Expanding Situational Awareness to Address the Urgent Need for a Global Conversation on the Future of Humanity
Our goal in writing this book is to provide the average citizen with a book, a primer, that helps sort through the artificial intelligence noise— and to understand just how profoundly transformative AI technology is, so that we may all begin to develop situational awareness of it.
We also want to build a broader definition in the 21st century of “situational awareness,” where we understand how critical this moment is to the future of humanity. What has become crystal clear to us is that we now have the technological capability to create a post-scarcity world, one without poverty, hunger, and even the need to work.
What is also mega-clear is that AI, or this new digital species with unprecedented power for good and evil, is being thrust into a divided world where 195 competing nation-states are armed to the teeth, spending $2.7 trillion a year preparing for war. We’re living in a world that is standing at the brink of self-destruction—remember, it’s 89 seconds to midnight—because of our inability to get along.
Rather than prepare for the Deep Utopia now available to us, our corporate and governmental leaders are locked in a ferocious competition to be first. A competition that puts all of us at risk vis-à-vis AI. We have become our own greatest threat to survival.
In his seminal 2003 book, Our Final Century, Sir Martin Rees told us that we are living at the most important time in the history of the universe since the Big Bang. We thought that Sir Martin’s statement was true in 2003, and that it is even more true today. The next decade will be make-or-break for humanity. Which way we go will depend on the decisions we make in the coming years.
Our hope with this book is to launch an urgent, broad-based conversation dealing with the future of humanity; a conversation that takes place in every segment of our global society and on every corner of our small planet. A conversation that we hope will point the way forward for those of us alive— and for the trillions yet to be born.
Situational Awareness as it Relates to the AI Challenge
From Leopold Aschenbrenner’s groundbreaking paper:
“Everyone is now talking about AI, but few have the faintest glimmer of what is about to hit them. Nvidia analysts still think 2024 might be close to the peak. Mainstream pundits are stuck on the willful blindness of ‘it’s just predicting the next word.’ They see only hype and business-as-usual; at most, they entertain another internet-scale technological change.
“Before long, the world will wake up. But right now, there are perhaps a few hundred people, most of them in San Francisco and the AI labs, that have situational awareness. Through whatever peculiar forces of fate, I have found myself amongst them. A few years ago, these people were derided as crazy—but they trusted the trendlines, which allowed them to correctly predict the AI advances of the past few years. Whether these people are also right about the next few years remains to be seen. But these are very smart people— the smartest people I have ever met—and they are the ones building this technology. Perhaps they will be an odd footnote in history, or perhaps they will go down in history like Szilard and Oppenheimer and Teller. If they are seeing the future even close to correctly, we are in for a wild ride.”
In this book, our goal is to help those in global civil society understand that:
- The trendlines for AGI and ASI have been accelerated by two to three decades and are coming at us faster than any other previous
- The technology we are creating will be far and away more transformative than any other invention in human history.
Analysts struggle to find ways to compare AI with past inventions, such as the printing press or the internet. What most do not understand is that there is nothing to compare it to.
The printing press and the internet do not, and will never have, agency; they will never put our very existence in question. We are creating, for the first time in human history, a digital species with intelligence that will greatly exceed that of human beings, and the big worry is that AI will rapidly gain agency over us— and we will have no control over it.
Part of the problem comes from the lack of a formal definition for AGI (Artificial General Intelligence) and ASI (Artificial Super Intelligence).
“Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) is a type of artificial intelligence that can understand, learn, and apply knowledge across a broad range of tasks at a level equal to or surpassing human intelligence. Unlike narrow AI, which is specialized for specific tasks, AGI is designed to perform any intellectual task that a human can do, including reasoning, problem-solving, and adapting to new situations without needing task- specific programming, according to Amazon’s AWS.
AGI remains a theoretical concept and a major goal of AI research, with no consensus yet on how or when it will be achieved, according to Net Guru.
Here again, the general discussion is misleading. Anyone who has used Generative AI knows that the AI models we are using are vastly more “knowledgeable” and “smarter” than ourselves. AI can read 1.2 billion books a year, and it will be 100 million times smarter than any average human. That is 100 million times better to read and absorb data.
The primary difference is autonomy. Generative AI is already way smarter than us. However, as of today, they still need a prompt to jump into action. Generative AI are not yet autonomous or strategic, and as of today, they have no agency independent of us. The most prevalent expectations for the arrival of AGI range from 2026 to 2028.
Indeed, the timelines keep moving up. In a recent interview, Elon Musk just predicted ASI for this year or next. He defines ASI as being smarter than any human at anything in this brief video.
