Future Portal

The Future of Democracy

2011-12-08T03:17:00.000-08:00

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..

Future Enterprise Architecture

2011-11-28T00:51:00.000-08:00

By 2015 there will be a recognition that the philosophy and architecture of the enterprise of the future will require a major focus on adaptability- the capacity to adapt in shorter and shorter timeframes within a fast changing business, cultural, economic, environmental and technological environment.

The overall drivers for this shift will be a number of convergent strands- faster and more autonomous decision-making; an ethical and sustainable way of doing business; the increasing use of artificial intelligence to support decision-making at the strategic level; and greater reliance on an outsourced virtual organisational structure.

By 2025 each of these strands will be embedded in the culture of the enterprise. The architecture will be both decision-based and able to support loosely coupled processes that allow for adaptable reconfiguring on the fly. In addition, the enterprise will incorporate a virtual structure, supported by an always-on Grid Internet- Mark 2.

Artificial and human intelligence will increasingly merge at both the strategic and operational levels, driven by a need to implement decision-making autonomously with minimal human intervention, as is already occurring in advanced control, communication and manufacturing systems. This trend is also becoming apparent in e-commerce- including procurement, resource management, financial control and marketing applications.

By 2035 the shift to real time decision-making at all levels of the organisation will be complete – supported by a range of artificial intelligence algorithms and models. The future enterprise architecture will not only direct the deployment of computing and information resources to key decision nodes, but also channel intelligence and problem solving capacity, so that critical decisions can be implemented in optimal time frames.

The virtual enterprise will become the dominant structural model, allowing corporations to quickly assemble the resources and expertise necessary to take advantage of emerging opportunities, outsourcing operations to globally accredited project management firms. The flexibility of such a virtual entity will continuously evolve to access new information and process resources and keep abreast of relevant changes in a turbulent market environment

By 2040 the capacity for sophisticated planning, using AI decision support tools, will lead to rapid elimination of middle and senior levels of management.
Most employees will work from home or local neighbourhood centres and will no longer be employed on a permanent or hourly basis- but rather rewarded according to value-added performance outcomes.

The enterprise will be embedded within the culture and norms of the larger community and business will become an integral component of the global community culture. The days of separating business decisions from their social impact will be over.

There will also emerge much greater cooperation rather than competition between enterprises as globalisation becomes the dominant socio-political driver. At the same time business governance will reflect the ethical standards of the community.

By 2050 the enterprise will be a largely self-organising entity- operating in completely autonomous mode. New knowledge will constantly add value to its evolution, generated through organisational decision processes and architecture.
Future enterprises will therefore morph, merge and dissemble in a seamless and endless cycle, generating new processes, knowledge and services to support the global community.

Future World Order

2011-11-28T00:30:00.000-08:00

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.

Future of Migration

2011-11-27T23:31:00.001-08:00

The author contends that the future of Global Migration is governed by the laws of physics and that the flow of information, knowledge and education across borders will inevitably be followed by a flow of human skills on a global scale.

This 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 Future of Work

2011-01-06T16:34:00.000-08:00

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 Future of Society

2010-03-09T17:03:00.000-08:00

Director of The Future of Life Research Centre- David Hunter Tow, proposes that a process of evolutionary convergence is driving the complexity of society to a new level.

Recent research by a team of scientists from the University of Florida, has shown that insect colonies follow the same evolutionary “rules” as individuals; a finding that suggests insect societies operate like a single “superorganism” in terms of their physiology and life.

The researchers believe that the rules that guide social insect species and group behaviour may also have applicability to other species, including humans and human society.

David Tow postulates that a process of evolutionary convergence is a major driver governing this process.

Evolutionary convergence occurs when many critical feedback loops allow key knowledge-based processes such as computation and communication, to be optimised or reach convergence very quickly - eventually almost instantaneously from local to global and back to local again. At the same time new knowledge is generated, which continuously triggers change, feedback and problem solving on a continuously accelerated cycle. This has the capacity to create social complexity on a grand scale.

On the business and scientific front, global collaboration is now the norm, encompassing international networks of researchers, project alliances and commercial consortiums and involving diverse countries and cultures. Pluralist political, economic, trade, educational, cultural and environmental systems are also developing on a global basis including institutions such as the UN, WHO, UNESCO, EU, APEC, WTO, NATO, G20 etc. With increasing coverage and frequency of communication mediated by the Web, explosive growth in such social systems is already occurring.

This enmeshment process is now leading to a new phase in life's development, the realisation of a global human entity or intelligence. In other words, the same type of social Superorganism as emerges for insect species. According to Tow, such a global entity will eventually encompass all forms of human existence- biological, artificial and virtual.

Virtual communities will manifest in the form of groups of intelligent software agents- programs which cooperate to perform specific tasks and achieve goals. These are already being deployed within the cyberspace of the Web to solve communication and knowledge-based problems. Their current service capability includes locating, categorising, assessing, computing and negotiating information. More importantly however, they now have the capacity to learn, adapt, mutate and replicate- that is, to evolve in a primitive way.

Intelligent agents are only one example of the prototypes of virtual societies, with the eventual potential to evolve to a level of complexity similar to and symbiotic with our own. Eventually all such communities will merge with biological life throughout the universe. The evolution of society and civilisation, from the emergence of homo sapiens 200,000 years ago, to the sophisticated global society that we experience today will continue to be guided by this accelerating process, leading inevitably to the emergence of a global superorganism structure and intelligence.

The overriding outcome of evolutionary convergence ensures the continuing realisation of individual and social potential through the accumulation of knowledge and complexity. Enhancing the potential at the individual level expands the potential of the group, which in turn enhances the potential of society at large. Benefits at the societal and group level in turn feed back to each individual, so that knowledge gained at all levels is constantly recycled through a diffusion process. And so the cycle repeats endlessly, allowing life to continuously leverage its opportunities and extend its horizons.

This leads to an accelerating convergent process, where each increment of information gained catalyses the generation of all other elements, producing new knowledge at an accelerating rate. Concurrent with this process is the generation of meta-knowledge; a set of guiding principles which are continuously extracted from the base lode of information; designed to ensure that all knowledge contributes to the survival and the realisation of benefits for society at large.

These principles may be termed ethical codes, morality, human rights or principles of social justice. They include the set of modern democratic principles that encode the rights and responsibilities of the individual in relation to the group, such as equality under the law and freedom of speech. These become the rules that set the social and behavioural boundaries of human evolution, formulated through trial and error over eons.

