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Write a Letter to Future Generations About The World you Hope They Inherit: Check Samples & Format

dear future generations essay

  • Updated on  
  • Apr 21, 2024

A Letter to Future Generations About The World you Hope They Inherit

Reflecting on a future is always full of expectations. And what if the future holds hopes and dreams for the upcoming generations who will one day inherit the Earth? Everyone dreams of a world where people can live regardless of race, gender, or nationality and are treated with dignity and equality. A world powered by renewable energy where climate change is no longer a threat. A world where advancement in technology is used ethically to empower humanity rather than endanger it. Though today we are facing conflicts but believe in a world where people at present can build a world that is more peaceful tomorrow if paved with conscience, care, and collective action.

Let us delve into 3 samples of letter writing where we will be talking about all positive actions and changes that we can do today for the betterment of future generations about the world we hope they inherit. Further to help you more refer to the format and ideas that can be written more about it.

Master the art of essay writing with our blog on How to Write an Essay in English .

Table of Contents

  • 1 Ideas and Points to Include in Letter to Future Generations About the World You Hope They Inherit
  • 2 Sample 1: Write a Letter to Future Generations about the World you Hope they Inherit
  • 3 Sample 2: Write a Letter to Future Generations About the World you Hope They Inherit
  • 4 Sample 3: Write a Letter to Future Generations about the World you Hope they Inherit

Also Read: Essay on Labour Day

Ideas and Points to Include in Letter to Future Generations About the World You Hope They Inherit

Here are some ideas and points you could include in a letter to future generations:

write a letter to future generations about the world you hope they inherit

Also Read: Write a Letter to Your Friend About Tree Plantation Programme in Your School: Check Samples and Format

Sample 1: Write a Letter to Future Generations about the World you Hope they Inherit

Check out our Speech on Autism

Also Read: Write a Letter to Your Friend Telling Him About the Celebration of Earth Day in Your School: Check Samples

Sample 2: Write a Letter to Future Generations About the World you Hope They Inherit

Also Read: Write A Letter To Your Friend Sharing Your Feelings And Ideas About Your College Life: Check Samples

Sample 3: Write a Letter to Future Generations about the World you Hope they Inherit

Write a Letter to Future Generations about the World you Hope they Inherit

Also Read: Write A Letter To Your Friend Inviting To Your Village: Check Samples

Ans: Here are the ideas to start a letter to the future generation: Start a letter to future generations with Dear Future Generation. Express your hopes and dreams for the world you wished for them to inherit. Moreover, share your vision, for equality, compassion, and sustainable development. 

Ans: I hope to give future generations a word that is free from violence, discrimination, destruction, and poverty. 

Ans: To write a letter to the future, raise your voice about the hopes, dreams, and guidance about the world you hope to live in. Also discuss the values, advances, and changes that you wish to see in the society for their future. 

Ans: The future generation will shape the destiny of the world. We must pave the path for the future generation through our actions, ethics, policies, and progress. It is important to understand that our today is their tomorrow.

Ans: The concept of future generation refers to our responsibility towards what we are building for our future. We must care for the planet and should create a world as well as remedies to all the problems throughout our past and in the present for an improved world for them. 

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Deepika Joshi

Deepika Joshi is an experienced content writer with expertise in creating educational and informative content. She has a year of experience writing content for speeches, essays, NCERT, study abroad and EdTech SaaS. Her strengths lie in conducting thorough research and ananlysis to provide accurate and up-to-date information to readers. She enjoys staying updated on new skills and knowledge, particulary in education domain. In her free time, she loves to read articles, and blogs with related to her field to further expand her expertise. In personal life, she loves creative writing and aspire to connect with innovative people who have fresh ideas to offer.

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dear future generations essay

Dear Future Generations: Sorry by Prince Ea Analysis

dear future generations essay

The article, Dear Future Generations: Sorry by Prince Ea Analysis intends to magnify the acclaimed work of Richard William, known as his theatrical name Prince Ea. In this poem, Richard addresses the future generations and shows his distress for the harm we are trying to cause them. He thinks that humans have created a lot of mess for the upcoming generations as they are caught up in their business. 

He feels sad when he says how the beauty of the earth was corroded by its inhabitants. He talks about the extinction of the natural world; and explains how natural beauty has been superseded in the name of advancement. Technology has weakened man’s connection with his authentic self. To support his ideas, he uses the reference of the Amazon desert, which was once called the Amazon rain forest. There were billions of trees in that forest necessary for a pollution-free environment. 

As the poem progresses, he states the benefits of trees with a pinch of gloom. He informs that the trees were burnt down to use that fantastic land for sports. He recalls the valuable culture of Native Americans who used to leave grounds for future generations. Unfortunately, nowadays people are greedy, they do not think about the upcoming generations. He talks about climate change in an engaging way. He laments the way humans have polluted the air ocean and have caused significant damage to the natural order. Unfortunately, people wear pollution masks in many countries to keep themselves healthy.

Toward the end, he again shows his most profound concern for future generations because we are designing a dangerous world for them, a world that lacks mental peace and natural glories. He does not blame any government institutional body for this loss. Instead, he considers everyone who played their role in creating this mess. He suggests that we should globally warm our hearts to make this planet a worth living place. The only possible solution to save this world is to protect nature. He suggests that we should join hands to solve the problems like poverty, inflation, global warming. Otherwise, we will be extinct.

Major Themes in Dear Future Generations: Sorry by Prince Ea

Man versus nature, sorrow, world’s disasters, and collaboration are the major themes layered in the poem . Throughout the text, the writer seems worried about the upcoming generations. He expresses his most profound sorrow when he talks about the brutalities he spots on earth. He reminds us how we have brought unnecessary changes to the face of the planet. We tried every possible way to betray nature by changing its natural process. We cut down trees and did various other experiments with a resultant loss of natural beauty.

Although we live in an advanced world l, have you ever thought about what this advanced world stores for future generations? Does it store filthy environment and problems like hunger, global warming, and inflation? Do they need to pay the price of what their ancestors did?? Through this simple poem, the writer urges us to think about our choices due to our greedy nature. He wants to make us realize that we are going astray; we are leaving our roots behind.

To him, we should restore the lost glories by joining hands. He adds it’s not the responsibility of any government official or political leader. Instead, it’s our responsibility to clean this planet so that our children would live a life full of colors. Thus, this poem highlights the inner worry of the speaker that he feels sorry for the unborn children and wants to make this earth a better place before their arrival.

Techniques Used in Dear Future Generations: Sorry by Prince Ea

While expressing his sorrow for the future generation, Prince has used many literary as well as poetic devices in the poem to grab the reader’s attention. The analysis of the devices used in the poem is as follows.

  • Assonance: Assonance is when the writer/poet repeats vowel sounds in the same line such as; /o/ and /e/ in the following verses, “you probably know” and “let me tell.”
  • Consonance: Consonance is when poet repeats consonant sounds in the same verse such as; “but the thing” and “were literally washed.” Here, he has repeated /w/ and /t/ sound.
  • Free Verse: It is a type of poem in which no regular rhyme or meter is used. Dear Future Generations: Sorry is a free verse poem.
  • Imagery: The writers use this literary device to make readers visualize and feel the things being conveyed in the text. Prince has also used strong images in the poem such as; “ice is melting”, “farmer sees a tree” and “Racism, Poverty, Feminism.”
  • Metaphor: Metaphor is used to compare something with something else without using words like as or like. Prince has used worry as an extended metaphor to show the real face of the world.

Repetition: Repetition is inserted in the poem to bring musical quality in the poem. Prince has repeated the words, “I am sorry” throughout the poem.

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Prince Ea—the stage name of American rapper, spoken word artist, and civil rights activist Richard Williams from St. Louis— has done it again. Just in time for Earth Day, he  launched one of the most powerful videos I have ever seen about mitigating climate change -- in the first 48 hours, it had over 29 million views . This apology to future generations for the harm we have caused our planet has an incredibly profound and poignant message that we should all pay attention to.    

The purpose of the video is to raise awareness about the alarming rates of deforestation and the reckless destruction of our environment for which we are ALL responsible. Most importantly, this video serves as a platform to inspire citizens of the world to take IMMEDIATE action to stop climate change. How? by protecting threatened forests through the  Stand for Trees campaign .

Stand for Trees is an online initiative created by the amazing environmental NGO  Code REDD . It offers a tangible way for the general public to take direct action to combat climate change through crowd-funding the protection of threatened forests. Learn more here . 

THIS IS WHAT I’VE BEEN WAITING FOR!!! I don’t know about you, but I am tired of hearing about the imminent catastrophe that climate change is going to cause, without being given any solutions or tangible ways that I can personally make a difference. I’m tired of waiting for the gatekeepers who hold all of the power to fix this terrifying problem, but won’t because they are influenced by special interest groups to say and do nothing. I’m tired of relying on slow moving systems and bureaucracies that are risking our future by taking their sweet time to address the dangerous effects of climate change. What I really love about this video and this campaign is that it reminded me that WE THE PEOPLE have the power to make a difference. Something we really shouldn’t forget.

Wildlife and eco hero Mike Korchinsky is the  genius behind the Stand for Trees campaign and  Wildlife Works , an amazing company that protects threatened forests by making them more valuable alive than dead (see below for more information). Korchinsky articulates the power of this campaign perfectly:  “The Stand for Trees campaign was designed to put the power to save forests in the hands of the people to whom the future matters most: young people.”

