I Am an Optimist About the Future

Last week I was catching up with a good friend on Zoom that I had not spoken with in perhaps six months. I knew he was an avid reader and paid subscriber of this newsletter. So, when the topic of the newsletter came up, I asked him what he thought of recent columns.

He then said something that startled me. He said, roughly, that I was very pessimistic about the future and did not see a way out.

Huh? What?

For my entire 20 years as a global professional futurist, both in response to my writings and speaking from stages all around the world, I have been called ‘optimistic’ or ‘overly optimistic’, quite often

I stated as such and then asked him the column he was referring to. He mentioned this column from last week, the column published right before our Zoom call. This was the column:

It was immediately clear to me.

I asked him if he read this column as an American or a global citizen. He had obviously read my words as an American. Over the last 20 years, I have always said that when I use the pronoun “we” it means humanity, not any subset of humanity. My friend had not heard the term global citizen but immediately saw what I was saying.

The primary problems facing humanity today are:

-the climate crisis

-the historically unprecedented – and growing – global wealth inequality

-the currently wild west days of AI and its unbridled growth

Humanity has the wherewithal to face all three of these global problems, but do we collectively care enough to do so? I think we do and that is why I am optimistic about humanity’s future.

I am not necessarily keen on the future of the American Empire as I wrote in the above linked column. Clearly, the Trump administration is destroying the American Empire that was put in place post WWII, so the question was whether a single four-year term [eight years if you add on the less damaging first term] could bring down a global empire. Yes. The speed of change has accelerated such that an empire could end quickly.

As the above linked column stated the end of the American Empire, will not be succeeded by another nation’s empire. Not China, not the EU, not Russia, not India. We have entered the global stage of human evolution.

We are now a globally oriented species. The three big problems listed above are all global in scope. There is no nation state that can face and solve the climate crisis. That has already failed. Just look at the 2015 Paris Climate Accord. After 195 countries signed on to it and committed to lower the use of fossil fuels…. They didn’t follow through on their commitments.

Wealth inequality is continuing to grow globally, and the nation states seem to not capable of lowering it.

The unbridled growth of AI right now is a competition between the U.S. and China.

I have always said that I am am a global futurist as the future of the planet is the baseline for humanity and all living things on Earth.

More on the coming collapse of the nation state in columns in the near future.

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