The World In 25 Years: Megatrends And Context For Large Scale Change
This panel discussion at the 2011 Skoll World Forum was called “The World in 25 Years: Megatrends and Context for Large Scale Change.” Developments in the global economy, business, demographics, science and technology will define what the world looks like in 25 years. How will these trends shape the complex environment for those working to create large scale change? Daniel Franklin, Executive Editor of The Economist and the acclaimed ‘World In’ series, hosts leading thinkers and futurists in a session about megachange over the next 25 years with an emphasis on drivers and inhibitors of social progress.
With: Nick Bostrom, Daniel Franklin, Mark Stevenson
Nick Bostrom, Director of the Future of Humanity Institute here in Oxford, a professor, and also runs the Director of the program on the impacts of future technology. Nick, I think partly in the light of these grand things that we've seen One of the things you do is look at different scenarios for the future, nobody can be quite sure what lies ahead but paid for us, perhaps two or three of these scenarios, how do they look?
Yeah, I mean, we don't really do scenarios so much. It's a popular their technique, but one for which there is actually as far as I know, no evidence that that it works in our analysis my work is sort of social facilitation process but in terms of actuality, getting a more accurate picture of the future.
There is even some studies suggesting that it makes people have less accurate believes. But my interest is really in the really big picture, like thinking about how the human condition might change, not just that we have have some new cool gadgets or faster cars or a few degrees warmer or cooler temperature, but it's our fundamental changes in the human condition.
So the downside you can think of possible existential catastrophes that could put an end to the human story, including extinction scenarios or other ways in which we could permanently and drastically destroy our potential.
What do you think the chances of that are over the next twenty-five years, which is what we're looking at here?
Well, very small.
Are you talking very long term here, extinction?
Yeah, well, I mean it's one of the questions that one would think about. We had a conference actually in this same building a couple of years ago where we brought together some leading experts from different risk areas and at the end of that we had an informal poll asking what they thought was the probability that the human species would be extinct by the end of this current century, and the median answer to that was 19 percent.
Which is a disturbingly high. Now there might be a selection effect there like you are more likely to attend a conference on risks if you think that there are risks. Nevertheless, it's roughly in line with what other people have spent some time thinking about this should have concluded. So that's one broad class of scenarios is how things could go wrong, and I think that there is a qualitative difference between all the kinds of risks in this set have ever happened which have been tragic for the people immediately involved, but if you zoom out and look at it from God's point of view, even World War 1, World War 2, the Holocaust all of these horrible things, are really like mere ripples on the great pond of life.
If you look at say a world population curve, they do not even show up. So at the end of the day they will not have made a significant difference to the total amount of human suffering, or the total number of human lives, or the total number of deaths that will ever have been. Now an existential, a catastrophe is qualitatively different in that respect.
So we're at risk of deeply depressing here people whose very purpose is to make a difference in people's lives, so I hope you're going to paint some other scenarios for us as well.
There are a number of others. But there is an interesting Point out, which is that if you sort of pause instead of just rushing and doing things, and you think first of all, out of all the thousands and thousands of different things I possibly could be doing, which one has the greatest expected utility.
Like where do you do the most good, where you weigh the good by the probability of achieving the good. I think there is a very strong argument that existential risk mitigation very robustly comes up as a trump if you just do the numbers you count the number of future possible generations that could exist If all goes well then maybe in the very long run we'll colonize the galaxy and there are many galaxies and so far as their numbers there are such that even the tiniest probability that we could lose all of that.
We will tend to just be worth a lot more than eliminating world hunger or curing malaria or something. So for social entrepreneurs there is also a great opportunity here, I mean if the goal is really to do the maximum amount of good rather than something else people might be doing. been hearing about the powers of imagining things differently.
So you could be a, if you like, an evolutionary pessimist and say, "We are doomed to extinction in the long run." Or you could be a technological optimist and say, "The rate of change, the human genome is one example, is such that maybe far from extinction, some sort of reverse future you could envisage where we all live much, much, much longer, for example."