So, last month, Prince Ea traveled to Kenya and the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) to witness firsthand the horrors of tropical deforestation. He also visited some of the pioneering forest conservation projects that were developed by Wildlife Works. They demonstrate a successful and innovative way to stop deforestation by rewarding forest communities who conserve their forests. THIS IS BRILLIANT. The Wildlife Works projects that Prince Ea visited represent two of twelve forest conservation projects participating in the new Stand for Trees campaign. 

I had the honor of interviewing Prince Ea earlier this week to get his perspective on this incredible video and the powerful message he is sending to the world:  

What was your inspiration to do a video on Climate Change and the role of forests?

Prince Ea: When Wildlife Works reached out to me, and told me what was going on, I did research and dove into the literature. What I found was some very shocking information that truly inspired me to want to inform the masses about this subject.  You know, there are very detrimental processes that are reaching a tipping point and people need to be made aware, so that was the initial inspiration. I just felt like I wanted to be a voice.  

As you were researching information about the looming catastrophic effects of climate change, what facts stood out and shocked you the most?

Prince Ea: Number one, I didn’t know that deforestation contributed more to CO2 emissions than ALL of the transportation sectors combined. That’s startling. Another salient point was, the destruction of the trees in and of itself. 40 football fields every 60 seconds. That’s shocking to anybody.

What do you want people to know most about climate change and the role of forests and what do you hope people will  do with this information?

Prince Ea: I want people to know that we are affecting the climate, and yes the climate has been warmer at periods of times, yes there’s been more carbon in the atmosphere, but since the Industrial Revolution we have been pumping so much so fast that we can’t really control what’s going to happen. THIS is the issue. I want people to know and learn about environmental responsibility, I want people to change their relationship to the environment. Like I put in the song, to realize we’re not apart from nature, we are a part of nature. And to really just change our hearts. That’s what I want people to do with the information.

What do you hope to achieve with this video?

Prince Ea: I want people to become aware, simply put. It was a piece to spread awareness and to get people involved. To actively take steps to stop the destruction of the forests. So that we can actually bring mainstream attention to the issue.

I heard that you visited the Wildlife Works REDD+ projects in Kenya and the DRC. Can you tell me about your journey, what it was like to see deforestation first hand and how forest communities are protecting their forests for the benefit of all of humanity and biodiversity?

Prince Ea: That’s a big question right there. What I did see was, innovation. For Wildlife Works to essentially make trees more valuable alive than dead, to provide that incentive is great. It’s an innovative measure, an innovative step that I’m glad we’re taking. And we need to take more steps in that direction. It’s a beautiful thing. My journey was incredible and I had a lot of great experiences. It was worldview altering, it was life changing. I made some friends, met a bunch of good people and it was truly a once in a lifetime experience. The whole journey was beautiful and I can’t even express what it meant to me in words.

Is there anything else you want to say?

Prince Ea: I want people to not only see the video, but to take action . I want people who see the video to take that extra step. But to also take that step internally. That’s the real way that we’re ever going to change the world, is if we look inside. If every individual looks inside. That’s the only way that the world is going to really change and evolve. We can change laws, we can do this and do that on the outside, and those are great and necessary. But for me, I’m an artist, that wants to touch the root. And in the song I talk about how the root is the people. And the root of the person is a human heart. I want to touch people’s hearts with my words, and let things take their course after that. 

I can’t thank you enough, Prince Ea, for all of the incredible work that you do and for taking the time to share this journey with all of the global citizens out there. We need more voices like yours in the world. Protecting our environment is such a critically important task and I honestly believe that it is the single most important cause of our generation. As Prince Ea states in the video,

“it is up to us to take care of this planet, it is our only home. To betray nature is to betray us. To save nature is to save us. Because whatever you’re fighting for, racism or poverty. Feminism, gay rights or any type of equality. It won’t matter in the least. Because if we don’t all work together to save the environment, we will be equally extinct.”

On this Earth Day, I encourage you to stand up for our environment global citizens, and to Stand for Trees. To do your part to save our planet. Nothing matters more. I’ll leave you all with this:

A wise man once said: “when the rivers have all dried up and the trees are all cut down, man will then realize… that he will not be able to eat money.” 

About Prince Ea

Activist, spoken word artist and viral sensation with millions of fans, Prince Ea’s thought-provoking pieces deliver important social messages with wit, passion, and hard-hitting punch lines to inspire positive change.

In late 2009, Prince Ea, upset at the present state of the music industry, decided to form a movement named “Make ‘SMART’ Cool,” where SMART is short for Sophisticating Minds And Revolutionizing Thought. The movement attempts to promote intelligence to everyone, everywhere and integrate it with hip-hop without discrimination or preference.

Along with Prince Ea’s internet success, he has also been featured in both national and local publications including Huffington Post, CBS, FOX, Yahoo Music, VIBE Magazine and DISCOVER Magazine. His spoken word pieces have been featured nationwide in various publications and talk shows including the Queen Latifah Show and the Blaze with Glenn Beck. His alias, Prince Ea, is derived from Sumerian mythology, “The Prince of the Earth.”

About Wildlife Works

Wildlife Works protects threatened forests, including the wildlife that inhabits them by providing forest communities with a transformative sustainable development path. Since 1997, the company has worked with communities in developing countries to help them manage their transition away from forest destruction towards sustainable economic development utilizing job creation as a core conservation strategy. In 2010, Wildlife Works delivered the world’s first REDD+ (Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation) VERs (Verified Emission Reductions) from its pioneering REDD+ project in Kenya.

REDD+ places a value on standing forests as a key element in mitigating climate change and sells that value to progressive corporate leaders who are committed to reducing the carbon footprint of their organizations on a voluntary basis.  Wildlife Works protects 1.24 million acres of forest in Kenya and the DRC mitigating approximately 7 million tons of carbon emissions annually.

About Stand for Trees

Stand for Trees is a first of its kind consumer campaign that uses the power of social media and crowd-funding to enable everyone to take real and effective action to reduce deforestation and curb climate change. Through an innovative mobile web solution, individuals can now purchase ‘Stand For Trees Certificates’ – high quality, REDD+ verified carbon credits – to help communities protect endangered forests and wildlife by supporting sustainable livelihoods. The campaign was founded by Code REDD.

Defend the Planet

Activist Prince Ea Has A Message To Future Generations: Sorry

April 22, 2015

preview

Analysis Of Dear Future Generations : Sorry

In the poem “Dear Future Generations: Sorry” by Prince Ea, he addresses that he is sorry for leaving the future generations with “our mess of a planet (3).” Using anaphoras, he is stating that he is sorry that they were “[...] too caught up in our own doings to do something (4)”, and that they “[...] listened to people who made excuses, to do nothing (5-6).” With a pleading voice and a well-known phrase, Ea says that they “[...] didn’t know what we had until it was gone (10).” From this quote, Ea is trying to convince the reader to forgive humanity of what they did to nature. Ea then uses juxtaposition as he talks about how there were once billions of trees in the once called Amazon Rain Forest, which has been renamed the Amazon Desert. He also expresses a depressed tone when he says “Oh, you don’t know much about trees, do you? (17).” Ea utilizes diction, and imagery to portray a horrific scene of humans while they “Cut them down with brutal machines, horrific, at a rate of 40 football fields every minute […](25-26).” As the section comes to a close, Ea uses two very short sentences to ask the audience “Why? For this (29).” After he says this, Ea pulls out a one-hundred dollar bill showing that the greed of humanity rules over nature. The author then recalls experiences that he had when he was a child, through the use of an allusion, Ea informs the reader that the Native Americans had tremendous pride for their land and their future generations land. This recollection leads Ea to use parallel structure to express his feelings of sorrow for the people of today who “[...] don’t even care about tomorrow(37).” Through the use of an asyndeton, Ea states that “[...] I’m sorry that we put profit over people, greed over need, the rule of gold above the golden rule. (38-39)” Continuing the disappointment in his tone as he apologizes for others wrongdoings, he is mostly sorry that some people “[...] had the nerve to call this destruction, progress. (46-47)” This quote makes the reader think about whether he or she thought that some of the actions people took where progress. The poem continues with Ea making an allusion to Fox News and Sara Palin. He uses juxtaposition to compare the people living in penthouses, to

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Sixteen by Jessamyn West

“No,” she said. “I’m determined to overdo it. Listen,” she exclaimed, as two birds sang together. “Not grieving, nor amorous, nor lost. Nothing to read into it. Simply music, Like Mozart. Complete. Finished. Oh, it is rain to listening ears.” She glanced at Edwin to see how he took this rhetoric. He took it calmly. She let go his hand and capered amidst the fallen eucalyptus leaves.

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Wise closes by explaining that dealing with racial inequality has nothing to do with guilt and everything to do with responsibility. He points out that no one person is responsible, yet this inequality still exists and this generation has inherited it. He ends with saying “it is up to us to take responsibility, not because we are guilty, but because we are here.”

