Keywords

“I’ve learned that everyone wants to live on top of the mountain, but all the happiness and growth occurs while you're climbing it.”—Andy Rooney

1 Towards a Better Future: World 50.0

In 2020, the Medical University of Graz organized a virtual Countdown TEDx event titled: “Think once! Think twice! Think future!” The Countdown is a global initiative to champion and accelerate solutions to the climate crisis, turning ideas into action. Karine Sargsyan gave a talk on the environmental (and not only) effects of a war. Tamás Landesz was invited to deliver a talk about the World 50.0 movement, which he launched a few years ago with fellow World Economic Forum Young Global Leader Sangeeth Varghese.

His virtual talk started something like this:

“I grew up in the beautiful city of Buenos Aires, Argentina in the seventies, where the skies are always blue. As a kid I was fascinated by two things: surfing and computers. I often set on the beach, staring at the ocean, fantasizing about the future, imagining how the world would look like 50 or 100 years later. Today, about 50 years later, we find ourselves at a crucible moment in human history in which leadership will define whether we can meet critical economic, social, political or environmental challenges… But we seem to be short of true global leaders.”

We often talk about how to create a more inclusive and sustainable future, which contributes towards the 2030 agenda and the Fourth Industrial Revolution. With members of World Economic Forum’s Young Global Leaders community, Landesz and Varguese conducted an open crowdsourced research project, titled World 50.0. In this open-access book which builds on their initial research, they partnered with Karine Sargsyan to further expand it and enrich the concept with a fresh perspective. As a consequence, the three authors decided to include new insights also about “how the Covid-19 pandemic changed the way we think about our future.”

“While we know that no person can predict the future, individuals can see snippets. Our aim was to collect many of these snippets and piece them together to answer the question: How will the world look like in 2050? Using a variety of social media tools, we invited selected global leaders from business, government, media, non-profits, intergovernmental organizations, artists and academia, as well as university students of all ages, to share their glimpse of the future.” (Sargsyan et al., 2022)

Initially, in the “Pre-Corona World,” the majority of our respondents were cautiously optimistic, while now, since the Covid-19 pandemic, we are seeing a slightly different picture of the world emerging and within that the future of humanity. We have closely examined and recorded these perspectives. Personal experiences and compassionate stories have been added to better portrait the changes triggered by the global pandemic, making the book appealing not only to businesses and governments, but also to the public.

Through this open-access book, we hope to reach a wider audience, crowdsource ideas, and mobilize people to build a better world together.

This book is organized into 19 chapters of which 17 chapters address the future of a particular sector, such as leadership; governments, politics and democracy; geopolitics; healthcare; energy; climate change; transportation; communication and interactions; sex and gender; consumption; food; families; homes; work and business; learning and education; religion; and entertainment. The last chapter discusses the World 50.0 movement and how to get involved, aiming to encourage governments, businesses, and societal stakeholders to think differently about the future.

Artificial Intelligence, machine learning, and the subject of singularity will be interweaved into all relevant chapters. By 2050 singularity may be possible and it is imperative to reflect on this already today from multiple perspectives—from the use and development for humankind to ethical and legal considerations and misuse. We will cover the benefits of new technologies in general but will also show possible risks and offer some solutions to minimize these.

Recently, there has been a growing interest in books aiming to describe the future. These include Yuval Noah Harari’s books “21 Lessons for the Twenty-First Century” and “Homo Deus,” primarily based on extrapolating from human history. In their book, “The Future is Faster than You,” Diamandis et al. write about how modern technologies like 5G, Artificial Intelligence, and Virtual Reality will transform the future. In similar vein, Ray Kurzweil in his book “The Singularity is Near” outlines the future of technology and makes predictions about singularity post-2045.

This book is entirely different in its scope and approach. The basic underlying assumption of World 50.0 is that no matter how credible one expert is, nobody on their own is able to predict the future, since the future is way too staggered, complex, and disruptive. While individual experts would be able to see snippets of the future and be able to make marginal rather than exponential forecasting leaps within their field of expertise, when the opinions of several such experts are considered and correlated, we are able to draw practical conclusions. World 50.0 will deep dive into various domains such as healthcare, technology, transportation, governance, geopolitics, education, and employment, rather than looking at the future as a single monolith. The underlying assumption being: though the future of domains is ultimately interrelated, they also undertake their own different trajectories.

World 50.0 draws from domain expertise and uses statistical tools to interpret and extrapolate the future, simplifying complex messages using a variety of tools, including modelling, sketching, storytelling, and quotations. World 50.0 targets a broader audience, making it an interesting and inspiring read across generations.

The following chapters will describe inter alia how we are entering a “human age” or the “age of empathy” where Moore’s law can be applied to the human potential curve. Humans will lose their natural biological identities—and become “homo nano-technus,” meaning that “it’s just a matter of time before we can ‘download’ ourselves fully into the digital domain and in doing so, pull the plug on our biological identities.” The future will be about “the use of technology and science to connect us with nature, instead of thinking that we can control it.” The book includes quotes from expert interviews, relevant essays, artwork, and a self-administered Future Intelligence or Future Quotient (FQ) questionnaire.

How best to prepare and thrive in the future? Here is some privileged advice from World 50.0 (Landesz, 2016, 2020, 2022; Sargsyan, Landesz & Varghese, 2022; TEDxTalks, 2020, 2022):

  • Follow your passion; hustle, hustle.

  • Exercise compassion and resilience and adapt.

  • Spread and scale stuff.

  • Do new things every day.

  • Practice mindfulness, presence, and being kind.

The aim of the World 50.0 movement is to build our future together and faster—a better future that we want our children and their children to inherit.