Yeah, I mean the reverse of extinction I guess will be to bring in new kind of species or something like that into existence. And certainly a lot depends on what you say, in the long term, like what do we mean, is it like 20 years? Or is it 20 billion years? It's a big different step. But certainly there is a huge upside as well if one is thinking about fundamental changes to the human condition that Just as one can imagine the human condition ending in a downward direction, I can imagine it ending in an upward direction by a transformation into some kind of post humanity, and through the development of technologies that can change human nature in profound ways.
By eliminating aging, for example, or radically increasing cognitive capacities, or changing emotional well-being, or indeed creating a new sort of Machine intelligences. I think that if we are seriously considering a very long time frames and I am not necessarily talking ten thousand years, but even, say, a century.
Then these kinds of radical transformations become fairly plausible. Not certain by any means, but they certainly are among the kinds of things one would need to seriously consider if we are thinking fifty or a hundred years out.
And if you look at the technology and you think here you're talking to a group of social entrepreneurs. What are the areas where you think the capacity to nudge this future in a benign direction Yeah that a very important beginning question, it is also one that is very difficult to answer, so I am struck.
I have been thinking about these things for a long time. Just how difficult it is even to know sometimes which direction it is we should be trying to push things in. So that is a lot of activity, a lot of people trying to pull something or push something and very little effort trying to be To spend trying to figure out which direction it is, things should be going.
So should we have faster technological advance or store technological advance in different areas. It is a very, very difficult question once you consider all the second order affects and so forth, these existential risks. Some technologies can reduce them. These same technologies might increase some other risks.
Some might interact with other Others, it becomes a hugely difficult problem. I sometimes feel like we are like ants that are busy Tugging our little straw to the anthill and building up an anthill. Maybe we are very creative and energetic in going about this, but few reflect on to what kind of hell that it is we are contributing to ultimately.
Like we could be like the workers in Hitler's war machine: very hardworking and doing what they are told. And we might be all be like that. I mean, if civilization is heading in the wrong direction, I am not saying it is, but if that were the case, then all our efforts in reducing inefficiencies and cultivating creativity and scientific innovation would actually be making things worse.
So it's really important to get these basic things right. I sometimes think of wisdom as the ability to get the important things approximately right. If one could figure out some way in which we could increase wisdom in that sense, our collective ability to figure out the truth about the important things and then coordinate I think that kind of contribution would be extremely valuable.
Great, but at this point I would like to invite our final panelist speaker, Bart Stephenson who is an unusual combination mark of both being a comedian, script writer, and I think you were once, or maybe still are, a stand-up Comedian, have I got that right?
I did that for a bit.
Yes?
I occasionally did that.
Now it's sit down.
Sit down.
But also a thinker about the future and an author. Of a book that has just appeared called 'An Optimists Tour of the Future'. So take us on a lightning optimist's tour of the future. What does it look like?
Well, sorry I have to say I am not intrinsically an optimist so the book when I originally came up with it simply called 'A Whirl Tour of the Future'. Like all of the people who have been on before, I do believe that what is happening with things like bio-technology and nano-technology, what's happening with the climate, what's happening with the internet, these are there game changers, they are going to change the way we think and i wanted to write an accessible book for every body.
A lot of popular science books are really for people who read popular science books, and I wanted to write something for my mum essentially. as she hasn't read it, which is rather unfortunate. So I didn't start of with an optimistic viewpoint, but I couldn't help bumping into lots of choices I didn't realize we had about the future.
So, if we look at the public discourse of the future, it's pretty much this, and certainly it's a reflection of our hypothesis: it's going to be a bit shit. Especially if you vote for that guy. You can't trust scientists, or religious people, or left wingers, or right wingers, or football fans, or your neighbor, vote for me, buy my paper, I understand.
