## Apologies & Reorganization of My Speech Again I would like to apologize if what I said during my speech that day made you feel uncomfortable in any way. I have never been good at public speaking and expressing my thoughts with words, and people received my message not the way I intended. However, all of what I said are truly what I wanted to say, and I am glad that I summoned up the courage to say it that day. Most of the time, I deeply believe that sometimes it is better for me to stay silent and just retreat into a corner with my own thoughts, but at certain times I feel the urgen too strong to share them. I re-organized my thoughts into my knowledge system. ## Update for our school & A Potential Project in Mind Update on our school -- Possibly because the immediate week after was mock exam week for us, there was not yet any updates on our "we will" statements. However, I have been constantly thinking about it during the break, and I am planning to re-start the conversation with our school after the break ends. From the other side, I guess this just illustrates again how easy it is for projects to fall apart, if lacking true passion and committment. At the same time, I have been thinking about the "Project Dashboard" or "Command Center" (for all UWC student projects) concept we talked about in our leadership group. I figured that while it could be challenging, one thing to start with -- something foundational, and also links to another one project in mind -- is that in order for people to colaborate in anyway, there must first be communiation -- which necessitates an information platform and communication channel. And this links to our school newspaper (of which I am the chief editor), as we were recently considering digitalizaing it and moving from paper-printing to an online community platform, which just open whole new opporunities for our community. Even furthering the idea, I was thinking about pushing it further beyond the scope of our campus in the future -- potentially to include other UWC Campuses as well and in the end truly "uniting" all campuses and students. All of these are not possible 50 years ago when UWC was first founded due ot limited information technology, which prevents effective communication and collaboration across long geographic distances. However, this is all made possible to the latests technologies we have oday int he 21st century. Which is quite an exciting picture. --- ## On Education, Sustainability, and AI Education has always been a subject of great importance to me. aving being educated in two different continents and in three different systems, I was constantly dissappointed by they system humanity designed for their future generations -- I was dissappointed by a lot of the things in the world as they are as a matter of mfact. In fact, I have come upon a naive conclusion that all of humanity's problem is the problem of education, because at the very core an education teaches someone how to be a man and how to live. And sustainability and climate change is one of the biggest problems we are facing at the moment. We simply can't talk about humanity's future without talking about education, which is why I am sad to see so much unfullfilled potential. This is also why, at the same time, I remain extrememly hopeful -- as I believe in the power of education the shape the future of humanity. I see great potential and was greatly excited by the development in AI. Knowledge is no longer what's scarce, and so could be intelligence. What AI enabled, by democratizing intelligence just like the internet democratized information 20 years ago, is greater agency for humanity to turn those knowledge and intelligence into projects that solve real problem and made real impacts -- the next scarce quality of what I call "effectuance". Too often we talk about things and fail to act. Everything that needs to be said was said, unfortunately few listened, and among those listened few acted. Although it's still very unclear to me how AI could change all these, I am constantly excited waking up every day, envisioning a world where we can easily turn knowledge and intelligence into real, working projects. In fact, this quality (of turning idea / understanding into project and work) is so rare that our entire value system is based upon it -- money is based upon one's ability to do work generate value for others, and elite universities look heavily upon a student's ability to do projects and activities. This is absolutely off-topic, but the idea is that education is so important for humanity's future and solving our problems (sustainability) nd AI could be a really strong leverage point (if it can be used to change the "paradigm", which is the highest leverage point identified by Deonella Meadows in [[Thinking in Systems -- A Primer]]). ## Two Interesting Papers After the conference -- I read two more papers that I found interesting after the conference [[Solving sustanability problems through systems leverage points]] role of AI in pursuing SDG ## Invitation & further interests Thank you for inviting us to the next conference in Vancouver, although we are still not quite sure how we can help or contribute, we want you to know that we remain greatly interested. I was also wondering is students from UWC Pearson will be invited, since if I'm not mistaken Vancouver is actually not that far from UWC Pearson in Victoria.