Democracy, as with all other processes engineered by human civilisation, is evolving at a rapid rate. A number of indicators are pointing to a major leap forward, encompassing a more public participatory form of democratic model and the harnessing of the expert intelligence of the Web. By the middle of the 21st century, such a global version of the democratic process will be largely in place.
Democracy has a long evolutionary history. The concept of democracy - the notion that men and women have the right to govern themselves, was practised at around 2,500 BP in Athens. The Athenian polity or political body, granted all citizens the right to be heard and to participate in the major decisions affecting their rights and well-being. The City State demanded services and loyalty from the individual in return. There is evidence however that the role of popular assembly actually arose earlier in some Phoenician cities such as Sidon and Babylon in the ancient assemblies of Syria- Mesopotamia, as an organ of local government and justice.
As demonstrated in these early periods, democracy, although imperfect, offered each individual a stake in the nation’s collective decision-making processes. It therefore provided a greater incentive for each individual to cooperate to increase group productivity. Through a more open decision process, improved innovation and consequently additional wealth was generated and distributed more equitably. An increase in overall economic wellbeing in turn generated more possibilities and potential to acquire knowledge, education and employment, coupled with greater individual choice and freedom.
According to the Freedom House Report, an independent survey of political and civil liberties around the globe, the world has made great strides towards democracy in the 20th and 21st centuries. In 1900 there were 25 restricted democracies in existence covering an eighth of the world’s population, but none that could be judged as based on universal suffrage. The US and Britain denied voting rights to women and in the case of the US, also to African Americans. But at the end of the 20th century 119 of the world’s 192 nations were declared electoral democracies. In the current century, democracy continues to spread through Africa and Asia and significantly also the Middle East, with over 130 states in various stages of democratic evolution.
Dictatorships or quasi democratic one party states still exist in Africa, Asia and the middle east with regimes such as China, North Korea, Zimbabwe, Burma, the Sudan, Belarus and Saudi Arabia, seeking to maintain total control over their populations. However two thirds of sub-Saharan countries have staged elections in the past ten years, with coups becoming less common and internal wars gradually waning. African nations are also starting to police human rights in their own region. African Union peacekeepers are now deployed in Darfur and are working with UN peacekeepers in the Democratic Republic of the Congo.
The evolution of democracy can also be seen in terms of improved human rights. The United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights and several ensuing legal treaties, define political, cultural and economic rights as well as the rights of women, children, ethnic groups and religions. This declaration is intended to create a global safety net of rights applicable to all peoples everywhere, with no exceptions. It also recognises the principle of the subordination of national sovereignty to the universality of human rights; the dignity and worth of human life beyond the jurisdiction of any State.
The global spread of democracy is now also irreversibly linked to the new cooperative globalisation model. The EU, despite its growing pains, provides a compelling template; complementing national decisions in the supra-national interest at the commercial, financial, legal, health and research sharing level. The global spread of new technology and knowledge also provides the opportunity for developing countries to gain a quantum leap in material wellbeing; an essential prerequisite for a stable democracy.
The current cyber-based advances therefore presage a much more interactive public form of democracy and mark the next phase in its ongoing evolution. Web 2.0’s social networking, blogging, messaging and video services have already significantly changed the way people discuss political issues and exchange ideas beyond national boundaries. In addition a number of popular sites exist as forums to actively harness individual opinions and encourage debate about contentious topics, funnelling them to political processes. These are often coupled to online petitions, allowing the public to deliver requests to Government and receive a committed response.
In addition there are a plethora of specialized smart search engines and analytical tools aimed at locating and interpreting information about divisive and complex topics such as global warming and medical stem cell advances. These are increasingly linked to Argumentation frameworks and Game theory, aimed at supporting the logical basis of arguments, negotiation and other structured forms of group decision-making. New logic and statistical tools can also provide inference and evaluation mechanisms to better assess the evidence for a particular hypothesis.
By 2030 it is likely that such ‘intelligence-based’ algorithms will be capable of automating the analysis and advice provided to politicians, at a similar level of quality and expertise as that offered by the best human advisers.
It might be argued that there is still a need for the role of politicians and leaders in assessing and prioritising such expert advice in the overriding national interest. But a moment’s reflection leads to the opposite conclusion. Politicians have party allegiances and internal obligations that can and do create serious conflicts of interest and skew the best advice. History is replete with such disastrous decisions based on false premises, driven by party political bias and populist fads predicated on flawed knowledge. One needs to look no further in recent times than the patently inadequate evidential basis for the US’s war in Iraq which has cost at least half a million civilian lives and is still unresolved.
