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  • For the Good of the World

  • Is Global Agreement on Global Challenges Possible?
  • By: A. C. Grayling
  • Narrated by: Mike Cooper
  • Length: 6 hrs and 27 mins
  • 4.3 out of 5 stars (35 ratings)

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For the Good of the World

By: A. C. Grayling
Narrated by: Mike Cooper
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Publisher's Summary

A lucid and inspiring consideration of the challenges we and our world now face, and a proposal for a way to overcome them.

Can we human beings agree on a set of values which will allow us to confront the numerous threats that we and our planet face?

Or will we continue our disagreements, rivalries, and antipathies, even as we collectively approach what, in the not impossible extreme, might be extinction?

To answer these questions, A. C. Grayling considers the three most pressing challenges facing the world: climate change, technology, and justice, acknowledging that there is no worldwide set of values that can be invoked to underwrite agreements about what to do and not do in the interests of humanity and the planet in all these respects. As extreme weather events increase in frequency, advances in AI and military technology accelerate, and inequities deepen everywhere, the question of how to confront the world’s various problems becomes even more urgent.

If there is to be a chance of finding ways to generate universal agreement, the underlying question of values (together with the problem of relativism) has to be addressed. One part of the answer may lie in toleration and convivencia—the basis of coexistence among Muslims, Jews, and Christians in the Iberian peninsula between the ninth and 15th centuries CE.

©2022 A. C. Grayling (P)2022 Blackstone Publishing

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what can be done, will be done.


"For the Good of the World: Is Global Agreement on Global Challenges Possible?" Is a frightening and guilt riddle experience that thrusts you back into the raw reality of the world's challenges: Climate Change, Technology, and Universal Rights and Justices.

This book is split into the vast array of problems, and unexpected turns of what A.C. Greyling calls Greyling's Law:

"Anything that CAN be done WILL be done if it brings advantage or profit to those who can do it."

This is followed up with a further reinforcement of Self-interest, "What CAN be done will NOT be done if it brings costs, economic or otherwise, to those who can stop it."

When you read this, it feels as though you're listening/reading a person who is not just standing on the giants of great intellectual men before him, but hoisted up and guided above by their very own hands. There is so much startling insight and beauty to an essay like this, however disappointing and somewhat pessimistic it appears on the outset.

Once he breaks you, the second half of the essay moulds a picture of hope however late it seems, however hard it seems. The solution although written to hit back against self-interest, strangely finds a way to maintain it (as it is inevitable anyway), and instead urges the focus of global powers to change their lens; or at least update it with the focus on these global challenges ahead.

It appears it would be a good idea and best self-interest to impose moratoriums on technologies like Artificial General Intelligence (AGI), and genetic enhancement techniques (CRISPR) until we can figure out how to use them effectively if we all want to live without some rise of machines or super rich immortals and segregation of superior race (sounds familiar).

This is my first introduction to A.C Greyling, and I can't wait to sink into more whirlwinds and intellectual genius that I can rely on.

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WHO/WEF

Seems to be a story by and for the elites. The book and thereby author and narrator, are scaremongers, generalists and promote long standing unworkable solutions.

As an example, why aren't the billionaires and trillionaires taxed for their roles in this theme of climate change? Why aren't the dozens of patents that have proven clean energy studied and produced? Why isn't there a dedicated university study to engineer the solution?

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