Educated predictions

Outlook 2007 -- (The Futurist, Nov-Dec 2006)

 

Business and Economics

• Economic disparities are growing. The ratio of the total income of people in the top 5% to those in the bottop 5% has grown from 6 to 1 in 1980 to more than 200 to 1 in 2006. These disparities will continue unless more cooperation occurs between the rich and the poor in addressing inequality.
• An estimated 3.3 million service jobs will move out of the United States over the next 10 to 15 years.
• Pharmaceutical manufacturing will migrate to the developing world. By 2040, the pharmaceutical industry will move to developing countries with skilled scientific labor pools. The Middle East might show an interest in promoting the industry as these countries become more democratized and as the demand for oil declines.
• Top industries for nanotechnology breakthroughs. Development of molecular machinery will be a boon to a wide assortment of industries. The brightest nano-futures are in manufacturing and materials, food and agricultural products and packaging, more powerful and efficient computers and electronics, medical devices and pharmaceuticals, alternative energy systems, and luxury goods, such as stain-resistant clothing.

 

Demography

• Generation Y will migrate heavily overseas. For the first time in its history, the United States will see a significant proportion of its population emigrate due to overseas opportunities.
• Progress on slowing population growth may reverse. The fight against overpopulation is not over, and global population is projected to reach between 9.5 billion and 12 billion if fertility rates do not continue to decline.
• Companies will see the age range of their workers span four generations. Workers over the age of 55 are expected to grow from 14% of the labor force to 19% by 2012.
• Education for the millenial generation will become more personal and mobile. Millenial generation learners--those born after 1992--are growing up in a mobile, personalized, on-demand media environment that poses challenges to traditional classroom-bound educators. Millenials are comfortable with multitasking, which forces their teachers to fight for their time and attention.

 

Environment

• The cost of global-warming-related disasters will reach $150 billion per year. The world's total economic loss from weather-related catastrophes has risen 25% in the last decade. According to the insurance firm Swiss Re, the overall economic cost of catastrophes related to climate change threatens to double to $150 billion per year in a decade.
• Humanity will continue to produce more carbon than oceans or forests can naturally absorb.
• Coastal fisheries could disappear in Florida. By 2100, many of the bays and estuaries on Florida's coast could be lost to floods due to global warming.

 

Special Focus on China and India

• Economically, China and India will surpass Japan and the United States within the next 30 years. Both China and India have emerged rapidly from deep poverty to become dominant players on the world's economic and political scene. India's economy is predicted to surpass Japan's by 2032, and China could surpass the U.S. economy by 2039.
• China will surpass the U.S. as world's leading consumer. As a nation, China already out-consumes the United States on basic commodities such as food, energy, meat, grain, oil, coal, and steel. As individuals, Americans still lead the world in consumption, but if the Chinese economy continues its rapid growth, per-person consumption levels will match or surpass those of the U.S., with dire impacts on the global environment.
• More recognizable brand names will come from China. American firms have outsourced so much of their production to the Chinese that they have actually groomed their future competitors. Following the branding success of firms like Lenovo, look out for more uniquely Chinese brands to show up across all sectors of the consumer economy, including Changhong Electric (an electronics supplier to Wal-Mart), Xi'an Aircraft (a Boeing subcontractor), and Hair (an appliance manufacturer).
• Energy choices will make or break Chinese and Indian economies. Heavy reliance on fossil fuels, particularly coal, could undermine the investments that China and India have made in growing their economies. A new push toward developing the rich potential of solar and wind energy systems over the next 10 years could help these countries leapfrog ahead of the West.
• Dwindling supplies of water in China raise concerns for the global economy. With uneven development across China, the most water-intensive industries and densest population are in regions where water is scarcest. The result is higher prices for commodities and goods exported from China, so the costs of resource and environmental mismanagement are transferred to the rest of the world.
• China and India will be exceptions to the global urbanization trend. Nearly half of the world's residents will live in cities by 2030, according to demographer Philippe Bocquier. However, this urbanization trend is not occurring in the two countries with the largest populations--China and India.
• The world economy will experience intense "Chinafication." China's growing consumer class and its monopoly on cheap labor in manufacturing give it enormous clout in the market for critical resources. Competitors among developed countries may increasingly cry foul over Chinese trade policies, currency manipulation, and piracy of intellectual property.
• Outlook for Asia: China for the short term, India for the long term. By 2025, both countries will be stronger, wealthier, freer, and more stable than they are today, but India's unique assets--such as widespread use of English, a democratic government, and relative transparency of its institutions--make it more economically viable farther out.

