We propose that getting wiser personally and collectively is central to addressing critical challenges ranging from mental health to climate change.

1. There is a wisdom gap: Our technological powers have expanded dramatically as have the complexities of our societies. These increases place greater demands on us to make “wiser” choices personally and collectively.  Yet our wisdom has not kept up as evidenced by, for example, the growing crises in the climate and mental health. In short, there appears to be a growing wisdom gap.

Stone Age Minds for a Space Age World

We have created a Star Wars civilization, with Stone Age emotions, medieval institutions, and godlike technology.

Humanity today is like a waking dreamer, caught between the fantasies of sleep and the chaos of the real world. The mind seeks but cannot find the precise place and hour. We have created a Star Wars civilization, with Stone Age emotions, medieval institutions, and godlike technology. We thrash about. We are terribly confused by the mere fact of our existence, and a danger to ourselves and to the rest of life.

I also have other fears about the impact of the digital on our well-being. In fact, I must confess I am something of a hopeful pessimist. I write the Open Revolution not because I am confident of our future but because I am so afraid – and, as Hemingway said, the world is a fine place and worth fighting for. We have better angels of our nature and we should attend to them. That does not mean I am confident we will listen.1

My basic concern here is simple: that there is a fantastic mismatch between our “emotional-spiritual” maturity and our “techno-intellectual” maturity.

“Techno-intellectually” we started from a zero base a few hundred thousand years ago: without language, without tools, and as a tiny part of a vast ecosystem. Having discovered language and tools we began to advance and over the last five thousand or so, and especially over the last three hundred we have hit the exponential fast forward button. We created cities, we built roads and railroads, we flew aeroplanes and space-shuttles, we discovered anti-septics and penicillin, made the phone, the computer and Internet. And the latter all within a generation.

And the digital really takes this to a different level because that world – the world we live in now – is the world of Moore’s “law” which states that computation power per unit cost doubles every 18 months. That’s exponential growth on steroids. It means that since 1985, which some of us can actually remember, computers have got a million times more powerful for the same cost (or, equivalently, a million times cheaper) – a computer costing $10,000 in 1985 would cost a cent today.

So here we stand, developing and evolving digital technology faster, literally, than we can comprehend.

And on the other side we have, comparatively, the emotional and spiritual maturity of a small infant. We have barely developed at all for the last few hundred thousand years. We still fight wars, commit everyday violence verbal and physical, and, perhaps most importantly, have incredibly limited self-control and self-awareness. Most of us live as dodgem cars, often out of control, careering through life bumping, sometimes violently, into things and people. Right now, as a group, we have such limited ability to coordinate and reflect that we are putting our entire environment and very existence at risk through climate change.

"For the kind of explosiveness that man will be able to contrive by 1980, the globe is dangerously small, its political units dangerously unstable."

CAN WE SURVIVE TECHNOLOGY?

by John von Neumann
Member, Atomic Energy Commission

"The great globe itself" is in a rapidly maturing crisis—a crisis attributable to the fact that the environment in which technological progress must occur has become both undersized and underorganized. To define the crisis with any accuracy, and to explore possibilities of dealing with it, we must not only look at relevant facts, but also engage in some speculation. The process will illuminate some potential technological developments of the next quarter-century.

In the first half of this century the accelerating industrial revolution encountered an absolute limitation—not on technological progress as such but on an essential safety factor. This safety factor, which had permitted the industrial revolution to roll on from the mid-eighteenth to the early twentieth century, was essentially a matter of geographical and political Lebensraum: an ever broader geographical scope for technological activities, combined with an ever broader political integration of the world. Within this expanding framework it was possible to accommodate the major tensions created by technological progress.

Now this safety mechanism is being sharply inhibited; literally and figuratively, we are running out of room. At long last, we begin to feel the effects of the finite, actual size of the earth in a critical way.

Thus the crisis does not arise from accidental events or human errors. It is inherent in technology’s relation to geography on the one hand and to political organization on the other. The crisis was developing visibly in the 1940’s, and some phases can be traced back to 1914. In the years between now and 1980 the crisis will probably develop far beyond all earlier patterns. When or how it will end—or to what state of affairs it will yield—nobody can say.