2012 State of the Future
October 24, 2012
“The world is getting richer, healthier, better educated, more peaceful, and better connected, and people are living longer; yet half the world is potentially unstable,” according to Jerome C. Glenn, CEO of The Millennium Project and co-author of the “2012 State of the Future,” an overview of our global situation, problems, solutions, and prospects for the future.
The 16th Annual Edition includes 145 pages and a 10,000 page electronic supplement with more than 1,500 additional pages of detailed current material, and searchable research from the past 16 years. It is available on CD, USB flash drive, or download.
The report is a distillation of research, including tables, graphs, and charts with special chapters on 15 Global Challenges, the State of the Future Index, changing stereotypes about women around the world over the past 50 years and projected next 50 years, future factors affecting cooperatives and businesses, and futures of ontologists.
Among the trends:
- Protesters around the world show a growing unwillingness to tolerate unethical decisionmaking by power elites.
- An increasingly educated and Internet-connected generation is rising up against the abuse of power.
- Food prices are rising, water tables are falling, corruption and organized crime are increasing, environmental viability for our life support is diminishing, debt and economic insecurity are increasing, climate change continues, and the gap between the rich and poor continues to widen dangerously. However, the most recent data from the World Bank shows that the share of world population living in extreme poverty has fallen from 52% in 1981 to about 20% in 2010.
- The world is in a race between implementing ever-increasing ways to improve the human condition and the seemingly ever-increasing complexity and scale of global problems.
The report’s 15 Global Challenges include energy, food, science and technology, ethics, development, water, organized crime, health, decisionmaking, gender relations, demographics, and war and peace.
The briefing is especially critical for senior executives, thought leaders, strategic planners, public policy experts, policy advisors, non-profit organization leaders, teachers/professors of world issues, and anyone interested in a global overview of our prospects for the future.
The approximately 10,000 pages detail the global situation with a range of strategies, analyses, and regional considerations for 15 Global Challenges facing humanity; eleven years of research and analysis for developing a State of the Future Index; several global and regional scenarios; governance-related studies; concepts for building collective intelligence systems; environmental security studies; over 850 annotated scenarios; and various approaches for improving futures research, making it an extraordinary resource and data base for exploring the prospects for humanity.
The Millennium Project was established in 1996 as the first global futures research think tank. It conducts independent futures research via its 46 Nodes around the world that connect global and local perspectives. Nodes are groups of individuals and institutions that pick the brains of their region and feed back the global results. It is supported by UN organizations, multinational corporations, universities, foundations, and the governments of Azerbaijan, Kuwait, South Korea, and the United States.
Comments (25)
by Bri
We will be increasingly using AI to solve these problems. They will expose all the corruption and organized crime. In the beginning they will be subverted and used as tools for corruption, but as they become more autonimous and cross linked, they will illuminate all the riff raff, and bring them to justice. This is starting already. Things like wikkileaks and tools that the police, FBI, and CIA use will become far more effective and pervasive. The more that the world population gets educated, the less likely that they will be radical extremists. The process is underway. It won’t be long till robotic AI will scan everything for signs of bad behavior. People are too easily corrupted.
by Gabriel
Superficially Bri, what you are saying is a good thing….however, that exact line of reasoning, that we will be scanned for “bad behavior” and it will be eliminated, is exactly what other people fear because we will lose ourselves, our liberty, our freedoms (mentally/emotionally speaking) and so on…sort of like Minority Report where criminals are arrested before they even commit the crime — were they really criminals?
Superficially, what you say is good, but it sounds hollow in the long-run and the peace and prosperity that a future society with this technology will be artificial…..how truly peaceful could it possibly be if everytime somebody thinks something supposedly “bad”, that is immediately purged? or perhaps you are punished for even thinking of it?
What’s bigger is, of course, what decides for right and wrong behavior? I’m sorry, but the Law doesn’t decide my own moral code for me — just because something is lawfully decided to be unethical behavior or whatever, doesn’t mean everybody feels that way or it’s even right in the first place.
by GAUSS
As an AI scientist and roboticist, I can honestly say that this would be a bad thing. I’m all for using these technologies to help battle corruption, but mobile (physical) robotic units can easily be hijacked, hacked, or subpoenaed.