Star Spangled Banner

It portrays America’s peerless zeal to defend its homeland and, in the course, its rights, its values, and its freedom that require such dear efforts to attain. Furthermore, it duly illustrates the many trials America is willing to face to create this new haven in which every person is free from persecution for following their perception of true freedom. However, the moral and humane laws of the Americans dictate the extension of freedom to others. Freedom, as the Americans come to believe, belongs to everyone. The most conspicuous example of America’s extending arms of compassion and equality is the Civil War. Of course, there is no obligation for America to fight a war against itself for the welfare of African Americans. Still, America is only abiding by its own set of ethical laws and the humanity that the Bible dictates. In comparison, the moral cause of this war is exceptionally similar to that in “The Star Spangled Banner”. Both of the conflicts involve America in an attempt to uphold its significant values and tenets through confiding in their religion. Both of the conflicts hail a future in which freedom shall govern this nation. Moreover, both of the conflicts prove America’s traditional values and faith apt to withstand wave after wave of bombardment without faltering. America is a separate little haven in which no limits exist to restrict the people’s religious faith or to hinder them from following their moral laws and values. “The Star

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Throughout history, humans have had a strong reliance on nature and their environment. As far back as historians can look, people have depended on elements of nature for their survival. In the past few decades, the increased advancement of technology has led to an unfortunate division between humans and nature, and this lack of respect is becoming a flaw in current day society. In Last Child in the Woods, Louv criticizes modern culture by arguing that humans increasing reliance on technology has led to their decreasing connection with nature through the use of relevant anecdotes, rhetorical questions and powerful imagery to appeal to ethos.

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for example Thomas king tells a story About a duck and fox and how the fox needed some feathers to help protect the ducks. The fox kept losing feathers and coming back for more and more feathers. Thomas king finished the story with, “Now, I could finish this story but you already know what’s going to happen, don’t you? The ducks are going to keep giving up their beautiful long feathers. Coyote is going to make a mess of things. The world is going to change and nobody is going to be particularly happy. (page 127) If you take the context in which this story relates it’s that the “Americans” are the coyote and the ducks are the “Indians” and the feathers are land. See the coyote got very greedy with the duck’s feathers and wanted them all just like the Americans got greedy and wanted all of the Indians

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In today’s society, many have come to believe what they have been instructed over the years, whether it is fiction of facts. Living in a world, where only certain race can be seen as superior to others. Schomburg was a pioneer beyond his times. In the article “The Negro Digs up His Past”. The beginning of this essay revealed a powerful statement, “The American Negro must remake his past in order to make his future” (Arthur Schomburg). It is very clear, Schomburg realized the importance of being knowledgeable on your true history. “History must restore what slavery took away, for it is the social damage of slavery that the present generations must repair and offset”. Therefore, I acquiesce with such statement, it is up to the present generation to fight, and to aspire on restoring what was taken away. As we acquired more intelligence, today’s generation must continue on indoctrinating one another on our true history. However, let’s not forget, slavery was not the onset of the Negro history; when in fact, slavery interrupted the Negro history. Meanwhile, long ago, before slavery, Africans ruled the world, built nations, mastering in architectural ideas, philosophies, etc. Nonetheless, it is crucial for the Negro to dig up his past, for from it; today’s Africans shall conceive their true potential, and their ancestor’s greatest achievements. Just as Schomburg found his motivation after being told “Negroes has no history. On the other hand, he then stated “The Negro thinking

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The atmosphere of this exposition is clearly foreboding: "the dark clouds, broken chimneys, unused street, solitary cat, and dead air" all prove ominous and reflect the sordid ruling mood. Failed culture and solitary of aimless women ("a cat moved itself in and out of railing") not knowing exactly what to do about their predicaments in which

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Protest sign: "Fight today for a better tomorrow"

What do we owe future generations? And what can we do to make their world a better place?

dear future generations essay

Senior Lecturer in Psychology, Australian Catholic University

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Your great grandchildren are powerless in today’s society. As Oxford philosopher William MacAskill says:

They cannot vote or lobby or run for public office, so politicians have scant incentive to think about them. They can’t bargain or trade with us, so they have little representation in the market, And they can’t make their views heard directly: they can’t tweet, or write articles in newspapers, or march in the streets. They are utterly disenfranchised.

But the things we do now influence them: for better or worse. We make laws that govern them, build infrastructure for them and take out loans for them to pay back. So what happens when we consider future generations while we make decisions today?

Review: What We Owe the Future – William MacAskill (OneWorld)

This is the key question in What We Owe the Future . It argues for what MacAskill calls longtermism: “the idea that positively influencing the longterm future is a key moral priority of our time.” He describes it as an extension of civil rights and women’s suffrage; as humanity marches on, we strive to consider a wider circle of people when making decisions about how to structure our societies.

MacAskill makes a compelling case that we should consider how to ensure a good future not only for our children’s children, but also the children of their children. In short, MacAskill argues that “future people count, there could be a lot of them, and we can make their lives go better.”

Read more: Friday essay: 'I feel my heart breaking today' – a climate scientist's path through grief towards hope

Future people count

It’s hard to feel for future people. We are bad enough at feeling for our future selves. As The Simpsons puts it: “That’s a problem for future Homer. Man, I don’t envy that guy.”

We all know we should protect our health for our own future. In a similar vein, MacAskill argues that we all “know” future people count.

Concern for future generations is common sense across diverse intellectual traditions […] When we dispose of radioactive waste, we don’t say, “Who cares if this poisons people centuries from now?” Similarly, few of us who care about climate change or pollution do so solely for the sake of people alive today. We build museums and parks and bridges that we hope will last for generations; we invest in schools and longterm scientific projects; we preserve paintings, traditions, languages; we protect beautiful places.

There could be a lot of future people

Future people count, and MacAskill counts those people. The sheer number of future people might make their wellbeing a key moral priority. According to MacAskill and others, humanity’s future could be vast : much, much more than the 8 billion alive today.

While it’s hard to feel the gravitas, our actions may affect a dizzying number of people. Even if we last just 1 million years, as long as the average mammal – and even if the global population fell to 1 billion people – then there would be 9.1 trillion people in the future.

We might struggle to care, because these numbers can be hard to feel . Our emotions don’t track well against large numbers. If I said a nuclear war would kill 500 million people, you might see that as a “huge problem”. If I instead said that the number is actually closer to 5 billion , it still feels like a “huge problem”. It does not emotionally feel 10 times worse. If we risk the trillions of people who could live in the future, that could be 1,000 times worse – but it doesn’t feel 1,000 times worse.

MacAskill does not argue we should give those people 1,000 times more concern than people alive today. Likewise, MacAskill does not say we should morally weight a person living a million years from now exactly the same as someone alive 10 or 100 years from now. Those distinctions won’t change what we can feasibly achieve now, given how hard change can be.

Instead, he shows if we care about future people at all, even those 100 years hence, we should simply be doing more . Fortunately, there are concrete things humanity can do.

Read more: Labor's climate change bill is set to become law – but 3 important measures are missing

We can make the lives of future people better

Another reason we struggle to be motivated by big problems is that they feel insurmountable. This is a particular concern with future generations. Does anything I do make a difference, or is it a drop in the bucket? How do we know what to do when the long-run effects are so uncertain ?

book cover of What We Owe the Future

Even present-day problems can feel hard to tackle. At least for those problems we can get fast, reliable feedback on progress. Even with that advantage, we struggle. For the second year in a row, we did not make progress toward our sustainable development goals, like reducing war, poverty, and increasing growth. Globally, 4.3% of children still die before the age of five. COVID-19 has killed about 23 million people . Can we – and should we – justify focusing on future generations when we face these problems now?

MacAskill argues we can. Because the number of people is so large, he also argues we should. He identifies some areas where we could do things that protect the future while also helping people who are alive now. Many solutions are win-win.

For example, the current pandemic has shown that unforeseen events can have a devastating effect. Yet, despite the recent pandemic, many governments have done little to set up more robust systems that could prevent the next pandemic. MacAskill outlines ways in which those future pandemics could be worse.

Most worrying are the threats from engineered pathogens, which

[…] could be much more destructive than natural pathogens because they can be modified to have dangerous new properties. Could someone design a pathogen with maximum destructive power—something with the lethality of Ebola and the contagiousness of measles?

He gives examples, like militaries and terrorist groups, that have tried to engineer pathogens in the past.

The risk of an engineered pandemic wiping us all out in the next 100 years is between 0.1% and 3%, according to estimates laid out in the book.

That might sound low, but MacAskill argues we would not step on a plane if you were told “it ‘only’ had a one-in-a-thousand chance of crashing and killing everyone on board”. These threaten not only future generations, but people reading this – and everyone they know.

MacAskill outlines ways in which we might be able to prevent engineered pandemics, like researching better personal protective equipment, cheaper and faster diagnostics, better infrastructure, or better governance of synthetic biology. Doing so would help save the lives of people alive today, reduce the risk of technological stagnation and protect humanity’s future.

The same win-wins might apply to decarbonisation , safe development of artificial intelligence , reducing risks from nuclear war , and other threats to humanity.

Read more: Even a 'limited' nuclear war would starve millions of people, new study reveals

Things you can do to protect future generations

Some “longtermist” issues, like climate change, are already firmly in the public consciousness. As a result, some may find MacAskill’s book “common sense”. Others may find the speculation about the far future pretty wild (like all possible views of the longterm future).

MacAskill strikes an accessible balance between anchoring the arguments to concrete examples, while making modest extrapolations into the future. He helps us see how “common sense” principles can lead to novel or neglected conclusions.