The forces governing such historical outcomes according to this thesis are manifestations of the flow, exchange and refinement of information within a social context. Only at the local level is history therefore contingent. At the global level it is convergent, with the deep undercurrents of evolution guiding its progress.

The Future of War

2010-02-23T21:06:00.000-08:00

Aggressive wars and conflicts- that is those not waged in direct defence of a nation or region, cause massive destruction to human life and its environment as well as future generations.
Therefore it is morally incumbent on all governments to avoid or minimise the horrendous social and economic consequences.

In addition, wars are not only immoral but also illegal under national and international law. At the Nuremberg trials following the defeat of Nazi Germany, aggressive wars were judged to constitute the worst of international crimes, with prevention the major reason for founding the United Nations.

Methods for managing such conflicts and avoiding escalation between major powers have been greatly bolstered since the end of WW2, with the creation of institutions such as the UN, NATO and later the EU. In addition, new methods of mediation and diplomacy have gradually evolved in which third party nations and groups are involved in the resolution of conflict and peacekeeping processes. Although these methods are far from perfect, there are grounds for optimism that over time, combined with increasing globalisation ensuring the intermeshing of all national interests and cultures, major conflicts between and within states will become impossible to sustain.

Post cold war there have been numerous civil and neighbouring national conflicts, often involving ethnic or separatist groups, creating great suffering and subsequent large flows of refugees. However a study of wars and armed conflict, The Human Security Report: War and Peace in the 21st Century, shows that the number of armed conflicts has fallen by 40% since the end of the Cold War.

Also since its establishment, the UN has played a significant role as effective peacemaker, with a positive outcome achieved in 66% of peace missions. There has been a sixfold increase in UN efforts to prevent wars from starting, a four fold increase in UN peacemaking missions to end unresolved conflicts and an eleven fold increase in the number of states made subject to UN sanctions.

A variety of techniques from mediation and peace-keeping to trade sanctions and threat of reprisal, are being applied in order to force warring parties to the peace table. These have been applied with mixed success in Bosnia, Kosovo, Kashmir, Northern Ireland and the Sudan, while high-pressure mediation is continuing in more intractable conflict areas such as Palestine, Somalia, The Republic of Congo, North Korea and Burma. There is no doubt that that we are witnessing the evolutionary genesis of globally mediated methods for permanently maintaining peace across the planet.

It is now clear that most military analyses relating to the future of war are severely skewed and one dimensional, failing to adequately factor in drivers beyond traditional geopolitical and weapons trendlines. These future drivers- primarily globalisation, cyber-culture and global warming are now approaching with the force of a tsunami and will overwhelm all other traditional military drivers by mid-century.

Failing to adequately take their consequences into account is to blindside future reality, with the potential to lead to further irrevocable impacts on a fragile world.

Globalisation involves the interweaving of the cultural, educational, legal, economic, political, and technological protocols of all nations in a dense web of dependencies and relationships. China and the US for example are now joined at the hip despite ideological disparities and are mutually interdependent. The US needs China’s financial reserves to prop up its massive dollar debt, while China needs US markets for a large proportion of its exports. These two superpowers are also indirectly connected by the web of alliance and trade networks of the international community as a whole. They are now both too big, too interconnected and too focussed on trying to improve the quality of life of their own populations to become involved in massive national global wars.

The outstanding template for globalisation is of course the European Union, which now links the economies of 27 nations, that up until a century ago warred continuously, with massive loss of life and potential. Now their populations work together, trade together, marry together and share a common currency despite the current difficulties in the Eurozone. The EU is the third force in an increasingly multi-polar world, counterbalancing both the US and China. Emerging economic powerhouses such as Brazil and possibly Russia will make up a fourth force.

Globalisation is also being accelerated by the Cyber revolution- providing access by all populations to the world’s knowledge base and providing an unstoppable catalyst for democracy, despite short term futile attempts at national censorship. It now mediates civilisation’s social, scientific and commercial progress, with the potential to provide enormous computational and decision power for future global governance.

Simulated war-gaming, involving complex scenarios based on holistic social, cyber and economic factors, will therefore be increasingly applied to pre-evaluate the potential outcomes of waging war. The result will be that military imperatives will play a significantly reduced role in the future. This will be accelerated by the emerging dimensions of cyber and economic warfare, which within the next decade will overtake military systems capacity as key determinants in the geopolitical supremacy stakes.

Cyber warfare in particular will become increasingly common, used as a proxy for direct weapons-based assault. Recent major attacks on Google as well as 2,500 major companies worldwide, demonstrate the potential for even small groups to wage global computer and economic warfare- hijacking strategic planning data and shutting down critical control systems and infrastructure.

But global warming is the biggest challenge, with the greatest potential impact ever faced or ever likely to be faced by our civilisation. By the middle of this century the budgets of all countries, particularly those of the major and middle powers will be focussed on mitigating the disastrous outcomes including- increased frequency and severity of catastrophic events, resulting in massive damage to both the natural and built environment, acidification of oceans, scarcity of food, water and energy, disease pandemics and unprecedented refugee flows.

The stresses on all societies will be enormous, but only through global cooperation will anarchy and conflict will be constrained. This will require planning and allocation of resources on a global scale. The budgets and assets of all major powers including the US, China, India and the EU will need to be synchronised and focussed on avoiding this over-riding threat to the future of humanity. National rivalries will be subsumed and military and weapons programs drastically cut.

A timeline on the evolution of this process is as follows-

By 2020- battlefield strategy will evolve towards one that is increasingly fought in covert form – not through the use of large-scale traditional weaponry as in previous wars, as conventional military values become obsolete. Most attacks will be focused on subduing increasingly integrated terrorist and criminal groups, military juntas and authoritarian regimes as well as minority ehtnic groups.

A high proportion of battlefield operations will be automated, with drones and robots operating remotely and eventually autonomously, using satellite and sensor surveillance and the latest Web based intelligence for decision support. Cyber and economic warfare will also play an increasing role, conducted both by governments and criminal and terrorist groups.

At the same time there will be greater emphasis on a variety of peace-keeping and mediation initiatives, involving a range of alliances between Governments, NGOs and military forces such as the new-look NATO, operating at the local level in cooperation with civilian populations. These strategies will increasingly be applied to support failing and dysfunctional states and establish democratic institutions and are now beginning to be rolled out in Iraq and Afghanistan. This will become the primary template for future military operations.

