William Halal
Prof. Emeritus at GWU, President of TechCast Global
Building a World That Works: How to Get Through the Global MegaCrisis
William Halal specializes in technology forecasting, strategic planning, knowledge, and institutional change and is a Professor Emeritus of Science, Technology, and Innovation at George Washington University, where he has worked for over 35 years.
Using an evolutionary perspective, we show how the world is likely to make the passage through today’s “Global MegaCrisis” to a mature state of development. The MegaCrisis is defined as the confluence of climate change, energy shortages, financial instability, terrorism, institutional failures, and other threats that are reaching a critical point as industrialization doubles over the next decade. Our survey results show people think there is a 60 percent probability these trends could cause major global disasters or even a collapse of civilization in large parts of the world. Results of macro-forecasts from the TechCast Project outline how the technology revolution and social trends are likely to create infinite knowledge and intelligence in about a decade, raising awareness dramatically. We conclude with general principles that could help make this transformation to a sustainable global order.
Gerd Leonhard
CEO - The Futures Agency
Redefining the Relationship of Man and Machine
Gerd Leonhard, a Swiss-based Futurist, Keynote Speaker, Author and CEO of The Futures Agency, sets out the case for a Digital Ethics Treaty - ensuring that - in the face exponential waves of disruption - we focus on controlling these technologies and harnessing them to serve humanity and further human happiness.
We are witnessing exponential progress in digitisation, automation, virtualisation and robotisation all around us, in all sectors of society, technology and business. “Software is eating the world” and it's getting smarter every single day. Artificial intelligence, deep learning and cognitive computing are becoming the next big memes, and many businesses don't know how to separate the hype from the likely-to-happen future. How will this play out in the next 5-8 years? What are the biggest opportunities, and what are the challenges we shouldn't ignore?
Gray Scott
Founder, Futurist - Serious Wonder
The Automated, Digitized, and Simulated Future
Gray Scott, a New York-based futurist, techno-philosopher, speaker, writer, artist and founder and CEO of SeriousWonder.com, outlines the relentless forces that are driving the deep and transformative penetration of digital technologies into every aspect of society.
The future will be automated, decentralized, digitized and eventually, simulated. By 2035, our homes, cars, and most of our jobs will be automated. Automation will decentralize and disrupt almost every industry. Imagine a future filled with self-replicating autonomous robots that harvest raw materials from near earth asteroids. These asteroid mining robots could manufacture products directly on the asteroid and then ship the goods back to earth. It may sound like science fiction, but a company called Planetary Resources is working on making this into science fact.
Worldwide shipments of multipurpose industrial robots are forecast to exceed 207,000 units in 2015. Each of these robots can do the job of several human workers and can work 24/7 without breaks or holidays. Agricultural farm bots will grow and harvest food from urban underground vertical LED PinkFarms. These automated farms use red and blue LED lights to grow food indoors without ever seeing sunlight. Autonomous self-driving cars will become the standard form of transportation in urban areas. Automated planes, trains, and drones will deliver products directly to our doors, and home service robots will be waiting to accept the delivery for you.
Will corporations survive a decentralized automated future if everyone can harvest energy, food, and raw materials? How will humanity react to the automated future? What will we do with our lives if we no longer need to work? Without the need for work what will stop us from slipping into the digital cosmos?
Vinay Gupta
Ethereum
Digital Currencies
Vinay Gupta's career has seen three distinct phases: software nerd, ecologist, and revolutionary. He is now the release manager for Etheruem, a new "trustless software platform for developing and running decentralised applications on the internet. He examines the challenge of valuing complex assets such as ecosystem services, and explores how large scale simulations could enabled us to value the impact of everything from climate change to a new business model.
Right now money is represented, for the most part, as numbers: $61.47, £22.42, €11.92. Nature is represented as 300 page reports with complex charts and graphs, and the conclusions are argued over indefinitely. What if we could make tools which have the ability to represent nature as easily as we represent value in the abstract economic game that we use to manage most of our planet's physical and (increasingly) intellectual resources?
Money that works like software is possible: bond trading and similar areas of finance can include esoteric financial instruments with extensive software support, instruments which a paper-and-pencil team could simply never trade, no matter how slowly, because of the danger of arithmetic order.
