The Question
A single, fundamental question to the world’s leading minds
The Question is our platform for exploring the ideas that will shape our future. Each edition focuses on one carefully framed, foundational question. We put that question to leading thinkers from around the world. Rather than seeking consensus, we bring together diverse perspectives. These views come from different disciplines, regions, cultures and intellectual traditions. As a result, readers can explore a wide range of ideas and approaches.
Our goal is to encourage informed reflection. We focus on issues that have implications beyond immediate political and policy debates. In doing so, The Question creates space for deeper thinking about the challenges and opportunities ahead.
Understanding the Future Through Better Questions
The Question invites readers to engage with ideas that challenge conventional thinking. It encourages curiosity, debate and informed discussion. Most importantly, the conversation does not end with the published answers. Readers can also contribute their own perspectives in the Comment Section below each answer. Together, these voices can help broaden the debate and deepen our understanding of the ideas that may shape humanity’s future.
Question 4: Can wisdom triumph over artificial intelligence?
The SFG report, The Essential Convergence: Global Compact for Extreme AI Risks, was launched at the auditorium of the International Federation of the Red Cross in Geneva on 6 July. While the report advances a few practical proposals, its central message is simple: the greatest safeguard against the gravest dangers posed by AI is not technology itself, but human wisdom. (Read the full report: The-Essential-Convergence.pdf)
Question3: Can we imagine there’s no countries, nothing to kill or die for?
Fifty years ago, John Lennon urged us to imagine that there were no countries. The nation state is proving incapable of solving civilizational scale problems such as climate, pandemic, arms race, technological overreach. In a recent book, Jonathan Blake and Nils Gilman propose a model of planetary and local governance which accepts the nation state but takes away its centrality. Can you imagine a world without or beyond the nation state?
Question2: What is the Real Tragedy?
Rabindranath Tagore, philosopher, poet and Nobel Laureate, said in the Hibbert Lectures delivered at Oxford University in May 1930. “The real tragedy, however, does not lie in the risk of our material security but in the obscuration of man himself in the human world.” What is the real tragedy today almost a hundred years later?
Question1: Is there any way of delivering humankind from the menace of war?
Albert Einstein posed this question to Sigmund Freud in a letter written in 1932. It resurfaced in the 1955 Einstein–Russell Manifesto, which asked starkly: “Shall we put an end to the human race; or shall mankind renounce war?”The same moral urgency was echoed in the Normandy Manifesto for World Peace issued by Nobel Peace Laureates and others in 2019. Now, perhaps more than ever before, this question demands a fresh and honest answer.”