By 2030- superpower states – US and China, will no longer able to sustain long term conflicts using 20th century arsenals of air, sea and land forces. The US will be forced to abdicate its traditional 20th century role of global military dominance as its resources become spread too thinly and it struggles to maintain quality of life for its population against unsustainable mounting levels of debt.

Similarly China, India and middle power nations will be forced to channel most of their resources to developing infrastructure, capacity and social services. Numerous flashpoints involving quelling local insurgencies and ethnic uprisings will remain. Increasingly the UN and representative government groups such as the present G20 will work together to minimise conflict globally. The EU will be seen as the template for global cooperation and peace-keeping will become the norm for conflict containment.

By 2040 – it is realised by most nations that conflict and wars are increasingly unsupportable. Globalisation continues to accelerate, with the creation of more complex networks of alliances and treaties binding nations and regional groups. At the same time countries start to lose their traditional status, with pressure for more fluid cross border relaxation as in the EU. The mixing of races and nationalities eases pressure for conflict, and provides greater accessibility to global health, education, and knowledge resources.
The reality of climate change, with its increasing frequency of disaster events, forces ideological disparities to play a secondary role.

By 2050- all available global resources are marshalled to overcome the immense problems associated with global warming. The end of wars between nations is in sight.

The Future of Health

2009-12-07T00:07:00.000-08:00

Within the next thirty years to 2040, the following scientific and technological trends will be deeply embedded in the global Medical / Health Ecosystem-

Global-Personalised Medicine

Most developed countries will have established comprehensive electronic Health Record Systems to track lifetime patient medical and general health histories including DNA genome sequence and microarray SNP test results.
By 2030 it will also be possible to sequence the human genome at the personal level for less than $200, providing more accurate individual disease prediction and prevention. In addition, an individual’s medical records will provide personalised drug and vaccines protocols based on genetic response variants. Whole-of-Life e-health records will be accessible initially within countries and regions across the developed and much of developing world, eventually allowing the creation of online global networks of personalised records from pre-birth to death.

As well as the information records technologies outlined above, there will be a major trend towards providing expert biomedical advice and services to individuals and populations across the planet, utilising the communication modalities of the Web.
Libraries of medical and hospital patient records including scanned images, will be linked in vast virtual databases by 2030, to provide remote expert support to local medical teams and practitioners. In addition advanced surgical techniques, applied remotely using robotic, virtual and augmented reality technologies will be in widespread use.

Smart mobile phone technologies will also function as personalised helpers, performing real-time monitoring and transmission of patient status data- pulse rate, blood pressure etc, via inexpensive sensor networks, forwarding continuous data to expert hubs for online analysis and intervention.

The Grid/Mesh/Sensor Web will provide ubiquitous communication support for the acquisition and delivery of knowledge on a global basis. It will incorporate virtually limitless bandwidth as well as high levels of redundancy and security to guarantee continuous and fail-safe operation. Sensor webs, collections of wireless processing nodes that can capture local sensor data and transfer it to a processing hub, will play a vital role in customising and updating mobile devices such as smart phones; supporting applications that constrained by a constantly varying environment or context such as the monitoring of patient well being.

These developments will be particularly valuable for developing countries with limited health support resources.

The Intelligent Web 4.0

By 2030, current versions of the Social Web 2.0 and emerging Semantic Web 3.0 will have evolved to the next level of autonomy and intelligence-Web 4.0. The Web’s evolution will have made many important contributions to the biological sciences through the application of new knowledge, network science, logical inference and artificial intelligence.

Web 4.0 will be ubiquitous, powered by a smart computational sensory, computational grid/mesh enveloping and connecting human life and encompassing all facets of social and scientific activity- always on and available. It will connect not only most of the 9 billion individuals existing on the planet by 2050, but also link with other biological and artificial life forms, as well as countless everyday electronically available objects. It will interact with the repository of most available knowledge of human civilisation- including algorithms, protocols and processes, digitally coded and archived for automatic retrieval and analysis.

Through Web 4.0, human intelligence will have co-joined with advanced forms of artificial intelligence, creating a higher or meta-level of knowledge processing. This will be essential for supporting the immensely complex decision-making and problem solving requirements essential for civilisation's future progress, including medical diagnosis and management.

Systems Biology

The power of the web will be supported by a new way of unlocking a deeper understanding of nature and its evolution- Systems Biology. This marks a paradigm shift from traditional reductionism to a more holistic level of understanding of biological phenomena- interpreting organisms in terms of information processing networks at the system rather than component level of genes, proteins, environmental factors etc.
Systems biology also marks the beginning of a more quantitative science, highlighting the causality and dynamics of biological interactions by applying mathematical models and the capability of simulating interactions at all levels- cells, organs and the total organism.
This paradigm will be central to further progress in understanding the patterns of life in terms of biological networks processing digital data.

Genetic-Tissue Engineering

Applying genetic engineering or gene therapy techniques, corrected genes can be inserted into cells including adult stem cells taken from a patient affected by a particular disease. The future treatment of diseases such as heart failure and breast cancer will also be revolutionised by the option of growing new organs and tissue inside the human body using the patient’s own stem cells and biodegradable scaffolds to avoid immune rejection.

Molecular engineers are already beginning to create custom-built proteins with enhanced functions, including the capability to correct disease genes causing haemophilia, muscular dystrophy and sickle cell anaemia.

Stem cell therapies, including both adult and embryonic stem cell differentiation, will be commonly applied by 2030 to the scaffold synthesis and repair of human tissue and organs including—complex skin sheets, cartilage, blood vessels, bone, eyes, spine, pancreas, liver and heart muscle- mimicking their biological counterparts.

Molecular biology has largely been applied as a reductive science but now synthetic biologists are building machines from interchangeable DNA parts that work inside living cells, deriving energy, processing information and reproducing.
Flexible reliable fabrication technology, together with standardised methods and design libraries have enabled a new generation of biological engineers to already create new organisms from biological components- from the ground up.

Cyber-Human Symbiosis

The linkages between cyber-computer technologies and human biological systems is now well advanced and includes development of the following applications-
Interactions through Virtual and Augmented Realities;
Sensory augmentation implants- such as the Cochlear and early retinal devices;
Prosthetics- such as the recent DARPA funded neurally controlled prosthetic arm –combining technologies of signal processing, electrical and mechanicalengineering and neuroscience.
Brain interfaces-which will enable a paralysed person to pick up a cup and drink, using interpreted brain signals.
Artificial hippocampus- to assist patients with memory deficits;
Brain image extraction- reconstructing and displaying images using fMRI mapping; Building brain functions at the system level- applying evolutionary self organising and learning principles;
Interactive humanoid robots- to provide company and support

Current developments including synthetic biology, cyber-human symbiosis and bioengineering also signal the creation of new and enhanced life forms for the first time in human history. This will open a portal for the explosion of human potential beyond the confines of biological evolution alone.

