The Future of Humanity—From Global Civilization to Great Civilization By ZhouyingJin, Chicago: Intellect, the University of Chicago Press. 2022. 2nd ed. Translated by Lane Jennings and Ying Bai. 338 pp of text + references (no index)

Zhouying Jin is a much accomplished and world traveled Professor at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences. With an extensive publication record of books and papers, she has been a visiting professor at acclaimed universities in the USA and France, and consulted with the UN and private corporations; she chaired the Future 500 China project. The future of humanity is her latest work. As might be surmised from the title, this is a sprawling text, both in a good and a bad sense. On the positive side, it is an ambitious examination of the powerful and threatening role of technology on the human prospect. Some sections are imaginative speculations about possible, even probable evolutionary next steps of the human species: think the sci fi vistas of the Terminator and I, Robot movies translated into a more standard futures analysis. She regularly combines informed assessments with a refreshing ethical sensibility, using a moral viewpoint about human nature and society shareable by all persons of goodwill regardless of their geo-political locations. Critical to the transformation from industrial to global civilization must be a change in cultural consciousness embodying a more ecologically sensitive, economically modest, and a socially fair and just set of values. I found myself agreeing with many of her judgments, thinking they could as easily have come from Western social critics and futures analysts. The book has a trove of Chinese reference sources no doubt new to many Western readers. The following paragraphs will outline the chapter structure of the book along with their content summaries. The final paragraphs will take note of the drawbacks of this sprawl along with concluding remarks. The future of humanity is covered in eight chapters. While not specifically organized as such, the first three chapters focus on the role of technology in our emerging global society while the next three contemplate what it means to move towards and become a global, then great civilization. Chapter 7, a full third of the text, is basically an inventory and assessment of China and its status in this evolving world scene. The last chapter is an agenda of action items for supporting humanity's global promise. The basic theme of the first two-thirds of the book is that humanity is on the verge of runaway science and technology creating social and moral problems insoluble in the context of industrial civilization. Unless we can grapple with the multitude of technological, social and ecological problems linked to the unsustainable modern lifestyle which now structures our lives, we won't need to worry about whether artificially intelligent robots will surpass and then destroy us because “we can do [that] job ourselves.” (p 87). On the other hand, humanity can move to a sustainable global civilization, and perhaps then, to a great global civilization over the next few centuries by transforming our institutions and values. Chapter 1 begins by noting that the expectation that technology will solve humanity's problems, both now and in the future, is a pervasive belief common to most people today. She identifies a dozen major technological domains in this regard, including the standard listing of biotechnology and genetic engineering, nano-tech and 3D manufacturing, materials and energy systems, and various information technologies; the review of artificial intelligence is particularly noteworthy. Each application, however, carries not only potential benefits but also real risks. Chapter 2 segues into the potential for these technological developments to transform the human being and reshape human nature. Beyond our current normal human genotype, two new species can emerge over the next generation or so. One is the genetically and/or mechanically enhanced Superman with brain-computer linkages and exoskeleton enhancements, while the other is autonomous humanoid robots. Among the various risks possible, one clear danger is of hacking the programming of the latter two for commercial, military or political reasons. The coexistence of these three species, she contends, would trigger conflict or “global wars” for domination of one over the other two. Chapter 3 is the weakest of this set, arguing that since the root cause of these issues is industrial civilization, it is industrial civilization which must be transformed. In chapter 4, industrial civilization is indicted on four counts: the unrestricted pursuit of economic growth, promoting a materialistic lifestyle (what de Graaf, Wann, and Naylore (2014) diagnosed as “affluenza”), the worship of money which leads to a decline in moral behavior, and the degradation of our terrestrial environment. Not only must industrial institutions be transformed, so must human nature be tamed and sublimated. The terminus of this assessment is a vision of a sustainable global civilization of universal material sufficiency, ecological and social harmony, freedom of thought, political equality and justice. (In the futures literature, similar efforts to blueprint what a real postindustrial society would look like can be traced back at least to Masini 1983 Visions of desirable societies.) Chapter 5 extends this argument by cataloging the reasons why industrial civilization is not sustainable, and introduces the idea of great global civilization with such characteristics as a sublimated human nature sharing basic values, a world governance structure, and the corresponding disappearance of the nation-state. Chapter 6 draws more attention to the current shortcomings of human nature (greed, selfishness, and quest for power). She also refers to the utopian tradition, both classical (such as More's