Living the metamorphosis – from an industrial society to whatever is emerging…
About the future in a global perspective
When we have been so enormously successful in analyzing the virus and developing a vaccine during 2020, why do we still struggle with the pandemic? The answer is politics and our current social organization. In the FT article Lessons from a year of Covid Yuval Harari argues that the increased technical capabilities to master … Continue reading Does technical development turn everything into politics?
In the West we have for some time been aware that we live in a world of unsustainable growth and excessive consumption. When the resources are limited it will come to a point where it stresses the whole system. And we don’t have to be rocket scientists to see that the systems around us are … Continue reading Are we now approaching THE global reset?
Only days before(!) Donald Trump is inaugurated as POTUS the US Nation Intelligence Council released a public report on the future which underlines their views of the uncertainties which will shape the next 20 years. The timing of the release of an open intelligence report is of course a whole discussion in itself. What caught my eye … Continue reading National Intelligence Council futures report: Paradox of Progress
On October 11, 02011 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 … Continue reading Welcome to the transition society
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 … Continue reading Why is there a decline of healthy lifestyle?
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 to reframe the situation. I quote here from the first chapter when … Continue reading What can we learn from Asimov’s Foundation trilogy?
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 … Continue reading Mumbai attacks – the systems learning perspective
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 … Continue reading Timeouts instead of bailouts?
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 … Continue reading How much does national political governance matter?
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 … Continue reading LIFT08: Future and Asia