The impact of cyberspace on the evolution of the brain is also likely to be very significant over the coming decades. Children are constantly being neurally rewired as the interactive Internet becomes a seamless part of their lives for example in the form of video games and social networks.

NeuroEngineering

NeuroEngineering technology will be commonly applied by 2030, involving a greater understanding of brain function and enabling enhancement of human intelligence, memory and creativity. Significant advances are already being made towards simulating and emulating the brain’s capacity for sensation, perception, action, interaction and cognition, using advanced 3D fMRI and Optogenetics. This recent technology combines genetic engineering with optics to study specific cell types, using fluorescent dyes to better visualise the functions of various groups of neurons and their interactions. This allows the location and dynamics of neural circuits controlling behaviour in animals to be studied and controlled, including food seeking, decision-making and stress avoidance. It also reveals new targets for drugs that can regulate neurons and lead to better treatments.

Cognitive enhancement compounds will also be widely used by 2030; applied to Alzheimer’s and other forms of dementia as well as enhancing human decision-making, alertness and memory capability. Two enhancers- methylphenidate and amphetamines, have already been shown to alter the activity of the neurotransmitter dopamine in neural synapses. Enhanced dopamine signalling may improve learning by focusing attention and interest on a task.

Brain simulation is also a nascent field offering huge future potential. IBM has already simulated a brain with a billion neurons and ten trillion synapses- equivalent to a cat’s cortex or 4.5% of a human brain; while a team of European scientists have taken the first steps towards creating a silicon chip designed to function like a the cortex of a human brain. By simulating a fundamental microcircuit, down to the level of individual neurons it can be used to test genetic variations in particular neurotransmitters, mimicking what happens when the molecular environment is altered using drugs.
With research and development converging on all fronts in this field- both at the hardware and software level, it will be only a matter of time until a brain with human-level complexity is scaled up for experimental use.

NanoBioEngineering

Molecular biology has largely been applied as a reductive science but now synthetic biologists are building machines from interchangeable DNA parts that work inside living cells, deriving energy, processing information and reproducing.
Flexible reliable fabrication technology, together with standardised methods and design libraries have enabled a new generation of biological engineers to already create new organisms from biological components- from the ground up.

The technologies of the first generation of Medibots is now well progressed. Medibots are tiny robots that only a few millimetres in size that can work internally- and are designed to enter our bodies through the mouth, ears, eyes and lungs and swim through the bloodstream. Bby 2030 they will be commonly used to conduct robotic surgery, install medical devices inside the body, including a camera in a capsule small enough to be swallowed, deliver drugs and take tissue samples. remote control is conducted by a surgeon via a computer console, in the same way that a present day astronomer works.

Self-replicating, autonomous nanoscale robots are also being bioengineered and will change the face of healthcare and life enhancement. Nanoscale machines and motors will be inserted inside cells which can then self-assemble and seamlessly integrate with the cell. Smart implants and tiny biological fuel cells are also on the drawing board, capable of producing electricity from glucose and oxygen in the bloodstream.

The Web Takes Control

As previously outlined, the intelligent Web 4.0 will be in full play by 2040 and beyond as a symbiotic extension of life-intelligence on a global scale. It already functions as the central information- processing hub for life on the planet, enabling the successful design and delivery of most complex knowledge generation projects.

The web is evolving, not as an application sitting on top of the Internet, but as a living organism in its own right; because it encapsulates all human as well as artificial intelligence. In addition it already links biological life and artificial life in forms such as software agents and learning machines such as intelligent robots, as well as providing enormous computing power for civilisation’s repository of knowledge.

Most importantly it will have co-joined with human intelligence as an active partner, creating a higher or meta-level of knowledge processing. This will be essential for supporting autonomously the immensely complex decision-making and problem solving essential for civilisation's future progress.

By 2040 the evolutionary trajectory of the Web, within its human and planetary environment, will have necessitated it taking responsibility for most major medical and health management decisions, becoming the senior decision partner in the process with humans.

Major health decisions will require verification and confirmation by the Web’s enormous informational intelligence, encompassing as it will, all medical knowledge, protocols and diagnostic algorithms. In addition, this intelligence capacity will allow it to creatively partner and effectively manage key local and global medical research projects.

The benefits to humanity of autonomous Web intervention in the medical-health decision space will be seen as enormous; allowing far more efficient and rigorous diagnosis and problem-solving, with many lives saved and quality of care improved. For example, real-time, optimal planning will be particularly critical in managing future pandemics, particularly as global warming continues..

On the basis of the current Trendlines this capacity will continue to grow, with human decision input becoming increasingly peripheral; as is the case already in many major engineering, transport, communication, financial and logistical operational areas, where realtime responses are required and optimal algorithms scientifically accepted.

The Web 4.0 and its descendents will then have taken virtual control of the evolution of medical-health science and practice.

The Future of Life

2009-08-31T00:53:00.000-07:00

Cooperation is the key to the future evolution and survival of life, each species learning to work together cooperatively, facilitating information exchange with a higher probability of survival. Human cooperation takes the form of groups, families, communities, tribes, nations, trading blocks and now the beginnings of a truly global society; all maximising individual potential through the group's potential.

The human species is also linked to all other species on the planet through the web of life, currently undergoing enormous stress from global warming. In the near future our species will be linked via the internet to billions of additional electronically coded objects, computing devices and databases, generating an enormously powerful global intelligence.

Beyond biological life, the first forms of artificial life are now emerging, including intelligent software agents and robots. Intelligent agents are a particular class of computer software program, designed to provide autonomous and cooperative problem solving support to humans through the application of knowledge-based methods.

As well as being equipped with the ability to perform information-related tasks such as discovery, filtering and negotiation, agents are already being equipped to learn from experience, problem-solve and think creatively. In effect they will become decision partners with humans, explaining and exploring alternative scenarios, discovering new sources of knowledge, recruiting other specialised agents and when necessary replicating and evolving more powerful variants of themselves. Already they assist humans in e-commerce, economic simulation, medical diagnosis, engineering maintenance and financial trading; gaining information or expertise on a specific topic by drawing on knowledge sources linked to the web.