Which isn't very inspiring, and yet I kept coming across people who were just getting on with solving our grand challenges. So I'm not saying the future will be better, but I'm saying that we still have everything to play for. And I didn't know that when I started out and now I do. And I think everybody of good conscience needs to be in that game, which is what's so impressive about the people here.
What many people here probably need to do is look up and look at some of those choices that are coming, because things like nano-tech will have radical implications for the threat of water scarcity and if you're not thinking about that, then you're putting your efforts partly in the wrong direction.
And if you get into the institutional setx x x x Steven was talking about, you might actually be sitting on that x x; stopping innovation that need you to do the thing; that will make that change. So we have lot of choices so I'm saying it's not going to be better, but it definitely could be. It could be Renaissance.
Let's take you up on one point that you mentioned briefly, that institutional changes i mean that is one dimension of choices. A lot of our talk about the future often revolves around technology and ideas and New ventures, but what about the institutions? What sorts of choices do you think after that?
Well, this is the biggest, probably one of the best decisions i came to. I came away and i was thinking and i came to the end of my travels and i realized there is a big problem with innovation and that when we talk about innovation we very happily talk about innovation, in you know science, technology or eve inn the arts; music or fashion.
But we hardly ever talk about institution relation, changing the way our governments or institutions work to keep up with the pace of change, which means there's a rate of pace of change in the technology and medicine for instance, it is completely different to rate of change in how organisations run including organisations we work for such as publishing.
Government is a classic example Innovation in parliamentary democracy in this country 1928 they gave women the vote. Wasn't really even innovation, it was just getting more within the same system. We are getting all upset now about a slightly more representative voting system. Governments talk about promoting innovation, Innovation in the way they work in the last 350 years.
So our big challenge, actually, to solve all the problems we have, we have the tools. They're already there. I mean, I've seen them. We can deal with climate change, we can deal with The poverty would do in quite short order if we organized ourselves better, which is why what Steven is saying is important, but also more importantly we need to have an optimism of ambition.
One of the things I got very concerned about was I realized that optimism and ambition has been taken off the table by our politics and our press. If you look, is there is a problem of scale here. I think this often lies at the heart of social entrepreneurship too that the challenge to take very good ideas and make them work at a bigger scale, we saw first of all that faced with a very precise problem that Stephen presented.
A small group of people could organize astonishingly quickly to do something much, much better, but when you take that and try and scale it up to the level of governments, let alone the international system, it may be a lot harder. Is that I think that's certainly true.
an issue that you would recognize?
Absolutely. And there is no one approach to things. What is interesting about what's, particularly with the internet and our increasing interconnectedness and the power of technology, is that it actually, as small groups of people can now make massive changes and make very important interventions now for good or bad, so it is, and the other thing is you can now go and create something much more quickly as an alternative.
So you'll see lots of people going on not interested in your big organization and are going to create a very small agile one over here and everybody takes a look at that and goes Oh. Oh. You know, in fact I was just talking to a very large software company yesterday and I managed to convince them they can build a version of their own business in the cloud for about a hundredth of the staff, and they're going to go ahead and do it so their management starts to pay attention to it.
I can't resist before I invite Our first speakers are for a general discussion to ask you about humor, and the role of humor in the picture really. It's just some of these discussions, well you all have good laughs at various times, but some of the discussions tend the be rather serious. But is there a role that humor can play beyond light relief?
Does it matter?
You know, it's a good question. I think so. It's not so much humor itself. I mean, humor is very important. If you can't have a laugh, then you really are in trouble I think. And actually humor is actually designed in many ways, one of the theories of humor is actually designed to relieve us from difficult emotional matters.
There's a theory of humor called 'the Relief Theory of Humor' which which is actually, if you see a stand-up comic, we'll often talk about things that are pretty horrible. We'll talk about, you know, our relationships going down the toilet, or death of a parent, or something like that. And then we'll make a joke about it, and actually it gives you an emotional release and that's why people laugh.
