From 600+ conversations with the world’s leading thinkers.
The sad reality is that if we tried to pass that declaration today, the UN General Assembly would fail to do so. Firstly, we don't have someone like Eleanor Roosevelt as an advocate for human rights, and where previously the US played a leadership role, Trump would no doubt block virtually every human rights pillar associated with the declaration.
As a collective, we tend to look at progress as being linear, especially where it concerns women's rights. This is a huge mistake and breeds complacency because we risk losing the hard-won gains.
Today, a fear-based politics has largely replaced the promotion of ideals. Obama's call for 'the audacity of hope' in 2006 now feels quaint. To me, this concession to fear poses a big challenge: how do we recover an aspirational politics?
People in power live in fear of their power being taken away, and they fight like bears in a cage that are being backed into a corner. I had no idea how hard those in power would fight me, and it's an extraordinarily difficult thing to be on the receiving end of.
However much we would like to pursue a 'be kind' policy, we have to recognize that there are others in the world who are going to eat our lunch if we don't do our best.
There has been a pathetic failure of governments to invest in educating people about the rights that they hold and enjoy; I suspect because if people knew their rights, they would claim them and put the governments of the world under pressure.
Deep fakes in terms of a true deep fake, you do not even know if this is Barack Obama speaking or if this is a synthetic Barack Obama. There are ways to detect that today, and we think that we can discern otherwise. That's quickly going to fall, but already the minute changes that can manipulate perception are terrifying.
We need a new Manhattan Project to rebuild trust in a world that's been deliberately attacked at its cultural foundation. This is not about state actors nuking each other's electricity grids but attacking each other's trust and cultural infrastructure which is just as critical.
We're starting to realise that business is a major force in deciding the sort of society we live in- and so the role of business must be more in tune with political, social and moral norms of the day.
And the overall picture that's emerging is that the controls which still work operate more along corporate boundaries than along national boundaries. In order to censor YouTube, for example, countries like Turkey and Pakistan had to block access to the whole site; it's not practical just to block selected content.
Too often when we find someone disagreeing with us, our question is about why. Why do you believe this ridiculous thing? What tends to work better is a how question... This kind of approach helps to view the real complexity of a situation and reveals gaps in knowledge.
What we need now is the George C. Marshall of our era to help us train better than the Chinese and the Russians.