Mr. Nguyen Anh Tuan, CEO of Boston Global Forum, the editor of the book “Remaking the World – Toward an Age of Global Enlightenment”, and Ramu Damodaran, Co-chair of the United Nations Centennial Initiative, spoke at the launch of the book “AI in the Age of Global Enlightenment” on Feb. 25, 2023 in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam.
Here is Mr. Ramu Damodaran’s speech:
“As the United Nations marked its seventy fifth anniversary in 2020, it sought to repair and restore a world devastated over the past few months by the COVID-19 pandemic. At the Boston Global Forum, eyes were on another horizon, 2045, when the world organization would mark its centennial, and the opportunity that would give to go beyond the restoration and repair circumstances had made necessary 25 years earlier, to go beyond those to a “remaking” of the world, a remaking that would celebrate a new age of Global Enlightenment. In the words of Boston Global Forum Chief Executive Officer, Nguyen Tuan Anh, that remaking would “require concerted action by governments, individuals, organizations and firms; each must be a source of innovation.”
I am glad that Tuan mentioned individuals particularly since we all to often tend to blend or subsume them into entities of which they are a part through birth, education and profession. The United Nations Charter celebrates the dignity and worth of the human person, a worth we see manifest each day in the extraordinary range of creativity that the minds and hearts of women and men the world over yield.
Michelle Nguyen is one such human person. She has drawn from the scholarship in the Boston Global Forum’s publication on Global Enlightenment the seeds of a story her mind has planted, allowed to take root, and flower. A story I won’t go into detail, for fear of giving its plot away, but a story that centers around a scientist who creates an Artificial Intelligence assistant and a robot with the capability, in her words, to “self learn, feel and act like a human while yearning to experience human happiness.”
What a moving phrase. That to feel and act as a human —as each one of us do—is not an assurance that we will experience the happiness that should come with the sheer exhilaration of being human. There are many reasons for this lack of assurance but at least one is each one of us being overwhelmed by the everyday tasks for survival which inhibit our capacity, as a species, to truly flourish.
The creation of an Artificial Intelligence World Society, governed by an Artificial Intelligence Social Contract, for both of which the Boston Global Forum has made so compelling a case, can help fulfill many of these tasks, liberating our time, our minds and our hearts to flourish and be humanly happy. Michelle references that possibility with gentleness and care in her book, personifying the many pitfalls of AI, of which most of us are aware, with its immense potential to enhance good, vindicating the idea that what human beings create, they can transform.
In the words of Governor Michael Dukakis, Chairman of the Boston Global Forum “there are too many judgments you have to make in this world that involve values, ethics and morality.” These are judgments for humans to make, and they can be best made when humans are happy and fulfilled. Michelle’s thoughtful, but easy, novel shows us a gentle way.”