So certainly, you know, I think gallows humor is very valuable when you're approaching difficult problems. But more fundamentally, there's a technique in humor which is about nailing the truth very succinctly. I think George Bendachour and Blaise Pascal have both been attributed with the quote "I'm sorry I wrote a long letter I didn't have time to write a short one." A good piece of comedy is about distilling a truth into something everybody can get hold of.
And, actually, when I started, when I quit my job as I wanted to commit myself to being with pragmatic optimism. I took up my job as a stand up, not because I wanted to be a comedian, but because I wanted to learn to communicate succinctly even though I've just answered that question in a very long winded fashion.
Yeah, I mean, we don't really do scenarios so much. It's a popular their technique, but one for which there is actually as far as I know, no evidence that that it works in our analysis my work is sort of social facilitation process but in terms of actuality, getting a more accurate picture of the future.
There is even some studies suggesting that it makes people have less accurate believes. But my interest is really in the really big picture, like thinking about how the human condition might change, not just that we have have some new cool gadgets or faster cars or a few degrees warmer or cooler temperature, but it's our fundamental changes in the human condition.
So the downside you can think of possible existential catastrophes that could put an end to the human story, including extinction scenarios or other ways in which we could permanently and drastically destroy our potential.
What do you think the chances of that are over the next twenty-five years, which is what we're looking at here?
Well, very small.
Are you talking very long term here, extinction?
Yeah, well, I mean it's one of the questions that one would think about. We had a conference actually in this same building a couple of years ago where we brought together some leading experts from different risk areas and at the end of that we had an informal poll asking what they thought was the probability that the human species would be extinct by the end of this current century, and the median answer to that was 19 percent.
Which is a disturbingly high. Now there might be a selection effect there like you are more likely to attend a conference on risks if you think that there are risks. Nevertheless, it's roughly in line with what other people have spent some time thinking about this should have concluded. So that's one broad class of scenarios is how things could go wrong, and I think that there is a qualitative difference between all the kinds of risks in this set have ever happened which have been tragic for the people immediately involved, but if you zoom out and look at it from God's point of view, even World War 1, World War 2, the Holocaust all of these horrible things, are really like mere ripples on the great pond of life.
If you look at say a world population curve, they do not even show up. So at the end of the day they will not have made a significant difference to the total amount of human suffering, or the total number of human lives, or the total number of deaths that will ever have been. Now an existential, a catastrophe is qualitatively different in that respect.
So we're at risk of deeply depressing here people whose very purpose is to make a difference in people's lives, so I hope you're going to paint some other scenarios for us as well.
There are a number of others. But there is an interesting Point out, which is that if you sort of pause instead of just rushing and doing things, and you think first of all, out of all the thousands and thousands of different things I possibly could be doing, which one has the greatest expected utility.
Like where do you do the most good, where you weigh the good by the probability of achieving the good. I think there is a very strong argument that existential risk mitigation very robustly comes up as a trump if you just do the numbers you count the number of future possible generations that could exist If all goes well then maybe in the very long run we'll colonize the galaxy and there are many galaxies and so far as their numbers there are such that even the tiniest probability that we could lose all of that.
We will tend to just be worth a lot more than eliminating world hunger or curing malaria or something. So for social entrepreneurs there is also a great opportunity here, I mean if the goal is really to do the maximum amount of good rather than something else people might be doing. been hearing about the powers of imagining things differently.
So you could be a, if you like, an evolutionary pessimist and say, "We are doomed to extinction in the long run." Or you could be a technological optimist and say, "The rate of change, the human genome is one example, is such that maybe far from extinction, some sort of reverse future you could envisage where we all live much, much, much longer, for example."
Yeah, I mean the reverse of extinction I guess will be to bring in new kind of species or something like that into existence. And certainly a lot depends on what you say, in the long term, like what do we mean, is it like 20 years? Or is it 20 billion years? It's a big different step. But certainly there is a huge upside as well if one is thinking about fundamental changes to the human condition that Just as one can imagine the human condition ending in a downward direction, I can imagine it ending in an upward direction by a transformation into some kind of post humanity, and through the development of technologies that can change human nature in profound ways.