We believe the best definition of the kind of intelligence we are creating is included in Dario Amodei’s paper, Machines of Loving Grace, where he explains that powerful AI will provide the capacity to put a “country of geniuses in a datacenter.”
The fundamental question facing humanity today, as it relates to AI, is: Do we want this digital species to have autonomy? The leading actors in the field tell us there is a ten to twenty percent existential risk to humanity that the AI simply takes over and gets rid of human beings or keeps us as pets. That was never a worry with the printing press or the internet. There are a whole host of additional threats that arise from the proliferation of powerful AI, particularly if it gets into the wrong hands or if the robots we are creating are used for war.
Situational Awareness Expanded
As we indicated above, our goal in this book is to understand the AI revolution and then situate that revolution in today’s increasingly complex world to expand our situational awareness to find a pathway or pathways to achieve Sustainable Super Abundance.
What is clear to us is: we can no longer deal with the civilizational threats facing humanity in isolation as we explained in Chapter 10.
In some ways or many ways, the ChatGPT moment has poured gasoline on a human fire that was already on the brink of self-annihilation. The big difference here is that the nature of this gasoline is fundamentally different in that it has the potential to both exacerbate our risks and to go a long way toward solving our problems.
The OpenAI launch of ChatGPT, on November 30, 2022, transformed our destiny forever. That commercial launch unleashed a ferocious competition between trillion-dollar companies bound and determined to become the first to develop AGI, as whichever gets there second may no longer be able to compete. The one attempt to call for a six- month pause was swept aside as the AI tsunami hurdled past the call for a pause as if it did not exist.
At the same time, this tremendous technological power has been thrust onto a divided world at a time when our post-World War Two institutions are fraying and the big power rivalry between the U.S. and China has been accelerating. This, at a time when the group created by Oppenheimer and Einstein tells us that we are closer to self-annihilation than ever before, or 89 seconds from midnight.
The ferocious, no-holds-barred, corporate and geo-political competition is putting all of us at risk. The more we fight against one another, the greater the chances of AI taking over and asking, among their AI selves, why keep these insidious, stupid beings with us? They have never built up a wisdom commensurate with their technology despite repeated calls from global thought leaders. Why keep them around other than possibly as pets?
What has become clear to us is that the Greek Tragedy unfolding here could be the last act in the human project if we do not act swiftly and comprehensively to address our civilizational threats—all of them—as well as work together to build the post-scarcity world now available to us.
The Chat GPT movement unleashed a ferocious competition among trillion-dollar companies to become the first to attain AGI in a capitalist world, where the principal actors are begging for us to put in place rules of the game— but no one is listening.
At the same time, the leading AI countries—China and the US— are in a pitched battle for global supremacy with nuclear tensions spreading across the planet as we move further away from the end of World War Two. That was the last globally calamitous event, which led to the creation of our global institutions.
The challenge is clear: if humanity can unite and use the technology tsunami for the good of all humanity, and at the same time overcome our other civilizational threats, we can create a world of Sustainable Super Abundance, and the trillions of human beings yet to be born will see the light of day
If, however, humanity is unable to unite and create a new set of global institutions ready to take on today’s challenges, there is a very high probability that we will prove the creators of the Great Filter Theory correct and become just the next advancing civilization to self-destruct because we were unable to build a wisdom commensurate with our technology.
In the next section of this chapter, we will speak to the need to educate the 1.4 billion students studying in K-12 institutions across the world, and with 100 million educators working with them. One of the big challenges facing humanity today is that education is a nation-state enterprise in a world in desperate need of global competence and a sense of what it means to be a global citizen.
In the last part of this chapter, we will address the need for the whole of humanity to build a situational awareness that goes beyond the AI challenge and beyond the climate change challenge to embrace not just our civilizational challenges but to also discuss how we can navigate past those challenges to create the world of Sustainable Super Abundance. Technology has made it available to us if, if, if we can only learn how to get along with one another.
The Education Solution
Let’s start with K-12 Education and the 1.4 billion students studying today.
In this chapter, we will first look to educators from across the world to help us generate the conversation and set the stage for this world of abundance, then invite everyone to join the fun. One leg of the pathway to abundance will need to come from the K-12 and university education sectors.
UNESCO tells us that in today’s world, there are currently between 1.3 billion and 1.4 billion primary and secondary school students being guided by just under 100 million educators. It seems to us that this critical segment of our global population is all too often forgotten.
This audience is critical for obvious reasons, K12 students are our future. Providing K12 educators and students with a roadmap to Sustainable Super Abundance is essential to the success of this effort.