However there remains a disjunction between the developed west and those developing countries only now recovering from colonisation, the subsequent domination by dictators and fascist regimes and ongoing natural disasters. There is in fact a time gap of several hundred years between the democratic trajectory of the west and east, which these countries are endeavouring to bridge within a generation; often creating serious short-term challenges and cultural dislocations.
A very powerful enabler for the spread of democracy as mentioned is the Internet/Web- today’s storehouse of the world’s information and expertise. By increasing the flow of essential intelligence it facilitates transparency, reduces corruption, empowers dissidents and ensures governments are more responsive to their citizen’s needs. Ii is already providing the infrastructure for the emergence of a more democratic society; empowering all people to have direct input into critical decision processes affecting their lives, without the distortion of political intermediaries.
By 2040 more democratic outcomes for all populations on the planet will be the norm. Critical and urgent decisions relating to global warming, financial regulation, economic allocation of scarce resources such as food and water, humanitarian rights and refugee migration etc, will to be sifted through community knowledge, resulting in truly representative and equitable global governance. Implementation of the democratic process itself will continue to evolve with new forms of e-voting and governance supervision, which will include the active participation of advocacy groups supported by a consensus of expert knowledge via the Intelligent Web 4.0.
Over time democracy as with all other social processes, will evolve to best suit the needs of its human environment. It will emerge as a networked model- a non-hierarchical, resilient protocol, responsive to rapid social change. Such distributed forms of government will involve local communities, operating with the best expert advice from the ground up; the opposite of political party self-interested power and superficial focus-group decision-making, as implemented by many current political systems. These are frequently unresponsive to legitimate minority group needs and can be easily corrupted by powerful lobby groups, such as those employed by the heavy carbon emitters in the global warming debate.
By 2050 a form of global consciousness will have evolved, where the back channel of opinion and reason will gradually subsume today’s hierarchical and populist consumer/brand filtered political models. New forms of the democratic process at the community and regional level are already growing, pointing towards the emergence of a new form of truly representative public participation and cooperation.
This trend towards a fairer and more peaceful society must continue if the human race is to survive the uncertainty and turmoil ahead..
Thursday, December 8, 2011
Monday, November 28, 2011
Future World Order
Three years ago the emergence of a New World Order was a relatively simple outcome of the political process- both to understand and predict. The prognosis primarily involved the rise of Asia in economic terms followed by a relatively orderly transference of political and financial power from the West to the East, resulting in the emergence of a more multi-polar globalised world over the next 30 years.
The signals for such a shift were clear then and still are- up to a point.
Following a rapid period of industrial development, as occurred in Europe after its industrial revolution, Asian nations are now playing social and technological catch up.
The speed of Asia's advance has been breathtaking, Before the West's industrial revolution, Asia accounted for almost 60% of the world's economy. By WW2 this had slipped to 20%. It is now projected to rise back to 60% by 2020. Asia is in the middle of a long-term growth phase, even accounting for the current financial meltdown mark 2, that extends back to the Meiji Restoration period in Japan in the 19th century and the end of Imperial rule in China at the beginning of the 20th century. By 2040 it is predicted that China will be the world’s leading economy, followed by the US and India.
In India and China the middle class now accounts for over ten percent of the population. It is also upwardly mobile in terms of its consumer and knowledge culture. Combined with improved access to education, science and technology, this means the push for political pluralism is now inevitable. It is also inevitable that the new regional Asian grouping- the East Asian forum will begin to play a dominant over the next 5 years, extending the present ASEAN forum to include over 2 billion people in a model similar to that of the EU.
This transition to equalization of opportunity in the east was always a given. Then along came the greatest financial catastrophe of the modern era with the potential collapse of the Eurozone and the contagion spreading throughout the west.
The US is US$15 trillion in debt and counting and the main lender is Asia. China has a US$2 trillion surplus in currency reserves. Within the decade economic power will have passed to Asia, with the US no longer in the drivers seat of the world’s capital markets. Its banking structure is already emasculated and unlikely to ever recover its former glory.
China is now banker to the world.
But creating a new multi-polar and globalised world order has only just begun. It is about much more than Asia’s rise to power. The current economic and political architecture is totally bankrupt and will have to be rewritten in a radical new language- a hybrid of socialism and capitalism with various other ethical and green sustainable strands woven in. And this new architecture will need to have the flexibility to continue to evolve and adapt as the cultural, social and technological landscape around it changes at breathtaking speed.