20 years from now, we will likely have a million times more computer power: could we finally build a system which models value directly rather than abstracting it out to simple numbers? Could we compute the true value of nature, and of a contract, and thereby right the world?
Victor Vahidi Motti
Chief Foresight Advisor - Vahid Think Tank
Life in 2035: Future Consciousness, Cyborgs and Wisdom
Victor Vahidi Motti, a noted and award-winning Iranian scholar and academic futurist, explores how rapid and radical advances in science and technology could disrupt and reformulate our understanding of human capability, wisdom and the nature of work.
Whatever can be written, will be taken over by programmers and AI researchers sooner or later. In other words, if there is a manual, book, handbook, paper, or the like around on how to do something, then some software may be developed and evolved to sufficiently human-level precision and skill.
David Wortley
CEO and Founder - GAETSS: Gamification and Enabling Technologies
The Impact of Wearable Lifestyle Technologies and Gamification on Business and Society
David Wortley is a Malaysia-based author and expert on the strategic use of gamification and enabling technologies for the transformation of business and society. His chapter considers the future potential impact of wearable lifestyle sensor technologies, AI, mobile applications and gaming concepts on personal and corporate health.
Wearable lifestyle technologies, which track physical activity and sleep patterns, combined with increasingly sophisticated body composition devices, which not only measure weight and body mass, but also analyse the fat and water content of the body in a simple non-obtrusive way, have the potential to tackle serious societal health issues such as obesity. This article examines the impact on society of personal health management adoption by large numbers of citizens.
David Wood
Principal - Delta Wisdom
The Prospect of Democracy 2.0
David Wood, a UK-based futurist, technologist, writer and chair of London Futurists, sets out the case for embracing technology to help enable the transition from democracy 1.0 to a more open, participative and informed democracy 2.0 model of governance in the digital era.
Accelerating technology is already radically transforming many areas of life, including education, entertainment, health, transport, and warfare. Technology has, in the same way, the potential to radically transform politics. It can do this by enabling improved collective decision-making, by instant fact-checking of claims made by politicians, by evaluating options in a way free from human bias, and by identifying which are the most significant points in a large sea of noisy democratic discussion. It will be like when Google gently asks us, "Did you mean to type...?", and when Google draws our attention to improved navigation routes through cities we thought we already knew well. Technology will, similarly, be suggesting innovative new policy, perhaps better than anything dreamt up by human analysts. New technology can also offer improved alternatives to archaic first-past-the-post voting systems, in which electors are unable to express their actual preferences.
But like all technology, the technologies of decision-making are capable of misuse as well as use. They could produce a horrific state of Big Brother oppression and alienation. Under the motto that “forewarned is forearmed”, this chapter provides a roadmap through the possible changes in political systems that lie ahead
Kevin Wheeler
Founder and President - Future of Talent Institute
The Future of Talent Management: Recruiting, Workforce Planning, Leadership Development & Performance Management
Kevin Wheeler is a US-based author, consultant, teacher and global speaker, and Founder and President of The Future of Talent Institute. Kevin highlights how the confluence of factors driving business change will force us to rethink every aspect of talent management in tomorrow's organization.
This article presents an overview of the changing nature of work and the future of the labour market. It will discuss how organisation will find, utilize and engage talent over the next decade or more. The article will discuss the evolution of workforce planning, the future of the on-demand worker versus the permanent worker, and future approaches to succession planning and human resources strategy. It will also provide some thoughts on the future competencies leaders will need, and how those competencies will be attained.
Alexandra Whittington
Futurist - Partners in Foresight
Social Technologies - How Will Tomorrows Technologies permeate Our Everyday Lives?
Alexandra Whittington has taught undergraduate courses about the future at the University of Houston since 2009. She has authored and co-authored articles for publications including The Futurist magazine and the journal Futures. Alexandra has a B.A. in Anthropology and M.S. in Studies of the Future.
Together with Amir Bar, she presents four scenarios exploring how mobile technology could permeate every aspect of our social and professional lives by 2030.
