Recently in Future of humanity Category

Last week the ABC's 7:30 Report spent the entire week looking at the drivers of Australia’s long-term future. The fourth program, on The social impact of the population boom, was an excellent examination of the diverse issues and perspectives on the implications of rapid population growth, including interviews with a diverse range of politicians, demographers, analysts, and myself as the lone futurist.

It’s well worth seeing the video of the full program along with the transcript on the ABC's website. A video of the program’s introduction and excerpts from my comments are below.

The program examined Australia’s demographic and social future, however the issues raised are absolutely relevant in all developed countries, where low immigration inevitably means a rapidly aging population, with all of the associated challenges.

Last December I wrote about the driving trends and uncertainties in Australia’s population growth, pointing to the recent dramatic increase in the 2050 forecast for Australia’s population from 28 million to 35 million. This revised forecast had a powerful impact, resulting in heated discussion about the social, ecological, and economic implications of what would be the fastest population growth of any developed country in the world.

For the last few years Richard Watson of NowandNext has created annual trend maps based on city subway maps. This year he has been more ambitious, creating a highly detailed map with five time zones, ranging from 2010-2015 out to 2035-2050.

For the previous three trend maps (shown at the bottom) I collaborated with Richard and we co-branded them with Future Exploration Network, however time pressures this year meant that I haven't directly contributed to the 2010 map. It is still as rich and glorious as ever - spend some time delving into the trends ahead!

MEGATRENDS OF THE TREND MAP
- Ageing
- Power shift Eastwards
- Globalisation
- Localisation
- Digitalisation
- Personalisation
- Volatility
- Individualism
- Environmental change
- Sustainability
- Debt
- Urbanisation

In his excellent book The Meaning of the 21st Century, James Martin asks when in human history you would most like to be alive.

For me there is no question that it is now. The coming decade will be the most exciting in human history. The very challenging year of 2009 that we are preparing to bid farewell to helped to tear up the fairly linear progress of the first decade of the century. Now, technological and social change are poised to accelerate far beyond what we have become accustomed to.

A critical uncertainty is how well we will respond to this extraordinary pace of change, both as individuals and as societies. Will we be able to adapt and change, or will severe dysfunctions emerge? Just one dimension is the manifold ethical dilemmas that are raised by gaining extraordinary technological capabilities.

Here are the ten trends that I believe will be most fundamental to the decade ahead. I hope to present these and associated trends in an interactive visual format before long. For now, here are the 10 trends for 2010.

1. Information Intensity
We will soon consume more media than there are waking hours, by virtue of multi-channeling at most times. Billions of people and places will be media producers, including video streaming from most points of view on the world. We are just at the dawn of an incomprehensible daily onslaught of news and information – some valuable, much useless.

Other 2009 summary posts
Top blog posts of 2009: 6 on Twitter and the media
Top blog posts of 2009: Enterprise 2.0 and organizational effectiveness
Top keynote speech presentations/ videos of 2009

Third in my series of my blog posts that have attracted the most interest this year, on the general topic of the future. (I haven't included any of my presentations - I'll select some of these to put in another post.)

1. Wealth Adaptation Syndrome (WAS): a defining malaise of our times and the opportunities that stem from it
A syndrome to help understand society in 2009

2. Why traditional conferences are dying and how unconferences and audience participation are the future of events
Why events will always be important but they are starting to look very different from before

To anticipate what will shape 2010, we need to understand the TENsions that will define the opening year of the TENsions decade. The TENsions that are most prominent will evolve during the course of the decade. However the accelerating pace of change means that TENsions will inevitably define the decade, in myriad forms.

These are the 10 TENsions for 2010, the opening year of the TENsions.

1. Optimism - Fear
Many companies and workers are now daring to be optimistic as they put 2009 behind them, look forward to opportunities, and worry about getting left behind if things improve rapidly. Yet with the shock of the onset of the financial crisis still fresh, any optimism is subject to being shattered, resulting in wild swings in confidence.

2. Institutional work – Independent work
While many lost their jobs in 2009, sparking a rise in home-based work such as direct selling, many others gave up self-employment to return to the workforce. Over the long term more people are making the shift to work independently, by desire or necessity. However the temptations of self-employment can be replaced by desire for a steady pay packet, pulling people both ways.

This morning I gave the opening keynote at an internal leadership conference of a major Australian retailer, addressing the topic of Embracing the Future.

One of the key issues for the long-term planning of any large organization is the basic demography of the country. While I spent much of my presentation looking at social change, I started by looking at the state of population forecasts for Australia.

A few months ago Australia's Treasury department foreshadowed the release of the third Intergenerational Report, which examines the impact of population change and aging. The second report, released in 2007, forecast an Australian population of 28.5 million in 2050, however two scant years later the forecast has been revised to 35 million. This would make Australia the fastest-growing developed country in the world.

Let's look at some of the figures and uncertainties behind these forecasts. While we often hear that "Demographics is Destiny", in fact demographic forecasts are fraught with uncertainty.

This first image shows the earlier three population scenarios for this century from the government.

THREE POPULATION SCENARIOS FOR AUSTRALIA

Since 2006 I have owned and written about video glasses, including in my Six Trends that are transforming Online and Future of Media Lifecycle framework.

Despite my predictions, we still don't see many people around wearing video glasses. However I still think it's going to happen, as I predicted earlier this week.

In the many radio interviews I've done this week I was asked a lot about the video glasses. As I explained, there are many applications for video glasses, but augmented reality is the most powerful.