Agents are a classic example of alternate forms of emergent artificial life- A-Life, in contrast to biological life or B-Life and mark a significant milestone in the evolution of the symbiotic relationship between human and computer-mediated intelligence.

By 2050, the symbiosis of A-Life and B-Life or Meta- life, cooperating via the Intelligent web, will be a common feature of our civilisation.

Intelligent robots are designed to learn and evolve progressively. They also have become more complex with the flexibility to act autonomously and simulate human behaviour and emotions. As with intelligent agents, they learn from the experience and the interaction gained in their physical environment in the same way that humans learn.

Eventually life on earth, both biological and artificial, will link with other life forms in the galaxy as an extension of the web of life on earth. From current research, it seems highly likely that life has the capacity to spontaneously generate in any environment capable of supporting complex auto-catalytic biochemical reactions.

For example life forms have been discovered in deep underwater volcanic vents and underground oil shales, so it is likely that other planets with similar environments revolving around main sequence stars will also have the capacity to support life. The first ‘other’ life forms may have already been discovered on Mars in the form of fossil bacteria and potentially exist on moons such as Jupiter's moon Europa, or Saturn’s Titan where signatures of water and hydrocarbons have been sensed.

The proven capacity of human life to create another life form in the laboratory is now very close to reality and will provide an enormous impetus to the next phase in the evolutionary trajectory of life.
This has ceased to be a purely philosophical conjecture. If life is confirmed on Mars or elsewhere in the solar system, the implications will be beyond estimate, providing critical evidence that life has the capacity to kick-start wherever water, complex carbon based molecules and appropriate energy sources co-exist. And if primitive life forms are ubiquitous throughout the universe, then it is also probable that higher intelligence such as mammalian, primate and human-like species will also eventually emerge, as a statistical outcome of the process.

The SETI- Search for Extra Terrestrial Intelligence project represents the first serious attempt to contact other intelligent life in the universe. This project represents a major mind shift by humans; acknowledging the real possibility of intelligence elsewhere in the universe and taking pro-active steps to exchange information with a view to future co-operation. The space exploration program is a similar acknowledgment that the boundaries of life must extend not just to the ends of the earth or even the outer limits of the solar system, but eventually to other star systems and galaxies.

Autonomous missions to Mars, Jupiter and Saturn are already producing a huge expansion of our knowledge of other worlds. A probe to the Moon will assess whether water is available there, enabling a colony to be established and a manned mission to Mars is already on the drawing board.

By the time such missions within our own solar system become commonplace, probably by the middle of the 21st Century, the technology to explore other star systems via autonomous intelligent probes and perhaps ‘seed’ other worlds with life, will be well advanced.
This is not an ad hoc trend. It follows the same consistent pattern that life has taken through the centuries, continually pushing the boundaries of its potentiality. It applies the same drive that extended the capabilities of the horse with the automobile, terrestrial travel with air travel, and the boundaries of the old world with those of the new world. The push-pull ratcheting effect of evolution will ensure that this trend continues.

The human species capable of advanced technological innovation has existed in the universe for only several hundred thousand years. This species has now taken the first tentative steps to leave its planet of origin. Its descendants will over the next few thousand years begin to transform the universe on a cosmological scale.

Over time Meta-life will adapt and morph into much more flexible and abstract information-based forms, in order to withstand the extremes of extraterrestrial exploration and the requirement for vastly extended life-spans. One form will be the inter-stellar von Neumann probe, with human/web intelligence, capable of self-replicating and refuelling. These are likely to be released as early as the end of the 21st century. As they reach their target stars, copies will be made from available elements such as iron and nickel. The process will then be repeated over and over. Within the comparatively short timescale of less than a billion years, they will explore the entire galaxy and from there seed other galaxies.

According to a number of leading physicists and cosmologists, it is possible that our particular universe, initiated by the big bang, is but one of many, inflating eternally; perhaps only one an infinite number of universes all existing within a larger meta or multi-verse.

Leading cosmologists such as André Linde have postulated that it may be theoretically possible to induce an initial quantum fluctuation coupled with the addition of extra mass to establish the conditions for the creation of a universe artificially. This opens up the possibility that in the far future universes may be designed to specification; capable of evolving carbon-based life like ourselves or perhaps alternative life forms based on other exotic forms of matter.

Professor Frank Tipler, a major physicist and mathematician, in his book The Anthropic Cosmological Principle, postulates that life may be capable of infinitely delaying the end singularity or Omega boundary point of a universe by processing an infinite amount of information, preserving true immortality for a future meta-life.

Alternatively, if life is capable of achieving the immense level of intelligence as predicted, it is also likely to possess the capability of seeding a universe either in physical or simulated form which will support its continued existence, recreating the conditions for the spontaneous re-emergence of life.

Finally it is postulated that life has been selected by the evolutionary process within the universe, as the most efficient form of information processor. This capacity will eventually accelerate it to unimaginable levels of intelligence, while at the same time extending the life of the universe and by implication its own existence.

This therefore is Life’s future.

The Future of Cities

2009-05-31T22:29:00.001-07:00

By 2015 over half the population of the planet will be living in high density cities, with dozens of mega-cities having populations greater than 10 million. On current estimates of access to basic services this level of population density will make them unsustainable in terms of acceptable quality of life standards.
Major cities today are already facing escalating problems of survival including transportation gridlock, critical lack of low cost public housing, massive pollution, high crime rates and ongoing disruption caused by natural disasters.

Urban planners are beginning to have some success in solving these problems. For example standards for both public and private architecture are going through a major transformation aimed at energy conservation and sustainability. At the city planning level, China is building its first ecocity- Dongtan, on an island near Shanghai in the Yangste Delta. It offers a model for sustainable cities of the future, designed to be completely self sufficient, generating its own power, zero carbon emissions and the capacity to feed its inhabitants. Similarly in Abu Dhabi, work has begun on the first zero-carbon, zero-waste city in the region at Masdar.

Building and planning codes will also seek to minimise natural disasters such as hurricanes, earthquakes, arctic storms and sea inundation, for city dwellers. Such catastrophes are now occurring more frequently and at greater intensity across the planet due to climate change, causing serious loss of life and billions of dollars of damage and disruption each year.

