The Great Questions of Tomorrow

The Great Questions of Tomorrow, by David Rothkopf, Simon & Schuster, TED series, 2017

David Rothkopf's The Great Questions of Tomorrow, a TED book, just published this week, is a lifeline out of the deluge of tech/IOT/leadership features and books fighting for our attention.  It's a mile-high look at the very few big movements that every other change is contributing too.  But's its also a refreshing and short - as all TED talks are designed to be - presentation that will make readers feel that they've got it.  

He's got the transformations that we may not even have perceived were happening - the shift away from a beleaguered and tired Europe to unexpected commerce and innovation centers, and the questions of what are basic human rights and who has and gets them; what happened to the tribe, and how do I find one; what is money, and will digitized currency really convey the sum total of human value?  

Chapter 1, "The Day Before the Renaissance" positions us.  Growing up with a father who was Holocaust survivor who had lost most of his family in Europe, Rothkopf watched his Dad focus at Bell Labs on everything scientific.  But Rothkopf, more a child of the sixties, developed an interest in World War III and nuclear threats.  

                    As was the case during the fourteenth century, we too are living what what might be described as the day before the Renaissance.  An epochal change is coming, a transformational tsunami is on the horizon, and most of our leaders and many of us have our backs to it.  We're looking in the wrong direction...

The following chapters, as promised, cover The Big Questions:

Who Am I Identity and Community

Who Are We?  The Social Contract and Rights Reconsidered

Who Rules?  Democracy and Government Re-imagined

What Is Money?  Economics, Work, and Markets Re imagined

What Is War?  What Is Peach?  Power, Conflict, and Stability Re-imagined

If big data and overwhelming computing power are the drivers of the coming transformations, does that mean that he who holds the most storage devices wins?  Could be.  Or does it mean that he who runs the systems - the cpu's, the monitors, the embedded chips - only wins when he maintains a private and secure island of data reachable only through drawbridges and secret moats? Rothkopf does not seem optimistic about the power of economists to answer these questions - they are too slow!  He says "...Labor statistics, such as unemployment rates, are cooked and deceptive.  The list goes on.  The reality is that only two things are dependably known about most of the data that policy makes use to make decisions:  it is late, and it is wrong."

Which takes us to the leaders, the charismatic figures who would naturally offset the information shift and divide.  Who are those leaders?  Rothkopf declines to provide a definitive list, but he does share  In the section "Wrong Leaders/Wrong Questions" Rothkopf leaves us with the unsettling opinion that we don't have leaders to pull this off, and the leaders that we do have don't get it:

                    Answering those questions would be easier if the people in power understood the changes that are afoot and had the context, insight, and vocabulary to frame or answer the questions they need to be asking.    

One solution, he explains, is to populate government with professionals who have backgrounds in computer science or technology.  He tells us that in the US Congress only 12 percent of its members have a background in science or technology.  Hence their lack of understanding of the implications and workings of big data, cyber and other tech movements (think healthcare analytics!).

Like all TED books, Rothkopf's The Great Questions is a refreshingly uncluttered view to the near future, to the big issues that could guide our top-down thinking and expectations.  Its certainly a valuable departure from too many detailed leadership style books, and the author's Holocaust immigrant scientist background only adds to the power of its messages.  

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