FUTURE MATTERS
CULTIVATING TRUST FOR PEACE ON EARTH By Claire A. Nelson
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021 has blown by like a hurricane. Space Tourism. The Omnicron Variant of the COVID 19 and the deflated expectations from COP-26. A lot has happened to change the trajectory of the future for the better in some ways it seems. And yet when we consider the statistics on crime, corruption, violence and wars, we seem to be worse off now that when we started. As I contemplate the Christmas season with its message of ‘Peace on Earth’ and ‘Goodwill to All’, I wonder why is it so hard for our species to be at peace, to cultivate peace, to envision peace. How and why is it, that despite all the technological marvels we have, we still are not happier? How is it that despite all ability to splice the genome and 3-D print body parts and send probes to Mars, we still don’t seem to have the tools to engineer our way out of the never-ending wars? How might we get to more peaceable futures? I wonder if the metrics we have in our rule books are not contributing to the problem. Perhaps we might get to peace faster if our economy measured and valued Gross National Happiness over Gross National Product. Perhaps we would be better off defining and deploying metrics about well-being or some other human-centric data, that address what people really want and need to help them thrive. But how does one really capture ‘how you are feeling about life?’ in a score? Or do you take account of subjective realities embedded in the question ‘how you are feeling about your opportunities for advancement in your city?’ This is a real question to be addressed so that the architects and engineers of the SMART Cities of
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HUMAN FUTURES
the future fabricate the metrics that matter for improving on human wellbeing. This is needed if we are to achieve more peaceable futures, f rom the cloth of the society we have today. We might begin by bringing in all the actors in the system at hand. Too often participatory planning begins and ends with the political leaders and captains of industry. Too often the ones who are assumed to be on the margins are excluded from the planning pool. The pool of leaders may sometimes extend to the leaders of the Main Street Chamber of Commerce, for example, but how are the leaders of churches, temples and mosques, Girl Scouts, homeless shelters, pre-kindergarten schools, sanitation workers, and juvenile detention centers included in the conversation about smart cities. When we talk about designing SMART City X 2050 (Mexico, Boston, London or New York) who decides who gets a seat at the table? If we’re to move towards peaceable futures that are conducive to human thriving, as opposed to the dystopian futures of the movies we love to fear, we need find the seeds to the soul of society. There’s this idea that technology is going to solve all our problems. But we live in a world of duality. It’s Yin and Yang. So quite often we set out to solve one problem, and we succeed in creating new problems. We invent self-driving autonomous SMART cars. But now we wait for the solution of how we are going to ensure that if the GPS network system winks out, we have a way to address in real time the cascading effect of thousands of suddenly offline self-driving cars in the hands of unskilled drivers. In addressing the design for SMART cities how will we take account