What I’m really saying is that I agree with you in principle, but in practice, what big brother wants big brother gets. I’ve faced this in numerous situations. Really the only way for AI or robotics to do any real good for society is if government stays out of the personal data, which is never going to happen. A personal robot is the perfect tool of social control: it’s a constant spy that the people will somewhat trust. In a way, smartphones have already become just that.
Consider it the case that government went too far, and the people can’t wrest power back without a civil war. In such a war, government will do everything and anything to ensure that powerful tools such as robots/AI work for *them*, not the people. Take one look at all this DARPA research going on and ask yourself if you think that’s really meant or terrorists. I got news for ya: not too long from now, it will be true that the second one dissents one is labelled a terrorist. We’re already seeing lots of signs of that, where protesters are painted as radical terrorists and so on. Protester = dissenter = terrorist = enemy of the state.
I reiterate: robotics and AI would only do any good if they remained civilian. Unfortunately, it’s already too late or that.
by eldras
Transhumanists have to organise and put their own people in office. No Republic or empire has ever been reverted from corruption except by dictatorship or mass religion! The first transhumanist politician has been elected in Italy. We can change things, even by investing only in ethical companies.
by Snazster
One more time, the USA is not a democracy. The word is never mentioned in the Constitution. Our founding father’s felt, with good reason, that a democracy would be an even worse form of government than a tyranny. We are a Constitutional Republic. Unfortunately, they did not adequately prepare for the development of the past century that we refer to as “career politicians.” To be fair, the term would have been something of an oxymoron to them as, at least for the most part, they seemed unable to imagine a man willing to neglect his personal business affairs for many decades. Career politicians find the Constitution inconvenient and ignore it a lot, seldom being called to task for it or even to justify why something they are voting on is constitutional. This, of course, causes people to think the USA is a land where the majority is always free to do anything it decides to put to a vote,
by AZryan
A republic is a”type of Democracy”. It’s a representative democracy. The teabagger, neocon, faux-libertarians who keep getting this wrong while thinking they’re teaching everyone else something only they know are deluding themselves. Also, please stop living in 1776 and worshipping the ‘Founding Fathers’. They weren’t Gods. They did’t know about DNA, evolution, the Big Bang, other galaxies, or dinosaurs! Oh, and the right to bear ‘arms’ meant a single shot musket and was before we had a standing Army, Navy, Air Force, Marines, FBI, CIA,Coast Guard, and thought Great Britian might take us back over. Time to move ~250 forward in time religi-regressives.
by Snazster
A republic is a type of democracy?!? Dude, no, just no, it’s not. No one said the founding fathers were gods. In fact, they made lots of mistakes but we are bound to live by their rules until we change them. Ignoring them isn’t a better option. Oh, and George Washington may not have known about our technology but he knew people. His farewell address lays out some advice to us and what would happen if we ignored it. We ignored it and what he warned would happen — did. The man was not perfect but he could freaking see the future. Not familiar with his Farewell Address? Not surprising, most career politicians avoid mention of this document as they don’t like what it says at all, yet denigrating George Washington is still, thankfully, political suicide.
by AZryan
So your aguement is ‘Dude, no, just no due’?? Pathetic.
Jefferson and Madison were from the “Democratic-Republican Party” because of the exact point I made above. Look up the words you use before you use them. You’re using them wrong.
You want to live by the Founders perfect rules? Good luck getting slavery back on the books. Good luck making women and non-property owners 2nd class again. You are the ideal definition of a naive, ignorant regressive.
by z
Where did this notion come from? Its accepted by virtually everyone, these days. Politicians should be made up of doctors, engineers, scientists, as well as lawyers.
by Jerry
Yes I would wholly support a technocracy over any other current form of government. It still has it’s faults, but a “technocracy is the worst form of government, except for all others that have been tried” ;)
by AZryan
It sounds nice to think of Congress being made up of assorted professionals of all stripes, but it’s just not practical. Congress makes laws, so it’s mostly made up of lawyers. It really does make sense that politics became a career like any other profession. Doesn’t matter that the Founders didn’t mean for it to be like that. They didn’t mean for us to go to the Moon or develop nuclear power. Times have MASSIVELY changed.