By 2025 the impact of global warming will dominate city planning, with water and waste recycling mandatory for all households and businesses. Buildings will be designed to conserve energy, with surfaces utilising flexible organic solar panels. In addition, high growth public gardens, green belts and mini-parks will generate cooling air-flows and most surfaces will be utilised to collect runoff water to support sustainable horticulture.
Garbage will be totally recycled, including paper, plastics, metals, chemicals and electronics, with organic waste generating significant levels of methane energy for local heating and power grid usage.

At the same time, in all major cities, planning and architecture will shift towards the design of small self-sufficient interconnected neighbourhoods, within walking or cycling distance of essential service centres. These will provide the full range of communication, education, work, health, leisure and social resources.

In addition, locally available high bandwidth web infrastructure will provide community and home-based alternatives to today's physical shopping malls and office blocks. Those facilities already built will be largely recycled over time to create community low cost living, work and leisure facilities.

Most conventional vehicle-based transport infrastructure will be replaced in favour of flexible urban public transport including rapid bus transit and automatic monorail pods operating on demand for personal use. Very high speed trains travelling up to 500kph will also replace a large percentage of cross-country aircraft travel, as is already occurring in China.

By 2035 cities will be operating primarily as complex service and knowledge hubs fostering high levels of innovation. Fully automated supply, manufacturing and distribution centres will function with near-zero carbon emissions on the outskirts of cities connected by underground automatic rail links to ports and storage centres, eliminating the bulk of truck transport congestion, damage to roads and risk of accidents.

Planning and control centres will be distributed within city neighbourhoods, with sections of the urban environment built underground to conserve energy, avoid extreme weather events and also free up more land for local sustainable city horticulture.

By 2050, cities will have evolved to become fully integrated service, supply and knowledge ecosystems, largely supported by the intelligent Web 4.0( Ref Future Web). Ongoing higher education and trade-related skills for populations will be mandatory and constantly updated to meet evolving societal requirements. Earlier problems such as traffic congestion, capacity bottlenecks and pollution within cities will have been largely eliminated. Physical and petty crime will also have been significantly reduced by automatic implementation of ubiquitous security monitoring and prevention.

In the future, the current and growing complexities and population densities of cities will be recognised as lifestyle assets to be exploited and leveraged by their populations rather than liabilities to be avoided.

The Future of Economics

2009-05-31T22:26:00.000-07:00

The recent failure of classical economics to predict and manage the catastrophic failure of the world’s financial system has triggered a re-evaluation of the whole basis of current economic theory, which has been applied to sustain capitalism for the last 100 years. .

By the end of the 20th century traditional economics was dominated by the classical paradigm based on notions of rational consumers making rational choices in a simple supply/demand world of finite resources, with prices constrained by decreasing returns; all driving the economy to an optimal equilibrium point.

Twentieth century economists had finally realised their dream of creating a rational, rigorous and well-defined mathematical model for describing the workings of the global economy. This standard model has been applied by business leaders, finance ministers, central bankers and presidential advisers ever since.

Up until recently classical economic theory has appeared to work adequately by a process of trial and error. In stable times people are generally rational and optimistic and the theory describes reality reasonably well. But in extreme circumstances people panic and the theory fails spectacularly, including the performance of the quantitative risk algorithms beloved by hi-tech stock market traders.

Unfortunately such a clockwork model has proved over the last four decades to be seriously out of synch with reality, as global markets have been roiled by a series of disastrous credit, market, liquidity and commodity crises. The predictions of the standard model have failed to match real world outcomes, generated in succession by the Savings and Loan, Asian, Mexican, Dotcom and now toxic mortgage bubble disasters.

In this ‘mother of all’ excess greed debacles, high risk mortgage loans were repackaged many times over into opaque risk financial instruments, such as Collateralised Debt Obligations or CDOs, which ended up through the unregulated banking system in the portfolios of nearly every bank and financial institution around the world. Because of lack of regulation, members of the shadow system such as hedge funds and merchant banks borrowed scores of times their own worth in cash. When the CDOs finally failed, the losses rippled through the world economy. The banks stopped lending, leading to further business failures and investors were then forced to sell previously sound stocks causing a stock market crash.

But this crash now increasingly likely to be followed by a period of major long term recession is far more serious- perhaps even more than the Great Depression, as it cannot be contained within borders as easily or so simply solved by mass lending and job creation programs. Now we have the biggest banks, manufacturers, miners, energy suppliers and even national economies including- Iceland, Greece, Ireland, Spain, Italy and perhaps even Scotland and the UK toppling like dominoes around the world, under trillions of dollars of debt - with no end in sight. And now the US is losing its AAA rating with a $15 trillion debt equal to 80% of GDP.

In fact a number of interdisciplinary thinkers, starting in the seventies, began to question the credibility of the entire basis of the classical economic model, likening it to a gigantic academic exercise rather than a serious science. And it gradually began to dawn on this group that at a number of the key premises or axioms underpinning the existing model were seriously flawed.

As mentioned, the first is the assumption that humans are rational players in the great game of market roulette. They are not. Behavioural scientists have shown that while people are very good at recognising useful patterns and interpreting ambiguous or incomplete information in their decision-making, they are very poor when it comes to performing complex logical analysis, preferring to follow market leaders or flock. This can further amplify distorting trends.

The new theories of behavioural finance argue that during a bubble the rate of buying and selling can become manic, resulting in irrational decisions. Making money actually stimulates investor’s brain reward circuitry, causing them to ignore risk and making it difficult to value stocks accurately.

But perhaps the most critically flawed assumption is that an economic system always reaches an ideal point equilibrium of its own accord. In other words, the market is capable of self-regulation- automatically allocating resources and controlling excesses in an optimum way, with minimum outside interference.

Since the nineteenth century the fundamental principle underpinning economics has been based on the idea that the economy is an equilibrium system- a system that moves from one equilibrium point to another, driven by shocks from external disruptions - technological, political, cultural etc- but always coming to rest in a natural equilibrium state.

The new emerging evolutionary paradigm however postulates that economies and markets, as well as the internet, enterprises and the brain, are all forms of complex adaptive systems in which agents dynamically interact, process information and adapt their behaviour to a constantly changing environment- but never reach a final equilibrium or goal.

In biological evolution, the natural environment selects those systems that are able to best adapt to its infinite variation. In economic evolution, the market is a combination of financial, production, trading, cultural, organisational and regulatory elements which adapt to and influence a constantly changing ecological, social and business environment.

