The Greater Good
Eric launched the Greater Good Initiative in 2017 to address why the world’s a mess in the 21st Century – and what, together, we can do about it.
Central to the Initiative is the recognition that the rise of digital technologies in the late 20th and early 21st centuries is fundamentally changing not only the economy but also all social and ideological structures, on the scale of the agricultural or industrial revolutions … only much more rapidly. This will affect how we govern ourselves – i.e., how we make collective decisions as a society and world – and how the costs and benefits, risks and rewards, are distributed, ameliorated, or redistributed. This, in turn, is already having profound effects on democracy and civil discourse that will only intensify.
These fundamental changes in all aspects of technology, economics, ideology, and governance require deep and urgent rethinking of our existing structures and new ideas as to how to build a better world.
Together, these factors drive the dissolution of democratic processes in the U.S. and worldwide. Eric’s approach to addressing these challenges concerns not any one of the symptoms described above, but rather the root cause – the atomization of society as a result of the world-historical technological revolution through which we are living.
The Greater Good Initiative is an evolving concept, consisting – so far – of several components:
Greater Good Gathering. An annual conference convening technologists, academics, entrepreneurs, journalists, and government officials from across the globe to discuss how technological change is affecting government, society, and the economy in an annual conference at the Columbia University School of International and Public Affairs (SIPA), co-sponsored by the nationwide Academy of Political Science.
This Greater Good Gathering has grown into a conversation involving leading thinkers on the role of technology in governance, community-building, and reshaping the economy, with social innovators from around the globe and international participants ranging from the current head of Internet security for the Estonian government to an African agro-tech entrepreneur; U.S. Cabinet Secretaries and Governors; leading journalists and noted scholars; famous AI and digital innovators; founders of social venture like pigeonly.com, speechify.com and kulisha – a formerly-incarcerated individual, a learning-disabled student, and a young woman from Vietnam – and student entrepreneurs creating the ventures of the future; and many more.
- Published proceedings both online video and in a special print volume by the Academy of Political Science.
- Spin-off conferences at other institutions, including a conference of national theologians on the ethical, social and religious implications of AI, cosponsored with Union Theological Seminary.
- “Policy Hackathons” for Regular Americans: A series of structured, interlinked conversations on these topics, called “policy hackathons,” which have been piloted at the City University of New York, the RAND Institute in Southern California, and two colleges and a public library in Iowa. The longer-term plan is to “franchise” this hackathon format such that anyone – from universities to community groups to individuals – can utilize it to host events feeding into the national conversation. Eric’s vision is for a decentralized, organic, and spontaneous series of events in this format designed to be entirely participatory, site-specific, and locally-driven in genesis, organization, and substantive content, enabled by new technologies allowing participants to be connected in a decentralized network that continues the conversation and drives toward shared understanding, consensus, and solutions. These will mutually interconnect with the “expert”-led discussions and conversations we conduct.
- Cross-Partisan and Cross-Ideological Dialogue: A quiet, ongoing series of conversations among prominent thought leaders across the ideological spectrum seeking common ground, exploring ways to communicate a better understanding of their respective constituencies, concerns, and agendas, and collectively preserving multicultural, multiparty democracy. These began when Eric was contacted by a conservative national security official and former Trump transition team leader, who began, “I would like to reach out to you in strict confidence to share some concerns. I don't know you well at all, but I trust you…” This is reflective of who Eric is and the kind of “greater good” he is trying to build across today’s divisions.
The ultimate goal is to bring Americans together to strengthen our democracy by increasing participation, discourse, and mutual understanding, to begin building a new public consensus on the agenda facing the U.S. and the world in the 21st Century.
