Abstract

The COVID-19 pandemic will fundamentally transform every aspect of our lives on the personal, professional, national, and global levels. The crisis has made processes that might otherwise have unfolded over decades arrive all at once. Our future has come crashing into our present. As much as many of us are hoping our previous world will snap back after this crisis abates, that will not be the case. But while it is appropriate to mourn what we have lost and the tragedy of this moment, the foundations for our new lives, companies, and world are today being laid. Futurist, WHO expert adviser, Atlantic Council Senior Fellow, bestselling author, and founder of the global social movement OneShared.World, Jamie Metzl places our current crisis in its most essential context and helps communities understand how the world we’ve known is dying faster than we’d thought and imagine our new world emerging faster than we’d imagined.

About the Speaker

Jamie Metzl is a leading technology futurist and geopolitical expert, a faculty member of Singularity University Exponential Medicine, a Senior Fellow of the Atlantic Council, and founder of the global social movement OneShared.World. In 2019, he was appointed to the World Health Organization expert advisory committee on human genome editing. Jamie previously served in the U.S. National Security Council, State Department, and Senate Foreign Relations Committee and with the United Nations in Cambodia. Jamie appears regularly on national and international media and his syndicated columns and other writing in science, technology, and global affairs are featured in publications around the world. He is the author of  Western Responses to Human Rights Abuses in Cambodia, 1975-80, the historical novel The Depths of the Sea, the genetics sci-fi thrillers Genesis Code and Eternal Sonata, and the recent bestseller, Hacking Darwin: Genetic Engineering and the Future of Humanity. Jamie holds a Ph.D. from Oxford, a law degree from Harvard Law School, and is a graduate of Brown University.

About the Moderator

Tommy Koh is currently Professor of Law at NUS; Ambassador-At-Large at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs; the Rector of the Tembusu College at NUS; Chairman of the Governing Board of the Centre for International Law at the National University of Singapore (NUS) and Special Adviser to IPS.  He is the Chairman of the International Advisory Panel of the Asia Research Institute (NUS) and Chairman of the Advisory Committee of the Master’s Degree on Environmental Management (NUS).  He is also the Co-chairman of the Asian Development Bank’s Advisory Committee on Water and Sanitation.   He is the Chairman of the Board of Directors of the SymAsia Foundation of Credit Suisse (pro bono).

He had served as Dean of the Faculty of Law of NUS, Singapore’s Permanent Representative to the United Nations in New York, Ambassador to the United States of America, High Commissioner to Canada and Ambassador to Mexico. He was President of the Third UN Conference on the Law of the Sea.  He was also the Chairman of the Preparatory Committee for and the Main Committee of the UN Conference on Environment and Development (Earth Summit).  He was the UN Secretary General’s Special Envoy to Russia, Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania.  He was the founding Chairman of the National Arts Council, founding Executive Director of the Asia-Europe Foundation and former Chairman of the National Heritage Board.  He was Singapore’s Chief Negotiator in negotiating an agreement to establish diplomatic relations between Singapore and China.  He was also Singapore’s Chief Negotiator for the US-Singapore Free Trade Agreement. He acted as Singapore’s Agent in two legal disputes with Malaysia. He has chaired two dispute panels for the WTO. He is the Co‑Chairman of the China‑Singapore Forum and the Japan-Singapore Symposium.

Professor Koh has received awards from the Governments of Singapore, Chile, Finland, France, Japan, Netherlands, Spain and the United States.  Professor Koh received the Champion of the Earth Award from UNEP and the inaugural President’s Award for the Environment from Singapore.   He was conferred with honorary doctoral degrees in law by Yale and Monash Universities.  Harvard University conferred on him the Great Negotiator Award in 2014.