Our Vision 2030
We envision to build an inter-governmental organization, and systems accountable to it, that will contribute to realize the incredibly positive potential of IT and Narrow AI, in order to (1) stave off ensuing catastrophes and dystopia by ensuring that they foster fair and effective global dialogue and coordination, and (2) become tools under our individual and collective control to boost our personal privacy, security, health and abundance.
The next decade has a good chance to be by far the most challenging and decisive in the history of humanity.
On the one hand, previously unimaginable opportunities for increased wellbeing, security, abundance and health have become possible via accelerating advances in IT and AI.
On the other, we are also faced with unprecedented catastrophic threats deriving from climate change, nuclear war, technological disruption and concentration of power and wealth.
These challenges and their solutions are highly interlinked in a sort of meta-crisis.
Our actions and inactions in the following years will be hugely impactful, with only slight chances for intermediate outcomes.
Given the inherent global nature of those challenges, even China and the US, can do nothing alone - and far from enough together - to tackle and steer them in a positive direction for their own citizens.
Global Cooperation is Key
It can only be done through a much deeper and structural global cooperation and coordination among nations and citizens.
Only that can reliably enforce climate commitments and nuclear weapons reductions.
Only that can safely manage the unprecedented global oversight necessary to manage the risk of increasingly accessible and destructive technologies like nuclear weapons, biotech, AI, hacking, drones, and their combination.
We've done it before very successfully at the national levels. We need to repeat, at the global level, the federation constituent processes that led to the creation of the federal republics of Unites States, Germany or Switzerland.
They were not created by imposition on all, nor by the unanimity-based confederal processes that lead to the EU and the UN where every or a few nations have veto.
The new transnational institutions that we need can be created a small number of nations that are highly diverse in terms of key global demographics, that bind themselves in an open process committed to global diversity, representativity, participation and to letting all nations join later on equal terms. Initially it could be as low as seveb nations, joined by a global citizen assemblies, and globally-representative councils of scientific experts and sages.
Such process, in time, wpuld inevitably lead to a transfer and concentration of practical global power onto such institution, itself a primary catastrophic and existential threat by entrenching a "durable form of inhumane global governance."
We are “damned if we do, damned if we don’t”. We have no other choice than to walk this fine line.
So, it is all-important that the constituent processes leading to new multi-national federal institutions are to be made reliably democratic, competent, and resilient to maximize their chance of of positive institutional outcomes.
We therefoe envision that, for the first time, a critical mass of a few globally-diverse nations launch such a federation process but this time at the new dominant geographical level, the global one. They'll gather not around on a shared cultural past or geographical interests, but on shared vision for the future global human community, centered on an equal respect for ideologies and cultures through rock-solid guarantees for the principle of subsidiarity.
We need to create a sort of “open transnational earth federation”, open to all nations to join on an equal basis.
Initial participation by dominant nations would be welcome but not required, and incentivised via higher temporary influence for those that join earlier rather than later.
The key role of IT and AI, if built and managed right
Such a prospect was impossible even a few years ago because the barriers of languages, distance, communications and citizens’ awareness of our global interdependence, made it impossible for such a federation to ever turn out to be sufficiently accountable and efficient. But revolutionary advances in digital human communications and language translation have changed all that.
It is now possible for a few globally-diverse nations to build and govern a new open multi-governmental communication and media infrastructure that through uncompromising technical and organisational transparency that can at once:
(a) enable fair and effective constituent processes that can lead to such a federation as well as the communications infrastructure that reliably can sustain it;
(b) enable participating nations that are social and liberal democracies to enhance their national and democratic sovereignty, safety and liberty;
(c) constitute a platform for fair and effective dialogue among all nations, that fosters mutual understanding, the emergence of shared truths, and deliberative constructive discourse.
Can we fix the current dominant digital platforms
But current dominant digital communications are completely unsuitable to the task, because their are shaped and governed by an entrenched digital hegemony of a few nations and ultra-billionaires, that manipulate the masses via obscure social media, spy nearly all journalists, diplomats and prime ministers on their phones.
Fixing those systems via adequate regulation is nearly impossible because five UN security council members, 50 US senators, 27 EU nations have a veto - while Big Tech lobby power has grown enormously and Wall Street has "bet the house" on them. Recent regulations by such institutions turned out to be no more than “lipstick on a pig”. As before, proposed or approved ones claim to be resolutive when enacted. Sure, suitable regulations may be eventually enacted, but we’d be fools to count on it.
An actionable path from here to there
In order to gradually overpower the current hegemony of digital devices, networks, apps and services, such new global digital communications infrastructure will be designed to run in parallel to those, and governed and certified by a new open, neutral and participatory inter-governmental body. It will include cloud systems, apps for mainstream mobile app stores and ultra-thin standalone mobile devices that are embedded face-out in the back of their Android, iOS, or Harmony smartphones, of all price ranges, carried face-out in a wide variety of custom leather wallets, as well as in e-government kiosks.
The nearly unstoppable increase in personal data and AI capability can be a great blessing or a terrible disgrace. It is currently heading to become an ever more powerful tool in the hands of ever fewer persons - in pursuit of their narrow and uncoordinated interests - leading us to dystopia and catastrophes.
Imagine
Suppose instead that we can wrest their control into resilient, trustworthy, and democratic collective governance structures. If we succeed, we could turn them into incredibly potent agents in our own hands to improve our physical and emotional lives significantly and collectively enhance global coordination and democracy - realising what our ancestors could only have dreamed of.
It is time for good-willed nations and citizens to join together to turn IT and AI advances into tools firmly in our own hands to realize the opportunity of exceptional abundance, health, peace and well-being, rather than letting their current controllers continue leading us towards catastrophes and dystopia.
Our Vision 2050
We also have a longer-term vision that we call “Vision 2050”, which may come to be much sooner, that details how our initiative play a pivot role in a future dominated by emerging advanced AI capabilities that risk being controlled by very few or by noone at all, with possible catastrophic or extinction prospects for humanity, or else properly restrained and controlled ushering humanity in a time of unimagined happiness, peace and wellbeing.