In essence, economic and financial systems have been fundamentally misclassified. They are not perfect self-regulating systems. They are enormously complex adaptive networks, made up of individual agents which interact dynamically in response to changes in their environment- not merely through simple price setting mechanisms, tax or interest rate cuts, liquidity injections or job creation programs. They must be understood and managed at a far deeper level.

Modern evolutionary theorists believe that evolution is a universal phenomena
and that both economic and biological systems are subclasses of a more general and universal class of evolutionary systems. And if economics is truly an evolutionary system and general laws for evolutionary systems exist, then it follows there are also general laws of economics which must be harnessed. This contradicts much of the standard theory in economics developed over the past one hundred years.

The economic ecosystem is now fed by trillions of transactions, interactions and non-linear feedback loops daily. It may in fact have become too complex and interdependent for economists and governments to control or even understand. It may therefore, as several eminent complexity theorists have recently stated, be on the verge of chaos. Too much or not enough regulation can distort the outcomes further- creating ongoing speculative pricing bubbles or supply and demand distortions.

There is now an urgent need to understand at a much deeper level the genie that modern civilisation has engineered and now let loose. This can only be done by admitting the current crumbling edifice is beyond repair and building a radical new model from ground zero; a system that incorporates the hard science of network, behavioural and complexity theory.

A new adaptive evolutionary model is not only essential- it is the only option.

The Future of the Media

2009-05-24T19:58:00.001-07:00

By 2013- most print media has been forced to radically adapt towards an online multimedia model. Newspapers are already in turmoil as they switch to a primarily online model with advertising revenues collapsing as traditional revenue streams dry up and loss of classified and banner advertising unable to be compensated by online revenues. Already mass layoffs of journalists and support staff are in train- 12,000 this year alone, as page layouts and editorial are contracted out.

To boost news gathering and editorial in the face of diminishing revenues newspapers and online specialist commentary sites will open up reporting to largely unpaid citizen journalism and freelance bloggers. This in turn will encourage syndicated commentary via blogging.

There will also be the beginning of a major trend to local online reporting by major newspapers and news sources aimed at attracting small community interest groups and advertisers. This trend will be reliant on combining both citizen and staff reporting.

Traditional news media, both local and global, will be rapidly reduced to a stream of headlines with minimal analysis. Special editions and feature articles will continue in reduced quantity, but online short-burst information- text, video and audio streams, will be increasingly popular, distributed via multimedia platforms such as new generation smart phones and tablets, already in common use.

By 2020- traditional free to air television channels will have largely disappeared, along with many cable channels, with television advertising similarly caught in the headlight glare of change. The switch will be to web channels covering every topic- personalised to individual taste- viewable anywhere, anytime and watched primarily on mobile media screens. The personalised channel will be ubiquitous- news and information will be filtered and customised to every personal taste.

All print media including magazines and books will have followed newspapers to a multimedia model distributed over the web, using almost exclusively electronic readers such as Amazon's Kindle, iPads and smart phones for flexible viewing. Terabyte flash memory will be used for offline personal media storage- but will be largely redundant due to the availability of virtually unlimited archival storage utility sites run by Google, Amazon, Microsoft etc.

Most print and video media will be available via direct ultra-fast wave division multiplex wireless downloads. Bookstores, despite the use of print-on-demand Xerox machines as a short term stop-gap will also convert exclusively to downloads and be forced to compete for business with coffee houses and other social/cultural hubs, offering direct media experiences. These hubs will morph into the dominant local community knowledge and workplace centres of the future (ref Future of Cities).

In addition, the trend towards alternate realities will continue, with entertainment media such as virtual worlds combining with social gaming to become a dominant form. News and sport will also become interactive, overlapping with gaming and increasingly available within 3D holographic spaces for maximum immersive effect.

The media will focus on a number of differentiated streams available from thousands of web hubs, aggregation sites and social networks in three broad forms. First- news headlines and short synopses of current events as currently available online, competing with traditional news feeds and wire services. Second- indepth reviews and features relating to past events and narratives, merging with traditional book and blog formats. And third- future scenario analyses and forecasts tied to current trends. These scenarios will also feed back into current events creating additional news.

In addition the number of individual and small group freelance multimedia blogs, twitter conversations and wikis, distributed via syndicated web sites, webcasts, social networks, media feeds and aggregation sites, will have grown exponentially- to at least triple current levels- exploring every aspect of societal experience. Citizen journalism and stream-of-consciousness twitter conversations will continue to expand.

By 2030- free-to-air networks, except for public broadcasting, special demographic and dedicated sponsored channels will have disappeared, eliminated by reduced advertising revenue and the ready availability of unlimited web on-demand material.

Public broadcasting will continue to receive strong support from community groups.

Specialised channels covering real-time activities, such as major sporting events, will survive, but increasingly these will be produced by freelance groups and directly brokered to consumer groups for distribution on social networks for example.

Film and video makers will be dominated by small independent producers and creative groups working on particular projects within virtual teams; marketing their services directly to consumer groups or market brokers.

All news including geopolitical, weather, economic, financial, arts, cultural, environmental and technology coverage, will be handled automatically as 24 hr feeds, operating largely independently of human intervention. Analysis will be available as a product of contracted specialists, not permanently connected to any particular media organisation.

The web behemoths such as Google and Microsoft will have become the largest media as well as advertising players. However a reverse trend will have begun with citizen journalism playing a major role, together with greater acceptance of the Global Commons model- a free sharing marketplace of material and knowledge accessible for the global benefit. This will make in-house news gathering and reporting functions largely redundant. In addition, traditional advertising will have become increasingly irrelevant as markets fragment and consumers begin to take control, dictating their own information in-depth requirements on a need-to-know basis. Low key informational advertising, embedded within social media but only available on a request basis will become the dominant form.

Alternate knowledge and social hubs such as the thousands of Wikipedia look-a likes, controlled by consumer groups, will start to compete with and displace the power of the media and ultra web enterprises such as Google, which will be forced to cede part of its global knowledge control in its own survival self-interest.

The Web will be controlled by and open to all nations via the global commons in conjunction with a specially constituted body such as the present ICAAN, devolving away from US control.

By 2040- news analysis, as well as its gathering and distribution, will be largely automated and fluid- available independently on demand and on a push feedback basis- tailored to all net-citizens and ever-changing special interest groups, operating in diverse virtual social realities.

Traditional advertising as we know it will have largely disappeared. Product and service information will be available instead via reliable consumer assessment feedback networks supported by semantic and intelligent web assessment (ref Future of Web ) and assisted by a small number of specialised human information researchers- continuously updated, with factual information available on demand or pushed to meet personal preferences.

