement relative to all three existential risks and the idea of Sustainable Super Abundance after which we compared the three risks and the idea of Sustainable Super Abundance (SSA) as picked up by news organizations and academia.
Our AI search relative to student participation and academic attention to Climate Change, Nuclear Proliferation, AI risks and the potential for Sustainable Super Abundance is included below. Here is how Perplexity AI summarized their findings:
- Climate change is by far the most widely studied of these issues in higher education worldwide.
- Nuclear proliferation and AI risks are much more specialized and attract far fewer students, almost exclusively at the graduate level.
- The explicit study of sustainable superabundance is essentially absent from formal academic curricula, reflecting its status as an emergent and marginal theoretical concept.
DeepSeek provided us with the following numbers:
Ranking by Student Engagement
- Climate Change (~600,000+ students)
- AI Risks (~70,000+ students, growing fast)
- Nuclear Proliferation (~15,000–30,000 students)
Key Observations
- Climate dominates due to institutionalization in academia.
- AI risks are rising but still fragmented across disciplines.
- Nuclear studies have faded since the Cold War.
- SSA is barely taught—lacks academic infrastructure.
For the full AI survey please click here: Student Involvement in SSA & X Risk
As one would expect given the length of time humanity has been dealing with Climate Change, news media and academic coverage of climate change is far more robust than coverage of the threats emanating from AI or Nuclear War, although the coverage of AI is on the rise.
AI Survey Results
- Climate change remains by far the most reported and academically studied global threat.
- AI threats are rapidly gaining prominence, especially in the past few years.
- Nuclear war coverage and research are substantial but less sustained, with periodic spikes in response to world events.
Clear here for full AI survey: Climate News vs AI News vs Nuclear News
Our AI surveys also found that there is very little media or academic coverage of humanity’s potential to achieve Sustainable Super Abundance.
AI Survey Results
- Sustainable superabundance is virtually absent from mainstream news and academic discussions compared to the three major threats.
- Coverage of this optimistic future is dominated by a small set of futurists and select think tank publications.
- The idea is gaining minor traction in discourse around energy transitions and post-scarcity economics, but remains a marginal theme relative to existential risks1279104.
In summary: While the threats of climate change, AI, and nuclear war dominate academic and media attention, sustainable superabundance is an emerging narrative that garners minimal but gradually increasing interest, primarily among thought leaders, futurists, and a few dedicated researchers189.
Clear here for full AI survey: Sustainable Super Abundance in the News & Academia
The purpose of this book is to invite civil society from across the world to join the Global Coalition for Sustainable Super Abundance (GCSSA) we hope to create with your support. Our goal is that the first act of GCSSA will be to generate a new, expanded, more urgent conversation on the future of humanity that covers all three existential risks as well as the potential for Sustainable Super Abundance.
There is precedent for expanding the X-Risk conversation. For example the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists and virtually all of the X-Risk ecosystem participants have expanded the civilizational risk conversation to include all three predominant threats with some including other threats like biosecurity and pandemics.
However, as far as we know this is the first time someone has suggested we expand the conversation to include the potential for Super Abundance as well. We are confident that including the potential for Sustainable Super Abundance will be a welcome new positive angle on this all-important conversation.
Reorienting and Refocusing ESG
In recent years, numerous MNCs got involved with the ESG movement (Environmental, Social, Governance), but that movement has come under pressure due to lack of standardized measures that led some corporations to game the system. Without standardized, measurable criteria, the efforts made by corporations were often seen as virtue signaling rather than authentic attempts at community building.
We would encourage corporations from across the world to get involved with a new ESG movement but where the E stands not just for climate change, but for all three existential risks – climate change, nuclear proliferation and AI.
We never understood why MNCs, who are by definition global citizens, have not gotten more fully involved in the effort to build global citizenship.
In thinking about a new, more serious-minded corporate movement that tackles existential risk head-on, it seems clear that these global corporate citizens with their tremendous bounty of resources have a critical, authentic role to play in bringing humanity together.
Perhaps we can move to something like EEESG or Esg where the big E stands for all three existential risks. Even better, the movement should consider going one step further and ask the corporate world to think about Esg4 Sustainable Super Abundance.
We believe that businesses and corporations have an essential, authentic role to play in generating a global conversation on the future of humanity and our need to face our existential risks while making every effort to build Sustainable Super Abundance. No sector of the globe has more to lose than our leading businesses and their employees or corporate citizens. The more you have, the more you stand to lose, with existential catastrophes.
One thing is crystal clear for anyone who spends 3 minutes looking at our world today, the status quo is not tenable, we need transformative change at every level. Multinational corporations would do themselves and humanity a great service to help their employees focus on their human connectedness and human survival.
The Role for Multilateral Organizations and the SDG Conversation
As can be seen from the discussion above our focus has been on encouraging global civil society, understood in the broadest of terms, to get involved in this conversation rather than direct our focus on multinational organizations. The principal reason for our focus is that we believe that in order to effect the kind of urgent consequential change we are hoping to achieve, all segments of our global civil society need to be involved in the conversation.
This is not an effort that can be simply handed over to any single entity be they national or multinational. We are hoping to create a movement that builds a new 21st Century Renaissance mindset whose end goal is to transform the human project such that we become a multiplanetary species.
However, that being said we would welcome an informed, enthused response from the UN and other multilateral agencies. We have been very supportive of the UN SDG goals with our programs and are grateful for the establishment of these humanity wide goals. In many ways the SDG conversation could be considered a first attempt at the kind of conversation on the future of humanity we have been discussing.
We would be overjoyed to work with the UN on the kind of conversation we are hoping to generate. The first two SDG Goals are to bring an end to poverty and hunger, that is the promise of Sustainable Super Abundance.
However, our concern is that having 17 SDG goals dilutes the impact and focus of the message. If the UN or any other multilateral organizations were interested in pursuing a future of humanity conversation with a re-purposed SDG goal conversation that starts with the urgent need to overcome the civilizational threats facing us and ushering in a world of Sustainable Super Abundance thereby achieving the first two goals we would be very interested in pursuing that path.
We have also featured the UNESCO November 2021 report on education. The conversation they called for in November 2021 has been launched. It would be wonderful to find ways to get UNESCO working with OECD and PISA and other entities like the World Economic Forum and the ASIA Society to come up with a set of updated recommendations on how it is we really need to transform education across the globe.
To be clear, we would be more than happy to work with the UN and any other multilateral organization interested in working together to generate this future of humanity conversation we have envisioned.
In the next chapter we will discuss the urgent need for informed AI regulation.
Annex #1
Here is the UNESCO report
CNBC Feature on the UNESCO Report, with an interview of Dr. Fernando Reimers