Hardin Tibbs
CEO, principal consultant - FutureLens
Futures Thinking - A Critical Organisational Skill
Hardin Tibbs, a highly experienced UK-based futurist, strategist, educator and writer, highlights the importance of developing the critical future thinking skills that enable an organisation to anticipate and adapt to change.
Is futures thinking just another name for futures research? A good case can be made that it is something distinct and complementary. The author’s experience starting from the early years of Global Business Network (GBN) in California suggests that a set of participatory social practices underpin successful futures research consulting projects carried out for client organizations. Futures thinking lies on a continuum with history and anthropology as a generator of interpretative narrative and understanding about society, and shares an ethnographic approach with anthropology. Futures thinking can more effectively serve a vital organisational role in enabling adaptive learning and catalysing social and cultural change if it is explicitly recognized as a social praxis. The participatory social aspects of futures thinking are at least as important as the specific futures research methodology that is used – for example, scenarios.
Rohit Talwar
Founder & CEO - FastFuture
Opening Chapter & Global Drivers of Change
Rohit is a global futurist, strategist and award-winning speaker noted for his humour, inspirational style and provocative content. He advises global firms, industries and governments on how to survive, thrive, spot and manage emerging risks and develop innovative growth strategies in the decade ahead.
Rohit Talwar, along with co-author April Koury, introduce over 100 global drivers of change that shape organizations today and will continue to impact the future of business.
The drivers fall into seven broad categories:
Tomorrow's global order - How might power balances shift?
Emerging societal landscape - Who are we becoming, how will we live?
New economic and political architecture - How might economic and political systems evolve?
Social technologies - How will tomorrow's technologies permeate our everyday lives?
Future of business - What are the critical success factors for organizations in a rapidly changing world?
Disruptive technology - How might new technologies enable business innovation?
Energy environment and resources - How can we protect and power the planet?
Julian Snape
Consultant - Technovation Anglia
Constructing the Future - Investigating the Future of Additive Manufacturing
Julian Snape is a UK-based adviser on the impacts of disruptive technologies for small to medium enterprises and one of the early co-founders of Transhumanism in the UK. He traces the rapid evolution of 3D printing, and examines the transformative ways in which it could impact the construction sector.
This chapter will briefly examine the current state of play in the use of additive manufacturing (3D Printing) in the construction industry, with examples from Holland, China, Spain and the UK.
Then it will look at some of the proposed convergent developments within the field, such as metal, carbon fibre and graphene printing, and speculate how these might be integrated into existing building printers to achieve rapidly printed near or fully functional living spaces. It will also look at how these processes could be commercialised.
It will then look at the socio-economic implications of the proposed technologies in terms of its impact upon the current construction industry and supply chain, as well as investigating how the dramatically increased speed of building printing could disrupt the housing market in terms of addressing housing shortages and costs.
Finally, it will look at proposals to use additive manufacture in extra-terrestrial environments to produce large structures in space, on the Moon and Mars, and it’s potential impact on the nascent private space exploration industry.
Tiana Sinclair
Founder - Future Tech Track
The Future of Events and Networking
Tiana Sinclair is a UK-based product manager, futurist and an advocate of emerging technologies, and she runs the Future Tech Track event for early technology adopters. Tiana discusses how a range of advanced technology developments could be deployed to augment the live experience for attendees, event owners, sponsors and planners.
This chapter will focus on the intersection of real life interactions and emerging technologies, and provide some insight on how we will be able to enhance our experiences and boost our networking reach to engage with those who matter the most, turning 'connecting' in real world into an easier, more structured and quantified process.
As we strive towards the future, more and more mediums from the worlds of Artificial Intelligence, Augmented Reality, Robotics and Wearables will become available at our expense, which will allow more automated solutions and enormous potential for integration with our existing digital identities and social media platforms. I will look at event industry trends and explore whether it is likely that in the future, the gap between offline and online will shrink, and whether networking will turn into a two-word 'net working' - meaning quite literally, 'working the net'.
Anna Simpson
Curator - Forum for the Future
The Future of Futures Journalism
Anna Simpson, a Singapore-based author and curator of Forum for the Future's Futures Centre, examines the current crisis in the practice and institutions of journalism and news reporting, and argues the need for journalism to evolve by learning from the practices of futures and foresight research.