America was a FAR simpler place with far fewer laws and complications back then. The Department of Education was just ‘find spinsters to teach kids the bible, manners and the alphabet’.
Yes, everyone hates the idea of red tape and gridlock and gov. over-reach, but it’s just not rational to long for most 19th Century ideas like someone getting into politics for a short time in the middle of their entirely different career. Just the facts of long life spans and pressures of modern Capitalism alone make such backwards notions unworkable.
If anything we should push for term limits. Larry Sabato’s book on reforming Congress, Elections, Term Limits, etc is a really good start for such a debate. Too bad it takes an act of Congress to reform Congress.
by Snazster
Yes, term limits are what the founding fathers overlooked or considered unnecessary. Congress types have actually claimed they already have term limits because they can be voted out of office. That’s not even a good enough argument to be considered specious. In fact it’s ridiculous when the reelection rate of incumbents in Congress is higher than in the old Soviet politburo due to runaway gerrymandering (which leads to crippling partisanship as representatives no longer need to worry overly much about compromising) and both parties make common ground to do it because, for career politicians, reelection goes ahead of all other priorities.
by Kevin Haskell
And business people. We ‘clearly’ need highly educated and successful business people to handle how the nation and states manage the money. I might add some philosophers would be nice, as well.
by AZryan
‘W’ Bush was a successful businessman with a MBA from Harvard. Also the most fiscally irresponsible president we may have ever had. Got handed a budget surplus and a 5T debt that had finally stopped growing. Turned it into 11T, gave everyone huge tax cuts and over a decade of 2 wars he didn’t bother to pay for. Then they blame Obama for having to turn the ship around while living under those same conditions. But they can’t seem to name what Obama blew all this money on. Because the only big ticket he bought was the Stimulus which was largely paid back.
Goes to show that being in business does not mean you’re going to run the country well. Running a Nation is not a Corporation. Romeny won’t be able to liquidate the US and walk away with millions for Bain Capitol.
by Cybernettr
Then maybe Obama shouldn’t have gotten elected on the basis of false promises (such as pulling us out of this recession).
by Bri
Read up on W. Bush. He was a failed businessman. As the economy was tanking, he told us the fundamentals of our economy are sound. Look at the Great Depression. It was created by everyone speculating without any real money. It was all on margin. The same thing happened again. The banks lent money to people who couldn’t pay it back. There was all this “shadow” banking going on. No bank new if the other was solvent or not. That’s why they all froze up. They wouldn’t give money to each other, because they didn’t know if the other was going to stay afloat. If we didn’t bail out the banks, all their customers would have lost all their money. The damage to the economy would have made a great depression again. That’s a lot worse than a great recession. Yes this is the worst recession since the great depression. Of course it will take longer to recover from. Forbes magazine stated very clearly that the top one percent has made1.7 trillion dollars. That’s without the tax cuts that the Tepublicans want. If we give them tax cuts, they will make even more money. If they wanted to help the evonomy, they have made more than enough to do so. No amount of tax cuts for the wealthy will make them creat jobs. Corporations are sitting on huge profits. They dont want to invest because they are not interested in helping the average American. Tbey want their profit margins. Corporate profits and U.S. Manufacturing is doing just fine. Its jobs that are not Everyone else has seen their net incomes go down. The average American has what he’d there income get cut by10 to 30%. this is not an accident. The reason they won’t do anything about illegal immigration is because they want cheap labor. If we drop our incomes, we become cheaper labor. If Romney really cared about America, he would keep his money in American banks, not Swiss banks. That’s where you put your money if you want to hide it. He won’t even disclose his finances. He changes his political stance whenever it suits him. If you take the time to follow what he says, it’s easy to see he is a liar. Saying whatever is politically expedient. Obama made some promises that he couldn’t keep. He thought that the Republicans would work with the Democrates. They very openly stated that they wouldn’t. If they helped Obama fix the country, Obama would get reelected. That’s not good for them. Obama tried to make the banks clean up their act. He wanted some of the old regulations that were put I. Place after the Great Depression. That’s not good for the one percent. That’s good for the people who want to borrow money, so they can be wealthy too. I don’t think anything says it better than the nonpartisan report on tax breaks. The republicans had it silenced because it showed that giving tax break to the rich didn’t creat more jobs, they just got richer. I really don’t know why I bother talking about this stuff. It’s do easy to see, but few do. It’s like that Joe the plumber character. The one that spoke up at Obamas call for an increase of taxes starting at 250,000 dollars of income. For it to have affected him, he would have had to be making OVER $ 5,000 a week. He was only an assistant plumber. It was such a farce. It’s as if nobody bothers to figure out the true. Romney and Ryan follow Ayan Rands philosophy. The average person should just get out of their way and let them crush the average American, so they can fill their Seiss bank accounts. Obama is just as bad in my eyes cause he’s stupid enough to think that the Republicans would work for the average American, and that the Democrates could actually do something about it. We don’t have a real democracy. We have an oligarchy!