For example, if there is any moral weight on future people, then many common societal goals (like faster economic growth) are vastly less important than reducing risks of extinction (like nuclear non-proliferation). It makes humanity look like an “imprudent teenager”, with many years ahead, but more power than wisdom:

Even if you think [the risk of extinction] is only a one-in-a-thousand, the risk to humanity this century is still ten times higher than the risk of your dying this year in a car crash. If humanity is like a teenager, then she is one who speeds around blind corners, drunk, without wearing a seat belt.

Our biases toward present, local problems are strong, so connecting emotionally with the ideas can be hard. But MacAskill makes a compelling case for longtermism through clear stories and good metaphors. He answers many questions I had about safeguarding the future. Will the future be good or bad? Would it really matter if humanity ended? And, importantly, is there anything I can actually do?

The short answer is yes, there is. Things you might already do help, like minimising your carbon footprint – but MacAskill argues “other things you can do are radically more impactful”. For example, reducing your meat consumption would address climate change, but donating money to the world’s most effective climate charities might be far more effective.

Beyond donations, three other personal decisions seem particularly high impact to me: political activism, spreading good ideas, and having children […] But by far the most important decision you will make, in terms of your lifetime impact, is your choice of career.

MacAskill points to a range of resources – many of which he founded – that guide people in these areas. For those who might have flexibility in their career, MacAskill founded 80,000 Hours , which helps people find impactful, satisfying careers. For those trying to donate more impactfully, he founded Giving What We Can. And, for spreading good ideas, he started a social movement called Effective Altruism .

Longtermism is one of those good ideas. It helps us better place our present in humanity’s bigger story. It’s humbling and inspiring to see the role we can play in protecting the future. We can enjoy life now and safeguard the future for our great grandchildren. MasAskill clearly shows that we owe it to them.

  • Climate change
  • Generations
  • Future generations
  • Effective altruism
  • longtermism

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Dear Future Generation Rhetorical Analysis

Prince Ea’s video titled “Dear Future Generations: Sorry” portrays the possible future faced by future generations if people don’t take responsibility for environmental issues that mankind has caused. Humankind must apologize for leaving the Earth an eyesore for the generations to come because they gave themselves reasons to not act. The descendents of the people of today will be forced to live without tree, for the reason that people of today didn’t realize how extraordinary the Earth was. Trees did a great deal such as, provide oxygen, fight against human ailments and contamination, but they were cut down so humans could obtain money. Unlike the Native Americans who took care of the planet for their children’s children, humans now aren’t thinking about …show more content…

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Dear Future Generations: Sorry

By Prince Ea

Richard Williams aka ‘Prince Ea’ reflects in his powerful and ecocritical spoken-word-poem on a dystopian future of our world, which was destroyed by environmental pollution, the devastating deforestation of the rainforests and exhausted consumerism. The speaker apologises in front of the ‘future generation’ for not taking responsibility for the planet’s biodiversity – for putting profit over people and nature. Finally, the voice offers a paradigm shift, outlining and demanding to stop climate change and the destruction of nature by saving water, practising ethical consumerism and reducing our carbon footprint to save our world.

The spoken-word-poem is suitable for interdisciplinary teaching with the subject of Biology and Geography or a cross-curricular project on environmental awareness. As the poem is used as an advert, teachers might discuss product placement with their pupils.

Poetry · United States · 2015

Critical edition

Williams, Richard. "Dear Future Generations: Sorry." YouTube , Prince Ea, 20. April 2015. 6 min., Website

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In favour of this entry.

  • Addresses current affairs
  • Charged with meaning
  • Intercultural perspectives
  • Interdisciplinary or cross-curricular teaching
  • Silenced voices
  • Students can identify with the text

Recommended for these classrooms

  • Years 9–10 (Realschule)
  • Years 11–12 (Grundkurs)
  • Years 11–12 (Leistungskurs)

Berufsbildende Schule

Online resources.

  • YouTube: "Dear Future Generations: Sorry" (2016) by Prince Ea
  • Lyrics: "Dear Future Generations: Sorry" (2016) by Prince Ea
  • Homepage: Prince Ea
  • Book listing on buchhandel.de
  • Book listing on openlibrary.org

Suitable for discussing these topics

Anglophone societies.

  • Equality and inequality
  • Globalisation

Coming of Age

  • Becoming an active member of society

Current affairs

  • Fridays for Future
  • Advertising
  • Ethical consumerism

History and politics

  • Demanding change

Science and Environment

  • Climate change
  • Experiencing nature
  • Plants and animals
  • Saving and recycling resources
  • Weather and climate

People promising to take action on climate change

Dear future generations,.

I am sorry that we were all too caught up in our own doings to do anything to help our earth. We didn’t know what we had until it was gone. I’m sorry about the polluted oceans, flooding cities and the unbreathable air. I’m done being sorry because an error does not become a mistake until you refuse to correct it. This future I do not accept it. This generation is where we start to make a difference. We must take care of the earth today because it is our only home. This generation must realize we are not apart from nature but rather a part of nature. To betray nature is to betray us; to save nature is to save us. I plan to start now. Otherwise, there is no way to be certain there will be a future generation to write to. We need to work together and look beyond the issues that divide us, because at the end of the day, if we don’t work together to save our environment, we will all be equally extinct.

More Messages to the Future

Dear Tomorrow,

My climate promise is to reduce electricity at home. I will turn off the TV and lights when I’m not in the room.

I promise my next vehicle will be an EV.

Dear Gabriel,

When the worst consequences of climate change still feel far away today, or the barriers to acting on climate change seem steep today, I do not think about today. I think about you, and your world when you are my age.

Dear Child,

Hope we get to have that snowball fight I always dreamed we’d have.

Dear Rosie,

But when you are reading this years from now, by the light of a solar powered lamp, know that your dad, mom and millions of others who burned brightly with love for our kids did what we could, when we knew the stakes.

Dear World,

I vow that I will try to make a difference every day, so that you may enjoy the world as I have.

Dear Society,

If we work together to spread the awareness of what is occurring today, we will be able to prevent it from continuing into the tomorrow.

To future Geof,

Cool, now that your jetpack is put away in your garage where you keep your flying car; how did the aliens save us from our own destruction? Did they have this hyper advance vacuum that just sucks all the greenhouse gases out of our atmosphere?

Last week I took you to protest the Dakota Access Pipeline.

The transformation of human consciousness

Dear Grandchildren,

So here we are. In 2022 millions of people are suffering from the climate catastrophes, killing pollution and pandemic, not mentioning about poverty, gender and social injustice, racism, wars and dictatorships that can go on as long as bad people in power are allowed to grab our natural resources.

I have solar and will be getting an electric car next week

Send Your Own Message

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How Future Generations Will Remember Us

History is a long series of moral abominations.

An illustration of a person looking ahead into the future

The Romans enslaved people , enforced a rigid patriarchy, and delighted in the spectacle of prisoners being tortured at the Colosseum. Top minds of the ancient Western world—luminaries such as Aristotle, whose works are still taught in undergraduate lectures today—defended slavery as an entirely natural and proper practice. Indeed, from the dawn of the agricultural era to the 19th century, slavery was ubiquitous across the world. It’s hard to understand how our predecessors could have been so horrifically wrong.

We have made real progress since then. Though still very far from perfect, society is in many respects considerably more humane and just than it once was. But why should anyone think this journey of moral progress is close to complete? Given humanity’s track record, we almost certainly are, like our forebears, committing grave moral mistakes at this very moment. When future generations look back on us, they might see us like we see the Romans. Contemplating our potential moral wrongdoing is a challenging exercise: It requires us to perceive and scrutinize everything that humanity does.

Some of our sins are obvious with even a small amount of reflection. Take, for example, how we treat incarcerated people. Unlike the Romans, we mostly no longer stage the suffering of prisoners as public spectacle. Still, we subject them to conditions—such as extended solitary confinement —that enlightened future generations will likely regard with horror. The massive harm we inflict on incarcerated people (and their innocent families) is often greater than the harm inflicted by beating and caning—practices we’ve rightly left behind.

Or consider how we treat animals. Every year, humanity slaughters 80 billion land animals to satisfy our culinary preferences. Most of these are chickens, and their lives are miserable: Male chicks of layer hens are gassed, ground up, or thrown into the garbage, where they either die of thirst or suffocate to death; female chicks have their sensitive beaks cut off, and most are confined to cages that are smaller than a letter-size piece of paper. On average, a regular meal containing chicken or eggs costs at least 10 torturous hours of a chicken’s life—and more chickens will be killed within the next two years than the number of all humans who have ever lived . Similarly, pigs are castrated and have their tails amputated, and farmed cattle are castrated, dehorned, and branded with a hot iron—all without anesthetic. If animals matter at all, our treatment of them is a crime of epic proportions .

These ethical failures share a pattern. Disenfranchised and marginalized groups—such as the global poor, incarcerated people, migrants wrested from their families by our immigration system, and even humble farm animals—are out of sight and out of mind. Future generations will observe how we hid these groups from society’s gaze, allowing ourselves to ignore their basic interests. This is not a new point . But there’s another dimension that’s less discussed. When future people look back on us, they are bound to notice our disregard for another disenfranchised group: them .

