Introduction

First, thank you for taking time from what I'm sure is a busy day, week, month, year, and full life to read what I have written. I decided to write One Sustainable Planet Powered by AI because I felt it needed to be written. As a people, the human race, we are at a crossroads, a nexus. We all have what feels like the entire world coming at us, all at once, every day—through our televisions, our computers, and our smartphones.

This can make it hard for any one of us to zoom out and see the entire theater of the world. The constant messaging makes it difficult to see how all of these things work together, work against each other, work against us, and, at times, work for us. That is where this book will focus—how we can all zoom out and untangle this mess and make the world work for the betterment of humanity.

What This Book Contains

Throughout the coming chapters you will read about the current state of the world, how we got where we are, my vision of how we move forward, and the thoughts of other visionaries in the world of artificial intelligence (AI) and digitization.

I will go through the movement from the 2010s to the current day of companies that have integrated AI and digitalization extensively throughout their organization, subsequently experiencing stock prices averaging four times the performance of the S&P 500. Drawing on my experience and expertise, I will show how enterprises can transform using sustainable models with societal impact.

I will provide insights and trends from leading companies, and thoroughly explain what it means to be fueled by sustainable and human‐centric AI, from strategic archetypes for adoption to the necessary technological infrastructure.

But it's not only big companies or tech companies, the Googles and Amazons of the world, that can benefit from sustainable and human‐centric AI. Small to midsize companies, including legacy businesses, can benefit by fully embracing and integrating sustainable and human‐centric AI and digital transformation into their business practices and strategies.

I will give you the fundamentals of what it means to install all‐inclusive AI to transform your business and beat out the competition to drive your businesses and the world to a better place. And I will show how a company's leadership and sustainable culture is fundamental to a thriving human‐centric AI‐powered transformation.

You will learn the ways AI can enable new business strategies, models, and ecosystems for innovation and growth with social/societal impact, and, finally, how to create societal benefits, social impact, and ethical AI capabilities through transparency, fairness, reliability, privacy, safety, robustness, and more.

But before we get to all that, I want to truly introduce myself to you. I want to tell you why I am writing this book, what this vision means to me, and what the world I want to help build for my daughter looks like. First, I want to tell you about the amazing people who brought me into this world, raised me, and instilled in me my work ethic, passion, and drive that I draw on to this very day.

From Eastern Europe to the United States

My life began in the Union of Soviet Socialists and Republics, in a region presently called Ukraine. Politics, wars, strife, and struggle have plagued my homeland since before my time until this very day.

I was born and grew up in the city of Lviv. Lviv went through a lot of changes over many years. It was occupied by Nazis and Germans, it was once part of Poland in the Austro‐Hungarian Empire, and it was part of Romania at one point. But at the time I was born in Lviv, it was one of the most western cities in the former Soviet Union.

My Parents' Background

The challenges that faced my family were heartbreaking and unforgivable. My grandfather was jailed, accused of attending forbidden religious events and participating in activities against the Soviet regime. We were discriminated against for being Jewish and were isolated.

During my childhood we didn't have much wealth—no one did. We relied on my dad's ability to make a living and work to provide for us. But because of the circumstances and lack of possibilities, my dad never had a chance to complete his education. His mother died very, very young during or toward the end of World War II, when his family was living in exile in Uzbekistan.

When Dad was 13 years old, he had to drop out of school to support his sisters and work in the fields. One of the skills that he learned was to become a mechanic, and later he became a mechanic of sewing machines to support us.

My mother was a Holocaust survivor. She, along with several of her family members in concentration camps, barely survived. My resolve and determination comes from my parents. I can never give up, because it would be a failure of everything they instilled in me and stood for. Sadly, my incredible mother passed away in New Jersey due to a hospital‐induced infection in March 2023 as I was writing this book.

In all, we were an average family in Ukraine at the time. We didn't have much means whatsoever, living under the oppressive Soviet regime; the president at that time was Leonid Brezhnev, the head of the Communist Party. It was a difficult time; I remember that you couldn't get supplies, and the waiting lines were very long.

Leaving Ukraine

We also had to live with the secret police, and people would pick on me, especially those from minorities or different religions in school. It was a difficult childhood, and so my mom and dad made a decision: they decided that they were going to leave the Soviet Union. They were going to renounce their regime.

Of course, to leave, you had to quit your job and leave a lot of your belongings and assets, and in the end, you didn't know where you were going. Fortunately, we had relatives in the United States. My mom had a sister who had immigrated earlier and lived in New Jersey, and my dad had a sister who lived in New York, so we started on a journey to be reunited with them.

It was not a fairytale from there. I was just a little boy, nine or so years old. We had a lot of challenges. We were struggling, trying to free our minds and spirits from the Soviet dictatorship and regime, and we were looking for something better—a better life, a better opportunity for me and my brother, and hopefully a college education that would allow us to have a shot at the world.

Even knowing that we would have a lot of challenges moving to a faraway country where we didn't speak the language, the option of staying in the former Soviet Union and under the Soviet regime was far worse than taking a chance and leaving. We filed all the paperwork and received permission from the United States to travel. We also were able to get permission from the Soviets to leave the country, but it took years to get it.

Obviously, denounce the regime meant that we were going to leave our assets, we were not going to communicate with our Ukraine‐based relatives, we would never come back, and we would never have citizenship again. It was a one‐way ticket the regime was happy to use to push us out.

My memories of that time are brutal, but my parents made a decision to improve all our lives. They believed that opportunities would be significantly better in the United States.

Joining the United States

The journey to the United States wasn't easy. We passed through several European countries such as Austria, the Czech Republic, Italy, and others. We spent months traveling, but finally arrived in the United States as legal immigrants.

Today I can still clearly remember the first week we arrived in the United States. We were settled into a home for not more than a few days when we were robbed at gunpoint. Not such a great welcome to the United States!

To support our family, my dad had to work numerous jobs, sometimes three or four. We didn't get the chance to see him much. He took on a lot of responsibility and felt that he had to really work hard so that he could sustain us and our life in the United States. Needless to say, I always felt like I needed to repay my dad for all that he did for us, as well as my mom, for all the care and nurturing she gave us.

Because we got to take advantage of the opportunity of being in this amazing country that is the United States, as a child, I started thinking about the potential of what we could do and what could happen in the future. I knew that my dad would continue to work hard to support us, but it was always on my mind that the future and what would happen would depend on me and my generation and what we made of it.

I believe that going through all those challenges created a need in me to do something special in life. I want to create opportunities, from a societal perspective, so that not only we, but other families and people as well, will be helped in the process.

I can say that today, and with all the experiences from my childhood, I'm very proud that I have an ability to see the world through a slightly different lens and to have a unique perspective.

Where My Love of Science and Technology Was Born

When early personal computers came out, I was immediately intrigued. The first Commodore 64 came out when I was a teenager in the early 1980s. I kept thinking “What is this computer system?” It was my first “aha!” moment, and I remember sitting in school, and at...