Why does Fortune do Brainstorm? I guess the simplest reason is…the world is screwed up. We have a lot of problems, but the most fundamental is that those of us in a few developed countries have enormous wealth, but most people in the world remain very poor. Yet poor people, no matter where they live, always seem to find enough to spend on communications. TV, cellphones, and now even the Internet at those ubiquitous Internet cafes—these are literally everywhere.

All that technology is a window—the poor now see the rich with unprecedented clarity. They see what the rich have, and they want some. Thus, the world’s economic divide is becoming unsustainable. The way it looks to me, we’ve reached a point where the world is fundamentally unstable. Yet it will seek equilibrium. Either we start bringing those people up or we will assuredly begin going down. With all the recent clamor about job losses in the U.S., in just about every industry and job type, one could argue that that latter process has already begun.

Brainstorm proceeds from the premise that business is part of the problems and part of the solutions. In recent years we’ve seen lots of evidence of a growing awareness of this on the part of businesspeople. See my colleague Marc Gunther’s recent piece in Fortune on corporate social responsibility, called Tree Huggers, Soy Lovers, and Profits.

In many ways business dominates the processes of the world. Government is not nearly so efficient at responding to the exigencies of modern life. And large multinational corporations are more truly global than just about any governmental organization. With that ubiquity comes a heavy responsibility.

Meanwhile, the average citizen’s understanding of the actual nature of business is egregiously poor. So we have a crisis—even as business gets more important, people have an inadequate understanding of this powerful force over their lives.

Brainstorm is one way we try to find remedies for these challenges. It is all about bridging gaps and broadening understanding. To that end we—with our co-host this year, the Aspen Institute—are bringing together 210 attendees, including Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer; a number of Bush administration officials; General Wesley Clark; the heads of NGOs including Human Rights Watch, Environmental Defense, the AIDS Vaccine Initiative, and the Gates Foundation; the presidents of Harvard University (Larry Summers) and my own alma mater, Amherst College (Tony Marx); and technologists (of course) including Esther Dyson and Mitch Kapor. In addition we have the CEOs of Activision, Baxter International, Charles Schwab, Gateway, Logitech, Staples, Sybase, Walgreen, and many, many more business leaders.

So now that we’ve got them all together we will get them talking—about corporate power, weapons of mass destruction, the future of the Middle East, global warming, AIDS, the role of the U.S. in global relations, the future of Africa, the economy, technology (of course) and numerous other topics. With luck we’ll come up with some new ideas, make some new connections, and maybe make the world a tiny bit better place. I’ll be back next week with a report from the front.

“Fast Forward” is David Kirkpatrick’s weekly column for Fortune.