Stephen Hawking: This is the most dangerous time for our planet
We can’t go on ignoring inequality, because we have the means to destroy our world but not to escape it
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 choices made by these two electorates, 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.
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
