How Technology Can Make Sense of the World

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Sally Kohn: Technology can help us individually and collectively see the world that we're moving into. If on Google Maps, you could see every time you looked at it, the flood lines in 10 years, that brings the future into the here and now. She says tech industry could be mass recirculation of essentially a closed loop of materials economy and a zero emissions economy. "I want to know who's signing up to do this? I have my paper ready to sign"

How can we feel empowered to take on global threats? The battle begins in our heads, argues Christiana Figueres. She became the United Nation’s top climate official, after she had watched the 2009 Copenhagen climate summit collapse “in blood, in screams, in tears.” In the wake of that debacle, she began performing an act of emotional Aikido on herself, her team and eventually delegates from 196 nations. She called it “stubborn optimism." It requires a clear and alluring vision of a future that can supplant the dystopian and discouraging vision of what will happen if the world fails to act. It was stubborn optimism, she says, that convinced those nations to sign the first global climate framework, the Paris Agreement. We explore how a similar shift in Silicon Valley's vision could lead 3 billion people to take action.