Session 12: The end is here: optimism or pessimism?

The grand finale session brought us a generous dose of optimism. Matt Ridley presented the case comprehensively, showing that we are happier, healthier, more intelligent, kinder, cleaner, more peaceful and more equal than we ever have been before. Peter Diamandis, for his part, puts his optimism in our ability to harness our amazing technologies for the greater good. Both argued that we have the resources and the capacity to create a world of abundance.

A poll revealed that the audience has not changed its views in terms of percentage optimists and percentage pessimists (81% optimists to 19% pessimists). Nobody was shaken from the perspective with which they came into this conference, it seems. But if we haven’t changed these broad orientations, there has nonetheless been enough intellectual stimulation to foster a great deal of change and innovation, as long as all these thinkers are also doers. In any case, many of those who claimed to be optimists called themselves “natural” optimists, as though which camp one identifies with boils down to an inscrutable lens through which we see things, one that is unlikely to change with persuasion. Is it perhaps just a different way of approaching the same difficult challenges and the same hard work, each giving us the same results, or do we need optimism? Many of our speakers, after giving us frightening data about the state of the world, our environment and our social conditions, argued that an optimistic outlook is vital to motivating us to work towards change. But what of pessimism? Don’t we need that – or at least some serious realism – in order to recognize the problems and their urgency? Fortunately we’ve been given both here these past three days, and hopefully we will all take that back into our lives and work on a new and better vision of the future.

What an illuminating and exciting three days we’ve had here. So many brilliant ideas in the talks and so much spin-off in the conversation breaks. Rumblings of what’s to come next year can already be heard moving through the crowd. The world will undoubtedly have changed one year from now, and there will be new challenges and new solutions that we will be putting up on the ideacity stage. Have a stimulating and productive year!