Future generations can’t vote in our elections, or speak across time and urge us to act differently. They are voiceless. It’s easy to imagine that in the year 2300, our descendants will look back on us and deplore our failure to take their interests into account. And the stakes of this potential failure are incredibly high. Because of the sheer number of future people, and because their well-being is so utterly neglected, I’ve come to believe that protecting future generations should be a key moral priority of our time . When we consider which groups we’re neglecting, it’s all too easy to forget about most people who will likely ever live.

Here’s just one example of our disregard for future people. Despite the devastating wake-up call of COVID-19, most governments remain almost entirely underprepared for future pandemics. For instance, the U.S. still spends only less than $10 billion a year on preparing for pandemics, compared with about $280 billion on counterterrorism. Since 9/11, about 500 people have died on U.S. soil as a result of a terrorist acts. More than a thousand times as many have died from COVID: The excess-death toll from COVID in the U.S. is more than a million people. If we don’t massively ramp up our meager attempts to prevent the next pandemic, it’s highly likely that a pathogen much deadlier than the coronavirus will eventually cause devastation. The risk of accident from experimentation on the very deadliest pandemics will only increase, and soon, as such dangerous research becomes rapidly more accessible .

Read: America is sliding into the long pandemic defeat

If our descendants live in a postapocalyptic dystopia, how will they see our failure to prevent catastrophe? And what will our descendants think of our choice to spew carbon dioxide into the atmosphere? Carbon dioxide will pollute the air they breathe for thousands of years ; sea level will continue to rise for 10,000 years. And when it comes to climate change and pandemic preparedness, there are concrete steps we can take today. We can invest in the most promising clean-energy technology, like batteries, solar panels, and enhanced geothermal power, to mitigate climate change. To avoid the next pandemic, we can develop next-generation personal protective equipment and early-warning systems that detect new pathogens in wastewater, and we can get the cost of far-UVC lighting down low enough so that we can easily and safely kill viruses in the air. If we don’t act now to safeguard the future, our descendants will predictably—and fittingly—judge us for our shortsightedness .

But climate change and pandemics aren’t the only catastrophes that deserve much more attention. How can we mend a breakdown in international relations and mitigate the risk of spiraling into World War III? Artificial intelligence is rapidly progressing—how can we prevent it from being weaponized by bad actors, and how can we ensure it stays aligned with humanity’s values? And how can we prevent authoritarian and illiberal ideologies from gaining currency, and ensure that moral progress continues long into the future?

These are difficult problems. But over the past decade or so, we’ve made real progress on them. Groups such as the Alignment Research Center are working to ensure that AI benefits humanity rather than destroys it. Forecasters at sites such as Metaculus are learning how to make careful, evidence-based predictions about the future, and how to score those predictions impartially. And organizations such as Alvea , the Nucleic Acid Observatory , and the SecureDNA Project are developing concrete solutions to protect people, now and in the future, from biological catastrophe.

But there is so much more to be done. Society still devotes an embarrassingly small portion of its time and resources to tackling the most important problems. We need more impact-driven research , forecasting tournaments , prediction markets , and truth-seeking public debate. We need a social movement committed to protecting the future, and public-advocacy campaigns for the interests of our descendants. We need creative experiments to represent future people—and other powerless populations—in our political institutions . We need to continue expanding the circle of moral concern so that it includes the global poor, incarcerated people, immigrants, animals, and all other beings that can flourish or suffer—now and far into the future .

We also need to recognize just how much we might be missing. The most important moral causes in previous centuries might be obvious to us now, but they were only dimly apparent at the time. We should expect the same to be true today. So we can’t address just the problems that strike us, today, as most obviously pressing. We must also cultivate our society’s wisdom, foresight, and powers of reflection—so that we, and our children, can make progress in discovering what the most important problems truly are. This process of moral reflection could take considerable time, but it’s one we can’t afford to skip.

To truly understand the most important problems we face, and to find the most effective solutions, is no small task, and we’ve barely gotten started. But with hard work and humility, we can steer toward a future that our grandchildren, and their grandchildren, will be glad to inherit.

What will future generations think of us? Perhaps they will see us as selfish and myopic. Or perhaps they will look back on us with gratitude, for the steps we took to leave them a better world. The choice is ours.

Dear Future Generations: Sorry

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Literary Context

“Dear Future Generations: Sorry” is a poem working within the literary context of the environmental movement. Rachel Carson’s renowned book Silent Spring (1962) is credited with launching the environmental movement. However, the book begins with an epigraph from a poem by John Keats, a prominent English poet who wrote in the period of the Romantics (1800-1850). The Romantic poets often wrote about nature as an ideal; however, today, Prince Ea reflects that nature is no longer a beautiful, idyllic scene. While nature and the environment remain a muse and a source of poetic inspiration for the poet, the poem also shares an urgent warning and touches on the deep political quandary of 21st century Environmentalism. In “Dear Future Generations: Sorry,” Prince Ea invokes nature to sound an alarm for his readers that if humanity does not change, nature will cease to exist and so will all the organisms that depend on nature to live–including humans.

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Dear Future Generations Sorry

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dear future generations essay

A Message to My Next Generation

Shining Moon

You will shine and you will achieve whatever you want if you keep working hard and dreaming more.

Don't let anybody destroy your peace of mind. You are on the right path to pursue your dreams. You have to be ready to do whatever you are interested in.  You are the hero of your family, society, community and your country.

Try to be proactive, self starter, quick learner and self motivator and don't have the fear of taking risk.

If you want to touch the sky, you have to accept that you may fall down so many times.

Regardless of how much people and your community interfere, be like stone in front of them and convince them with your ego and words.

Furthermore, be an inspiration to their children and add your name on the top of the real heroes for freedom of thoughts and humanity.

Keep motivating yourself, try thousands of ways and come up with the best version of yourself. Don't be disappointed when none of them work. You are not the only one who suffers, there are thousands more who suffer even more than you but they didn't quit, they started struggling even harder.

Dear my next generation, keep educating yourself and focus on your studies and find learning opportunities, don't follow peoples' negative thoughts and beliefs nor the culture instead inspire others to follow you and be a role model to your society, fellow classmates and colleagues.

TRY TO SPREAD HUMANITY AND UNITY AMONG OTHERS.

Don't lose hope, be as smart and as patient that nothing stops you from what you wish to achieve.

YOU ARE UNIQUE IN THE WAY YOU ARE.

You are lucky more than you think, just believe in yourself everything will come to you in the right time.

KEEP STRUGGLING AND SHINING! 

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Dear Future Generations: Sorry

Dear Future Generations

Mari Jørstad provides support for Facing the Anthropocene, a project under the Ethics and Environmental Policy program area. She is originally from Norway and spent a decade in Canada, where she earned a bachelor’s degree in art & art history and political science and an MA in religion before coming to Duke to work toward a PhD studying the Hebrew Bible.

dear future generations essay

Letters to future generations and children

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A collection of letters addressed into the future as part of a virtual time capsule, all discussing issues of women’s equality, from around the world.

To all future generations,

I hope by the time you or your peers read this, words like men, women, gay, lesbian, transgender etc etc etc are alien words. I wish that you have to pick up the Oxford Dictionary or a history book to understand what the above words mean.

We are humans. We have a habit of systematically segregating everything except garbage. We specialise in segregating humans into various categories.

Man. Woman. Transgender. LGBTQI. Caste in India: Brahmin, Kshtriya, Vaisha, Shudra, untouchables. Black. White. Poor. Middle Class. Rich. Millionaires and Billionaires.

All the above are interrelated and we have put a lot of energy and resources to build this imaginary structure. There has been many movements, protests and riots to bring down these systems of segregations but unfortunately in the year 2018 we still struggle with a very basic human right: Gender Equality.

I might sound insane, but I am 26-years-old and struggling to survive as a woman with aspirations!

To many I am seen as an unmarried woman who works in a man’s world and can’t cook. But I’m a woman who has dreams, aspirations and, most importantly, a voice.

On the positive side, there is a huge population fighting to break all the above segregated barriers and make the world gender neutral. They are doing all this to help future generations like yours lead a comfortable life in a world where gender inequality is no longer a stigma.

To give you a glimpse of the life we lead in 2018…

We have laws: each individual above the age of 18 is an adult and we provide excellent laws for women. Yet 70% of our population in India does not follow these laws. Women are mistreated, underpaid, harassed, beaten, raped, killed even before they are born because they are female and considered to a burden on the family.

The ratio of women in India in 2011 was 943 females per 1,000 males. Women in 2018 are struggling to break the man’s world and become leaders: only 2-3% of women are at powerful positions. I hope this is not the way women of your generations are being treated.  

LGBTQI people do not exist in our laws. In India they are considered illegal. However, the transgender community finally got a few legal rights which justify them as a legal community and are beginning to get respectable jobs in various government and non-governmental sectors.

While our legal systems may have adapted to transgender community, our imaginary structure discriminates against them and treat them as the worst.

In 2018, we have laws, structures, democracy, access to technology and social media. Yet we lack implementation of laws, and suffer from corrupt structures, unequal access, misuse of technology and virtual technology taking over human interaction.

Well isn’t it better to speak to Siri, Alexa or Cortana than the orthodox patriarchal society that judges and discriminates people on the basis of the imaginary structures/categories?

Yours, Pooja, in India

dear future generations essay

Dear Future Daughter,

I hope you’re doing good wherever you are, and getting ready to face the world I live in.

I write this letter with great expectation from you. I’m displeased about the current state of gender equality – it is poor. For now, I do not know your father’s tribe. But believe me when I say gender inequality cuts across most part of Nigeria.

