What Will The World Look Like In 50 Years?

We need to make radical changes to the frameworks in which we operate. The world is now an interconnected neural network, where problems are considered shared and where solutions are crowdsourced -- we're no longer living in silos.
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In our world of both exponential growth and accelerating innovation, systems of repetition are "doomed to collapse." We need to make radical changes to the frameworks in which we operate. The world is now an interconnected neural network, where problems are considered shared and where solutions are crowdsourced -- we're no longer living in silos.

This power of connection has begun -- and will continue--to reveal what we are capable of. We must work together to redefine what "growth" and "development" really mean.

What will the world look like in 50 years? Dare to imagine...

The Skoll World Forum reconvened for another year across Oxford's cobbled streets. During the opening plenary, Jeff Skoll, founder and chairman of the Skoll Foundation, Participant Media and the Skoll Global Threats Fund, identified 10 key achievements in social entrepreneurship over the past 10 years -- achievements that are a testament to the world's growing community of changemakers.

10) Technology drives social, and social drives technology. Skoll cited the increase in mobile phone ownership as having implications on society and the ways in which we design solutions to challenges.

9) We now have global government commitments to scaling up social innovation, particularly from leadership in the U.K., Canada and the U.S.

8) Muhammad Yunus (Global Academy Member) and Grameen Bank were awarded the Nobel Peace Prize "for their efforts to create economic and social development from below."

7) Al Gore, Jr. and the IPCC were awarded the Nobel Peace Prize "for their efforts to build up and disseminate greater knowledge about man-made climate change, and to lay the foundations for the measures that are needed to counteract such change."

6) Deforestation rates are on the decline. Brazil, which was responsible for a third of the world's carbon emissions, has reduced these by two billion tons--the single greatest reduction in carbon emissions in history.

5) Billions of people now have access to clean water. "The 2015 goal to halve the number of people without access to safe drinking water had been met in 2010, five years ahead of schedule," said Skoll.

4)Social Entrepreneurship has turned mainstream! There are now 40 million people with careers in social entrepreneurship, with more than 200 million volunteers lending a helping hand. Contrast this to 10 years ago, Skoll said, when the leaders of the social entrepreneur movement were "rogue disruptors." (For more on the evolution of social entrepreneurship over the years, catch Bill Drayton's conversation with Tim West from Pioneers Post.)

3) Global markets are steadily shifting towards sustainability. The future of business is social. Lourenço Bustani, one of Fast Company's 100 most creative people in business, has said that "the tipping point was reached in 2012."

2) We have made significant progress against significant killers. Eight million lives had been saved from HIV and AIDS, parasitic guinea worm disease is set to follow smallpox as the next disease to be completely eradicated, and polio is in line to disappear after that.

1) Fewer people are living in poverty than ever before. Skoll says the "disappearance of poverty is tantalizingly close" with the possibility that we could bring extreme poverty to virtually zero in the next generation. For the first time since poverty rates have been monitored, rates are falling in every region.

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