If we are going to usher in a world of abundance, we are going to need to do more than publish well-written, well-researched books at the university level and pretend that’s how we are going to overcome the challenges in front of us. As UNESCO stated in its November 2021 report, Reimagining Our Futures Together: A New Social Contract for Education, education itself needs to be transformed and that starts with K12 education.
We wholeheartedly agree that education needs to be transformed at the K-12 and university levels. We need a driving mission, a challenge that unites educators across the world. We hope that achieving Sustainable Super Abundance can be that mission.
We would propose that K-16 educators answer UNESCO’s call for a new social contract for education by working together to build the world of Super Abundance that technology has made available to us.
Reimagining our Futures Together: A New Social Contract for Education (cited above) calls for a fundamental transformation of education systems worldwide to address the challenges facing humanity and our 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.
The education sector has been slow to respond to today’s societal needs. Indeed, we believe the big risk in education today is that far too many schools are educating our youth for a world that no longer exists. Rather than prepare K-12 students for a world of scarcity, we need to prepare them to live in a world of Sustainable Super Abundance, in a rapidly globalizing world of exponential technological change.
Part of the challenge in developing a global educational policy is that education is a national endeavor, where each of the 195 competing nation-states develops its own education policy. And while many educators understand the need to build global competence, those educators continue to be too few and far between, particularly as most nation states do not provide any real incentive to educate across borders.
In our view, someone or some entity or entities are going to need to pick up the slack, as there is an inherent disconnect between nation- states that govern their education systems and the need to teach global citizenship. Over the last decade, One World has tried to fill the gap with different levels of success, as we will discuss in Chapter 14.
Educational leader John Dewey wrote in 1934 that “Any education is, in its forms and methods, is outgrowth of the needs of the society in which it exists.” In his day, he suggested that educational needs would vary from place to place. We believe the educational goals of today are consistent across the world but need to include a global perspective and a clear sense of the unique time we are living through, a clear goal that unites humanity.
One futurist who captures and understands today’s educational challenge extremely well is James Martin, who has written more than a hundred books. His The Wired Society (1978) is one of the most influential. In 2006, he wrote another prescient book, The Meaning of the 21st Century: A Vital Blueprint for Ensuring Our Future. We believe that this book, more than any other, captures the challenge of our day, even though it was written almost twenty years ago.
From Martin’s The Meaning of the 21st Century:
“At the start of the 21st Century, humankind finds itself on a nonsustainable course— a course that, unless it is changed, will lead to catastrophes of awesome consequences. At the same time, we are unlocking formidable new capabilities that could lead to much more exciting lives and glorious civilizations.
This could be humanity’s last century, or it could be the century in which civilization sets sail toward a far more spectacular future. Decisions that will lead to these wildly different conclusions have to be made soon.
They depend on our being able to understand the options for the 21st century, think logically about our future and collectively take rational action.”
This is exactly what we are attempting to do with this book and the conversation on the future of humanity we hope to generate:
- Make clear the options in front of us
- Think logically about those options and our future
- Encourage a collective approach to taking rational action
We are also calling on the International Commission on Stratigraphy, the world’s leading authority for defining geological time, to classify our era as the Anthropocene Age, or the age in which the dominant actor on the planet Earth is no longer Mother Nature but rather Homo Deus or humankind.
James Martin explains why the focus on this classification is needed.
“Historically, evolution has been in nature’s hands. Now, suddenly, it is largely in human hands, but we need to be cautious, using our scientific know-how as responsibly as possible.
The job of today’s young people, or the Transition Generation, will be to get humanity through the coming period of chaos, peril, and opportunity. A massive transition is needed, and the agenda should be created for the generation that will bring about this transition.
Much of what needs to be done is not happening. Today’s computer models show that we are not adapting quickly enough because we are not thinking ahead. There must be an absolute crusading determination to address the changes ahead.
Today’s young people will collectively determine whether civilization survives or not. We need to give them 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.”
We agree with Martin that the number one goal of education today needs to be to provide K-12 youth with a foundation for making wise choices so that they can understand humankind’s likely, possible, probable, and preferred futures. Indeed, this is precisely the kind of global conversation we are attempting to create with this book. Our mission is to engage as many of the 100 million K12 educators and 1.4 billion K12 students in a discussion on Sustainable Super Abundance as possible.
We also believe that the University Sector, with its estimated 250 million students and 12 to 15 million educators, has a very important role to play in building a foundation for making wise choices. We are convinced that UNESCO’s call for a global conversation on education needs to be a K-16 conversation.
If the CEO of IBM is having difficulty keeping up with the pace of change, how can we expect the average third-grade teacher to keep up? Rather than distance themselves from K-12 educators, universities should embrace them. They should host events at their universities celebrating K-12 educators and students who engage with the real world in a meaningful and impactful way.