When you come into the world, do not be surprised to hear some irrational comments like “you can’t do this because you’re a girl”, “you can’t inherit your father’s property because you’re a girl”, “do not sit like that, you’re a girl”, “do not play like the boys”, among others.

These comments will humiliate and demoralise you as they did to me. However, now that I have the opportunity to warn you beforehand, I’ll give you some tips to guide you.

Do not listen to preachers who preach against women’s rights. Do not listen to teachers who teach against women’s empowerment. Do not listen to rulers who rule against women in power. Live life to its fullest, do not let anyone deprive you of living as human.

See, I was born in a time where I was meant to believe everything said against women. They said it’s a man’s world so my lips were sealed and my body subject to men’s authority.

Now you know the truth of the matter, guide yourself with knowledge and get ready to face reality.

With love from,

Dear girls of the next generation,

I am very glad to write this letter to you because I know you will be working a lot towards achieving gender equality in the world.

The generation of our grandmothers suffered a lot due to inequality, a little more than the generation of our mothers, and our generation is struggling hard to make the world equal for your generation. So, I hope your generation will enjoy more rights than we do. But it will not be the end, for it is only the beginning of the equality. You will still have a way more to go for your next generation.

In 2018, the issue of gender campaigners is different in the different parts of the world ranging from Chhaupadi (the tradition in western Nepal where girls in periods are compelled to live out of house in small sheds and not allowed to eat nutritious food), Female Genital Mutilation (FGM) in Africa, and pay gap in developed countries. I hope the issues will not be this serious for your generation. I wish that you will have to advocate for your rights and not against extreme human rights violation for women, like of today. I believe that with the achievement of Global Goal 5, those serious issues will have been phased out in our societies.

In our generation, celebrities are also being more aware and open about advocating the equality and we are very thankful for Emma Watson for being the role model to our generation of girls. Your generation will certainly have a lot more people advocating about equality and it will definitely be very helpful to our movement of feminism.

Also campaigns like Youth Power are inspiring the youths from all over the world to take positive actions from our own levels. I hope you will also get to involve in such campaigns and get inspired as well as inspire many youths all over the world because our small steps sometimes are milestone to set up a huge change in the world.

I hope I can experience the equal, peaceful, clean, green and sustainable world in our generation but if unfortunately, our generation could not reach there, our best wishes are always with your generation. You are not just a tender princess but a strong, bold, determined, talented, intelligent, kind and a brave queen, able to rule the world. It will be our greatest achievement when you reach to that stage.

Poonam Ghimire

dear future generations essay

I cannot recall the last time I wrote a letter to someone but I felt very excited the whole day today thinking about it. I had a lot in my mind to say.

Despite progress made enhancing gender equality, there are still a lot to be done. A woman’s world is shaken upside down by the patriarchal dominated norms and narratives. Rights that were asked for in many ways but still conditioned at various angles and levels making the path we are taking more and more challenging.

Most of the time, it seems we do feel comfortable to differentiate human rights and women’s rights. However simply put, Women’s Rights are Human Rights. Period.

Empowering and Amplifying Voices: We Lead’s Impact at the Women Deliver Conference 2023

I hope and I work and contribute and commit to do more that in the next 10 years to stand firm and make things better for ourselves and for those following our paths.

I am grateful for those strong women, young women and girls standing beside me and supporting me to become who I am and reminding me who I am and who I can be through my highs and lows fully with my flaws and my strengths.

Don`t be afraid to questions norms and challenge them. It feels OK to be different – you are differently amazing! Push your boundaries.

Use your voices to advocate, denounce and claim for justice and equality. Unlearn, learn and learn and unlearn.

Hold the moment, own the movement as this cause is mine and yours and it speaks and will speak our truths, together, not just for ourselves but for the future generation coming after us.

In solidarity,

Lana Razafimanantsoa,   in Madagascar

dear future generations essay

No one can be free until everyone is free. This slogan should apply for everyone who is working for gender equality. As a white, educated woman from Norway it is especially important to remember. I can’t see myself as free from gender stereotypes when too many people elsewhere in the world are not free.

The next four months I am working in My Age Zimbabwe Trust, as part of a volunteer exchange. Living and working in Zimbabwe forces me to step out of my comfort zone and see differences in real life.

It’s important to note that a lot has improved for gender equality in my lifetime alone.

But still things are moving much too slow. As a citizen of one of the world’s most equal countries, I can still see issues affecting girls and women not only in my own home country but all around the world. Women still earn less than men while doing the same job. Women still face far more harassment and gender-based violence than men do. The last months of 2017 saw the #MeToo campaign, where people shared their stories of sexual harassment and assault on social media. In Norway I saw men step down from political positions and quitting their jobs after multiple allegations of sexual harassment were made public. Men who have long been abusing their positions have finally been told enough is enough.

Maybe we will see a shift from only focusing on women’s equality, to a focus on gender equality. Are women’s rights only a method to get to the final goal – gender equality? As so much impressive work and improvements have been done on girl’s and women’s rights, it’s equally important to not exclude other genders. For centuries the focus was male, and the last years have seen a fight for female improvement. Let’s work together to include people with different gender identities into the fight for gender equality. I think this is the most important issue of gender campaigning in 2018 – to not leave anyone behind.

Trying to involve all genders in the longstanding fight for equality will be crucial for seeing true change. I will try to be open minded, take a step back and remember no one can be free until everyone is.

Tina Andersen VÃ¥genes, in   Zimbabwe

dear future generations essay

Dear Future Women Leaders, Typically, when we speak to issues of gender equality and women’s rights in Jamaica the usual response is that Jamaican women are doing well and are empowered, are perhaps a little greedy and are asking for too much. You see, in Jamaica, 80 percent of graduates are women, up from 56 percent in 2009.  STEM (science, technology, engineering and science) subjects are still male-dominated, but with the increasing visibility of successful women in the field, that is changing too. Jamaica has the highest proportion of women managers globally at 59.3%. Basically, the best-qualified people getting the senior jobs were predominantly women. Education is changing the culture. However, whilst women are clearly running Jamaica, men are still leading it.  Only 18% of Jamaican MPs are women, Women made up 17.4% of board directors of the 53 companies listed on the Jamaica Stock Exchange (JSE) in 2012, with 10 of the companies having no women on their boards at all.   The truth is Jamaican women have made significant strides through the years. Their accomplishments in certain critical areas should be celebrated, not used to undermine their achievements or to hinder their progress in other areas. I believe that women in national leadership positions are a major issue for gender equality campaigners in 2018 and the future. The fact of having a woman in charge makes a difference in all areas including the matter of violence against women and the victimisation of women. The #MeToo movement has been able to highlight that stubborn and persistent problem that we have yet to substantially address. The typical response from sectors of the society that Jamaican women are responsible for the violence because they are poor mothers, or ”asking for it” in how they dress is nothing but victim blaming. The Jamaican Gleaner in December 2017, reported concerning new findings that Jamaican men are killing their spouses and then themselves at a higher rate than men in the United States and other countries in the world. My late grandmother who will always be my example of a powerful, wise and caring matriarch was a victim of this violence and abuse. At a point in her relationship with my grandfather she decided to step out on her own and become a leader, she opened successful businesses, grew her children and cared for her community. Always finding time and food to share with those who needed it. I believe she could have been a victim but she decided to lead and be in charge of her own life. We need women and girls to take charge of their destinies because they have the ability to positively impact nations.

Mario Boothe, Youth Power Global Leader, in Jamaica

dear future generations essay

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  • Today, we’re introducing Meta Llama 3, the next generation of our state-of-the-art open source large language model.
  • Llama 3 models will soon be available on AWS, Databricks, Google Cloud, Hugging Face, Kaggle, IBM WatsonX, Microsoft Azure, NVIDIA NIM, and Snowflake, and with support from hardware platforms offered by AMD, AWS, Dell, Intel, NVIDIA, and Qualcomm.
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Today, we’re excited to share the first two models of the next generation of Llama, Meta Llama 3, available for broad use. This release features pretrained and instruction-fine-tuned language models with 8B and 70B parameters that can support a broad range of use cases. This next generation of Llama demonstrates state-of-the-art performance on a wide range of industry benchmarks and offers new capabilities, including improved reasoning. We believe these are the best open source models of their class, period. In support of our longstanding open approach, we’re putting Llama 3 in the hands of the community. We want to kickstart the next wave of innovation in AI across the stack—from applications to developer tools to evals to inference optimizations and more. We can’t wait to see what you build and look forward to your feedback.

Our goals for Llama 3

With Llama 3, we set out to build the best open models that are on par with the best proprietary models available today. We wanted to address developer feedback to increase the overall helpfulness of Llama 3 and are doing so while continuing to play a leading role on responsible use and deployment of LLMs. We are embracing the open source ethos of releasing early and often to enable the community to get access to these models while they are still in development. The text-based models we are releasing today are the first in the Llama 3 collection of models. Our goal in the near future is to make Llama 3 multilingual and multimodal, have longer context, and continue to improve overall performance across core LLM capabilities such as reasoning and coding.

