TeachforUN.com TeachforSDGs.com: Dad, Norman Macrae (1923-2010), was The Economist's sub-editor of would 100 times more tech per decade sustain our species?
This became his friends' favorite journalistic question when he met von neumann in 1951 at Princeton while being seconded for a year to New York by The Economist.
Dad would have been 100 in 2023 so his family and friends regard 2022-23 as most exciting students' and teachers' year ever!
After 35 years of leaders at The Economist, dad and i co-authored the first 2025 report in 1984 which was translated in various updates to Sweden's New Vikings in 1993. About that time dad brought out the first biography of Von Neumann. During 2022-23, friends and family will pilot AI Hall of Fame - if Johnny was alive today who would he hope all teachers and youth collaborate around?
There were three future (HER)stories that my father connected with as much purpose as anyone I know of. With one exception: 1970's reformed Young Asian Oil Company Engineer , Fazle Abed, who dedicated his last 50 years of life to helping poor Asian village women develop their families and rural regions including the new nation of Bangladesh -see abedmooc.com
NORMANS 3 FUTURE STORIES
1 That of Scots from Adam Smith onwards. Smith is interesting to systems mapmakers because he wrote the last book on the higher (moral) purpose of markets' transparency before the era of man and machine power; and the first book surveying what nations started up round the first 2 decades of engines. 80 years after Smith had mediated the morals of capitalists who started up the era of machine power, London-Scot James Wilson founded The Economist initially as a Royal Society gossip sheet (1843). Might it be wise for Queen Victoria to enjoy changing leadership role of the most powerful person of the 19th century democracy from being head of slavemaking empire to commonwealth? Foot 1
2 Because dad was homeschooled mainly in British Embassies including Stalin's Moscow as he reached adolescence, dad became fascinated by von neumann, einstein and the greatest generation of mathematicians. How had they been schooled? What was it like to be a Central European Immigrant on the east Coast of USA in the middle of technology races from nuclear to nature's quantum science, from computing intel to satellite telecommunications? Would this scientific networks gift of machine intel (100 times more maths and media tech per decade) turn out for better for worse? locally and globally?.
The first 180 years (6 inter-generations of 30 years of Glasgow's machines has reached the 1930s climax of unstop[able world wars and nuclear arms, what would be the exponential consequence of blending human and artificial intel? This seemed likely to be a far faster revolutionary race - 30s to 60s to 90s to 2020s seemed likely to be an unprecdeneted time for emdia and emdiation
In particular 2020s-1990s would educators free the younger half of the world to co-create extraordinarily happy or dismal millennials futures? 1990s-1960s Would entrepreneurial revolution (The Economist 1976) return human advancement to the collaboration networking of SME value chains instead of big get bigger (externalisation driven) organisations?
3) Because dad served in world war 2 as a teenage navigator bomber command Burma campaign , you could say he had locally diverse google maps of east and west in his head a generation ahead of even the world's biggest decision-makers. Coming from generation of missionaty Scots, he saw that the English Empiring mindset had accidentally trapped 90% of Asians in poverty and so he questioned how the viewpoint of the two thirds of humans who are Asian could win-win with the fifth of humans whose ethnicity is white and north western as well as the sixth of the world of greatest diversity (eg african, latin american. native peoples before the old world knew the new workld exsted, and potentially the quarter of today's nations that are small islands)
From 1984's viewpoint, the coming of the worldwide web would be pivotal to thye innovation compass of 100 times more from 1984-1993. Norman had expected 1994-2003 to be the end of non-digital media's monopoly of influence . He advised that before humans digitalised market purposes it was vital that global awareness of man's greatest risk was mediated -a namely discrepanvcies in incomes and expectations of rich and poor nations. The hypothesis that the human race would unite in questioning this one core milennium goal did not happen. So much of 1980's 2025 reporting now looks hopelessly optimistic just as the reality of eg Putins war and Covid's plague and Cliimate crisis meltdowns might have looked extraordinarily pessimistic scenarios from 1984. Today it seems timely to ask IF humanities deepest learning opportunities were not designed into the web from 1990, is it possible that the metaverse can be the smartest education space every co-created? Is this pivotal to huamnity's best last chnace?
2025 report last edition
In updating what seem to be the most positive sdg and esg solutions form these viewpoints we hope to encourage any and every community to join in with what their family-loving peoples now ma. Intergenerationally, can we help millennials collaborative map extraordinary leaps for human advancement as nature's smartest species or is the younger half of the world destined to be the first extinction generation? Techforgood exists .. so what's missing?
Foot 1. Whilst the scots are only 1/400 of the world they are one of the first mainly diaspora nation - less than a quarter of scots make their lives out of Scotland. You might say that Scot's great weakness is to be over-optimistic a generation too early. Who else would try building the panama cana a generation before inb=venting engines. The result was Scotland failed as a nation and had become a colny of London by the time Smith and watt were making machine power prime time. Again, Wilson's optimist attempt to end vested interests in London's parliament and change Queen Victoria's role was to see him dispatched to Calcutta where he died of diarrhea 9 months into trying to start up queen victoria's gift of charter bank as by and for all peoples of India subcontinent. It was to be 112 years later that Engineer Abed changed womens world with last mile community health services including oral rehydration to end death by diarrhea , village mothers rice and veggies microfranchises to end starvation, and ultimately redesign of the entire value chain of aid and national banking and in millennial primetime the largest partnership in cashless banking viewed in terms of population served