Tinkering around the edges with an infusion of Government backed liquidity and greater regulation isn’t going to cut it this time around. After all what we are witnessing is at least a 50% write down of the world’s wealth, which among other downsides is going to force a return to poverty for tens of millions in the developing nations.
The US has been living with serious structural deterioration for more than a decade- negligible levels of private savings, chronic balance of payment s deficits and domestic budget shortfalls. Foreign savers have funded these gaps. Half the US treasury bills on issue are now foreign owned, while sovereign wealth funds are diversifying out of US debt and taking influential positions in some of America’s iconic companies. While China’s growth rate has retreated below 7 percent, the West’s growth rate is negative.
And still the world leaders, bankers, economists and investors have no real solution to this cataclysmic disaster, let alone a real willingness to take responsibility for it. It’s as if after a few years and an infusion of a few tens of trillions of dollars the bad news will go away and life will return to ‘normal’ – business as usual again.
When you’ve got the current level of uncertainty in the collective economic and political mind and basically flying blind, you know there is zero probability that this will happen.
But this is just the beginning of a great unwinding of current civilization. The sudden shock to the world’s traditional order will create many unforeseen ramifications- some chaotic and violent. We already see social unrest in China, Russia and Europe. This has the capacity to turn anarchic as the economy continues to deteriorate. Combined with worldwide food, water and energy shortages in a time of global climate change, this shock has the potential to put immense pressure on social norms.
We’ve arrived suddenly and unexpectedly at the beginning of the 21st century at a great impasse, a great disjunction in human affairs.
But there is also a great opportunity to fast track reform of a flawed system from the ground up. This crisis can be turned to huge advantage for all humanity, providing the solutions are applied with great creativity, courage and cooperation.
It’s not a time for more of the same- for more great leaders and hubris. Instead it requires the harnessing of collective wisdom, knowledge and responsibility; extending beyond the false pride and patriotism of the national political process, tangled in its debilitating web of self-interest, delusion and corruption.
We can already see the tentative beginnings of this New World Order- Mark 2.
Pressure to reform unrepresentative voting structures of the UN; moves to establish a more inclusive grouping of middle power decision-making nations- from the G8 to G20; initiatives to reform the IMF and World Bank; the rise of the NGO community as an ethical counterweight to political decision-making; the continued rise of democracy; greater national cooperation supporting global conventions on human rights, conflict mediation, global warming, the sea, trade, health, science, legal and financial protocols etc; and the rise of the internet with its promise of providing equal access for the developing world to the sum of human knowledge.
But time is short. The luxury of leisurely progress toward achieving these critical goals is past. All options must now be on the table and open to radical reform- ideological, economic and social.
After all, nothing less than the future of human civilisation and the well being of the planet’s seven billion inhabitants is at stake.
The signals for such a shift were clear then and still are- up to a point.
Following a rapid period of industrial development, as occurred in Europe after its industrial revolution, Asian nations are now playing social and technological catch up.
The speed of Asia's advance has been breathtaking, Before the West's industrial revolution, Asia accounted for almost 60% of the world's economy. By WW2 this had slipped to 20%. It is now projected to rise back to 60% by 2020. Asia is in the middle of a long-term growth phase, even accounting for the current financial meltdown mark 2, that extends back to the Meiji Restoration period in Japan in the 19th century and the end of Imperial rule in China at the beginning of the 20th century. By 2040 it is predicted that China will be the world’s leading economy, followed by the US and India.
In India and China the middle class now accounts for over ten percent of the population. It is also upwardly mobile in terms of its consumer and knowledge culture. Combined with improved access to education, science and technology, this means the push for political pluralism is now inevitable. It is also inevitable that the new regional Asian grouping- the East Asian forum will begin to play a dominant over the next 5 years, extending the present ASEAN forum to include over 2 billion people in a model similar to that of the EU.
This transition to equalization of opportunity in the east was always a given. Then along came the greatest financial catastrophe of the modern era with the potential collapse of the Eurozone and the contagion spreading throughout the west.
The US is US$15 trillion in debt and counting and the main lender is Asia. China has a US$2 trillion surplus in currency reserves. Within the decade economic power will have passed to Asia, with the US no longer in the drivers seat of the world’s capital markets. Its banking structure is already emasculated and unlikely to ever recover its former glory.
China is now banker to the world.
