On October 11 Thomas L. Friedman, author of widely selling books like The Lexus and the Olive Tree, The World Is Flat and Hot, Flat, and Crowded as well as a NY Times columnist wrote a massively referred and tweeted column by the name Something’s Happening Here, which he started off by: When you see spontaneous social protests [...]
Posts under ‘Global perspective’
Sarkozy is misinterpreting the Internet revolution completely
Mr Sarkozy has now taken the battle of the Internet to the next level of open conflict between governments and the Internet by initiating the e-G8 meeting where he argued: “The universe you represent is not a parallel universe. Nobody should forget that governments are the only legitimate representatives of the will of the people [...]
Why is there a decline of healthy lifestyle?
Today FuturePundit reports about the decline in healthy life style in the US. Investigators from the Department of Family Medicine, Medical University of South Carolina, Charleston compared the results of two large-scale studies of the US population in 1988-1994 and in 2001-2006. In the intervening 18 years, the percentage of adults aged 40-74 years with [...]
What can we learn from Asimov’s Foundation trilogy?
The other weekend I reread Asimov‘s Foundation trilogy, one of the brilliant books that might have influenced me to work within the area of foresight. In these times it might be appropriate to use one of the major SF novels of all times in order to reframe the situation. I quote here from the first [...]
Mumbai attacks – the systems learning perspective
One major strength with humanity is that every time the current system is being threatened it is learning something. Some of us argue that we should be using our relatively recent develop pre-frontal cortex in order to foresee things, but at the same time we know that real collective learning emanate from real experiences which [...]
Timeouts instead of bailouts?
One major challenge with the failing global financial markets is that the amygdala is directly connected to the economic system. This means that individual feelings of billions of people around the globe is directly linked to the global economy. To some extent this have of course been true for a long time, but the increasing [...]
How much does national political governance matter?
Many of you readers know that I am skeptical to to future of traditional hierarchies. I believe the huge change that is happening now (again) is that new communications technology is simply creating another playing field for the basic human capacity to organize and solve problems at hand. A field where the model of traditional [...]
LIFT08: Future and Asia
One of the highlights of LIFT08 was the Asia track. First on stage was Marc Laperrouza who talked about the telecommunication situation in China. To summarize what I thought was most interesting (download PDF of presentation): 59% of the world’s 2,5 billion mobile phone users are in developing countries – it is the first time [...]
What have I changed my mind about?
The Edge have this year an interesting question as it’s Annual Edge question: What have you changed your mind about? Why? I happened to stumble upon Kevin Kelly’s contribution on Technium, his blog. He changed his mind about the possibilities and powers of mass collaboration and uses Wikipedia as an example. I was a bit [...]
