The 2013-14 State of the Future, an influential annual report on what we know about the future of humanity will be launched at the Washington, DC Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars on March 20th from noon to 1:30pm.
The report integrates and distills the rapidly changing global situation in technology, environment, social unrest, development gaps, security, energy, food, organized crime, gender relations, governance, health, education, and more.
Jerome Glenn, CEO, The Millennium Project; Dennis Bushnell, Chief Scientist, NASA Langly Research Center; and Paul Werbos, Program Director, National Science Foundation, will launch the report at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars March 20th from noon to 1:30pm.
This is the 17th State of the Future report produced by The Millennium Project – a global participatory think tank that has grown to over 50 Nodes around the world and is listed among the top ten think tanks in the world for new idea/paradigm by the Go to Think Tank index of the Univesity of Pennsylvania and selected by Computerworld as a laureate for its innovations in collective intelligence systems.
At the same time, notes the report, the world is increasingly engaged in many diverse conversations about the right way to relate to the environment and our fellow humans and about what technologies, economics, and laws are right for our common future. These great conversations are emerging from countless international negotiations, the evolution of standards established by the ISO, the preparations for the post-2015 UN Development Goals and other UN gatherings, and thousands of Internet discussion groups and big data analyses. Humanity is slowly but surely becoming aware of itself as an integrated system of cultures, economies, technologies, natural and built environments, and governance systems.
These great conversations will be better informed if we realize that the world is improving better than most pessimists know and that future dangers are worse than most optimists indicate. Better ideas, new tech, and creative management approaches are popping up all over the world, but the lack of imagination and courage to make serious change is drowning the innovations needed to make the world work for all.
Meanwhile, the world is beginning to automate jobs more broadly and quickly than during the industrial revolution and initial stages of the information age. How many truck and taxicab drivers will future self-driving cars replace? How many will lose their jobs to robotic manufacturing? Or telephone support.
The number of employees per business revenue is falling, giving rise to employment-less economic growth.
New possibilities have to be invented, such as one-person Internet-based self-employment, for finding markets worldwide rather than looking for local jobs. Successfully leapfrogging slower linear development processes in lower-income countries is likely to require implementing futuristic possibilities—from 3D printing to seawater agriculture—and making increasing individual and collective intelligence a national objective of each country.
The number of employees per business revenue is falling, giving rise to employment-less economic growth.
New possibilities have to be invented, such as one-person Internet-based self-employment, for finding markets worldwide rather than looking for local jobs. Successfully leapfrogging slower linear development processes in lower-income countries is likely to require implementing futuristic possibilities—from 3D printing to seawater agriculture—and making increasing individual and collective intelligence a national objective of each country.
The explosive, accelerating growth of knowledge in a rapidly changing and increasingly interdependent world gives us so much to know about so many things that it seems impossible to keep up. At the same time, we are flooded with so much trivial news that serious attention to serious issues gets little interest, and too much time is wasted going through useless information ( Facebook, Twitter, linked-in).
Although the long-range trend toward democracy is strong, Freedom House reports that world political and civil liberties deteriorated for the eighth consecutive year in 2013, with declines noted in 54 countries and improvements in just 40 countries. At the same time, increasing numbers of educated and mobile phone Internet-savvy people are no longer tolerating the abuse of power and may be setting the stage for a long and difficult transition to more global democracy.
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