 

Habitats

• More Americans will move to rural areas than will move out.
• The Internet will drastically change living patterns and urban populations. More people will use the Internet to work remotely from scenic locations. In contrast, more corporations will move their headquarters back to major metropolitan cities, to allow management heads to network with their global peers in banking and the media, while nonessential duties are performed elsewhere.
• By 2025, 75% of U.S. residents will live on the country's coasts.
• Some localities may disappear in a post-petroleum world. The end of an oil-based economy could mean the end of certain communities that rely on petroleum for transportation. Even hybrid vehicles may not come soon enough to save them. Arizona, for instance, is currently so automobile-dependent that, without cheap oil and power, its far-flung communities may fade away in 50 years.

 

Health and Medicine

• Uses of nanotechnology in medicine will increase.
• By 2030, we will see drugs individualized according to a patient's genome.
• Embryonic stem cells will help the fight against Alzheimer's disease.
• Children's "nature deficit disorder" is a growing health threat. Children today are spending less time in direct contact with nature than did previous generations. The impacts are showing up not only in their lack of physical fitness, but also in the growing prevalence of hyperactivity and attention deficit. Studies show that immersing children in outdoor settings--away from television and video games--fosters more creative mental activity and concentration.
• Look for cell-based computing and microchip-enhanced brains. New research fusing electronic microchips with living brain cells could one day lead to chip implants to combat neurological disorders. Connecting neurons to semiconductors successfully is the key to future breakthroughs in human-computer synthesis.

 

Information Society

• Computers may soon have artificial empathy for their users. Computer scientists are developing ways for machines to sense their users' mood. Bored? Distracted? Frustrated? A more user-aware computer could one day pick up on your body language, facial expressions, and the tone of your voice, then perhaps pull up a soothing photo of your puppy to calm you down if you're upset.
• Education will be portable, and learning will be "on demand." Education may follow the entertainment-delivery model, allowing customers (learners) to download what they want and use it when they want it. Faculty will increasingly upload lectures and educational "playlists" to Podcasting services for students to attend at their convenience.
• Internet will increase need for social connections. New mental illnesses such as "digital depression" and "connected aloneness" are on the rise as people spend more time engaging virtually with others through the Internet and cell phones rather than face-to-face.
• Loss of minority languages could be reversed. Globalization is one of the forces driving out minority cultures and their languages, but communication technologies and national policies may help reverse the trend. Thanks to the Internet, Modern Hebrew, for instance, can be studied and spread around the world. Catalan, French Canadian, Irish Gaelic, and Welsh are among the minority languages receiving renewed institutional support from governments.
• Text will be instantly translated into multimedia presentations. No more waiting for the movie version: Rapid language processing will create multimedia animations of your favorite book (or any text, such as directions to a museum in a foreign city). Filmmakers could use the technology to create more realistic storyboards from screenplays and experiment with different camera angles before actors are brought onto the set.

 

Resources

• Agriculture's role in the world economy may expand. By concentrating more on producing transportation fuels than food, the world's farmers could strengthen their role in the global economy.
• Water shortages in Africa will grow more severe.
• World energy demand will increase dramatically. Experts predict that energy demand will rise by 60% between 2002 and 2030 and will require about $568 billion in new investments every year. Part of this demand can be offset through greater energy efficiency.
• Coal could make a cleaner comeback. Skyrocketing oil prices make cheaper energy sources like coal look more attractive. Use of coal worldwide is expected to grow by 1.5% a year. If not managed properly, that increased consumption could have dire environmental impacts.
• Cost of solar energy will decline.