Advertising will have morphed to provide consumer virtual experiences on an entertainment and support knowledge basis. At the same time future trend analysis and scenario creation will become increasingly significant and the largest media growth segment, merging with the gaming and entertainment markets.

By 2050- traditional major media organisations will be extinct, with the last of the media barons and dynasties departed. Instead media generation and dissemination will begin to shift to countless creative individuals and small-scale media enterprises operating cooperatively and seamlessly in tandem with the medium of the global commons and intelligent web.

At the same time there will be an inevitable loss of direct individual control over media processing, as all aspects of news discovery, aggregation, processing, analysis and distribution are automated as a function of the combined fusing of artificial and human intelligence and the rigorous decision-making capacity of the Web 5.0.

The media will instead become a pervasive medium for recording local and global experience, generating new forms of knowledge and immersive entertainment for human civilisation- including automatic collection by embedded sensors in every artefact and environment on the planet- to instant delivery via ultra-fast bandwidth and direct neural/brain connection.
Its role will encompass, document and support the evolutionary progress of all cultural, political, artistic, scientific and technological experience of life's existence.

Web 5.0, as a synthesis of all human and cyber extended knowledge, sensory experience and intelligence will merge with and start to take control of this medium.

The Future of Food

2009-03-24T15:23:00.000-07:00

By 2015- global warming will be beginning to have a major impact on food production. Dislocation in climate patterns, increasing frequency of droughts and floods-including the drying up of the major river systems of Asia, plus rising population and cultivation of biofuels will result in less arable land and rising costs of food production.

This will lead to increased prices of staple foods such as rice, wheat and maize as well as meat, forcing another 100 million people in developing countries into malnutrition, including 10 million children in India alone. This is in addition to the already 1 billion already affected by poverty and malnutrition.

This will have severe flow on effects for the future of developing countries as malnutrition severely impacts the cognitive capacity of the next generation.

Food aid will also be under pressure from richer countries, as governments are forced to provide priority for food security to their own populations, particularly following a decade of financial turmoil. Friction will also be created as major population countries such as China begin buying up arable land in poorer countries such as africa as a hedge against future food shortages.

By 2025- the world population will have grown to more than 8 billion. Global demand for grain and animal production will now significantly outstrip supply. To satisfy demand, cereal production needs to increase by 50% and animal production by 90%.

Additional arable land equal to 150 million hectares or a minimum 10% of the 1.5 billion hectares already under cultivation will be required to keep pace despite improvements in agricultural management and technology. This is likely to come in the short term from areas such as the Congo and Amazonia, accelerating the onset of global warming and drought as forests are further fragmented.

This will inevitably create global unrest and conflict with waves of mass migrations in developing countries to the cities. In turn this will accelerate the need to make cities and urban environments more food self sufficient, through use of treated sewage, local community food gardens, based on urban harvested water runoff and solar energy collection.

By 2030- major programs will be underway to recover genes from ancestor plant species that originally evolved to cope with drought and salinity, together with a return to original middle eastern and African dry land farming techniques.

There is recognition that conventional breeding techniques for plant traits such as tolerance to dry conditions, may be too complex and time consuming to achieve within the available urgent timeframes. Genetic modification provides the only answer, with accelerated cooperative science initiatives to increase crop yield, drought tolerance and disease resistance.

Bright spots will be a major shift from grains to tuber crops such as potatoes, which need less land and water than grain and are extremely nutritious, with four times as much complex carbohydrate and better quality proteins than grains. In addition meat products will synthesized from culturing the muscle cells of a broad range of animals, bypassing the need to slaughter them.

Animal production as a primary source of protein will also be seen as unsustainable, as is large-scale use of arable land for cattle grazing. Monoculture and irrigation farming is also phased out as unsustainable in terms of inefficient water and land useage. Poultry remains viable on edge of farmland and cities.

World fisheries are also at major risk by 2030, with fish traditionally providing 20% of animal protein. All fish, crustacean and sea mammal stocks are already severely depleted despite greater conservation controls. The oceans are rapidly becoming too acidic to support sea life including plankton and shellfish. Ocean dead zones, depleted of oxygen, are spreading fast.

The UN Food and Agricultural Organization- FAO draws up contingency plans for global food management, planning for relocation of populations from the drying tropical zones to those of the more habitable northern and southern latitudes.

By 2040- glacial and mountain snow fed sources of water will be in full retreat across the globe. As a result the major river systems in Europe, South America and Asia, providing water to the traditional farming areas of southern Europe, Pakistan, China, India, Afghanistan and Vietnam, begin to dry up.

China’s vast rice fields, providing food for 400 million people and India’s wheat, fruit and vegetable farming locus in the Punjab are severely affected. Most of Africa, the Middle East and Australia will be in permanent drought, combined with major depletion and contamination by natural gas extraction of the groundwater aquifers.

Human habitation in the mid latitudinal belts- 30 degrees north and south of the equator, becomes unsustainable. The only regions with adequate rainfall, guaranteed to support stable food production and human society, are in the high latitudes such as- Canada, Greenland, Scandinavia, Russia, Siberia, part of Northern Australia, New Zealand and Antarctica. Small communities continue to survive in drought areas by building shelters and growing food underground, using still active aquifers and solar energy.

By 2050- global warming will be out of control with unsustainable limits to suitable land for agriculture, with contention between retaining forest as a carbon sink and clearing it for agriculture.

Friction reaches flashpoint between the major nations over land, food and water security. Massive human migrations are occurring globally – from poorer to richer countries and from drier to wetter habitats.

Giant solar energy generating belts become operational across North Africa, Middle east, Southern US and Australia, providing power for high density population centers and high intensity farming hubs to feed them.

With the world population reaching 9 billion, an extra 1 billion hectares more land are needed for food production- equal to the landmass of US. At the same time commercial fish and seafood species have collapsed.

It is recognized that only global cooperation beyond national borders can avoid conflict, anarchy and starvation for billions. Global food production, distribution and allocation plans are activated under the auspices of the UN.

Global cooperation in achieving the equitable allocation of land, water, energy and food resources through the advanced communication and knowledge mechanism of the Intelligent web 4.0, becomes the only realistic means of avoiding global anarchy and the disintegration of human civilization.

National boundaries and political hubris become irrelevant when the survival of human life- perhaps the most advanced life-form in the universe - is threatened