Health of Humanity, Larry Brilliant

Larry Brilliant, currently executive director of google.org, gave a talk at UC Berkeley. Melissa diligently took some excellent notes of an excellent speech. Larry outlines four main threats facing the world today:

- Global Warming: He stated that all the excellent work done by Mohd Yunus with the Grameen Bank will all go to waste because 10% of Bangladesh will get submerged under water if the sealevels were to rise by 1m. The developed nations of the world need to take up the responsibility because they share this planet with everybody else, and their negligence can spell disaster for their brothers and sisters on the other side of the world who never did them any wrong in life.

- Diseases - zoonoses: A global early warning system is needed to check the spread of diseases. It is being realized that even AIDS came out from chimpanzees, and now kills thousands of men and women and children across the world each day.

- Poverty and Injustice: The Internet has played a great role in linking people together, and provides avenues to keep injustice in check by empowering the people themselves with tools and technologies to do better sousveillance.

- Religious and Sectarian violence - including but not limited to terrorist: Hate is like a virus, and love is like a vaccine. If we start loving them, they will stop hating us. 'We' being all of us in this world. And 'they' being all of them who encourage their followers to perpetrate violence.