On May 27, 2021, the United Nations Academic Impact and Boston Global Forum will officially launch the e-book of the United Nations Centennial Book.
Mr. Ramu Damodaran, Chief of United Nations Academic Impact (UNAI) and co-Chair of BGF-UNAI Centennial Initiative, in honor of the United Nations 2045 Centenary, wrote introduction of the book:
“When my cherished friend Tuan Nguyen of the Boston Global Forum (BGF) and I spoke two years ago on how BGF and the United Nations Academic Impact (UNAI) could mark the 75th anniversary of the United Nations, his ever restless mind raced forward and asked “why not think of the UN at 100?” And so this centennial project began, bringing into its fold some of the finest minds of our times, minds that have anticipated the world we live in today, its terrain of rose and thorn, minds possessed of imagination and reason in looking a quarter century ahead. UNAI was privileged to publish a series of these articles on our website, curated by Tuan, reflecting its mission of being a movement of minds.
Had we embarked on such an exercise in 1995, could we have been better prepared for the extraordinary pace in which our world has moved since then? More particularly, could we have anticipated, and even created, the opportunities of collective, concerted global action, infused by the spirit of the United Nations, to protect us from dangers we foresaw and to seize the possibilities then dimly on horizon?
The United Nations came into being as a cerebral , as much as political, innovation , the very first resolution of its General Assembly, in the January of 1946, was on the “problems arising from the discovery of atomic energy.” 75 years later , in the January of 2021, Governor Michael Dukakis announced the “Artificial Intelligence International Accord Initiative” whose goal he described as “to stimulate a global conversation that will make sure AI is used responsibly by governments and the private sector around the world.” It is precisely conversations of that nature this volume, and BGF Roundtables over the past months, have fostered. Conversations that will continue in the quarter century ahead, shaping a world governed by international law and the exercise of international as much as individual, and indeed intellectual, responsibility (which UNAI seeks to foster) where the creativity and innovation of the human person work to shape a world worthy of our times just as surely as that world works to foster and further, in the phrase of our Charter, the “dignity and worth “of that human person.”