IN 1983 I was one of 3 co-authors of 2025 report. Father who had been the economist's end-poverty sub-editor mainly structured the question - what are the most sustainability-critical 7 yeras chalenges that peoples need to rehearse , and how do these relate to chnages in technolgy. Father had met vob neumann in 1951; become his boographer; but most importamtly noram wass the epicentre of journalists intereted in von neumanns question what cgood could peoples unite around 100 times more tech per decade. It was critical to understasnd 2 idaes which that question integrated:
good needed to be above zero sum ganes unlikes the armrs race that the goats of maths had been required to spent most of their life on , as well as unlike the industrial age of unlimited consmption . Our point being consuming things is a zero sum game especially if you have no government designing renewbility. Conversely imagine a knowledge networking age sharing kife critical knowhow whch multiplies value in use.
th eother critical idea: access to 100 tiles more tech would start with very privileged people - would they openly share and even design that privielge with the least connecetd people in the world; we knew for example in 1983 that silicon valley was one group - see norman's 1982 survey; we also knew from normans first 10 yera of monitring von neumanns qiuestion that by 1961 - there were 2 neumnn ai labs: mit and stanfrd
that japan/tokyo's demand for tech was interacting with stanford
that neumann and einsten based in princeton had primarily connecetd 2 north east coridors- north was the open corridor - not only had thise recahed mit but neumann had given his architecture on comuter hardawre to ibm - ibm and dec had become designers of computers but on balance both the harware and the program lamguages were open ; neumann had actually gone futr=ther- with his knowledge he had said most patents should not last more than 6 minths because if you were at the epicente of a network of connectimg knowhow and wanted to do good with it then 6 months lead time in choosiung you partners was more than enough
there was also the government and security cirridor down through north east coridro to dc along the south east cpast and across to texas- this became concerned with space and nuclear arms race as well as government sectrets; it was the er of governmente secrets that neumann last 12 years of life aimed to open upo safely; he did this not just with open source omputing architecure that he hiped woiuld chnage education but with debates on whow brains of humans and machine intel would interact- his famous posthumous course at yale needed to change every way psycholgists and sociliogists celebrtaed human being in era of 100 time more tec
Roughly our vision ofr tech chnage was tie lines like this as conformed by matt ridley's 2010 epitaph to norman
1984-1990 -era of starting to network personal computers
19990-7 begiing of web
in iyr view 1997-2004 was critical - wenneded mass television to blend its last majority audience reach with digital becmen g the biggest audience- -around the miennium a reality tv program could have invilved half of the world's adults - looking for sultions to the new millennium - our 2 over all goals - education needed changing so millennials could be te fits sustainability generation; tyhe graetest risk to huamns needed to be debated roas : differences in incomes and expectation of rich and poor nations
for example we could start with the old g8 whose asymetries were the main root cause of world wr 2; woul the countries of usa canada germany france ital ik ussr japan meiate 1984-2025 so that overal millennials were the first sdg generation
-you will see that in our book that even as 1984-1001 started to make every personal computer user connecetd the real chalenge ws could all the g8 put themseles in the mind of leading uusr transforation - we anticiapte the fall of the berlin wall within 3 months of actual timeline; the point is the remaining russia as roof of the world would be extremely hard for any leader to integrate- one of te largets land resources in the world but most iced up and hard to live in - owning perhaps the majority of all energy resources; with 2 major cities both with complicated shiopping access to the rest of the wordld; with valdivotok on the far east s=coast needing its own plans- with landlocked extremely poor herdsman on the majotity of the land- far the poorest and therefore those the world nneeded to plan for - this was not just a russian problem but a nothh south problem predictable to impact afghanista and even more so those places that were poor apart from oil eg irag , iran; ; the eu had never been designed to undertsnad its south east as the greatest arae of chnage - which shuld have bene obvious when you looked at the 2 main assets the suuz canal and the deserts which along with russia were the main carbon energy sinks- so all in all even as personal comuting networks were potentially the great open society advantage for humanity unless every wealthy nation saw 1989 neded a amrashall plab 2.0 for the future of far north peopels integration through the old world , we would be starting miellenials with the greatest conflict not the era of peaceful interconnectibity-
if we had started an age of joyful solutions to end poverty being the number 1 web page around 2000 we would also have been able to ask what next as decices other than desktop comouters strem in data from every gps - be ths=hese persnal mobile devices; or flu=ying objevyts like drones; or places saftey monitors such as smart camera monitiring citizen safety;
ironically 2004 on the geneva art of the un started debati=ting what we now call web 2.0 but policy parts of un out of new york did noit- so a few big corporates in west and east stared to wn all society's data and the ai algorithms began to reflect how they extracted profits instead of prepping 8 billion beings for 2015-2030 being our last next chnage of bodreess cooeration development goals
our book had made the case fors suatainbility depending on changing education - by late 2010s we believed every chils could oiwn their skills dashboars and start to have nextr=t exoereienetial learning cyrated by their onw bots
while you of course replay what gaes humans needed to sequence from 1983 in other wasy - it is clear taht the inter-generational and open world mapping decaisions that needed to be shared have not been done so by the old g8 , and this has spiralled into risks of extreme nationalism everywhere even as the poorest parts of teh world now needed to share life-critiacl sulyions across communities and in increasing boirdless wasy; the technolgy is there but we havee noit designed the human intel of 8 billion brains in such a ways as to apply aritifiicial intel to augment humanity and our intergenerational goals as a smart parent in species - this is wehere we are ar as the 2020s becomes the most exciting decade - last chance to remap sustainability of climate , of peace, of how we all beome life long stduents and tecahers
the un2 frameeowrks can be applied to resolve this challenge not just at the levels of multilateral gov design boyt gov 2.0 ebe=verwhere and at ebevery level - not just national but potentailly wherevcer communities or networks of 100000 peopels lives have interdependence connections- if we dont h=build tehs e poistive l=ly they will likely be hacked by microterrorsists;
we should be preepoing for 2050 maximising the su=imultaeous number of peopel that mother earth nurtures at 10 billion ie 10to the fifth commonities/networks by 10to the fitfth beings assiasted by almost infite artificial intel and eg abindamcy of the sun's energy - but that meedes a united communities model; it needs national gocvenments becoing humans servant leaders - this is not what the socalled western democracies have been spending political time on if you review eg hansard in uk or revisit cspan etc recordings of how bipolar political parties have been qyarreling about old dividing lines instead of mediating future chages the younger half of teh world needed smart elders to be building