[Music Playing]
What is our biggest challenge?
I was here to remind people that five years ago, I was just some guy sitting at home in my pajamas, typing on the internet and now I get this all this big picture, deep guru questions about the future of the world and so forth.
I think a lot of the challenges that face the world in the next five to 10 years are pretty obvious things. Basically trying to figure out how to contain the threat of terrorism without destroying freedom; that is a big, very complicated issue that I do not think anybody has all of the answers for.
I think we have a few things we know do not work but we do them anyway. So, the excessively paranoid security in airports does not seem to be doing any good whatsoever to me but, well, I do not see a stop in doing that anytime soon.
But I think one of the challenges that we face is to realize that military solutions to those problems are woefully inadequate. There maybe times when military actions is necessary or/are worth doing, but it is hardly the right answer in a lot of cases and it is certainly is never the fundamental answer.
The fundamental answer always has to be education, dialogue, learning, not just us learning about them but also us teaching them. It goes both ways of course but I think it is important to realize it. There is a certain brand of irrationality which is extremely dangerous. It is when you think of some group like the Taliban and there grouse violations of human rights and the name of religion are just completely unconscionable and that we cannot in the name of a spirit and multi culturalism which is a fine thing, but you cannot go down to path that says, “well gee, that is just the different way of living, and it is kind of okay to stone people to death for being homosexuals.”
It is not okay, it is completely wrong and we have to stay on firm on that even though, well, how do we fix that problem. That is not easy.
[Music Playing]
If we understand that the root cause of terrorism is frustration with poverty and no hope and tyranny in various places and that we need to think about how we arrange our affairs to help these very, very tragic places to become reasonable places for people to live and I think we have no choice, we are going to do that. It is just a matter of how bumbling we are at it along the way.
So then, I am very hopeful to imagine a time in a hundred years from now when Ethiopia is prosper with the middle class and people doing the simple thing that people want to do every where. Which to me, what most people want out of life is they want to go work, they want to have a decent job, they want to make a decent amount of money, they want to come home and play with their kids. And that the extreme as then we see in various place on the world is really not natural. It is certainly not inevitable and something that we can do something about in the long run and I am reasonably optimistic about that.
Of course, I have some concerns about bad things that may happen. Certainly when we have irrational, tyrannical governments working very, very diligently to get their hands on nuclear weapons, it has got to scare you. It has got to scare all of us that the Iranians have a missile that can reach Munich and they are working as far as anybody can tell quite diligently to get nuclear weapons.
Who knows? I do not know how to solve that problem but I do know that it does not do the world a lot of good to think about people like that with their values in control of incredibly dangerous weapons and that is the kind of thing that I think it could really derail human progress in the next century.
But I am an optimist. So, I do not think it is going to come to that. I think one of the things that we have to remember is that nuclear weapons are a World War II era technology, right? This is not rocket science anymore. It is something that can be built, will be built, but that at least so far as societies have come to the point of having those tools available, there is enough moral people, enough ethical people everywhere in the world who re
Transcription by:
Scribe4you Transcription Services