State-of-the-art performance

Our new 8B and 70B parameter Llama 3 models are a major leap over Llama 2 and establish a new state-of-the-art for LLM models at those scales. Thanks to improvements in pretraining and post-training, our pretrained and instruction-fine-tuned models are the best models existing today at the 8B and 70B parameter scale. Improvements in our post-training procedures substantially reduced false refusal rates, improved alignment, and increased diversity in model responses. We also saw greatly improved capabilities like reasoning, code generation, and instruction following making Llama 3 more steerable.

dear future generations essay

*Please see evaluation details for setting and parameters with which these evaluations are calculated.

In the development of Llama 3, we looked at model performance on standard benchmarks and also sought to optimize for performance for real-world scenarios. To this end, we developed a new high-quality human evaluation set. This evaluation set contains 1,800 prompts that cover 12 key use cases: asking for advice, brainstorming, classification, closed question answering, coding, creative writing, extraction, inhabiting a character/persona, open question answering, reasoning, rewriting, and summarization. To prevent accidental overfitting of our models on this evaluation set, even our own modeling teams do not have access to it. The chart below shows aggregated results of our human evaluations across of these categories and prompts against Claude Sonnet, Mistral Medium, and GPT-3.5.

dear future generations essay

Preference rankings by human annotators based on this evaluation set highlight the strong performance of our 70B instruction-following model compared to competing models of comparable size in real-world scenarios.

Our pretrained model also establishes a new state-of-the-art for LLM models at those scales.

dear future generations essay

To develop a great language model, we believe it’s important to innovate, scale, and optimize for simplicity. We adopted this design philosophy throughout the Llama 3 project with a focus on four key ingredients: the model architecture, the pretraining data, scaling up pretraining, and instruction fine-tuning.

Model architecture

In line with our design philosophy, we opted for a relatively standard decoder-only transformer architecture in Llama 3. Compared to Llama 2, we made several key improvements. Llama 3 uses a tokenizer with a vocabulary of 128K tokens that encodes language much more efficiently, which leads to substantially improved model performance. To improve the inference efficiency of Llama 3 models, we’ve adopted grouped query attention (GQA) across both the 8B and 70B sizes. We trained the models on sequences of 8,192 tokens, using a mask to ensure self-attention does not cross document boundaries.

Training data

To train the best language model, the curation of a large, high-quality training dataset is paramount. In line with our design principles, we invested heavily in pretraining data. Llama 3 is pretrained on over 15T tokens that were all collected from publicly available sources. Our training dataset is seven times larger than that used for Llama 2, and it includes four times more code. To prepare for upcoming multilingual use cases, over 5% of the Llama 3 pretraining dataset consists of high-quality non-English data that covers over 30 languages. However, we do not expect the same level of performance in these languages as in English.

To ensure Llama 3 is trained on data of the highest quality, we developed a series of data-filtering pipelines. These pipelines include using heuristic filters, NSFW filters, semantic deduplication approaches, and text classifiers to predict data quality. We found that previous generations of Llama are surprisingly good at identifying high-quality data, hence we used Llama 2 to generate the training data for the text-quality classifiers that are powering Llama 3.

We also performed extensive experiments to evaluate the best ways of mixing data from different sources in our final pretraining dataset. These experiments enabled us to select a data mix that ensures that Llama 3 performs well across use cases including trivia questions, STEM, coding, historical knowledge, etc.

Scaling up pretraining

To effectively leverage our pretraining data in Llama 3 models, we put substantial effort into scaling up pretraining. Specifically, we have developed a series of detailed scaling laws for downstream benchmark evaluations. These scaling laws enable us to select an optimal data mix and to make informed decisions on how to best use our training compute. Importantly, scaling laws allow us to predict the performance of our largest models on key tasks (for example, code generation as evaluated on the HumanEval benchmark—see above) before we actually train the models. This helps us ensure strong performance of our final models across a variety of use cases and capabilities.

We made several new observations on scaling behavior during the development of Llama 3. For example, while the Chinchilla-optimal amount of training compute for an 8B parameter model corresponds to ~200B tokens, we found that model performance continues to improve even after the model is trained on two orders of magnitude more data. Both our 8B and 70B parameter models continued to improve log-linearly after we trained them on up to 15T tokens. Larger models can match the performance of these smaller models with less training compute, but smaller models are generally preferred because they are much more efficient during inference.

To train our largest Llama 3 models, we combined three types of parallelization: data parallelization, model parallelization, and pipeline parallelization. Our most efficient implementation achieves a compute utilization of over 400 TFLOPS per GPU when trained on 16K GPUs simultaneously. We performed training runs on two custom-built 24K GPU clusters . To maximize GPU uptime, we developed an advanced new training stack that automates error detection, handling, and maintenance. We also greatly improved our hardware reliability and detection mechanisms for silent data corruption, and we developed new scalable storage systems that reduce overheads of checkpointing and rollback. Those improvements resulted in an overall effective training time of more than 95%. Combined, these improvements increased the efficiency of Llama 3 training by ~three times compared to Llama 2.

Instruction fine-tuning

To fully unlock the potential of our pretrained models in chat use cases, we innovated on our approach to instruction-tuning as well. Our approach to post-training is a combination of supervised fine-tuning (SFT), rejection sampling, proximal policy optimization (PPO), and direct preference optimization (DPO). The quality of the prompts that are used in SFT and the preference rankings that are used in PPO and DPO has an outsized influence on the performance of aligned models. Some of our biggest improvements in model quality came from carefully curating this data and performing multiple rounds of quality assurance on annotations provided by human annotators.

Learning from preference rankings via PPO and DPO also greatly improved the performance of Llama 3 on reasoning and coding tasks. We found that if you ask a model a reasoning question that it struggles to answer, the model will sometimes produce the right reasoning trace: The model knows how to produce the right answer, but it does not know how to select it. Training on preference rankings enables the model to learn how to select it.

Building with Llama 3

Our vision is to enable developers to customize Llama 3 to support relevant use cases and to make it easier to adopt best practices and improve the open ecosystem. With this release, we’re providing new trust and safety tools including updated components with both Llama Guard 2 and Cybersec Eval 2, and the introduction of Code Shield—an inference time guardrail for filtering insecure code produced by LLMs.

We’ve also co-developed Llama 3 with torchtune , the new PyTorch-native library for easily authoring, fine-tuning, and experimenting with LLMs. torchtune provides memory efficient and hackable training recipes written entirely in PyTorch. The library is integrated with popular platforms such as Hugging Face, Weights & Biases, and EleutherAI and even supports Executorch for enabling efficient inference to be run on a wide variety of mobile and edge devices. For everything from prompt engineering to using Llama 3 with LangChain we have a comprehensive getting started guide and takes you from downloading Llama 3 all the way to deployment at scale within your generative AI application.

A system-level approach to responsibility

We have designed Llama 3 models to be maximally helpful while ensuring an industry leading approach to responsibly deploying them. To achieve this, we have adopted a new, system-level approach to the responsible development and deployment of Llama. We envision Llama models as part of a broader system that puts the developer in the driver’s seat. Llama models will serve as a foundational piece of a system that developers design with their unique end goals in mind.

dear future generations essay

Instruction fine-tuning also plays a major role in ensuring the safety of our models. Our instruction-fine-tuned models have been red-teamed (tested) for safety through internal and external efforts. ​​Our red teaming approach leverages human experts and automation methods to generate adversarial prompts that try to elicit problematic responses. For instance, we apply comprehensive testing to assess risks of misuse related to Chemical, Biological, Cyber Security, and other risk areas. All of these efforts are iterative and used to inform safety fine-tuning of the models being released. You can read more about our efforts in the model card .

Llama Guard models are meant to be a foundation for prompt and response safety and can easily be fine-tuned to create a new taxonomy depending on application needs. As a starting point, the new Llama Guard 2 uses the recently announced MLCommons taxonomy, in an effort to support the emergence of industry standards in this important area. Additionally, CyberSecEval 2 expands on its predecessor by adding measures of an LLM’s propensity to allow for abuse of its code interpreter, offensive cybersecurity capabilities, and susceptibility to prompt injection attacks (learn more in our technical paper ). Finally, we’re introducing Code Shield which adds support for inference-time filtering of insecure code produced by LLMs. This offers mitigation of risks around insecure code suggestions, code interpreter abuse prevention, and secure command execution.

With the speed at which the generative AI space is moving, we believe an open approach is an important way to bring the ecosystem together and mitigate these potential harms. As part of that, we’re updating our Responsible Use Guide (RUG) that provides a comprehensive guide to responsible development with LLMs. As we outlined in the RUG, we recommend that all inputs and outputs be checked and filtered in accordance with content guidelines appropriate to the application. Additionally, many cloud service providers offer content moderation APIs and other tools for responsible deployment, and we encourage developers to also consider using these options.

Deploying Llama 3 at scale

Llama 3 will soon be available on all major platforms including cloud providers, model API providers, and much more. Llama 3 will be everywhere .

Our benchmarks show the tokenizer offers improved token efficiency, yielding up to 15% fewer tokens compared to Llama 2. Also, Group Query Attention (GQA) now has been added to Llama 3 8B as well. As a result, we observed that despite the model having 1B more parameters compared to Llama 2 7B, the improved tokenizer efficiency and GQA contribute to maintaining the inference efficiency on par with Llama 2 7B.

For examples of how to leverage all of these capabilities, check out Llama Recipes which contains all of our open source code that can be leveraged for everything from fine-tuning to deployment to model evaluation.

What’s next for Llama 3?

