Why We Are Thinking BIG
It’s hard to ignore the storms brewing on the horizon. Automation and AI are totally disrupting our already tumultuous job market. Climate change and over-consumption threatening the world we pass on to on to our children. We are watching a loss of civic cohesion and community bonds, and increasingly ugly politics.
We find ourselves frustrated that many of our leaders aren’t putting these things together. They keep pitching us more of what is already failing. More economic growth, and more jobs.
Why should we keep pushing “More is better” — when it’s obvious we can do better without more?
We already produce more than we need, and throw most it away. We consume 1.7 times what the earth can replenish each year, and our consumption keeps climbing. Old notions of jobs and work fail us. Automation is completely reshaping work, and as A.I. advances, the pace of disruption will only increase. Lacking answers for the underlying problems, people turn on each other.
Our society right now is like MS DOS, it was a functional operating system that worked for solving the problems of decades past, making more and more things for people. Now people notice that the OS isn’t working very well anymore; it doesn’t do the things we need it to today as making more and growing GDP won’t clearly improve lives anymore. Yet, almost all our leaders are merely proposing new software we could run. New software with the same OS won’t do anything to solve our problems. We need a new operating system. We need enough smart, thoughtful and civic-minded people to come together and shape a new OS, to adapt society to the new challenges and fresh opportunities of our time.
We need momentum around the right questions and the kind of solutions that will rewrite our operating system. We’re working to build out a new story to allow people to move forward together.
That’s why we’re uniting leaders and innovators to say the old system, the old assumptions need an overhaul.
We’re here because we know we have to do more, have more people with more ideas all asking the right questions of: How do we make sure people can meet their needs when a job won’t cut it? How do we increase people’s real freedom to seize the opportunity offered as fewer and fewer people need to have jobs?
More prosperous than ever, we are surrounded by abundance. If we can organize ourselves to allow people to pursue meaning and not fear for their basic needs, we can discover new dimensions of human potential.