 

Security

• In the future, the military will focus more on shaping perceptions than on human targets. Many U.S. security experts feel that the key challenges ahead are rooted in how people around the world perceive the West and themselves. The most-dangerous military threat in the coming decades will arise from small, independent groups without the ability to directly challenge U.S. might.
• Computer viruses in ordinary objects may become a terrorist weapon. As more and more things ranging from luggage to pets have RFID tags, new opportunities are emerging for tampering, security disruptions, or even terrorist attacks. A single piece of luggage infected with a computer virus could disrupt an airport's baggage-handling database.

 

Technology

• We'll incorporate wireless technology into our thought processing by 2030. In the next 25 years, we'll learn how to augment our 100trillion very slow interneuronal connections with high-speed virtual connections via nanorobotics. This will allow us to greatly boost our pattern-recognition abilities, memories, and overall thinking capacity, as well as to directly interface with powerful forms of computer intelligence and with each other. By the end of the 2030's, we will be able to move beyond the basic architecture of the brain's neural regions.
• Within the next three decades, people will begin experimenting more freely and recklessly with nano-electronic personal enhancement. One type of nano-device people might try to incorporate into their biological functioning could be artificial blood cells (respirocytes), which could greatly enhance human performance. Unfortunately, they could also cause overheating of the body and breakdowns.
• We will soon be able to build computer models of our preferences, opinions, and mental associations.
• Computers will be more than 1,000 times more powerful in a decade, one million times more powerful in 20 years, and one billion times more powerful in 30 years. By then, some machines might have capabilities to rival the human mind, giving rise to a new intelligent species to share the planet with us.
• Human babies may be genetically manufactured by the end of the century. Nations have historically competed for technological supremacy, as seen in the twentieth century with the nuclear arms and space races. This competition will likely continue with biotechnology.
• From prosthetic aids to mind programming? Cochlear implants, which meliorate hearing loss, are a harbinger of future human-machine interfaces. Currently, such devices operate one-way, with sensors picking up data and delivering it to the user's brain. But in the future, neural devices could be wirelessly connected to a computer, delivering information from your brain to a network. Our thoughts would thus become visible to all.

Transportation

• A rise of disabled Americans will strain public transportation systems. By the year 2025, the number of Americans aged 65 or older will expand from 35 million to more than 65 million. Individuals in that age group are more than twice as likely to have a disability as those aged 16 to 65. Rising rates of outpatient care and chronic illness point to an increased demand for public transportation.
• Wireless technologies will improve highway safety. Communications technology will enable motor vehicles to exchange information with each other, such as their proximity and speed.
• Future cars may run on exhaust fumes. A device that uses vehicle exhaust to spin a turbine for generating electricity could allow future cars to literally run on fumes. Up to a third of the power that a conventional engine produces is wasted in exhaust fumes. Turning those fumes into a power source could cut fuel consumption by as much as 10% according to researchers.
• Sports cars will be more environmentally friendly.

 

Values and Culture

• Workers will increasingly choose more time over more money.
• The production of art will increase as the audience for art shrinks. New media such as video, virtual reality, and hyperlinked text will create new methods for artistic expression. But fine art is facing increased competition for viewers' time and attention among "easier" forms of leisure, such as videogames and television.
• The future of antiquities is bleak. Archaeologists may one day see a world where no culturally significant site has been left unpillaged.
• Religious tolerance will increase--but not right away. The world's major religions share values but not philosophies, and their conflicting ideologies will continue to prevent peaceful coexistence in many societies. But as global communications and interaction among diverse peoples grows, tolerance is more likely to increase over the long term.
• Intolerance is accelerating along with growth of fundamentalist populations. The fastest-growing religions today tend to be those espousing the most fundamentalist and exclusivist points of view, making the hope for peace tenuous.
• Tolerance is accelerating along with interaction. Global economics and communications are increasing business and social interaction across religions. 