By eliminating aging, for example, or radically increasing cognitive capacities, or changing emotional well-being, or indeed creating a new sort of Machine intelligences. I think that if we are seriously considering a very long time frames and I am not necessarily talking ten thousand years, but even, say, a century.
Then these kinds of radical transformations become fairly plausible. Not certain by any means, but they certainly are among the kinds of things one would need to seriously consider if we are thinking fifty or a hundred years out.
And if you look at the technology and you think here you're talking to a group of social entrepreneurs. What are the areas where you think the capacity to nudge this future in a benign direction Yeah that a very important beginning question, it is also one that is very difficult to answer, so I am struck.
I have been thinking about these things for a long time. Just how difficult it is even to know sometimes which direction it is we should be trying to push things in. So that is a lot of activity, a lot of people trying to pull something or push something and very little effort trying to be To spend trying to figure out which direction it is, things should be going.
So should we have faster technological advance or store technological advance in different areas. It is a very, very difficult question once you consider all the second order affects and so forth, these existential risks. Some technologies can reduce them. These same technologies might increase some other risks.
Some might interact with other Others, it becomes a hugely difficult problem. I sometimes feel like we are like ants that are busy Tugging our little straw to the anthill and building up an anthill. Maybe we are very creative and energetic in going about this, but few reflect on to what kind of hell that it is we are contributing to ultimately.
Like we could be like the workers in Hitler's war machine: very hardworking and doing what they are told. And we might be all be like that. I mean, if civilization is heading in the wrong direction, I am not saying it is, but if that were the case, then all our efforts in reducing inefficiencies and cultivating creativity and scientific innovation would actually be making things worse.
So it's really important to get these basic things right. I sometimes think of wisdom as the ability to get the important things approximately right. If one could figure out some way in which we could increase wisdom in that sense, our collective ability to figure out the truth about the important things and then coordinate I think that kind of contribution would be extremely valuable.
Great, but at this point I would like to invite our final panelist speaker, Bart Stephenson who is an unusual combination mark of both being a comedian, script writer, and I think you were once, or maybe still are, a stand-up Comedian, have I got that right?
I did that for a bit.
Yes?
I occasionally did that.
Now it's sit down.
Sit down.
But also a thinker about the future and an author. Of a book that has just appeared called 'An Optimists Tour of the Future'. So take us on a lightning optimist's tour of the future. What does it look like?
Well, sorry I have to say I am not intrinsically an optimist so the book when I originally came up with it simply called 'A Whirl Tour of the Future'. Like all of the people who have been on before, I do believe that what is happening with things like bio-technology and nano-technology, what's happening with the climate, what's happening with the internet, these are there game changers, they are going to change the way we think and i wanted to write an accessible book for every body.
A lot of popular science books are really for people who read popular science books, and I wanted to write something for my mum essentially. as she hasn't read it, which is rather unfortunate. So I didn't start of with an optimistic viewpoint, but I couldn't help bumping into lots of choices I didn't realize we had about the future.
So, if we look at the public discourse of the future, it's pretty much this, and certainly it's a reflection of our hypothesis: it's going to be a bit shit. Especially if you vote for that guy. You can't trust scientists, or religious people, or left wingers, or right wingers, or football fans, or your neighbor, vote for me, buy my paper, I understand.
Which isn't very inspiring, and yet I kept coming across people who were just getting on with solving our grand challenges. So I'm not saying the future will be better, but I'm saying that we still have everything to play for. And I didn't know that when I started out and now I do. And I think everybody of good conscience needs to be in that game, which is what's so impressive about the people here.
What many people here probably need to do is look up and look at some of those choices that are coming, because things like nano-tech will have radical implications for the threat of water scarcity and if you're not thinking about that, then you're putting your efforts partly in the wrong direction.
And if you get into the institutional setx x x x Steven was talking about, you might actually be sitting on that x x; stopping innovation that need you to do the thing; that will make that change. So we have lot of choices so I'm saying it's not going to be better, but it definitely could be. It could be Renaissance.
