The Future

by Al Gore

  Consider the vulnerability of monocultured crops to the steady evolution of pests who learn to circumvent the natural defenses of the plants to eat their fill. Consider the vulnerability of computer systems to hackers when the passwords and other safeguards remain unchanged for an extended period of time. The intrinsic nature of the pests doesn’t change. Their learned behaviors—and the genes they express—do.

  Democracy and capitalism have both been hacked. The results are palpably obvious in the suffocating control of policy decisions by elites, the ever increasing inequalities of income and growing concentrations of wealth, and the paralysis of any efforts at reform. And the public’s ability to express their revulsion in more constructive ways, rather than surrendering to cynicism, is dampened by the structure of our dominant means of mass communication, television, which serves mainly to promote consumption of products and entertain the public, while offering no means for interactive dialogue and collaborative decision making.

  Fortunately, the awakening of the Global Mind is disrupting established patterns—creating exciting new opportunities for emergent centers of influence not controlled by elites and the potential for reforms in established dysfunctional behaviors. Yet the emergence of Earth Inc. has magnified the power and reach of our economic engines, even as it has hardened the incentives, measurements of value, and rules of behavior that reward unsustainable exploitation of limited resources, the destruction of ecosystems crucial to the survival of civilization, unlimited flows of pollution, and the disregard of human and social values.

  The outcome of the struggle to shape humanity’s future that is now beginning will be determined by a contest between the Global Mind and Earth Inc. In a million theaters of battle, the reform of rules and incentives in markets, political systems, institutions, and societies will succeed or fail depending upon how quickly individuals and groups committed to a sustainable future gain sufficient strength, skill, and resolve by connecting with one another to express and achieve their hopes and dreams for a better world.

  Here are the most important questions to be answered and battles to be won:

  Can Americans reestablish the healthy functioning of the U.S. political and economic system to the point where it can once again provide visionary leadership to the community of nations? It may well be that an alternative form of global leadership will emerge in the Global Mind, but that is uncertain for now and is likely to take time that we don’t have.

  It is theoretically possible, though extremely unlikely, that some other nation will rise to this challenge. It is also possible that the tectonic changes that have reorganized the equilibrium of power in the world, shifting it from West to East and redistributing it throughout the world, will make it difficult for the U.S. to once again provide the strength and quality of leadership it offered during the second half of the twentieth century. The world’s loss of confidence in the United States following the catastrophic political, military, and economic mistakes of the early twenty-first century accelerated this shift in power, but was not its fundamental cause.

  Still, the best chance for success in shaping a positive future and avoiding catastrophe is the reestablishment of a transcendent capacity for global leadership by the United States. And for those who have difficulty believing that the promise of American democracy can be redeemed, remember that the promise America offers the world has been resurrected in the past during some very dark days. Its revolution was almost stillborn. It nearly tore itself in two during the Civil War. The domineering crimes of the robber barons exceeded the excesses of today’s ambitious titans. Destitution during the Great Depression, the devastating blow at Pearl Harbor while Hitler rampaged through Europe, and the brush with Armageddon during the Cuban Missile Crisis were all followed by renewals of the American spirit and a flourishing of the values at the heart of the American Dream. So America can certainly be renewed again, and its potential for world leadership can be restored.

  Will it be? The answer to that question will have a profound effect on the future of humankind.

  How quickly can institutions be adapted to the Internet? Even though the potential for the reestablishment of reason-based decision making through collaborative processes empowered by the Global Mind are exciting and promising, long-established institutions are notoriously resistant to change. The speed with which business models have been disintermediated and new models have emerged offers reason for hope.

  But attention and focus are diluted on the Internet. The variety of experiences available, the ubiquity of entertainment, and the difficulty in aggregating a critical mass of those committed to change all complicate the use of the Internet as a tool for institutional reform. The addition of three billion people to the global middle class by the middle of this century, however, may be accompanied by new and more forceful demands for democratic reforms of the kind that have so often emerged with the growth of a prosperous and well-educated middle class in so many nations.

  Will there be sufficient safeguards and constraints placed on the impulse of governments to use the Internet as a means of gathering information about individuals and using it to establish unhealthy forms of centralized control? Will the impulse of nations to engage in conflict produce more destructive forms of cyberwar and mercantilist nationalism? As the severity of our challenges becomes ever clearer, I am hopeful, even confident, that enough concerned committed individuals and groups will join together in time and self-organize creatively to become a force for reform.

  Will China’s economic juggernaut continue, and if so, will its emergent commitment to safeguard the environment overtake its mercantilist imperative? Will its success in lifting standards of living and diminishing poverty lead to political reforms that produce a transition to democratic governance?