 

Work

• The robotic workforce will change how your boss values you. As robots and intelligent software increasingly emulate the knowledge work that humans can do, businesses will "hire" whatever type of mind that can do the work--robotic or human.
• Advances in technology will give rise to a new era of "hyperjobs." These new occupations will emphasize uniquely human skills over mere technical abilities. Hyper-human skills might include creativity, symbolic thinking, and responsibility.
• Outsourcing will actually create jobs. The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics has estimated that total U.S. employment is likely to increase largely as a result of efficiencies gained through outsourcing.
• Superlongevity will have a growing influence on career choices. Realizing that their careers might extend for 50 years or more, younger careerists, even those not yet ready for full-time employment, will experiment with unique career patterns. More young people will opt to not only pursue postgraduate education, they may remain in school well into their 20s or early 30s in order to train for the complex jobs required in our advanced society. More people in their 50s will also return to school to start new careers.

 

 

 

 

Eight Supertrends Shaping the Future of Business (Karl Albrecht & associates -- The Futurist, Sept-Oct 2006)

 

1. Customer Supertrend: The Microsegmentation of the Marketplace

Monolithic markets, customer segments, and product categories are continually breaking up into smaller clusters of demand and preference. Customers are becoming ever more differentiated in their lifestyles and interests, with smaller and more specialized groups responding to more narrowly targeted commercial messages. 

 

2. Competitor Supertrend: Value Targeting

Value targeting, simply put, means aiming for whatever matters most to individual consumers. Enterprises have traditionally offered a broad range of products or services are now facing specialized competitors who provide more specific, targeted solutions, often in new ways and at lower prices. The customary "one size fits all" packages are losing their appeal as customers increasingly "cherry pick" the offerings, selecting preferred options a la carte.

 

3. Economic Supertrend: "Chinafication"

The phenomenal growth of the Chinese economy is having global impacts, which are apparent even to enterprises that have never thought of themselves as operating globally or internationally. China's rapidly growing consumer class will compete ever more intensively with First World consumers for needed resources such as oil, water, energy, grain, manufacturing raw materials, and luxury food items, including meat.

 

4. Technological Supertrend: From Information to Knowledge

Information is rapidly becoming a profitless commodity, and knowledge is becoming the new competitive advantage.

The inexorable reconstruction of Western societies and economies, accelerated by the pervasive impact of information technology and the rapid spread of the Internet, is requiring us to rethink Alvin Toffler's "Third Wave" concept--the shift from industrial societies to information-based societies. Many low-level employees previously thought of as knowledge workers are now being recognized as "data workers," who contribute very little added value to the processing of information. In other words, information technology is doing more of the work formerly done by humans, even in high-tech areas such as sorting data for relevance.

 

5. Social Supertrend: Dumb and Dirty

America's rapidly saturating media environment is forcing marketers of the popular culture to resort to ever more provocative methods of capturing the attention of a jaded public, creating a pervasive "culture of amusement" that tends to devalue and displace thoughtful discourse.

Just as bad money drives out good, it can be said that "dumbed-down" content drives "wised-up" content out of circulation. The ever more desperate use of sexualized, violent, antagonistic, and voyeuristic content as an attention-getting strategy in news, advertising, publishing, and entertainment is causing more people to perceive the social values projected by the popular commercial culture as narcissistic, hedonistic, anti-intellectual, and regressive. This relentless dumbing-down of the popular channels of discourse is accentuating the differences in world view between fully conditioned media consumers and a smaller number of self-educating citizens who seek to counteract these influences in their own lives.

 

6. Political Supertrend: "CyberMobbing"

The emergence of Web communities, "smart mobbing," and "swarm" advocacy are spawning temporary or transient political entities that outflank traditional channels and methods of influence.

With political argument becoming much more popular in the broadcast media, and smaller and more-specialized advocacy groups forming and disintegrating over time, elected officials and public agencies are under increasing scrutiny and pressure for accountability. This "peasants with pitchforks" phenomenon is increasingly prevalent, as caused-based political activists can more easily assemble temporary constituencies through online marketing and fund-raising.

 

7. Legal Supertrend: Knowledge Warfare

Competitive struggles between knowledge-intensive enterprises are increasingly fought both on the legal battlefield and in the marketplace, as the creators, producers, publishers, distributors, and consumers of intellectual-property-based products pursue their separate interests.

High-profile lawsuits--and legislation--have highlighted the increasing vulnerability of copyrights and other intellectual property protections. The entertainment industry in particular may be driven toward zero-profit levels and mass mediocrity as media-based products have ever shorter profitable lifetimes.