Getting Through the Canyon with as Little Mayhem as Possible
We have attempted to make clear in this book that humanity stands at a crossroads and that, at a time of accelerating technological change, we need to find ways to come together across the world. Martin uses a wonderful metaphor of a whitewater raft hurdling downstream at an accelerating rate of speed:
“We are travelling at breakneck speed into an age of extremes— extremes in wealth and poverty, extremes in technology and the experiments that scientists want to perform, extreme forces of globalism, weapons of mass destruction, and terrorists acting in the name of religion. If we are to survive decently, we have to learn to manage this situation.
The message of this book is vitally important. We have reached a situation where grand-scale decisions have to be made. Collectively, humankind needs to be taught about the future so that it can understand these decisions. Rules of the road need to be put in place. As I will explain, the 21st century is very critical. It is a make-or-break century.”
Martin calls on the young people of today to become the much-needed “Transition Generation” to help humanity survive through the current challenges to a new creative era of history. He writes,
“Think of the 21st century as a deep river with a narrow bottleneck at the center. Think of humanity as river rafters heading downstream. As we head into the canyon, we’ll have to cope with a rate of change that becomes more intense— a white-water raft trip with the currents becoming much faster and rougher—a time when technology will accelerate at a phenomenal rate. As the world’s population grows, global tensions and pollution will climb, and the danger of massive famines will increase.
The decades in which we are swept toward the canyon bottleneck will be at a time when we unlock extraordinary new technology–nanotechnology, biotechnology, extreme- bandwidth networks, regenerative medicine, robotic factories, and intense forms of computerized intelligence.
The job of the Transition Generation is to get humanity through the canyon with as little mayhem as possible into what we hope will be smoother waters beyond.”
Our goal in writing this book is to help a new generation of youth navigate past the turbulent waters ahead to a post-scarcity world of abundance by providing them with a foundation for making wise choices. If humanity is going to successfully navigate these waters, we are going to need to apply an exponential mindset and understand that the intelligence explosion is upon us and that AGI/ASI are right around the corner.
If we can find ways to align human values with the new digital species, we can create a world without poverty, hunger, or the need to work. If, on the other hand, we fall short, the existential risks we are facing will confirm the Great Filter Theory rather than disprove it.
There can be no doubt that, as Martin forecast in 2006, humanity is at a crossroads and the decisions we make in the coming years will not only determine our fate but the fate of trillions of human beings yet to be born.
If we are going to successfully navigate this river, we are going to need educators and humanity to unite as never before, not only to avoid our next and last war but also to solve climate change and avoid the potential downsides of AI.
Broadening the Conversation Beyond Educators
While the K-12 education sector does provide one important pathway forward, we are going to need a broader society-wide conversation if we are going to succeed in achieving a post-scarcity world. Parents, citizen-leaders, public officials, business leaders, artists, and educators are all going to need to be involved in this civilizational conversation.
In Chapter One, we shared Yuval Noah Harari’s comment:
“…for the first time adults are not really good guides for the future of these kids. We for the first time have no idea what the world will look like when the children of today are themselves grown up. Nobody knows what the economy or the job market or what society will look like in 10 or 20 years.”
While we completely agree with Mr. Harari’s conclusion, we would argue that today’s uncertainty relative to the future of humanity makes the role of parents, civic leaders, business leaders, and educators even more important.
The one thing we can provide our youth that we know has the potential to last a lifetime is a strong set of values. Indeed, we are also going to need to align our AI around a strong set of agreed-upon humanist values. Generating those values will require conversations at many different levels.
Indeed, those of us above a certain age will be the last generation to have grown up in the old world, without cell phones, personal computers, where there were no flickers, and you had to get up to turn the channel on the TV to see one of three stations on VHF. We believe the older generation has something special to share with our youth— memories of a simpler, less-complex world.
At the same time, if you are like most parents, you would not be at fault for believing our world is upside down in that our sons and daughters know how to use the most powerful tool in the world better than us— technology. There has never been a more important time for different generations to come together and agree on a set of values that we can align with the AI extant.
Broadening our Perspective: Why is Bill Gates Only One-Third Correct?
To be clear, we are going to need to do more than broaden our outreach; we are also going to need to broaden our perspective. For example, why is Bill Gates only 25% correct in the assertion he makes below? Following the publication of his book, How to Avoid a Climate Disaster, the Microsoft founder was interviewed by Anderson Cooper on 60 Minutes. Here are some excerpts:
Anderson Cooper: You believe this is the toughest challenge humanity has ever faced?
