As the end of 2020 approaches, I find myself in an optimistic mood. There are so many reasons to be optimistic. One that I have thought about a few times this year is global connectedness. I’m not talking about Facebook walls or kumbaya spirituality, though both might have merit. I’m talking about small groups, even individuals, capable of making the entire world a better place thanks to widespread distribution on the internet. One great reason to be optimistic for our future: more people than ever—by a lot access to the best ideas in the world and a way to contribute their own.
I was born in the Soviet Union and moved to the United States as a child. That’s great luck on two counts! More luck: I never lacked access to water, food or shelter. Teachers, books, and eventually the internet were widely available to me. There are so many billions of people, and before I learned to dress myself I had already out-lucked most of them. But the great news is that luck is not relative, though it sometimes feels that way to the oldest part of our brains An extra thousand, million or even billion people with access to water, food, shelter, teachers, books, and the internet does not detract from my good fortune. In fact, I believe it benefits me greatly.
I’m optimistic because every year, more people escape extreme poverty More people get the basic building blocks that enable them to contribute to the world: clean water, food and education. More of them will join us on the internet, participating in our global connectedness. More will be able to coordinate thanks to better remote collaboration tools and communicate thanks to AI-driven language translation. Everyone’s ideas will add to our collective good fortune.
If you’ve been reading P.S. You Should Know for a while you’ve surely noticed how excited I get about advances at the bleeding edge of technology. There’s the “ordinary”: ubiquitous smartphones, fast internet, and cheap renewable energy. And there’s the extraordinary: artificial intelligence, gene editing, space travel. Mostly, those advances are driven by a very small group of people in a very small number of places. But will that remain the case? Some of the countries where people are escaping extreme poverty are the very ones showing dramatic growth in contributions to science I believe the rest of the world can contribute because I believe human ingenuity is well distributed. Many have been held back by a lack of luck, but more people join the ranks of the lucky every year. So, I’m optimistic for 2020 and beyond!