About Our Resilient World
“We are in the midst of a rupture, not a transition.”
— Mark Carney, Prime Minister of Canada, Davos, 20 January 2026
The world is changing fundamentally, and adapting yesterday’s approaches will not be enough. Before deciding which new policies, institutions or technologies we need, there is a more fundamental question:
What are we trying to create?
Our Resilient World starts with a goal.
By 2035, I want us to be moving towards a more resilient world: one in which people can live well through accelerating change, societies can remain cohesive and adaptable, essential systems and the natural environment can be sustained, and people obtain the agency to shape what comes next.
The aim is not a perfect world. It is a world better able to navigate change while protecting life, wellbeing, opportunity and the capacity of future generations to shape their own lives. It is a world where we start acting as world citizens and take power from our ‘representative governments’. We ‘the people’ start actively deciding what a resilient world looks like and how we create it.
Why this matters
We have entered a period of accelerating and compounding change that our existing institutions have already shown they cannot manage. Climate change, demographic decline, hegemonic geopolitics, AI-driven exponential technology change, economics and the environment do not change independently. They interact. Change in one system amplifies pressure in another, producing consequences that are increasingly difficult to understand or manage through institutions designed for a slower and more predictable world.
Many of the forces shaping our future cross national borders. Almost all of our mechanisms for making decisions remain organised within them.
For decades we have been told to “think globally and act locally.” That approach has demonstrably failed. A resilient world requires us to think globally and act globally as well. We put the world first, not our nation states.
The hypotheses I am testing
H1. National governments and the international organisations built around them are not fit for purpose for risks that operate at global scale, and have demonstrably failed to mitigate them.
H2. A resilient world therefore cannot be built without using AI to move towards an opt-in world government: institutions people choose to join, with power held by citizens cooperating directly across borders rather than by states negotiating with each other.
What would falsify this: evidence that existing institutions are closing the gap on global risks as fast as those risks compound. My 2022 book 2030 One World predicted above 1.5°C of warming by 2030. Single-year observations passed it in 2024. We are on track to experience close to 2.0°C in the El Nino year in 2027.
Where AI fits
Most discussions of AI policy focus on the need for control of the risks of AI. My belief is that without humans using AI we are unable to find ways to cooperate together to manage global risks and build effective global organisations that are designed from the ground up to be people led and driven.
AI will not decide our values or build the future for us. Those decisions must remain ours. AI can help us understand complexity, compare evidence, expose assumptions, explore competing perspectives, model consequences and test alternative pathways. It can also enable new forms of collaboration between people who live in different countries and hold different views, but share an interest in a future where people can live well.
Rather than starting with today’s institutions and asking only how to improve them incrementally, Our Resilient World also works from the other direction: what might a resilient world look like in 2035, and what would have to change between now and then to make it possible?
What resilience means here
A resilient world is one in which people, communities and institutions have the capacity and ability to live well through disruption while continuing to shape a better future.
It can meet essential needs, maintain social cohesion, sustain functioning economies and critical systems, protect the natural systems on which life depends, and adapt to technological, demographic, environmental and geopolitical change.
Critically, it can act at the scale of the risk. It can learn from evidence, distribute risks and opportunities fairly, cooperate across borders, recover from failures and change direction when existing approaches no longer work – without sacrificing the wellbeing of future generations.
Resilience is not simply the ability to survive change. It is the ability to live well through change while retaining the capacity to shape what comes next.
About me
I’m Rick Molony.
I don’t have a blueprint for a resilient world. I want to demo ways for people to explore one together and show you how you can use AI to start taking control of what matters to you and the wider world.
If these questions interest you, I hope you’ll participate.
Follow me on LinkedIn & see the AI policy hypotheses that I am testing on GitHub. I will be adding a new hypothesis every week.
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