The recent swathe of augmented reality apps on iPhone have shown us the very beginning of the potential of AR. However people don't want to be always holding up their phone in front of their face.

A case in point is ID tagging, in which facial recognition software identifies people in your field of vision and provides additional information about them. This is something far more easily and less obviously done using video glasses.

The classic scenario is that you see someone you've met before and don't remember their name, but your AR glasses displays their name and any other publicly available information or things that you've noted previously next to them.

Imagine when the technologies in this video can be embedded into your glasses. This kind of information could easily get people to start wearing glasses when they go out into social situations.

This morning Future Exploration Network issued this press release (excuse the hyperbole :-) ) I have already done several radio interviews on the forecasts in the release with quite a few more radio, newspaper and TV interviews lined up for the next days - the ideas seem to have struck a chord.

Futurist proved correct! …and today describes the extraordinary social technologies of 2016

Seven years ago, in his prescient book Living Networks, global leading futurist Ross Dawson accurately described the networked world of today, anticipating social networks, Twitter, corporate blogging, crowd-sourcing, personalised advertising, virtual personal assistants and much else that is now familiar to us.

Today, he offers insights into the extraordinary world of technology we will experience seven years into the future.

Ross’s forecasts for 2016 include:
• Many people will wear video glasses as they commute and walk around, experiencing new forms of television, news updates, and detailed information about the world around them and people they meet.

Radio National’s Future Tense last week covered the issue of Participatory democracy, Web 2.0 and the Australian Government 2.0 Taskforce with an excellent program. The program can be heard or downloaded on the website, along with a transcript.

During the program I was quoted talking about the potential and the underlying demand for participatory democracy:

I think that there is a growing interest in [Government 2.0], and it is very different in different countries and in different demographics, but absolutely people's interest is growing in participating and having a voice and being able to impact smaller things in the environment in which they live, as well as larger things such as the political parties in power. And I think that trend will accentuate over time, as people get more used to the ideas and the tools provided by participation.

However the core of the program is an interview with Dr Nicholas Gruen, who chairs the Australian government’s Government 2.0 taskforce, discussing what is being done currently. He noted:

This interview segment on Techcrunch quotes Google CEO Eric Schmidt as saying on the future of search: “Connect it straight to your brain”.

Indeed. Search is about finding meaningful information. If just by thinking about what we wanted to find, we could find that information or content among all the information in the Universe, that would be a Very Good Thing.

So the question is: will we ever get there? I certainly don’t know whether we will ever be able to search by thought, but it’s certainly in the realm of the possible.

If so, I hope I’m alive when we get it. It will be fun!

In finding the quote from Marshall McLuhan on professionals and amateurs I used in my last post, I dug up a file I created a dozen years go with some quotes I was collecting. Here are just a few that are still worth bearing in mind today:

“The empires of the future are the empires of the mind”
- Winston Churchill

“It is hardly possible to overrate the value… of placing human beings in contact dissimilar to themselves, and with modes of thought and action unlike those with which they are familiar… Such communication has always been, and is peculiar in the present age, one of the primary sources of progress.”
- John Stuart Mills in 1848

“Computer games don’t affect kids; I mean, if Pac-Man affected us as kids, we’d all be running around in darkened rooms, munching magic pills and listening to repetitive electronic music”.
- Kristian Wilson of Nintendo Inc in 1989

"Knowledge is of two kinds. We know a subject ourselves, or we know where we can find information upon it."
- Samuel Johnson (1709-1784)

This morning I did the opening keynote to the top executive team of a major organization.at their strategy offsite. It's not appropriate to share the full presentation, however I can share the rough scenarios I presented for the world to 2030. The scenarios were presented after having examined the driving forces and critical uncertainties for the company. (See also my post on The best visuals to explain the Singularity to senior executives)

As always, a strong disclaimer comes with any generic set of scenarios like these - scenarios really must be created by the users themselves for specific decisions and in context (for the full disclaimer as well as a brief background on using scenarios in the strategy process see my scenarios for the future of financial services).

SCENARIO FRAMEWORK FOR THE WORLD IN 2030
A traditional scenario process identifies two dimensions to uncertainty, that when combined produce a matrix of four scenarios. Once the framework is created, the full richness of trends and uncertainties uncovered in the research process are integrated into the scenarios. Here the two dimensions selected are:

RESOURCES AVAILABILITY: Resource Poverty TO Resource Affluence
Availability and real cost of key resources including energy, food, water, and environmental stability.

COHESION: Cohesion TO Fragmentation
Cohesion of society, government, nations, and institutions.

Together these dimensions yield:

SCENARIOS FOR THE WORLD IN 2030

Recent research suggests that ‘microevolution’ – that within species - happens faster in warmer climates – their DNA changes faster. This leads to the extraordinary tropical diversity of our planet.

Susan Kraemer asks: what happens if the planet’s climate gets warmer? Will we all evolve faster?

Which leads me to the bigger question: are we evolving faster? And if so, what is driving that?

We only occasionally think about human evolution, but now well into the 21st century it would be worth knowing if we were indeed evolving at a faster rate, and what that means.

That’s a good research challenge: determine whether and by how much the pace of human evolution is changing :-)

The extropians would of course say it’s accelerating, and I’d have to say I agree.

Once we start to determine our own DNA, as we are beginning to do, we are playing a hand ourselves in our evolution.

We are shaping ourselves, at an increasing pace.