The Llama 3 8B and 70B models mark the beginning of what we plan to release for Llama 3. And there’s a lot more to come.

Our largest models are over 400B parameters and, while these models are still training, our team is excited about how they’re trending. Over the coming months, we’ll release multiple models with new capabilities including multimodality, the ability to converse in multiple languages, a much longer context window, and stronger overall capabilities. We will also publish a detailed research paper once we are done training Llama 3.

To give you a sneak preview for where these models are today as they continue training, we thought we could share some snapshots of how our largest LLM model is trending. Please note that this data is based on an early checkpoint of Llama 3 that is still training and these capabilities are not supported as part of the models released today.

dear future generations essay

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We’ve integrated our latest models into Meta AI, which we believe is the world’s leading AI assistant. It’s now built with Llama 3 technology and it’s available in more countries across our apps.

You can use Meta AI on Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, Messenger, and the web to get things done, learn, create, and connect with the things that matter to you. You can read more about the Meta AI experience here .

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dear future generations essay

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IMAGES

  1. Importance of Education for Future Generation Essay Example

    dear future generations essay

  2. Dear Future Generations: Sorry Poem Study Guide by SuperSummary

    dear future generations essay

  3. Dear Future Generations: Sorry Poem Study Guide by SuperSummary

    dear future generations essay

  4. Dear Future Generations: Sorry! gap text

    dear future generations essay

  5. Dear Future Generations, Sorry by Bernard De vos on Prezi

    dear future generations essay

  6. Dear Future Generations: Sorry (Distance Learning Compatible Versions

    dear future generations essay

VIDEO

  1. DEAR FUTURE GENERATIONS

  2. WE NEED THESE HABITS NOW FOR A BETTER LIFE| THE THINGS THAT MADE THE GREATEST GENERATION SO GREAT

  3. DEAR FUTURE GENERATIONS...Sorry

  4. Dear future generations, sorry,(cover)

  5. dear future generations, we’re sorry

  6. Wh1teBean reacts to Dear Future Generations: Sorry (2023)

COMMENTS

  1. Dear Future Generations: Sorry

    Overview. "Dear Future Generations: Sorry" is written and performed by Prince Ea. It is a spoken word piece framed as an address to those who will live on Earth in the future and thus inherit the current planetary destruction at the hand of humanity and climate change. Performed and published in 2015, the poem is a timely piece, published ...

  2. Write a Letter to Future Generations About The World you Hope They

    Master the art of essay writing with our blog on How to Write an Essay in English. Table of Contents. ... Dear Future Generations, As I write this letter today in the year 2024, I hope the world you have inherited is one of peace, equality, and environment-friendly. While today we are facing many global challenges, I am optimistic that through ...

  3. Dear Future Generations: Sorry by Prince Ea Analysis

    1354. Dear Future Generations: Sorry by Prince Ea Analysis. The article, Dear Future Generations: Sorry by Prince Ea Analysis intends to magnify the acclaimed work of Richard William, known as his theatrical name Prince Ea. In this poem, Richard addresses the future generations and shows his distress for the harm we are trying to cause them.

  4. Dear future generations,

    I hope the future generation who reads this letter is a product of the people who were brave enough to make a difference. I hope you're living in a world that has learned to cohabitate with nature. I hope you are both thriving in a better world. That better world is what I am fighting for. -Baylee.

  5. Activist Prince Ea Has A Message To Future Generations: Sorry

    Activist Prince Ea Has A Message To Future Generations: Sorry. Prince Ea—the stage name of American rapper, spoken word artist, and civil rights activist Richard Williams from St. Louis— has done it again. Just in time for Earth Day, he launched one of the most powerful videos I have ever seen about mitigating climate change -- in the first ...

  6. Analysis Of Dear Future Generations : Sorry

    Analysis Of Dear Future Generations : Sorry. In the poem "Dear Future Generations: Sorry" by Prince Ea, he addresses that he is sorry for leaving the future generations with "our mess of a planet (3).". Using anaphoras, he is stating that he is sorry that they were " [...] too caught up in our own doings to do something (4)", and ...

  7. What do we owe future generations? And what can we do to make their

    Longtermism is one of those good ideas. It helps us better place our present in humanity's bigger story. It's humbling and inspiring to see the role we can play in protecting the future. We ...

  8. Dear Future Generation Rhetorical Analysis

    Rhetorical Analysis. Activity theory, as interpreted by Ph.D. candidates, Wardle and Kain, is a process that attempts to see all aspects of activity such as social interactions and use of writing and language to achieve goals. This theory is award winning. Activity theory states that for a system to be effective, the rules, community, subject ...

  9. Dear Future Generations: Sorry

    Dear Future Generations: Sorry. Richard Williams aka 'Prince Ea' reflects in his powerful and ecocritical spoken-word-poem on a dystopian future of our world, which was destroyed by environmental pollution, the devastating deforestation of the rainforests and exhausted consumerism. The speaker apologises in front of the 'future generation ...

  10. Dear Future Generations: Sorry (2024)

    An Apology Letter to Future Generations. Sorry.💬TEXT ME: 314-207-4482💬🔴URGENT: YouTube won't show you my NEW videos UNLESS you🔔 TURN ON MY NOTIFICATIONS?...

  11. Dear Future Generations,

    This generation is where we start to make a difference. We must take care of the earth today because it is our only home. This generation must realize we are not apart from nature but rather a part of nature. To betray nature is to betray us; to save nature is to save us. I plan to start now. Otherwise, there is no way to be certain there will ...

  12. Prince Ea

    It can be denied, not avoided. So I'm sorry future generation. I'm sorry that our footprints became a sinkhole and not a garden. I'm sorry that we paid so much attention to ISIS. And very little ...

  13. What Will Future Generations Think of Us?

    Future generations can't vote in our elections, or speak across time and urge us to act differently. They are voiceless. It's easy to imagine that in the year 2300, our descendants will look ...

  14. Dear Future Generations: Sorry Background

    "Dear Future Generations: Sorry" is a poem working within the literary context of the environmental movement. Rachel Carson's renowned book Silent Spring (1962) is credited with launching the environmental movement.However, the book begins with an epigraph from a poem by John Keats, a prominent English poet who wrote in the period of the Romantics (1800-1850).

  15. Dear Future Generations Sorry : Prince Ea

    Dear Future Generations Sorry by Prince Ea. Topics News & Politics. An Apology Letter to Future Generations. Sorry. Don't forget to like, comment, and SUBSCRIBE: https://goo.gl/3bBv52 For more inspirational videos on climate change, watch: I Quit https://goo.gl/CS3TQK Man vs. Earth https://goo.gl/XVQw2e 4 Ways to Fight Climate Change https ...

  16. Dear Future Generations: Sorry Poem Study Guide

    SuperSummary's Poem Study Guide for "Dear Future Generations: Sorry" by Prince Ea provides text-specific content for close reading, engagement, and the development of thought-provoking assignments. Review and plan more easily with poet biography, literary device analysis, essay topics, and more. Note: This rich poem-study resource for teacher and student support does not contain activities ...

  17. A Message to My Next Generation

    A Message to My Next Generation. You will shine and you will achieve whatever you want if you keep working hard and dreaming more. Don't let anybody destroy your peace of mind. You are on the right path to pursue your dreams. You have to be ready to do whatever you are interested in. You are the hero of your family, society, community and your ...

  18. Dear Future Generations: Sorry

    Dear Future Generations: Sorry Activist and Artist Prince Ea Releases New Video on Earth Day supporting Stand for Trees campaign. News provided by. Code REDD Apr 20, 2015, 10:31 ET.

  19. a message to future generations

    Dear future generations,I am writing this message with a heavy heart, knowing that the world you will inherit may be vastly different from the one we live in today. Climate change is one of the most significant challenges humanity has ever faced, and its impact on the planet and our way of life cannot be overstated.As someone who witnessed the effects of climate change firsthand, I implore you ...

  20. Dear Future Generations: Sorry

    By Mari Jorstad on April 25, 2019. Dear Future Generations: Sorry. Sometimes scientific names, their dependence on Greek and Latin in particular, can feel confusing and opaque, jargon intended only for the specialist. At other times, they make things painfully clear. Take for example the terms heterotrophs and autotrophs. Humans are heterotrophs.

  21. Letters to future generations and children

    A collection of letters addressed into the future as part of a virtual time capsule, all discussing issues of women's equality, from around the world. To all future generations, I hope by the time you or your peers read this, words like men, women, gay, lesbian, transgender etc etc etc are alien words. I wish that you have to pick up the Oxford Dictionary or a history book to understand what ...

  22. SPEECHES

    The following are examples of speeches the children who work as part of Voices of Future Generations have given to prestigious audiences around the world. JOna david, unga, nyc. Please click the photograph to the left to open the file of Jona David's speech, delivered at the UN General Assembly High Level Event on Climate Action and Youth, at ...

  23. Introducing Meta Llama 3: The most capable openly available LLM to date

    Today, we're introducing Meta Llama 3, the next generation of our state-of-the-art open source large language model. Llama 3 models will soon be available on AWS, Databricks, Google Cloud, Hugging Face, Kaggle, IBM WatsonX, Microsoft Azure, NVIDIA NIM, and Snowflake, and with support from hardware platforms offered by AMD, AWS, Dell, Intel, NVIDIA, and Qualcomm.