This
is the most dangerous time for our planet
Stephen Hawking
We
can’t go on ignoring inequality, because we have the means to
destroy our world but not to escape it
Thursday
1 December 2016 18.28 GMT
As a theoretical
physicist based in Cambridge, I have lived my life in an
extraordinarily privileged bubble. Cambridge is an unusual town,
centred around one of the world’s great universities. Within that
town, the scientific community that I became part of in my 20s is
even more rarefied.
And within that
scientific community, the small group of international theoretical
physicists with whom I have spent my working life might sometimes be
tempted to regard themselves as the pinnacle. In addition to this,
with the celebrity that has come with my books, and the isolation
imposed by my illness, I feel as though my ivory tower is getting
taller.
So the recent
apparent rejection of the elites in both America and Britain is
surely aimed at me, as much as anyone. Whatever we might think about
the decision by the British electorate to reject membership of the
European Union and by the American public to embrace Donald Trump as
their next president, there is no doubt in the minds of commentators
that this was a cry of anger by people who felt they had been
abandoned by their leaders.
It was, everyone
seems to agree, the moment when the forgotten spoke, finding their
voices to reject the advice and guidance of experts and the elite
everywhere.
What matters now,
far more than the victories by Brexit and Trump, is how the elites
react
I am no exception to
this rule. I warned before the Brexit vote that it would damage
scientific research in Britain, that a vote to leave would be a step
backward, and the electorate – or at least a sufficiently
significant proportion of it – took no more notice of me than any
of the other political leaders, trade unionists, artists, scientists,
businessmen and celebrities who all gave the same unheeded advice to
the rest of the country.
What matters now,
far more than the choices made by these two electorates, is how the
elites react. Should we, in turn, reject these votes as outpourings
of crude populism that fail to take account of the facts, and attempt
to circumvent or circumscribe the choices that they represent? I
would argue that this would be a terrible mistake.
The concerns
underlying these votes about the economic consequences of
globalisation and accelerating technological change are absolutely
understandable. The automation of factories has already decimated
jobs in traditional manufacturing, and the rise of artificial
intelligence is likely to extend this job destruction deep into the
middle classes, with only the most caring, creative or supervisory
roles remaining.
This in turn will
accelerate the already widening economic inequality around the world.
The internet and the platforms that it makes possible allow very
small groups of individuals to make enormous profits while employing
very few people. This is inevitable, it is progress, but it is also
socially destructive.
We need to put this
alongside the financial crash, which brought home to people that a
very few individuals working in the financial sector can accrue huge
rewards and that the rest of us underwrite that success and pick up
the bill when their greed leads us astray. So taken together we are
living in a world of widening, not diminishing, financial inequality,
in which many people can see not just their standard of living, but
their ability to earn a living at all, disappearing. It is no wonder
then that they are searching for a new deal, which Trump and Brexit
might have appeared to represent.
It is also the case
that another unintended consequence of the global spread of the
internet and social media is that the stark nature of these
inequalities is far more apparent than it has been in the past. For
me, the ability to use technology to communicate has been a
liberating and positive experience. Without it, I would not have been
able to continue working these many years past.
But it also means
that the lives of the richest people in the most prosperous parts of
the world are agonisingly visible to anyone, however poor, who has
access to a phone. And since there are now more people with a
telephone than access to clean water in sub-Saharan Africa, this will
shortly mean nearly everyone on our increasingly crowded planet will
not be able to escape the inequality.
The consequences of
this are plain to see: the rural poor flock to cities, to shanty
towns, driven by hope. And then often, finding that the Instagram
nirvana is not available there, they seek it overseas, joining the
ever greater numbers of economic migrants in search of a better life.
These migrants in turn place new demands on the infrastructures and
economies of the countries in which they arrive, undermining
tolerance and further fuelling political populism.
For me, the really
concerning aspect of this is that now, more than at any time in our
history, our species needs to work together. We face awesome
environmental challenges: climate change, food production,
overpopulation, the decimation of other species, epidemic disease,
acidification of the oceans.
Together, they are a
reminder that we are at the most dangerous moment in the development
of humanity. We now have the technology to destroy the planet on
which we live, but have not yet developed the ability to escape it.
Perhaps in a few hundred years, we will have established human
colonies amid the stars, but right now we only have one planet, and
we need to work together to protect it.
To do that, we need
to break down, not build up, barriers within and between nations. If
we are to stand a chance of doing that, the world’s leaders need to
acknowledge that they have failed and are failing the many. With
resources increasingly concentrated in the hands of a few, we are
going to have to learn to share far more than at present.
With not only jobs
but entire industries disappearing, we must help people to retrain
for a new world and support them financially while they do so. If
communities and economies cannot cope with current levels of
migration, we must do more to encourage global development, as that
is the only way that the migratory millions will be persuaded to seek
their future at home.
We can do this, I am
an enormous optimist for my species; but it will require the elites,
from London to Harvard, from Cambridge to Hollywood, to learn the
lessons of the past year. To learn above all a measure of humility.
• The writer
launched www.unlimited.world earlier this year
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