One World

50) The Transition Team

Posted 12th December 2016

"I'm sorry," said the young reporter, "but if I might ask before the meeting gets underway ...why are there no politicians present? I appreciate you have gathered World-leading scientists and engineers in the various core disciplines, regardless of their sex, ethnicity and nationality, but shouldn't you also have a political representative from each country on Earth? I mean, who is going to fight for the rights of a country which is not represented by someone here?"

"No-one here fights for any individual country," said the chairman, "These people have gathered here to work together for the Earth as a whole. Politicians fight on behalf of a limited group of people, a region or a country. They are partisan, only concerned with deriving the best deal for their constituents and/or funders. To this end they may employ deception, make immoral compromises, and adopt any tactic that benefits the relatively small group of people that keep them in power. A victory for an effective politician is their constituents being as well-off as possible, regardless of how this may affect other people on Earth. This is an unacceptable system. It leads to competition, conflict and suffering for many, as the various politicians fight among one another for their individual constituencies. This has been clearly evidenced by human history."

The chairman then swept out his arm to indicate the hundred specialists, each seated at a desk in a pigeon-hole-like structure of ten vertically stacked rows of ten desks per row.

"These men and woman," said the chairman, whose desk was off to the left of the vertical grid structure, "Have agreed on a simple ethos: To do what is best for all sentient beings, for all time to come. That is, they will cooperate with one another to design a global system and infrastructure where all beings who are capable of experiencing joy and suffering, will live happy lives. They will ensure that such a design does not steal from the well-being of future generations, but rather, is sustainable for all time to come. This simple philosophy is the founding basis of all their designs, research, activities and so on. That is, having agreed upon the singular objective to do what is best for all, and for all time to come, everything else is largely a technical problem to arrive at the solutions which best satisfy that ethos, with no place for unfounded opinion. That is, how to feed and care for everyone with healthy and enjoyable food and excellent health care, how to ensure a clean environment, how to provide a wide range of leisure activities, and what can and cannot be allowed, are all derived through logic given that we agree on the moral principle to care for everyone and all future generations."

"Mum, I'm thirsty!" said a little girl.

"Excuse me," said the reporter, muting the microphone on her desk as she turned in her chair, "Go and ask daddy for a drink. Mummy is in a meeting right now."

The little girl left the room. The reporter got up and closed the door to her home office. She returned to her recliner seat, put her feet up on her foot rest, and kicked off her slippers.

"Sorry about that," said the reporter, looking at all the meeting attendees on the large screen some 10 feet in front of her (via the intelligent screen-wide camera incorporated within the surface of the viewing screen, meaning she always made direct eye contact with whomever she was speaking to on the screen), "Please continue."

The meeting began with a short presentation of a futuristic looking circular city, given by a structural engineer. Although the structural engineer spoke in Hindi, only her perfectly and immediately automatically translated words could be heard by all 'present' (the delegates were also in their own individual home offices at 100 different locations around the World. This idea of interconnected home offices began as a World Health Organisation initiative to reduce commuter-related air pollution, but quickly gained widespread popularity as more and more workers moved to jobs offering such comfortable and convenient telecommuting roles. So by the time all vehicles were electrically or hydrogen powered there was no appetite to return to long traffic queues, to wait on unreliable buses, or to work in extrovert-oriented open-planned offices. People had got a taste of working in the comfort of their own homes, managing their domestic responsibilities alongside their occupations, and generally having a home-office designed just the way they like it, and so the inefficient practice of physical commuting was largely consigned to history). During the presentation, the structural engineer invited the 'attendees' to put on their virtual reality headsets. Then, everyone was taken on a three-dimensional walk through the proposed city.