Let's take you up on one point that you mentioned briefly, that institutional changes i mean that is one dimension of choices. A lot of our talk about the future often revolves around technology and ideas and New ventures, but what about the institutions? What sorts of choices do you think after that?
Well, this is the biggest, probably one of the best decisions i came to. I came away and i was thinking and i came to the end of my travels and i realized there is a big problem with innovation and that when we talk about innovation we very happily talk about innovation, in you know science, technology or eve inn the arts; music or fashion.
But we hardly ever talk about institution relation, changing the way our governments or institutions work to keep up with the pace of change, which means there's a rate of pace of change in the technology and medicine for instance, it is completely different to rate of change in how organisations run including organisations we work for such as publishing.
Government is a classic example Innovation in parliamentary democracy in this country 1928 they gave women the vote. Wasn't really even innovation, it was just getting more within the same system. We are getting all upset now about a slightly more representative voting system. Governments talk about promoting innovation, Innovation in the way they work in the last 350 years.
So our big challenge, actually, to solve all the problems we have, we have the tools. They're already there. I mean, I've seen them. We can deal with climate change, we can deal with The poverty would do in quite short order if we organized ourselves better, which is why what Steven is saying is important, but also more importantly we need to have an optimism of ambition.
One of the things I got very concerned about was I realized that optimism and ambition has been taken off the table by our politics and our press. If you look, is there is a problem of scale here. I think this often lies at the heart of social entrepreneurship too that the challenge to take very good ideas and make them work at a bigger scale, we saw first of all that faced with a very precise problem that Stephen presented.
A small group of people could organize astonishingly quickly to do something much, much better, but when you take that and try and scale it up to the level of governments, let alone the international system, it may be a lot harder. Is that I think that's certainly true.
an issue that you would recognize?
Absolutely. And there is no one approach to things. What is interesting about what's, particularly with the internet and our increasing interconnectedness and the power of technology, is that it actually, as small groups of people can now make massive changes and make very important interventions now for good or bad, so it is, and the other thing is you can now go and create something much more quickly as an alternative.
So you'll see lots of people going on not interested in your big organization and are going to create a very small agile one over here and everybody takes a look at that and goes Oh. Oh. You know, in fact I was just talking to a very large software company yesterday and I managed to convince them they can build a version of their own business in the cloud for about a hundredth of the staff, and they're going to go ahead and do it so their management starts to pay attention to it.
I can't resist before I invite Our first speakers are for a general discussion to ask you about humor, and the role of humor in the picture really. It's just some of these discussions, well you all have good laughs at various times, but some of the discussions tend the be rather serious. But is there a role that humor can play beyond light relief?
Does it matter?
You know, it's a good question. I think so. It's not so much humor itself. I mean, humor is very important. If you can't have a laugh, then you really are in trouble I think. And actually humor is actually designed in many ways, one of the theories of humor is actually designed to relieve us from difficult emotional matters.
There's a theory of humor called 'the Relief Theory of Humor' which which is actually, if you see a stand-up comic, we'll often talk about things that are pretty horrible. We'll talk about, you know, our relationships going down the toilet, or death of a parent, or something like that. And then we'll make a joke about it, and actually it gives you an emotional release and that's why people laugh.
So certainly, you know, I think gallows humor is very valuable when you're approaching difficult problems. But more fundamentally, there's a technique in humor which is about nailing the truth very succinctly. I think George Bendachour and Blaise Pascal have both been attributed with the quote "I'm sorry I wrote a long letter I didn't have time to write a short one." A good piece of comedy is about distilling a truth into something everybody can get hold of.
And, actually, when I started, when I quit my job as I wanted to commit myself to being with pragmatic optimism. I took up my job as a stand up, not because I wanted to be a comedian, but because I wanted to learn to communicate succinctly even though I've just answered that question in a very long winded fashion.
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