  Will the progressive substitution of intelligent machines for human labor result in increased structural unemployment, or will we find ways to create new jobs and adequately compensate those filling them? There is no shortage of work to be done, but the dominance of corporations and the encroachment of the market sphere into the democracy sphere have taken a toll on the initiative and will necessary to structure new employment opportunities in the creation of public goods in fields like education, environmental remediation, health and mental health, family services, community building, and many other challenges that must be met.

  Will the emergent potential for altering the fabric of life and the genetic design of human beings be accompanied by the emergence of wisdom sufficient for the far-reaching decisions that will soon confront us, or will these technologies be widely dispersed without adequate consideration of the full spectrum of consequences they could entail?

  Will the social compacts in developed nations survive the simultaneous effects of demographic changes that are placing heavier per capita burdens on those in the workforce even as jobs and incomes are lost to the combination of robosourcing and outsourcing? Will new models for restoring income support and health care to the growing population of older people be created to replace the twentieth-century model?

  Will the world community adequately support fertility management in developing countries with high population growth rates, continue to empower women, and improve child survival rates? The answer to these questions will determine the level of global population and the degree of stress humanity places on the natural systems of the planet. Will the unique plight of Africa be recognized and adequately addressed?

  Will we provide the incentives to quickly decarbonize the global economy and sharply reduce global warming pollution in time to stabilize and then reduce the global warming pollution that is so threatening to the climate stability on which the thriving of our civilization depends?

  These are hard questions that imply hard choices. Human civilization—indeed, the human species—is already in the early stages of the six emergent changes described in this book. They are beginning to transform our planet, our civilization, and the way we work and live our lives. Some o
f them are degrading self-governance, the fabric of life, the species with which we share the Earth, and the physical, mental, and spiritual nature of humanity.

  The complexity of these changes, the unprecedented speed with which they are occurring, their simultaneity and the fact that they are converging, each with the others, have all contributed to a crisis of confidence in our ability as a civilization to think clearly about where they are taking us, much less to change their trajectory or slow their momentum.

  But if we face these choices with courage, the right answers are pretty clear. They’re controversial, to be sure. And making the right choices will be hard. Yet we do have to make them. We do have to decide. Soon. If we were to decide not to reclaim control over our destiny, the rest of our journey would become very hard indeed.

  These currents of change are strong, and they are indeed sweeping us into a future that is very different from what we have known before. What we have to do—in the context of this metaphor—is deceptively simple: steer! That means fixing the prevailing flaws and distortions in capitalism and self-governance. It means controlling the corrosive corruption of money in politics, breaking the suffocating rule of special interests, and restoring the healthy functioning of collective decision making in representative democracy to promote the public interest. It means reforming markets and making capitalism sustainable by aligning incentives with our long-term interest. It means, for example, taxing carbon pollution and reducing taxes on work—raising revenue from what we burn, not what we earn.

  More than 1,800 years ago, the last of Rome’s “Five Good Emperors,” Marcus Aurelius Antoninus, wrote, “Never let the future disturb you. You will meet it, if you have to, with the same weapons of reason which today arm you against the present.” His advice is still sound, though soon after his reign the Roman Empire began the long process of dissolution that culminated in its overthrow 300 years later.

  SO WHAT DO WE DO NOW?

  Arming ourselves with the “weapons of reason” is necessary but insufficient. The emergence of the Global Mind presents us with an opportunity to strengthen reason-based decision making, but the economic and political systems within which we implement even the wisest decisions are badly in need of repair. Confidence in both market capitalism and representative democracy has fallen because both are obviously in need of reform. Fixing both of these macro-tools should be at the top of the agenda for all of us who want to help shape humanity’s future.

  Our first priority should be to restore our ability to communicate clearly and candidly with one another in a broadly accessible forum about the difficult choices we have to make. That means building vibrant and open “public squares” on the Internet for the discussion of the best solutions to emerging challenges and the best strategies for seizing opportunities. It also means protecting the public forum from dominance by elites and special interests with agendas that are inconsistent with the public interest.

  It is especially important to accelerate the transition of democratic institutions to the Internet. The open access individuals once enjoyed to the formerly dominant print-based public forum fostered the spread of democracy and elevated the role of reason and fact-based public discourse. But the massive shift in the last third of the twentieth century from print to television as the primary medium of communication stifled democratic discourse and gave preferential access to those with wealth and power. This shift eclipsed the role of reason, diminished the importance of collective searches for the best available evidence, and elevated the role of money in politics—particularly in the United States—thereby distorting our search for truth and degrading our ability to reason together.

  The same is true for the news media. The one-way, advertiser-dominated, conglomerate-controlled television medium has been suffocating the free flow of ideas necessary for genuine self-determination. In 2012, for example, it was nothing short of bizarre when the United States held its quadrennial presidential election in the midst of epic climate-related disasters—including a widespread drought affecting more than 65 percent of the nation, historic fires spreading across the West, and an epic hybrid hurricane and nor’easter that shut down large portions of New York City for the second time in two years—with not a single question about the climate crisis from any member of the news media in any of the campaign debates.

