In this chapter, I provide more details about a crucially important programme, designed to improve the ability of all of us to:
- Understand and assess the set of daunting but exciting issues and opportunities facing us in the decade ahead
- Think coolly and rationally about these issues and opportunities, freed from debilitating biases
- Reach optimal conclusions.
I call this programme Education+. It’s about people around the planet becoming smarter and wiser.
It’s not just about people thinking faster. It’s about people thinker more clearly. It’s not just about boosting our rational analytic powers. It’s about increasing our broader intelligence, including what’s been called our emotional intelligence and our social intelligence.
The result will be a critical mass of informed citizens who have a shared broad understanding of the power and potential of science and technology to provide deep solutions to the major problems facing human society. Leaders of society will be unable to ignore this critical mass.
5.1 Improved reasoning skills
<More to come>
Training in overcoming biases, in all their forms
5.2 Freedom from fundamentalism
Relaxing the power of dogma, whether from “scripture” or “tradition” or “prophets”
5.3 Education about accelerating technology
So people become fully aware of the opportunities, risks, context, and options
5.4 Cognitive enhancement & intelligence augmentation
To help everyone to become smarter and more sociable (both individually and collectively)
5.5 Artificial general intelligence
Important special case of above priority
