We stand at the most critical moment in human history since the Big Bang. After 250 years of accelerating technological change, the intelligence explosion is arriving decades ahead of schedule, offering humanity unprecedented power to transform our world. Where we harness these revolutionary technologies to create a post-scarcity, solved world where humanity thrives—or watch as our divisions lead us to extinction.
Those of us alive today are standing at the hinge of history. There has never been a more important or exciting time to be alive.
For the first time in human history, dramatic advances in technology have provided us with a clear opportunity to bring an end to poverty, hunger, disease, and even the need to work. Technology is now providing us with an opportunity to create a post-scarcity world of high universal income, or what we call Sustainable Super Abundance. This opportunity comes to humanity at a time when the post-World War II framework is fraying, and global and national tensions are all too often pulling us apart. This book is meant as an invitation to every human being alive today to join a global conversation on the future of humanity. Where are we today and where do we want to be in the year 2050?
We believe that if we manage to keep human civilization intact and on track, every human being alive in 2050 will live better than the billionaires of today in the same way we live better than the kings and queens of yesteryear.
If we learn to work together across the planet and use technology for the good of humanity, Sustainable Super Abundance can be our future. If, however, we cannot learn to come together as one, if we are unable to make the transition from 195 competing nation-states armed to the teeth to the collaborative world of abundance now available to us, our species faces severe civilizational risks.
No matter where you are reading this book today, you are a member of the human race, which now totals some 8.23 billion people on the planet Earth. As a member of the only thinking, “conscious” species in the known universe, you have a decision to make relative to how you are going to participate in the human project, which, after 250 years of the scientific and industrial revolutions, has come to a crossroads. Your decision is simple: choose to work to find ways to bring humanity together so that we can use technology to create a world of abundance— or risk the extinction of our species.
The idea that after 250 years of the Scientific and Industrial Revolutions humanity is at a crossroads is not new. In his book, Our Final Century, written in 2003, Sir Martin Rees, Britain’s Astronomer Royal, wrote that those of us alive today are living at the most important time in the history of our universe since the Big Bang!
This thinking is consistent with the philosophy called Long Termism that mostly comes out of Oxford University. One of the first Oxford professors to put forward this view was the moral philosopher Derek Parfit, who in 2011 published Volume Two of On What Matters, where he wrote:
“We live during the hinge of history. Given the scientific and technological discoveries of the last two centuries, the world has never changed as fast. We shall soon have greater powers to transform, not only our surroundings, but ourselves and our successors. If we act wisely in the next few centuries, humanity will survive its most dangerous and decisive period. Our descendants could, if necessary, go elsewhere, spreading through this galaxy.”
In January of this year, the organization created by Robert Oppenheimer and Albert Einstein to warn us of our proximity to existential threats told us that we’re closer to extinction than at any time in human history. The Bulletin of Atomic Scientists moved the distance between human survival and the Doomsday Clock to just 89 seconds to midnight, the closest we have ever been in Derek Parfit’s inimitable words to “blowing it.”
At the same time, dramatic advances in technology are very clearly creating the possibility of humanity bringing an end to poverty, hunger, and disease, creating a post-scarcity, “solved world” of Super Abundance where all human beings receive as many goods and services as they desire.
The decisions those of us alive today make in the coming years will determine the fate of humanity. The decisions we make in the next two decades will determine whether your children’s grandchildren will have children of their own or not. The fate of a trillion humans yet to be born hangs in the balance.
The universe, history, and the evolution of technology have placed those of us alive today in a critical turning point in human history; either we learn to come together as one to use technology for the good of humanity or we remain divided until the next and last war breaks out, destroying the human civilization and the only known conscious beings to have appeared in the 13.8 billion years since the Big Bang.
What are our prospects for success? You tell me. If you turn on the evening news, there is little discussion of the potential for abundance and lots of discussion about how divided we are across the world and within most nations.
Those of us who work at One World Future Ready see a very clear path to Sustainable Super Abundance. There is no doubt that a world of Sustainable Super Abundance is technologically feasible if we learn to get along across borders and build new global platforms of understanding.
Based on the work we have been doing for the last twelve years, we believe that achieving this world of abundance is probable if we can learn to come together.
Despite the proliferation of news sources and media outlets, there is very little informed discussion about the state of the world today, particularly as it relates to the intelligence explosion, which, despite all the hype, is not well understood beyond San Francisco.
Our goal is for this book to provide you with a snapshot of where the world stands today relative to the intelligence explosion hurdling our way two decades ahead of schedule as well as provide you with some of the key concepts needed to understand today’s world.
Our hope is that this book will serve as a catalyst to generate a multi- level, global conversation on the future of humanity. Our hope is that we can expand the sustainability conversation to include all of the civilizational threats facing humanity and to extend the conversation to include the extraordinary positive upside in front of us, if we can find a way to work together as a single species. Our goal in this future of humanity conversation is to address each of our existential risks as well as point the way forward to extraordinary gains we can achieve in a world of Sustainable Super Abundance.
We wholeheartedly agree with the view put forward by Sir Martin Rees that those of us alive today are living through the most profound time since the Big Bang some 13.8 billion years ago. As the only known conscious beings in an observable universe that stretches 93 billion light – years across we believe everyone alive today shoulders an infinite responsibility to each other to get the future right.
We are therefore creating a project called Humanity 2050 which is meant to be an invitation to all who are interested to join a Global Coalition for Sustainable Super Abundance (GCSSA). We are proposing that one of the first acts of the GCSSA will be to generate the above-mentioned global conversation on the future of humanity where the end goal will be to build a new story of human wisdom commensurate with our technology.
A story about the future of humanity that every parent across the planet Earth can share with their children. A story that helps build a new 21st century mindset of love and compassion, a 21st century Human Renaissance that takes Spaceship Earth to the stars bringing light, wisdom and consciousness to a dark and endless sky.