A United Planet, Part 1: The Cost of Coins

A world weighed in coins

Somewhere along the way, the world began to measure itself in coins. Worth became a number on a balance sheet, and power gathered quietly in the hands of those who held the most. Oil, water, land and minerals, the gifts of the earth meant for all of us, became prizes to be owned, traded and fought over.

I have walked through boardrooms and classrooms across South Asia, Australia and the United Kingdom. In each place I have seen the same quiet ache. People work harder than ever, yet many feel smaller, more anxious and more alone. Wealth grows, yet so does the distance between those who have and those who wait at the edges.

I have felt this ache in my own life. I have felt it in a dentist's chair, in the long wait for my GP, and in the corridors of universities I gave my heart to. Each moment taught me how quickly a person can become a number once money and power sit at the centre.

Now a new force has entered the room. Artificial intelligence is rising, swift and capable, and it carries a question we can no longer set aside. Will it deepen the old hunger for profit, or will it help us remember who we are meant to be?

Two roads from the same door

Technology has always been a mirror. It reflects the intentions of the hands that shape it. A tool built to extract will extract faster. A tool built to heal will reach further than any single healer could.

AI stands at this same door, with two roads stretching ahead. On one road, it becomes the sharpest instrument greed has ever held. It sorts people into profitable and disposable, watches us more closely than we watch ourselves, and widens the gap between the few and the many until the gap becomes a canyon.

On the other road, AI becomes a companion to our better nature. It helps a farmer read the soil, a teacher see the learner who is quietly struggling, a clinic in a remote village diagnose what once required a city hospital. It carries knowledge to places that money has long ignored.

I have walked a little way down that second road myself. When generative AI first unsettled trust in assessment at my university, I chose curiosity over fear and led action research with my MBA students. We introduced presentations and vivas, so that each student explained and defended their own thinking in their own voice.

The results moved me deeply. Students who had struggled in the first assessment did extremely well in the second, discovering a confidence that a written script alone had never drawn out. The approach spread to other units, became part of how the university now assesses, and I shared it with colleagues at the IAFOR conference in Barcelona in 2025.

Throughout that journey, I worked alongside Claude, an AI, as a thinking partner. It helped me reflect, refine my writing and test my ideas, while the judgement, the care for my students and the final word remained mine. That partnership showed me what AI can be when it is invited to serve learning rather than replace it: a companion that amplifies the human, never a substitute for one.

The machine will follow whichever road we choose. The choice belongs to us, and it is a moral choice before it is ever a technical one.

From the vault to the village

For generations, black gold has drawn borders, toppled governments and set nations against one another. Water, the most ordinary miracle, is now bottled, priced and withheld from those who cannot pay. The earth offers abundance, yet we have learned to treat it as scarcity, so that a few may profit from the thirst of the many.

Power needs to move. It needs to move from the vault to the village, from the shareholder alone to the community as a whole. This is a call for stewardship rather than resentment of wealth. Someone may hold great riches and still ask a simple question each morning: how can what I hold lift someone else today?

AI can help us see clearly where resources flow and where they pool. It can trace supply chains, expose exploitation and show where a single decision could feed thousands. Transparency has always been the enemy of greed, and few tools have ever offered us so much light.

I learned this lesson in a small, personal way. Hoping to tread more lightly on the earth, I bought a hybrid car on a finance agreement. Nobody told me that if it sits unused for a while, its starting battery drains and the car simply refuses to wake. I now pay for a car I cannot always rely on, and take taxis when I need to travel, spending more money and more of the earth's resources than I ever set out to save.

My intention was to protect the planet, while the system around the sale was built to close a deal. Imagine if the tools we build placed honest, plain information in every buyer's hands before they signed, so that good intentions were met with good faith. Doing right by the earth should never cost an ordinary person more than it costs those who profit from the sale.

The question returns, quiet and insistent. Which road will we choose? In the next part, I will dare to imagine the world we could build if we choose the second road, a world where care, rather than coins, becomes the measure of our worth.