 

8. Geophysical Supertrend: Counter-Americanism

"Made in America" is no longer "cool." Political counter reactions to an increasingly unilateral and militarized U.S. foreign policy, together with nationalistic and regionalistic coalitions, are eroding the taken-for-granted dominance of American styles, values, products, and business practices.

Americans traveling abroad and employees of U.S. businesses operating in other countries must increasingly consider personal-security risks in planning their activities. Threats of violence against Americans and U.S. enterprises are significantly increasing the cost of business operations. As the United States continues to lose its unique competitive advantages in science and technology, as intellectual capital continues to develop rapidly in competing countries such as China and India, and as competition for oil and other natural resources intensifies, an "American twilight" of influence is increasingly likely.

 

Reacting to the Trends

Several key points emerge immediately from this overview of supertrends. At least half of them relate directly to the emerging Knowledge Age. It's time to stop marveling about the coming age of information and knowledge and get serious about coping with it and capitalizing on it.

The most important key point to consider may also be the most obvious: These trends (by and large) represent both threat and opportunity. A pessimistic first reading might perceive many of these ongoing developments as "bad news," an inventory of challenges. A more careful reading, however, could well see them as strongly implying an action agenda. Clearly, enterprises that want to avoid the slow slide into irrelevance will need to respond proactively to these findings.

 

Forecasts for the next 25 years, World Future Society, January 01, 2007.

 

• Forecast #1: Hydrogen fuel cells will be cost competitive by 2010. The cost of power via fuel cell is dropping rapidly—from $600,000 per kilowatt-hour in the 1970s to $1,200 today. By 2012, fuel cell power is expected to cost around $400 per kilowatt-hour. It would then be competitive with every type of power. Fuel cells will power cars and allow each home to have its own non-polluting electricity generator.
• Forecast #2: The era of the Cyborg is at hand. Researchers in Israel have fashioned a "bio-computer" using the DNA of living cells instead of silicon chips. This development may soon allow a computer to connect directly with a human brain.
• Forecast #3: By 2015, New York, Tokyo and Frankfurt may emerge as hubs for high-speed, large-capacity supersonic planes. NASA's X-43A Scramjet recently flew at 7,000 mph (nearly ten times the speed of sound). These hyperspeed planes will whisk passengers across continents in the time it takes most people to drive to the airport.
• Forecast #4: Schools based on classrooms and a human teacher will dwindle over the next 25 years. Why sit in a classroom when you can visit virtual worlds and experience your subjects? An "avatar," a personalized interactive guide, will answer all of your questions and help you pose new ones.
• Forecast #5: Speculation in hydrogen energy stocks could create an investment bubble, as happened with the Internet. When investors see the huge potential of hydrogen energy, the stocks of companies with promising technologies may skyrocket to unsustainable levels.

• Forecast #6: Ocean Currents May Surpass Wind as an Energy Source. Turbines driven by ocean currents could generate four times more electricity than windmills. At one site alone—in the Channel Islands off the coast of France—the potential electricity could match that produced by three nuclear power plants.
• Forecast #7: A snail may save your life. A non-addictive painkiller one thousand times more potent than morphine could soon be on the market, thanks to research on conotoxins, the distinct set of chemicals found in tropical cone snails. Future medicines from the snails may help treat heart disease, depression and spinal cord injuries, among other ailments.
• Forecast #8: Weapons of mass destruction will be even easier to obtain over the next 15 years. Terrorists may move from bombs to creating havoc on the cellular level. The weapons of the future—genetic engineering and nanotechnology—require neither large facilities nor mass materials.
• Forecast #9: The convergence of genetic engineering, nanotechnology and robotics will allow humans to change their bodies in profoundly new ways. In the next 15 years, people may be able to rearrange their genes to change their physical features, extend their lifespan, merge their brains with computers and their bodies with robots, among many other remarkable developments.
• Forecast #10: Robots and smart environments will improve care and independence for the elderly. Intelligent walkers will help seniors get around while sensors on the handlebars monitor their vital signs. Handheld devices will track senior citizens' movements and guide them around town, keeping people mobile and independent.