But creating a new multi-polar and globalised world order has only just begun. It is about much more than Asia’s rise to power. The current economic and political architecture is totally bankrupt and will have to be rewritten in a radical new language- a hybrid of socialism and capitalism with various other ethical and green sustainable strands woven in. And this new architecture will need to have the flexibility to continue to evolve and adapt as the cultural, social and technological landscape around it changes at breathtaking speed.
Tinkering around the edges with an infusion of Government backed liquidity and greater regulation isn’t going to cut it this time around. After all what we are witnessing is at least a 50% write down of the world’s wealth, which among other downsides is going to force a return to poverty for tens of millions in the developing nations.
The US has been living with serious structural deterioration for more than a decade- negligible levels of private savings, chronic balance of payment s deficits and domestic budget shortfalls. Foreign savers have funded these gaps. Half the US treasury bills on issue are now foreign owned, while sovereign wealth funds are diversifying out of US debt and taking influential positions in some of America’s iconic companies. While China’s growth rate has retreated below 7 percent, the West’s growth rate is negative.
And still the world leaders, bankers, economists and investors have no real solution to this cataclysmic disaster, let alone a real willingness to take responsibility for it. It’s as if after a few years and an infusion of a few tens of trillions of dollars the bad news will go away and life will return to ‘normal’ – business as usual again.
When you’ve got the current level of uncertainty in the collective economic and political mind and basically flying blind, you know there is zero probability that this will happen.
But this is just the beginning of a great unwinding of current civilization. The sudden shock to the world’s traditional order will create many unforeseen ramifications- some chaotic and violent. We already see social unrest in China, Russia and Europe. This has the capacity to turn anarchic as the economy continues to deteriorate. Combined with worldwide food, water and energy shortages in a time of global climate change, this shock has the potential to put immense pressure on social norms.
We’ve arrived suddenly and unexpectedly at the beginning of the 21st century at a great impasse, a great disjunction in human affairs.
But there is also a great opportunity to fast track reform of a flawed system from the ground up. This crisis can be turned to huge advantage for all humanity, providing the solutions are applied with great creativity, courage and cooperation.
It’s not a time for more of the same- for more great leaders and hubris. Instead it requires the harnessing of collective wisdom, knowledge and responsibility; extending beyond the false pride and patriotism of the national political process, tangled in its debilitating web of self-interest, delusion and corruption.
We can already see the tentative beginnings of this New World Order- Mark 2.
Pressure to reform unrepresentative voting structures of the UN; moves to establish a more inclusive grouping of middle power decision-making nations- from the G8 to G20; initiatives to reform the IMF and World Bank; the rise of the NGO community as an ethical counterweight to political decision-making; the continued rise of democracy; greater national cooperation supporting global conventions on human rights, conflict mediation, global warming, the sea, trade, health, science, legal and financial protocols etc; and the rise of the internet with its promise of providing equal access for the developing world to the sum of human knowledge.
But time is short. The luxury of leisurely progress toward achieving these critical goals is past. All options must now be on the table and open to radical reform- ideological, economic and social.
After all, nothing less than the future of human civilisation and the well being of the planet’s seven billion inhabitants is at stake.
Sunday, November 27, 2011
The Future of Migration
The author contends that the future of Global Migration is governed by Global Warming as well as the laws of physics that controls the flow of information and knowledge across borders and will inevitably be followed by a flow of education and human skills on a global scale.
The flow of knowledge scenario is based on the physics of the Least Action Principle, which postulates that any dynamical process, whether the trajectory of a ray of light or orbit of a planet, follows a path of least resistance or one which minimises the 'action' or overall energy expended.
Physicist Richard Feynman showed that quantum theory also incorporates a version of the Action Principle and underlies a vast range of processes from physics to linguistics, communication and biology. The evidence suggests a deep connection between this principle based on energy minimisation and self-organising systems including light waves, information flows and natural system topographies, such as the flow of a river.
Information is now flowing seamlessly to every corner of the planet and its populations, mediated by the Internet and Web; reaching even the poorest communities in developing countries via cheap PCs, wireless phones and an increasing variety of other mobile devices.
Half the population of the developing world in Asia and Africa now have access to the Web via inexpensive mobile phones. Individual local farmers and small businesses increasingly use them to transfer money, track commodity prices and supplier deliveries and keep in touch with relatives and their community. They are also the ideal medium for transferring knowledge as the basis of the education process.
In sync with the flow of information and knowledge there is now a global flow of educational material online including open access courseware resources. Courseware is a critical resource already offered by a number of prestigious tertiary institutions including- The Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Yale and Harvard, in addition to free knowledge reference sites such as Wikipedia.