How can we - as writers and curators - balance dynamic, rapid information-sharing with considered reflection about the long-term implications? What examples are there of journalists looking up from immediate change to the long-term implications? How can we encourage the rise of futures journalism? I have interview futures writers such as Alex Steffen, Cameron Tonkinwise and John Sweeney.
Yates Buckley
Founder, Technical Partner - Unit9
The Future of Digital Media - The Freexpensive Prerogative
Yates Buckley is a founding partner at UNIT9, an award-winning UK digital production agency. He explores how we might use intelligent personal agents to integrate our technology ecosystem to best communicate to us, control access to our personal data and serve our needs.
Digital media has been transforming, and the substrate of communication tools has led to even quicker transformation and adoption. Over the years, the process of transformation has specialised around distance to the viewer and trying to bring the communication closer, targeted, and more entwined with the individual media consumer's life. Billboards that project version of themselves to specific target users and goggles which overlay the world’s content are part of a transformation of media, from communal distant broadcast to intimate, close, and personal relation. With this transformation, along with the fractioning of actual target platforms with every possible ratio of tablet, phablet, and tablone and a wave of new goggles, watches etc., we enter a space where we will bring media with us wherever we go, and it will be our personal broadcast. We will be feeding information to reinforce our networks, and taking our networks to the streets to win people over to our lifestyle basket. Is it inevitable that our media will be shaped by the networks we participate in? How and when will we discover the right balance between close media and shared media? Is our sharing inevitably a tunnel to a global space, or will the physical space matter again? What does it mean for some to see the world differently from others? Is implantation the end point to television? What does it mean to have a computer-brain interface to our future media?
My technique will be to try to start the article around some ground truth processes that I feel are difficult to disrupt, like assumptions in generous acceleration in bandwidth and processing, increase in population, struggle with inequality on a global scale, struggle with different knowledge globally, etc. I will then look at setting a scenario based on the kind of processes that shaped emergence of other media and look at this as waves.
David Saintloth
Chief Scientist - Apriority LLC
The Rise of the Cosmeceutical Sector
David Saintloth, a US entrepreneur, designer and writer, highlights the market potential of a new cosmeceutical health and beauty sector that could emerge as a result of recent developments in gene editing technology.
In this article I'd like to talk about the pending trillion dollar "cosmecuticals" industry. What's that? Well, we are in the process of doing what was done for computing in the mid 70's for biology, specifically for genetics and microbiology. The invention of iPSC in 2007 and the harnessing of Crispr-Cas9 in 2013 opens the door wide on what we can do with all living things to match the power that programmers have over code. The age of the GDE's (genetic development environment) is upon us, and the therapies and genetic changes we will be making to our phenotype (skin, eye, hair, etc.) will usher in a trillion dollar global industry.
I'll explain how and why business needs to be aiming their guns at this new remarkable space.
Andrew Vladimirov
Neuroscientist, Information Security Expert, Brain Hacker
The Near-Future Consequences of Linked Neural Recording and Stimulation Technologies
Andrew Vladimirov is an experienced Ukrainian neuroscientist specialising in stimulation technologies. Together with Martin Dinov, he will introduce the possible business applications of the latest breakthroughs in neural recording and brain stimulation.
The emergence of commercial neurostimulation and neurorecording devices are harbingers of a more widespread application of technology and science to the direct betterment of our own health, abilities, mood, senses and other attributes. However, perhaps most importantly, the most drastic effects will be seen when a critical mass of adoption of these technologies occurs and various facets of society are transformed by them and by the interlinking and cascade effects of the involved technologies. Here we focus on discussing likely outcomes of neuro-networks, or "networked brains". This refers to interlinking individuals' brain states creating collective neurofeedback loops and, eventually, constructing a physical "noosphere". We explore likely impacts of such developments on areas as diverse as online and offline interpersonal communications, learning and education, preventive medicine and counseling, neuromarketing, augmented virtual reality, entertainment and gaming.
Stephen Roulac
CEO - Roulac Global
The Derives from Place Choices
Stephen Roulac is a real estate expert, litigation consultant, strategy advisor and author. For four decades he has been involved in a global strategy and financial economics advisory firm that advises on significant decisions of investment banks, institutional investors, family offices, and public and privately held companies and government agencies, primarily regarding their involvements in real estate and the capital markets.
