Don Cayo: In my opinion
Humanity: Future studies program head says we have the potential; the only question is how we use it
Our society has the potential to eradicate disease and eliminate poverty. It also has the power to destroy the planet entirely.
This could be our species’ best century ever. Or our worst. The odds? About 50-50, says Ian Goldin, an acclaimed author who heads a future studies program at Oxford University, although he concedes the assessment may merely reflect “the optimism of the will and the pessimism of the intellect.”
What he is certain about is that the century has started well.
“We’ve never as a species been more successful,” he told me during a phone interview in advance of his visit to speak to a Board of Trade luncheon Monday.
“Life expectancies have never been greater. And there are lots of wonderful news including reductions in poverty, and many, many successes that are connected to connectivity and learning around the world.
“In the long sweep of history, there has never been a period that has been characterized by more success for more people.” But he worries it won’t last. “This progress has been extremely uneven globally and even nationally,” he noted. “Inequality is increasing everywhere, and not just in income, but in life expectancy and in other areas. So the question is: Can we manage the unintended consequences of success?”
The school Goldin heads at Oxford includes more than 300 scholars and research teams who investigate global challenges in most areas of human endeavour. He doesn’t purport to predict specific breakthroughs or setbacks in any of these areas, but he sees sharply different potential outcomes.
“There’s no logical reason why we couldn’t eliminate poverty, and many of the worst diseases that afflict humanity,” he said. “That is entirely plausible.”
Or we could fall victim to “all the old ways and many new ways we could destroy ourselves.”
He also identifies a couple of broad areas of concern.
“The worst risk is our inability to organize ourselves to solve problems,” he said. “Science, including social science, is pretty good at telling us what the problems are, whether it’s causes of war, or climate change, or antimicrobial resistance, or financial crises, etc. It’s also pretty good at understanding the many things that can be done to stop these things, or to at least reduce the potential of them happening.
“Yet our ability as citizens to make the tough decisions to do these things at the local, national and global level seems to be getting worse. Global governance is becoming more ineffective, less potent. National governments don’t seem to be able to think long-term and make tough decisions. And we as citizens tend to be short-term and local, rather than have a broader perspective, all for reasons that are understandable but that have, collectively, disastrous consequences.”
Another danger unique to our age is the rising power of individuals to wreak havoc.
“We’re approaching the first time in history when an individual can kill millions of people or create a global catastrophe. That’s because of bio-pathogens, new technologies, the leverage that comes out of some of the financial trades, the ability to cyber-infiltrate systems around the world, and a series of other massively improved capabilities for individuals or small groups.
“So we move to a world where the number of actors who will shape the future of the world is increasing almost exponentially with connectivity, technological progress, and the cheapening of many of these technologies. You don’t need a nuclear bomb to kill a large number of people.”
How do these big themes and global issues relate to the often-parochial concerns of the Board of Trade audience Goldin is to address in Vancouver?
“There are a lot of connection points,” he said. “The context of my visit is (Port Metro Vancouver’s) 2050 planning process. That’s long-term.
“There are very few places that are building visions for 2050 — that’s 35 years’ time. When you are building big things and making big lumpy investments, that’s the time frame you need to be looking at.
“Thinking about the way the world is going ... What are the key demographic drivers? What are the key technological drivers? How, when we can’t predict the future, do we make better decisions? That is closely related to my own thinking.”