The trend-lines in this open learning revolution are already evident and will become pervasive in the near future. They include online 24 hour access to the Web, open content via free courseware, and real-time wireless web delivery; making it much cheaper and easier for the flow of knowledge to reach previously illiterate societies and communities, particularly as a generational shift takes place.
At the same time the human learning process is being driven by the need to adapt to a fast changing work and social environment, to provide ongoing support for society’s needs in the new cyber-age. This shift in turn is being driven by the increasing rate of knowledge generation providing new opportunities.
By 2030 the full power of the Web will be deployed towards this new paradigm. At the same time work practices will become increasingly fluid, with individuals moving freely between projects, career paths and virtual organisations on a contract or part-time basis; adding value to each enterprise and in turn continuously acquiring new skills, linked to ongoing advanced learning programs.
And so by 2040, the flow of information followed by the continuous flow of educational courseware, together with improvements in standards of living, will have largely eliminated the inequalities of skills and training that currently exist between developed and developing nations.
The Action Principle will finally allow the developing world to achieve equal status with the developed world in terms of access to knowledge, training and the realisation of human potential and facilitate the free movement of human workers and their families between workplaces globally.
Already there is a large transfer of skills between countries like India, with a vast pool of engineering and computer science graduates, and the West’s need for such skills. This may be in the form of virtual outsourcing or physical transfers of a skilled labour force on short term contracts. The same process currently operates between EU countries to fill capacity shortages on a regular and continuing basis.
At the same time as the information/education/workflow convergence is occurring at a worldwide level, two other major drivers of global migration are accelerating - global warming and global conflict.
Planet earth is now reaching a catastrophic tipping point, where it is realised that humans have probably left their run too late to limit global temperature rise to the maximum safe 2 degrees centigrade and atmospheric carbon levels to less than 450 ppm.
The evidence is starting to become apparent from a number of sources. The melting of the Arctic and Antarctic ice sheets and mountain snows feeding the major river systems in Asia and Africa, the disintegration of the northern tundra threatening the release of vast amounts of methane, the catastrophic loss of biodiversity, disruption of most ecosystems including the coral reefs and tropical forests, ocean warming, threatening the phytoplankton base of the food chain, and increases in extreme climate related events- droughts, floods, rising ocean surges in coastal areas, tornados etc. These are already threatening to overwhelm even the wealthier nations’ capacity to rebuild damaged and obsolete infrastructure.
Rampant global warming will inevitably lead to major disruption of the world’s food and fresh water supply chains, seriously affecting at least half the world’s population. This will result in vast migration movements as the rivers and food bowls of China, India and Africa dry up and deadly tropical diseases such as the malaria and dengue fever, spread.
In turn these factors will result in increasing social chaos and conflict unless managed on a global basis.
To stabilise the situation, the 1951 UN convention on refugees will need to be strengthened and expanded to establish a world humanitarian body with the powers to override national sovereignty and mandate the number of climate and conflict refugees that each region will be required to accept, according to capacity and demand.
Migration has always been a routine way of coping with floods and droughts going back to the earliest civilisations, when there were few borders and the numbers affected were trivial in comparison with today’s 7 billion population and its vast infrastructure.
The magnitude and frequency of environmental hazards is now beginning to place enormous pressure on the capacity of many communities to survive. The recent IPCC / Stern Review of the economics of climate change estimates that climate refugees will reach 200 million by 2050.
An idea of the coming wave of human migration can be glimpsed from a sample of recent natural disaster statistics, which do not include earthquake, volcanic or tsunami events.
Mexico was a source of 1 million environmental refugees a year during the 1990s with increased hurricanes and floods also the root cause of its economic crisis.
Large-scale government enforced relocation programs in Vietnam and Mozambique moved hundreds of thousands of people to cope with worsening floods and storms in 2000.
Six million environmental refugees in China have been created by the expanding Gobi desert. Migration in China and India has also been greatly amplified by development of projects such as China’s Three Gorges, which displaced 2 million people.
The 1998 monsoon floods in Bangladesh covered two thirds of the country and left 21 million homeless.
In 2008, floods following the Burma cyclone forced hundreds of thousands to flee, with little assistance from the Burmese junta.
In 2010, record monsoon rains in Pakistan caused the Indus River to burst its banks, causing millions to relocate.
Although most of these events created internal rather than external migration, it is unlikely that this will continue to be the case, with rising temperatures forecast to force tens of millions to move from tropical to more temperate regions, due to ongoing droughts over the next twenty years.
