Mark,
Thank you for a very interesting essay.
I think you raise a lot of important points:
1. That if humanity is made of many communities with conflicting interests, it becomes very difficult to identify global future goals that humanity should steer towards.
2. That a lot of the evil in the world could arise through the pursuit of good, instead of purposeful evil action.
3. That, in any debate, reaching certainty and "closure" is a sign that you have become a "partisan", which is counterproductive.
4. That, for a debate to be fruitful, the receiver of the message must do some work, must take the time to receive the information and to understand it... which is, unfortunately, not often the case.
5. That ordinary citizens sometimes argue passionately about scientific issues (GMOs, energy policy), but that they often preselect the sources of their information through their personal motives and prejudices (even when they are not aware of the fact).
To address, among other things, the "problems" no. 4 and 5, I proposed in my essay that we try to identify collectively the most important basic knowledge that is useful to have a debate about the future, and that we refocus education (formal and lifelong) to ensure that the greatest number of citizens are made to participate in a worldwide "conversation" about the future: I call this endeavour the "Futurocentric Education Initiative".
The Futurocentric Education Initiative is a possible way to address the "Babel Problem": we could call it an "Augmented Intelligence" approach, which could complement the "Artificial Intelligence" approach that you tentatively suggest. While we wait for truly general artificial intelligence to appear (some people believe it is imminent, some think that it can never happen), maybe we can pool our human natural intelligence resources, augmented and coordinated through the Internet, to steer education, in order to eventually steer the future!
Your essay is one of the most on-topic that I have read, and I hope that it does well in the competition. Several essays in this contest emphasize that better communication and education is essential if we want humanity to successfully steer the future, and I hope your essay makes it to the finals so this point of view can be represented. (I have nothing against the unification of quantum mechanics and general relativity, but I think that this year's question deserves other approaches than just "let's unify QM and GR so we can save the world"!)
Marc