The following is a pre-release clip by the Swedish production bureau, House of Radon, which wrote to The Online Citizen about presenting it here on this website. It is a clip with the Minister of Foreign Affairs George Yeo, in an interview from the series “2020 Shaping Ideas“.
TOC thanks the bureau for this heads up.
About the project:
The 2020 project will result in a series of 20 interviews from scientists, entrepreneurs, industry leaders, artists and professors from all around the globe. Shaping Ideas is an attempt to paint a picture of a world to be.
The project focuses on two main areas; looking at what will be the drivers and in which areas we will see growth in the time to come.
These ideas cover a broad range of subjects such as globalization, the environment, connectivity, education and the economy.
The interviews will be packaged into 3-minute documentary style videos made available to everyone under a Creative Commons license through various forms of downloading and streaming services, free of charge and free to be used. Based on this series of interviews, a 20-minute documentary will also be produced and distributed.
Behind the 2020 project, as founding partner, stands Ericsson. The campaign site will be one of the numerous channels where users worldwide can access and share the 2020 interviews.
Among the names participating in the project are:
Dr. Jeffrey Cole – Media
Dr. Hans Rosling – Power Shifts
AP. Don Tapscott – Digital Natives
Dr. Will Steffen – Climate
Prof.Carlota Perez – Economy
Here is the transcript from the above clip:
George Yeo:
When I entered politics, at the age of thirty four, over twenty years ago in 1988, the year after the Berlin wall fell. That marked the end of the cold war and a new chapter in world history.
If we look back at what caused this change, it was really technology and particularly electronics and information technology which brought down the end of the Soviet Union.
If you look at global politics now, we have the emergence of China and India. Or more precisely, the re-emergence of China and India on a global stage. This is a huge phenomenon. We’re talking about between China, India and the countries in between, half the world.
Within a relatively short period after the end of the cold war, hundreds of millions joining the global marketplace. Which, of course has resulted in an enormous increasing global good. But also, creating new stresses along the way.
It’s not just economic multipolarity we are talking about or politic multipolarity. It is also multipolarity in the way ideas dominate our thinking, in global governence, in social organization, in the way human society is formed.
We have this process, which in the financial industry they call disintermediation, where everything has been disintermediated, political structures, churches, relationships, in the school and within the family.
Everyone now has alternatives, bypasses. This has outed the evolution of global politics and human relationships. So it’s a fascinating period that we are living through. The way people lead, persuade, get things done – all that has to change and all that remarks this century.
The first principal is, accepting that what were in the past, no longer works as well in the present. And may not work at all in the future. So one must be set in the mode of change. How to change is a challenge and for most people, they experiment and they end up doing the wrong things. But that’s part of the Darwinian process of sifting out. So one has to be in experimental mode and be alive to new possibilities. And be humble about our ability to anticipate new trends. And to say “I was wrong, let’s try again”.
And learn from others, learn from young people. See what young people are doing and try to drift in that direction. In the process you communicate better with them, you’re more engaged, you learn from them. Maybe they learn from you. Politically that is always useful.