There are also an increasing number of conflict refugees from autocratic and despotic regimes and failed states. Tribalism and fear and suspicion of the ‘other’ is still strongly embedded in the DNA of human evolution, leading to scapegoating of migrant groups in tough economic times. Examples include Muslim harassment in Christian countries, Neo-Nazism in Europe targeting African refugees and inter-religious conflict in Asia and the Middle East.
The refugee diaspora has greatly expanded in conflict zones across the globe over the past two years, driven by upheavals in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iraq, Somalia, Sudan and the Democratic Republic of Congo and the Ivory Coast, as well as persecution of ethnic minorities in China, Burma and Bhutan. Criminal violence, as now endemic in Mexico, is likely to add to this misery.
It is estimated that almost a million people are smuggled and trafficked across international borders each year, using increasingly sophisticated methods by criminal organisations linked to a range of other crimes- identity theft, corruption, money laundering, and violence ranging from debt bondage to murder- earning of the order of $10billion.
By 2030 mounting humanitarian crises are likely to make assistance to all climate and conflict refugees mandatory as it is realised that a piecemeal national approach will result in far worse disruptions to society in terms of the uncontrolled spread of violence in a very unstable time.
Any country that avoids its international obligations and attempts to free ride the system will be ostracised and severely sanctioned.
Europe already contends with a growing number of refugees from North Africa, which include economic, climate, disaster and conflict refugees, but with the upturn in Middle East violence and difficult economic times is battling xenophobia in its member states.
By 2040/50 most of the new migration infrastructure will be in place and communities will have to adjust accordingly. In an already largely globalised multicultural world where most nations have already accepted other cultures for several generations, even if begrudgingly, this will not be as revolutionary a development as many might expect.
It is therefore likely that the paradigm of controlled but flexible migration worldwide will cease to be controversial, endorsed and managed under the auspices of the UN, as a globalised One Planet philosophy gains traction.
It will be the only solution capable of managing cross border refugee flows in a time of looming climate disruption, but also the most economic means of allocating valuable human resources in a globalised educated world to areas of greatest need, as humans fight to save their planet.
The flow of knowledge scenario is based on the physics of the Least Action Principle, which postulates that any dynamical process, whether the trajectory of a ray of light or orbit of a planet, follows a path of least resistance or one which minimises the 'action' or overall energy expended.
Physicist Richard Feynman showed that quantum theory also incorporates a version of the Action Principle and underlies a vast range of processes from physics to linguistics, communication and biology. The evidence suggests a deep connection between this principle based on energy minimisation and self-organising systems including light waves, information flows and natural system topographies, such as the flow of a river.
Information is now flowing seamlessly to every corner of the planet and its populations, mediated by the Internet and Web; reaching even the poorest communities in developing countries via cheap PCs, wireless phones and an increasing variety of other mobile devices.
Half the population of the developing world in Asia and Africa now have access to the Web via inexpensive mobile phones. Individual local farmers and small businesses increasingly use them to transfer money, track commodity prices and supplier deliveries and keep in touch with relatives and their community. They are also the ideal medium for transferring knowledge as the basis of the education process.
In sync with the flow of information and knowledge there is now a global flow of educational material online including open access courseware resources. Courseware is a critical resource already offered by a number of prestigious tertiary institutions including- The Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Yale and Harvard, in addition to free knowledge reference sites such as Wikipedia.
The trend-lines in this open learning revolution are already evident and will become pervasive in the near future. They include online 24 hour access to the Web, open content via free courseware, and real-time wireless web delivery; making it much cheaper and easier for the flow of knowledge to reach previously illiterate societies and communities, particularly as a generational shift takes place.
At the same time the human learning process is being driven by the need to adapt to a fast changing work and social environment, to provide ongoing support for society’s needs in the new cyber-age. This shift in turn is being driven by the increasing rate of knowledge generation providing new opportunities.
By 2030 the full power of the Web will be deployed towards this new paradigm. At the same time work practices will become increasingly fluid, with individuals moving freely between projects, career paths and virtual organisations on a contract or part-time basis; adding value to each enterprise and in turn continuously acquiring new skills, linked to ongoing advanced learning programs.
And so by 2040, the flow of information followed by the continuous flow of educational courseware, together with improvements in standards of living, will have largely eliminated the inequalities of skills and training that currently exist between developed and developing nations.
The Action Principle will finally allow the developing world to achieve equal status with the developed world in terms of access to knowledge, training and the realisation of human potential and facilitate the free movement of human workers and their families between workplaces globally.