  The profit-driven blurring of the line between entertainment and news, the growing influence of large advertisers on the content of news programs, and the cynical distortion of news narratives by political operatives posing as news executives have all degraded the ability of the Fourth Estate to maintain sufficient integrity and independent judgment to adequately perform their essential role in democracy.

  The Internet offers a welcome opportunity to reverse this degradation of democracy and reestablish a basis for healthy self-governance once again. Although there is as yet no standard business model that yields sufficient profit to support high-quality investigative journalism on the Internet, the expansion of bandwidth to accommodate more and higher-quality video on the Internet may soon make profitable business models viable. In addition, the use of hybrid public/private models for the support of excellence in Internet-based journalism should be vigorously pursued.

  The loss of privacy and data security on the Internet must be quickly addressed. The emergent “stalker economy,” based on the compilation of large digital files on individuals who engage in e-commerce, is exploitive and unacceptable. Similarly, the growing potential for the misuse by governments of even larger digital files on the personal lives of their citizens—including the routine interception of private communications—poses a serious threat to liberty and must be stopped. Those concerned about the quality of freedom in the digital age must make new legal protections for privacy a priority.

  The new digital tools that provide growing access to the Global Mind should be exploited in the rapid development of personalized approaches to health care, what is now being called “precision medicine,” and of self-tracking tools to reduce the cost and increase the efficacy of these personalized approaches to medicine. The same Internet-empowered precision should be applied to the speedy development of a “circular economy,” characterized by much higher levels of recycling, reuse, and efficiency in the use of energy and materials.

  Capitalism, like democracy, must also be reformed. The priority for those who agree that it is crucial to restore the usefulness of capitalism as a tool for reclaiming control of our destiny should be to insist upon full, complete, and accurate measurements of value. So-called externalities that are currently ignored in standard business accounting must be fully integrated into market calculations. For example, it is simply no longer acceptable to pretend that large streams of harmful pollution do not exist where profit and loss statements are concerned.

  Global warming pollution, in particular, should carry a price. Placing a tax on CO2 is the place to start. The revenue raised could be returned to taxpayers, or offset by equal reductions in other taxes—on payrolls, for example. Placing a steadily declining limit on emissions and allowing the trading of emission rights within those limits is an alternative that would also work. For those nations worried about the competitive consequences of acting in the absence of global agreement, the rules of the World Trade Organization allow the imposition of border adjustments on goods from countries that do not put a tax on carbon pollution.

  The principles of sustainability—which are designed, above all, to ensure that we make intelligent choices to improve our circumstances in the present without degrading our prospects in the future—should be fully integrated into capitalism. The ubiquitous incentives built into capitalism—which embody the power of capitalism to unleash human ingenuity and productivity—should be carefully designed to ensure that they are aligned with the goals that are being pursued. Compensation systems, for example, should be carefully scrutinized by investors, managers, boards of directors, consumers, regulators, and all stakeholders in every enterprise�
��no matter its size.

  Our current reliance on gross domestic product (GDP) as the compass by which we guide our economic policy choices must be reevaluated. The design of GDP—and the business accounting systems derived from it—is deeply flawed and cannot be safely used as a guide for economic policy decisions. For example, natural resources should be subject to depreciation and the distribution of personal income should be included in our evaluation of whether economic policies are producing success or failure. Capitalism requires acceptance of inequality, of course, but “hyper” levels of inequality—such as those now being produced—are destructive to both capitalism and democracy.

  The value of public goods should also be fully recognized—not systematically denigrated and attacked on ideological grounds. In an age when robosourcing and outsourcing are systematically eliminating private employment opportunities at a rapid pace, the restoration of healthy levels of macroeconomic demand is essential for sustainable growth. The creation of more public goods—in health care, education, and environmental protection, for example—is one of the ways to provide more employment opportunities and sustain economic vibrancy in the age of Earth Inc.

  Sustainability should also guide the redesign of agriculture, forestry, and fishing. The reckless depletion of topsoil, groundwater reserves, the productivity of our forests and oceans, and genetic biodiversity must be halted and reversed.

  In order to stabilize human population growth, we must prioritize the education of girls, the empowerment of women, the provision of ubiquitous access to the knowledge and techniques of fertility management, and the continued raising of child survival rates. The world now enjoys a durable consensus on the efficacy of these four strategies—used in combination—to bring about the transition to smaller families, lower death rates, lower birth rates, and stabilized population levels. Wealthy countries must support these efforts in their own self-interest. Africa should receive particular attention because of its high fertility rate and threatened resource base.