What are the 100 best books to help humanity prepare for the challenges of the human future? Which can best train our minds—showing the problems, the possibilities, the hope—as we try to build a world that we’ll be proud to pass along to our children and grandchildren?

Books have a power to help shape the mind. When writing, an author leaves a trace of their neural activity encoded in words. Readers then decode the words—re-hydrating this “freeze-dried” form of thought and producing fresh patterns of neural activity in their own minds as they accept, reject, or modify ideas gleaned from the text. In this way, written words let ideas jump across continents and millennia, allowing us to commune with some of the great minds in human history and with great minds all over the planet.

 

A notebook can be a powerful tool, helping you learn how to think more clearly. At Humanity 2050—where we focus on thinking about long-term challenges of the human future—we certainly need the kind of careful, deliberative frames of thought that can be cultivated by using a notebook. (Obviously, some of the specific ideas that emerge after years of work on a problem—as with comments about risks associated with the rise of AI—are complex enough that they need to be described elsewhere and combined with perspectives offered by other groups.) Yet some of the cognitive tools we use, like a notebook, provide a starting point that is simple enough that almost anyone can try it. Whether you hope to advance your career, need to make a big life decision, feel stuck in your current circumstances, or want to help us think about these global challenges, there’s one key step that can help with everything else: Start a notebook.

What will it take to address our key global challenges and thus help ensure a livable human future? How can we develop a useful strategy, working with others and coordinating efforts around the globe?

I am writing to introduce Humanity 2050 (humanity2050.org) and to advocate a more comprehensive, coherent way of thinking about the human future. Like other public policy institutes, we’re concerned about challenges facing our planet—challenges such as global warming, environmental degradation, nuclear proliferation, and risks posed by the rise of artificial intelligence. Yet we bring a fresh perspective: we emphasize the underlying cognitive challenge inherent in every other global problem that we face. There is a crisis of complexity that often overwhelms our human minds and prevents us from finding and implementing real solutions. We’ll need to tackle this problem of thought as we work to address everything else. And Humanity 2050 can help.

 

Just a few days ago, officials in Saudi Arabia granted citizenship to a robot.  One might laugh this off as a PR stunt designed to showcase recent work on AI, but this raises serious issues that will affect the whole future of our species.

When we look at this event in a larger context, it serves as an urgent reminder that we need to establish a framework for regulating AI if we want to maintain prospects for a livable human future.

My time as a Visiting Professor at Caltech went quickly: I’ve moved back to San Francisco and had fun hiking again in the hills near Muir Woods. I’ll miss my friends and the students at Caltech, but it’s exciting to be back, ready to finish my book, ready to start my new institute and help address some of these critical global challenges.

I’m having fun at Caltech – teaching my course on “The World in 2050,” having dinner with friends and colleagues, meeting for coffee at the Red Door Café, hearing about some of the latest advances in science.

Yet – in my lectures – I’m focused on these tough “Zone IV challenges,” problems (as mentioned in my previous post) so complex they threaten to overwhelm the capacity of the human mind, yet so important that they have profound effects on everyone in society.

After working for years on Thought++, developing new ways to think about complex problems, it’s exciting to start this blog.  And it’s wonderful to be here at Caltech as a Visiting Professor, giving my new course on “The World in 2050.”

This class, which just started a few weeks ago, will focus on the cognitive challenges that arise as society tries to address the major problems of the 21^st century – among them ecological damage, global warming, resource depletion, artificial intelligence, etc.