Already there is a large transfer of skills between countries like India, with a vast pool of engineering and computer science graduates, and the West’s need for such skills. This may be in the form of virtual outsourcing or physical transfers of a skilled labour force on short term contracts. The same process currently operates between EU countries to fill capacity shortages on a regular and continuing basis.
At the same time as the information/education/workflow convergence is occurring at a worldwide level, two other major drivers of global migration are accelerating - global warming and global conflict.
Planet earth is now reaching a catastrophic tipping point, where it is realised that humans have probably left their run too late to limit global temperature rise to the maximum safe 2 degrees centigrade and atmospheric carbon levels to less than 450 ppm.
The evidence is starting to become apparent from a number of sources. The melting of the Arctic and Antarctic ice sheets and mountain snows feeding the major river systems in Asia and Africa, the disintegration of the northern tundra threatening the release of vast amounts of methane, the catastrophic loss of biodiversity, disruption of most ecosystems including the coral reefs and tropical forests, ocean warming, threatening the phytoplankton base of the food chain, and increases in extreme climate related events- droughts, floods, rising ocean surges in coastal areas, tornados etc. These are already threatening to overwhelm even the wealthier nations’ capacity to rebuild damaged and obsolete infrastructure.
Rampant global warming will inevitably lead to major disruption of the world’s food and fresh water supply chains, seriously affecting at least half the world’s population. This will result in vast migration movements as the rivers and food bowls of China, India and Africa dry up and deadly tropical diseases such as the malaria and dengue fever, spread.
In turn these factors will result in increasing social chaos and conflict unless managed on a global basis.
To stabilise the situation, the 1951 UN convention on refugees will need to be strengthened and expanded to establish a world humanitarian body with the powers to override national sovereignty and mandate the number of climate and conflict refugees that each region will be required to accept, according to capacity and demand.
Migration has always been a routine way of coping with floods and droughts going back to the earliest civilisations, when there were few borders and the numbers affected were trivial in comparison with today’s 7 billion population and its vast infrastructure.
The magnitude and frequency of environmental hazards is now beginning to place enormous pressure on the capacity of many communities to survive. The recent IPCC / Stern Review of the economics of climate change estimates that climate refugees will reach 200 million by 2050.
An idea of the coming wave of human migration can be glimpsed from a sample of recent natural disaster statistics, which do not include earthquake, volcanic or tsunami events.
Mexico was a source of 1 million environmental refugees a year during the 1990s with increased hurricanes and floods also the root cause of its economic crisis.
Large-scale government enforced relocation programs in Vietnam and Mozambique moved hundreds of thousands of people to cope with worsening floods and storms in 2000.
Six million environmental refugees in China have been created by the expanding Gobi desert. Migration in China and India has also been greatly amplified by development of projects such as China’s Three Gorges, which displaced 2 million people.
The 1998 monsoon floods in Bangladesh covered two thirds of the country and left 21 million homeless.
In 2008, floods following the Burma cyclone forced hundreds of thousands to flee, with little assistance from the Burmese junta.
In 2010, record monsoon rains in Pakistan caused the Indus River to burst its banks, causing millions to relocate.
Although most of these events created internal rather than external migration, it is unlikely that this will continue to be the case, with rising temperatures forecast to force tens of millions to move from tropical to more temperate regions, due to ongoing droughts over the next twenty years.
There are also an increasing number of conflict refugees from autocratic and despotic regimes and failed states. Tribalism and fear and suspicion of the ‘other’ is still strongly embedded in the DNA of human evolution, leading to scapegoating of migrant groups in tough economic times. Examples include Muslim harassment in Christian countries, Neo-Nazism in Europe targeting African refugees and inter-religious conflict in Asia and the Middle East.
The refugee diaspora has greatly expanded in conflict zones across the globe over the past two years, driven by upheavals in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iraq, Somalia, Sudan and the Democratic Republic of Congo and the Ivory Coast, as well as persecution of ethnic minorities in China, Burma and Bhutan. Criminal violence, as now endemic in Mexico, is likely to add to this misery.
It is estimated that almost a million people are smuggled and trafficked across international borders each year, using increasingly sophisticated methods by criminal organisations linked to a range of other crimes- identity theft, corruption, money laundering, and violence ranging from debt bondage to murder- earning of the order of $10billion.
By 2030 mounting humanitarian crises are likely to make assistance to all climate and conflict refugees mandatory as it is realised that a piecemeal national approach will result in far worse disruptions to society in terms of the uncontrolled spread of violence in a very unstable time.
Any country that avoids its international obligations and attempts to free ride the system will be ostracised and severely sanctioned.
