The Context: Nations Evolve, Too

We build societies based on the technologies that we have available, on the social contract that we can articulate expressing the mutual interest that we have in order to achieve our goals, and the ability to structure these goals in a way that reinforces the particular unit that the society encompasses. In this way, societies are able to self perpetuate until the point at which one of the components stops supporting it: either a new wave of disruptive technology comes, or the members of the society design and adopt a new social contract or the mechanisms that the society has employed undermine its own operations, for example, from an environmental point of view.

We can measure whether a given society or nation is expected to be able to generate future fitness, through the legal and illegal immigration flows. Look at what are the nations where emigration is larger than immigration. Look at those nations where it is the opposite. Other people want to come in, desperately, even risking their lives, because they realize that the country where they were born, doesn't give them an opportunity to thrive and maybe even to survive in the coming years. If you look at these flow, what you're looking at is a kind of a stock market for nations where people express their desire and their future expectation. The smarter nations can take action, and decide what they want to do, formulated in political programs. I hope that it is going to be possible to have rational conversations around this.

We have to be forward looking: new technologies are coming, these new technologies support new ways of living, new ways of living can give rise to new types of social contracts. And our imagination is such that we can dream, and we can then realize those dreams of just, inclusive, empowering societies that give opportunities to thrive in the future for all.