Utopia) and modern (the US Declaration of Independence, the UN Declaration of Human Rights and China's current institutional transformation). To build a global sustainable civilization, she argues in Chapter 7, it is necessary to integrate the ideals from six social domains into a coherent value system: green economics, natural resource husbandry and protection, environmental safeguarding, a stable and harmonious social order, science and technology, and a developing momentum to better global management and governance. In each of these domains, she goes through a fairly rigorous analysis of how Chinese society matches up, finding both commendable strengths as well as lamentable weaknesses. Chapter 8 is mostly a reprise of what needs to be done, under the epigram that “a better future cannot be predicted but it can be created.” Education, tolerance of visionary thinking, and changing our mindset and values are among the leading strategies for realizing this new and better world. As noted at the outset, this sprawling treatise has its issues, suffering, not fatally, from a variety of cuts, mostly small but some larger. Many are not so much about the content as with the presentation which increases the reader's friction in trying to move through the text. For example, the headings and sub-headings don't seem to use a standard (Western) format, making it difficult to see above the weeds as to whether you're in new or subordinate territory. Reference citations are organized by chapter, rather than as a single master list. More frustrating, citations to specific references are not included in the text itself, making it difficult to find the source of certain claims and arguments. Whether a translator error or part of the original, the list of references follows Chinese naming practices where family name comes first, followed by the given name. In Chinese, for the name Ray Kurzweil, Ray would be taken as the family name, Kurzweil as the given name. To find the full citation for his work, look under Ray, not Kurzweil. Descriptive analysis and projection are regularly blended with normative, even moral judgments. This makes it imperative to stay mindful of the difference between claims of what could or might happen versus those of what should happen. Perhaps these are minor quibbles, but in general the text could have benefitted from a more parsimonious editing to shave off these annoyances, streamline the argument and eliminate what seemed like a tendency to repetition. There are a few substantive concerns. Morality is generally taken as an undefined universal term, and in the context in which morality is usually invoked, that is permissible. However, details can be devilish and a stronger statement of what constitutes morality would have been nice. There is a mismatch in chapter 7, at least for this Western reader, between the avowed commitment of the Chinese regime to democracy, equality, justice and the rule of law versus the news reports that seem to suggest otherwise. Finally, much is made of the technological transformations of the human stock through brain-computer linkages and the development of humanoid robots in the relatively near term. Some claim that progress along these lines is already occurring (Kurzweil 2005), but I can make no judgment about the validity or promise of that claim at this time. Rather, I accept it as a possibility but with an uncertain probability provenance, keeping it at arm's length as a debatable hypothetical. This book was originally published in China as “The future of humanity: Global civilization and China's rejuvenation”. This explains another serious drawback of this text, because what we have are really two books in one. The first six chapters would be a serviceable, even provocative futures studies text by itself, but then, the seventh and longest chapter addresses the issues of sustainable development applied to China. (A beneficial byproduct aspect of this analysis, though, offers a good look at some of the inner workings of Chinese society.) It combines, at times, critical cultural-political polemic, an institutional reconstruction playbook and defensive arguments of current political structures. A better look at Chinese society would have detailed the structure of the political economy more fully. The at-times rather pointed criticisms of various Chinese institutions, including the Chinese Communist Party, are surprising given at least the impression that criticism of the state and the Party are not countenanced. One gets the unmistakable impression that this chapter was written primarily as an amicus curiae brief for a Chinese readership. While informative in its own right, this chapter could easily be expanded into a stand-alone volume. The future of humanity carries forward the baton of the by now common standard futures narrative warning about the existential ecological and environmental threats to us all and how we need to transform out of our industrial civilization into a greener, more sustainable one (see Ahmed 2010, and Jackson & Jensen 2022, for leading examples). In that sense, this book offers not much that is new. What is somewhat new is the analysis of existential technological threats, giving a particularly serious consideration to the implications of new sub-populations of genetically- and/or computer-enhanced humans and autonomous robots walking the streets alongside us normal folk. She offers a vision of what a unified global civilization would involve. Finally, she gives us a prolonged glimpse into the developments – and shortfalls – of contemporary Chinese society. For readers only partially informed about Chinese society, these assessments come as an often welcome surprise. This volume could be of general interest to entry-level futurists, particularly the early chapters, or, keeping the above caveats in mind, could have specific value to a more specialized and advanced readership.