Place choice changes everything, introducing dynamism and discontinuity in every aspect of society, culture, and institutions; transforming the lives of individuals and enterprises; changing places, subtlety and profoundly. The intersection of seven critical technologies, preferences and values, rules and regulations shape, define and realign the character of our places and therefore the quality of our lives. This chapter explores the consequences, rewards, risks, opportunities, and threats of how technology defines the possible, culture shapes the desired, and rules prescribe the possible.
Alberto Rizzoli
Business Director - Kidesign, Singularity University GSP15
Education in 2025
Alberto Rizzoli, a young Italian futurist, educational innovation entrepreneur and Singularity University student, explores how schools and learning could evolve as a result of the rapid adoption of new technologies and educational models.
When young talent joins the workforce after completing education, they often eclipse previous generations in their proficiency with technology. However, this is happening at an accelerating rate, and state education is falling behind in providing skills that are crucial for success 10 years from now. In a world where artificial intelligence organises our lives, 3D printers manufacture our goods, and cross-border collaboration is the norm, what kind of talent will employers seek? We will have a look at the technologies that will emerge in the next 10 years, and develop a strategy that equips today's primary and secondary school students with the skills required to harness them. We will take note from avant-gardist education systems such as Finland's, and discover laggard behaviours that must be modified to make way for modern alternatives. Ultimately, this essay reveals how entrepreneurs and businesses can play a leading role in advancing tomorrow’s education, and what direction they should take to successfully disrupt today’s school systems by revolutionising the industries that sustain it.
Norman Rebin
President - Success Mentors International
The Future of International Aid and Development
Norman Rebin is a US-based specialist in productivity and communications focused on global business. He outlines the drivers for and benefits of increasing future corporate involvement and investment in international aid and development.
As economies in both the developed and developing world continue to stagger, will the humane nature of foreign policy give way to domestic expediency? Or will we, collectively, (international fund organizations, NGO's and governments) find long term solutions for the underlying problems causing poverty and conflict, and address them in creative and sustained ways? The author will focus on these questions and their potential solutions.
Adrian Pop
Director - Centre for Regional and Global Studies; National University of Political Studies and Public Administration, Bucharest, Romania
Futures of Bretton Woods
Adrian Pop is Professor of International Relations with the National University of Political Science and Public Administration in Bucharest, Director of the Centre for Regional and Global Studies at the Romanian Scientific Society for Interdisciplinary Research, and Chair of the Romania Node of The Millennium Project.
He holds a Ph.D. in History and over 20 years of experience in interdisciplinary research and trans-institutional collaboration with experts from around the world. A former International Research Fellow with the NATO Defence College in Rome and Senior Visiting Fulbright Scholar with the University of Maryland, Adrian Pop is a member of various international professional associations including European International Studies Association (EISA), Central and East European International Studies Association (CEEISA), and World Futures Studies Federation (WFSF). He also sits in the scientific board of the Institute of the Romanian Revolution of December 1989 and the editorial boards of several scholarly journals. He has extensively published in the fields of Cold War history, history of historiography, international relations, geopolitics, and security and defence studies a series of books with a particular focus on the Black Sea region, East-Central and South-Eastern Europe, including The Origins and Typology of East European Revolutions, Moldova-Romania: Managing Migration and Combating Trafficking in Human Beings at the EU Eastern Border, Geopolitics, At the Crossroads of Interlocking Subregional Arrangements, and A Phenomenology of Romanian Historical Thinking.
The chapter suggests that the tentative process of establishing a new Bretton Woods encompasses four different, although interdependent tracks: an international monetary system based on a dollar-renminbi-euro triad or, at least, on dollar and renminbi; a right match between the emerging countries’ weight in the global economy and their power and influence in global economic governance structures; an enlargement of the ‘basket of currencies’ on which the Special Drawing Rights is based to all major economies; and a possible resumption of the gold standard. It pinpoints three scenarios as far as the evolution of the international monetary system is concerned and it suggests that the most likely in the medium term is the multipolar scenario
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