Bill Gates: Absolutely, the amount of change and new ideas is greater than the pandemic, and it needs a level of cooperation that would be unprecedented.
AC: It just seems overwhelming if every aspect of our daily life has to change.
BG: It can seem overwhelming…if people think it’s easy, they are wrong. If people think it is impossible, they are wrong. It’s possible, but it will be the most amazing thing mankind has ever done.”
We understand that at the time, Gates, a philanthropist and one of the world’s richest (and most knowledgeable) men, was focused on solving climate change, and he was only responding to a question, but it does seem clear to us that we need to broaden the X-Risk conversation as well as include the upside conversation relative to a world of Sustainable Super Abundance.
If we think about it for a minute, while climate change is a civilizational threat, it seems far less immediate at this point than the possible impending doom emanating from AI. And as it relates to nuclear risk, it is hard to tell when that might happen. However, in just the past few weeks, we have had tensions break out between India and Pakistan; between Israel, the US, and Iran; the ongoing war in Ukraine; and worry over North Korea.
Humanity has been operating at the edge of nuclear disaster since the outbreak of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, causing UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres to declare on August 1, 2022, that
“Today, humanity is just one misunderstanding, one miscalculation away from nuclear annihilation. We have been extraordinarily lucky so far. But luck is not a strategy. Nor is it a shield from geopolitical tensions boiling over into nuclear conflict.”
Humanity needs a strategy to ensure its future. What good does it do to solve the climate change challenge if the world is blown to smithereens the next day?
Broadening the conversation does not mean we should in any way stop talking about climate change; in fact, just the opposite: we need to make clear to everyone that our existential challenges are growing rather than shrinking, and the key to solving them all starts with finding ways to bring humanity together.
In this book, we suggest bringing the potential for a world of Sustainable Super Abundance into the discussion. The pathway to a world without poverty, hunger, and the need to work also requires that humanity unite in ways we have not yet done.
The Future of Humanity Conversation
Because we are living at the most important time in human history— at the hinge of history—and given the accelerating opportunity and challenge coming from AI, we believe we need to engineer an urgent future of humanity conversation across the globe.
The whole reason global leaders have taken on the climate change conversation is because they are concerned that climate change imperils the future of our human civilization. They are concerned that if we do not change course now, our human civilization will be severely disrupted.
It seems clear to us that if we are really and truly concerned about the future of human civilization, we need to extend the climate change conversation to include nuclear proliferation and the now imminent threat posed by AI. As we discussed in Chapter 10 we need to extend sustainability to go from just talking about climate change to talking about human survival and the potential for Sustainable Super Abundance.
We are therefore urging civic, public, academic, and business leaders to broaden this conversation at a time when our species is at a crossroads.
Returning to James Martin’s prescient 2006 book, The Meaning of the 21st Century: A Vital Blueprint for Ensuring Our Future, he made clear the challenge of our day and explained that:
“Much of what needs to be done is not happening. Today’s computer models show that we are not adapting quickly enough because we are not thinking ahead. There must be an absolute crusading determination to address the changes ahead.
The only change we would make to the above statement of almost twenty years ago is that, since we have done little to heed his call in the last two decades, the need to think ahead is greater today than 20 years ago and therefore the crusading determination needed to effect the change will have to be even more urgent because of lost time. No one should have any doubt that this is our last chance to address the change that Carl Sagan saw in the 1990s and James Martin wrote about in 2006.
The purpose of this book is to first provide readers with a foundation to understand the challenges and opportunities in front of us and second serve as a catalyst to generating an urgent conversation on the future of humanity.
This Global Conversation on the Future of Humanity is Urgent and Essential to our Survival – There is No Plan B
In thinking about the urgency of this conversation relative to the future of humanity, it is worth contemplating a couple of important points.
First, it seems that our far too many political leaders act only after the catastrophe has hit— be it financial prudence or other more serious risks. For example, according to this article in Business Insider, following the Washington D.C. airplane crash that took 67 lives, there is a concept in the Air Safety Industry called “blood priority.” In aviation safety, this means that needed changes will not be implemented until after a major accident with deaths, despite US safety officials pushing to be more proactive with safety measures.
In thinking about existential risks, we do not have the luxury of blood priority, because there is no way we can survive a nuclear war, an AI takeover, or advanced climate change. There is no Plan B. We only get one shot at preserving our human civilization. Now is the time; no one should doubt that we are living at the hinge of history.
We are of the view that if we can keep civilization intact for the next 25 years, proactively navigating past the kinds of catastrophes we see on the horizon, every human being alive in 2050 will live better than the billionaires of today.