 

 

 

Earth With Nanotechnology... Abusing Nanotech Factories

 

The following is a presentation by former Global Business Network member Jamais Cascio, given at this year's Pop!Tech conference. It highlights a problem currently quite a ways out on the horizon - and while we believe that as we approach the underlying capability, solutions will be developed to address its concomitant downside – we nonetheless wished to offer Cascio’s concerns, as yet another example of the unexpected consequences caused by technological advances.

The Coming Apocalypse

We are no more than 20 years away from the introduction of an utterly transformative technology: molecular manufacturing. This is the ability to create just about anything molecule-by-molecule, using millions of tiny nanodevices acting in concert inside of a "factory" not much bigger than a laser printer. In principle, you'll be able to make a new toothbrush, laptop or even new nanofactory at home just as easily as you now burn a CD.

 

Unfortunately, this could also lead to the end of civilization as we know it.

 

If you've followed arguments about nanotechnology, you might be familiar with terms like "gray goo," the result of armies of nanorobots converting everything in their path into more nanorobots. There's also "green goo" -- nanorobots that go after nature -- and "red goo" -- nanorobots that go after people. Scary stuff. Fortunately, it looks like these would be a lot harder to do and nowhere near as effective as feared.

 

No, the real threat is more insidious, attacking us not by tearing apart our bodies, but by breaking down our spirits.

I'm talking about Spam. Nanotech spam. Think of it as "pink goo."

 

Just about every digital technology able to carry a message has been turned into a vehicle for spam, because the cost of sending a million messages is little more than the cost of sending one. Ultra-efficient nanomanufacturing systems will be no exception. Some of the spam will be subtle -- nanofactories that insist on adding marketing slogans on everything they print out ("Made by the StuffStation 5000! StuffStation -- For When You Want More Stuff"). Some of the spam will be a bit more brute force -- super cheap mobile devices made to put advertisements everywhere, even by shouting them at you.

 

Imagine being unable to escape lurid pitches for herbal viagra, the latest holiday gift idea, or fraudulent get-rich-quick schemes because they're literally coming from all around you.

 

It gets worse when you add software viruses and the like to the mix. It's not just spammer nanofactories making the spambots, but your own desktop 3D printer. Or, worse, anything that your home nanofactory produces being made with a hacked-in vulnerability to spam.

 

There are ways we can avoid this nightmare, if we're lucky. It could be that the introduction of exponential manufacturing technologies so undermines traditional businesses that we have a global economic collapse, and spam disappears with all other advertising because nobody can buy anything. It could be that molecular systems make total global surveillance possible, and we willingly build a totalitarian police state to hunt down spammers. Or global warming could do us all in.

 

If we're really lucky, we'll end up in a world that parallels today's: cat and mouse games between spammers and security; active spam filters (in this case, "filter" robots hunting down spambots on the street); open source advocates offering much more secure systems that almost nobody actually uses; and a wearying, demoralizing sense of the inevitability of it all.

 

Imagine Earth without People -- (New Scientist -- October 12, 2006)
http://www.newscientist.com/channel/earth/mg19225731
.100?DCMP=NLC-nletter&nsref=mg19225731.100
If tomorrow dawns without humans, even from orbit the change will be evident almost immediately, as the blaze of artificial light that brightens the night begins to wink out.

 

Women Graduates Challenge Iran -- (BBC -- September 19, 2006)
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/5359672.stm
The number of women graduating from Iran's universities is overtaking the number of men, promising a change in the job market and, with it, profound social change. Over half of university students in Iran are now women. In the applied physics department of Azad University 70% of the graduates are women. It is a huge social shift since the 1979 Revolution: Iran's Islamic government has managed to convince even traditional rural families that it is safe to send their daughters away from home to study.

 

Methane Burps and Heat Waves: Global Warming Made Visible -- (ABC -- August 4, 2006)
http://abcnews.go.com/Technology/story?id=2274439&page=1
Scientists at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration in Boulder have now figured out how to project the results of global futures scenarios, based on sophisticated computer predictions — fomerly just rows of numbers — as changing colors on a 5-foot sphere with the continents outlined on it. A number of these spheres are now being installed in museums around the United States and the world, so the world can see what it's in for.