Europe already contends with a growing number of refugees from North Africa, which include economic, climate, disaster and conflict refugees, but with the upturn in Middle East violence and difficult economic times is battling xenophobia in its member states.
By 2040/50 most of the new migration infrastructure will be in place and communities will have to adjust accordingly. In an already largely globalised multicultural world where most nations have already accepted other cultures for several generations, even if begrudgingly, this will not be as revolutionary a development as many might expect.
It is therefore likely that the paradigm of controlled but flexible migration worldwide will cease to be controversial, endorsed and managed under the auspices of the UN, as a globalised One Planet philosophy gains traction.
It will be the only solution capable of managing cross border refugee flows in a time of looming climate disruption, but also the most economic means of allocating valuable human resources in a globalised educated world to areas of greatest need, as humans fight to save their planet.
Thursday, January 6, 2011
The Future of Work
By 2015 the traditional notion of an individual's job and work-related role will be recognised as outdated in developed countries. Output will be measured in terms of flexible value-added criteria or contributions to the goals of the organisation, together with social utility, rather than in terms of hours worked on a particular job.
The traditional office will also become redundant as the wireless web expands, allowing information workers- fifty percent of the workforce, to operate from home or local social hubs such as coffee bars as already occurring- (Ref Future Cities). All such centres will be linked seamlessly via the Internet's multimedia Grid/Mesh Utility supporting Web and Cloud Infrastructure. This will also enable enormous time and energy savings for workers and the planet in general, having a beneficial impact on the quality of life for millions.
By 2025 most tasks, even in the traditional labour-intensive sectors of health, construction, manufacturing and transport will be largely automated or robot-assisted. Projects will be managed and resourced on a real-time basis within the Web's global knowledge network- (Ref Future Web), with creativity and innovation recognised as critical competitive inputs.
Boundaries will blur between traditional full-time, part-time, contract and volunteering modes of employment as well as between worker and management roles, with most workers sharing time between their own creative projects and enterprise applications- the two often overlapping.
By 2035 organisational boundaries and work practices will be fluid and porous, with individuals moving freely between projects, career paths and virtual organisation structures; adding value and in turn continuously acquiring new skills, linked to ongoing learning programs.
The semantic distinctions between workers and management will have disappeared and robots will perform a large proportion of operational roles without human supervision. Union roles will have morphed to largely providing advisory, research and support services.
By 2045/50 work will relate primarily to the generation of new knowledge and services, by combining human, robot and web intelligence to maximum potential. Most processes will be fully automated both at the operational and strategic level within the context of the intelligent enterprise. New products and services will be generated from concept to design to production within days or hours. Individual creativity and skills will remain in high demand but will increasingly will be amplified and modulated within the context of the Web's cooperative decision-making and intelligence capacity.
Welcome to a brave new world.
The traditional office will also become redundant as the wireless web expands, allowing information workers- fifty percent of the workforce, to operate from home or local social hubs such as coffee bars as already occurring- (Ref Future Cities). All such centres will be linked seamlessly via the Internet's multimedia Grid/Mesh Utility supporting Web and Cloud Infrastructure. This will also enable enormous time and energy savings for workers and the planet in general, having a beneficial impact on the quality of life for millions.
By 2025 most tasks, even in the traditional labour-intensive sectors of health, construction, manufacturing and transport will be largely automated or robot-assisted. Projects will be managed and resourced on a real-time basis within the Web's global knowledge network- (Ref Future Web), with creativity and innovation recognised as critical competitive inputs.
Boundaries will blur between traditional full-time, part-time, contract and volunteering modes of employment as well as between worker and management roles, with most workers sharing time between their own creative projects and enterprise applications- the two often overlapping.
By 2035 organisational boundaries and work practices will be fluid and porous, with individuals moving freely between projects, career paths and virtual organisation structures; adding value and in turn continuously acquiring new skills, linked to ongoing learning programs.
The semantic distinctions between workers and management will have disappeared and robots will perform a large proportion of operational roles without human supervision. Union roles will have morphed to largely providing advisory, research and support services.
By 2045/50 work will relate primarily to the generation of new knowledge and services, by combining human, robot and web intelligence to maximum potential. Most processes will be fully automated both at the operational and strategic level within the context of the intelligent enterprise. New products and services will be generated from concept to design to production within days or hours. Individual creativity and skills will remain in high demand but will increasingly will be amplified and modulated within the context of the Web's cooperative decision-making and intelligence capacity.
Welcome to a brave new world.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