 

Sixteen Trends That Will Profoundly Effect the 21st Century

Gary Marx, the president of the Center for Public Outreach, has come up with sixteen identifiable trends that will shape the future of education and the whole of society in the 21st century.

Click here to see what they are.

 

Five Hot Products for the Future -- (CNN -- June 9, 2006)
http://money.cnn.com/2006/06/08/technology/business2_bigsellers/index.htm
Trend spotting is serious business. So much so that the Institute for the Future, a Palo Alto-based think tank, produces an annual 96-page 10-year forecast - an exhaustive compendium of societal and technological trends, widely regarded as the bellwether of long-range planning. But people wanted specifics, so it started giving away prescient product ideas instead.

 

Mapping the Global Future

The US government's National Intelligence Council sponsors "Project 2020", a discussion of what the world will be like fifteen years from now. They have recently [Jan 2005] published a report, "Mapping the Global Future" which is causing considerable comment and controversy. You can download a copy of this 123-page report (6.7M) by clicking here. An HTML version that can be read in sections can be found here.

(Taken from www.futurebrief.com )

 

Zombies: The Living dead

Niels Bøttger-Rasmussen

(Taken from Copenhagen Institute for Futures Studies website)

Zombie candidates

No one knows the future, and the last thing we want to know is of course when we are going to leave this world. Hence, the Institute's zombie list is of course just a list of candidates. There are efficient killers in the shape of megatrends like digitalization and globalization, but there also is an immune system that goes into action whenever there's a threat to the values we prize highly or simply have grown used to being foundations of our lives. In many ways that which disappears is thus a more radical change than what comes. We can reject new things, like mobile phones, but we must accept the loss of things that disappear, like phone booths.

 

At the strategic level, thinking in terms of zombies can be a suitable supplement to looking at changes and trends. In companies and organizations, zombies are sensitive and perhaps even dangerous subjects that we push aside. But perhaps we can close in on them by starting to spot zombies in the surrounding world and then gradually move towards the core of the organization. By looking at zombies and what we risk losing, we may also spot new opportunities that can lead to innovations, which will strengthen disappearing values like romance, the nuclear family and the private sphere.

 

Zombies - what will be gone in 15 years?

Home, Family, Personal	TV channels Vacuum tube TV sets Antennae / satellite dishes Fixed net telephones CD DVD Wallets Key bundles Senior housing Wristwatch Sunbathing Smoking Dialects The private sphere Romance Prostitution (legal) The nuclear family Sorting garbage (privately)
Communication - Paper solutions	Tickets / punch cards Calendars Handbooks Telephone directories Advertisement sections Paper money School books Paperbacks Advertisement-financed newspapers Daily newspapers Business cards
Workplace	Working hours / office hours Assembly line work Industrial holiday season Branch office meetings Wage earners Trade unions Writing desks PC keyboards Having finished studying Unemployment
Fields/Jobs	Checkout assistants Ticket inspectors Traffic wardens PC service technicians Mechanics Mailmen (Fighter) pilots Window cleaners Librarians Tobacco stores Record, TV & radio shops Video rentals Supermarkets Wholesalers Record companies The National Bank The Stock Exchange Prisons General practitioners
The public sphere	Mailboxes Power lines Parking meters Hot-dog carts Supermarkets Video rentals Fireworks (private) Internal combustion engines Free car rides Train schedules Public spaces
Systems/Regulation	The Shops Act Taxi regulation Rent control Digital copyright Pharmacy monopolies Danish and Swedish currencies Moonlighting Retirement Age
Globally	Dictatorships Pandas Tigers Bushmen Iraq North Korea Indonesia China Universal human rights EU
Organization/Management	Desk work Non-developing work Hourly wages Operating budgets Long-term strategic planning Middle management Top-down management Appointed managers Corporate culture Traditional further training

The list of Zombies; i.e., things that are gone in 10-15 years, is a candidate list and hence isn't all-inclusive.

 

Full article here. 

 

 

 

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