by A4i
The human population in nonagricultural areas of the world increases. That is good for Nevada, where you can get air-conditioning and swimming pool in the house , but certain area of Africa and Asia are not Las Vegas type of human habitat. So they depend on cheap agricultural overstock from Europe and US, often supplied as aid. When that aid stops, or population expands beyond aid supply channel capabilities,
scarcity induced war begins. So our Europe and US aid for the third world countries produces overpopulation in areas, where local agriculture can’t sustain that, As a result, war for scarce resources starts.
by Mr. Kirk
To expand on these ideas, read the novel “Ishmael” by Daniel Quinn.
by AZryan
Las Vegas is actually not so different a natural habitat than say central Africa. If A/C, and other technology are part of it, then anywhere can be just about anything. Africa simply doesn’t have the technology to handle the population. The biggest crime here is the assorted churches that try to block birth control there. They need educated women treated with equality and rational nation building planning.
by Jerome Glenn
The Club of Rome looked at the world in limits to growth, but it did it with a small team from the United States. We do our work with 46 Nodes around the world (including both Iran and Israel), with several thousand people from UN systems, governments, corps, universities, NGOs, and independent consultants – that is what is meant by globalized..
And sure, Amara is a genius who can read all that! But you can get the very distilled version – executive summary at: http://www.millennium-project.org/millennium/2012SOF.html
by Kevin Haskell
Yeah, yeah. Look, there’s no room for big religion, money, or politics in science. The Club of Rome has failed in its mission of industrial and technological stagnation. It would be nice to see all of these people get jobs that promote Transhumanist technology and Singularitarian technology. It would be a great help if the people in the U.N., the IPCC, etc. would ‘promote’ human progress in technology rather than roll it back.
Green is dead. Long live Man.
http://teapartyorg.ning.com/profiles/blog/show?id=4301673%3ABlogPost%3A1058940&xgs=1&xg_source=msg_share_post
by Frank Lindemann
“The Millennium Project was established in 1996 as the first global futures research think tank….”
What about the Club of Rome (formed 1968) who published The Limits to Growth?, or Leontief’s work with the UN (published as The Future of the World Economy in the late 70′s)? I think these qualify.
by Jerome Glenn
In addition to the Club of Rome comment I gave earlier, the Leontief work qualifies as global futures research, as does the Club of Rome, but not as a globalized on-going participatory think thank with diverse futurists around the world.
by Gorden Russell
“The 16th Annual Edition includes 145 pages and a 10,000 page electronic supplement with more than 1,500 additional pages…”
Dear Amara, please be sure to read all these pages and let us know what they say…
by GatorALLin
..so if the trends the list for #1 and #2 are correct…. then instead of invading countries and sending in troops, risking lives, killing people with our military, maybe it is a more effective plan just to push democracy with putting up cell towers and passing out free smart phones. Interesting that sharing good ideas faster/better is on track with a singularity, but could also be good for a true democracy also in countries that have long been abused by corruption and other political abuses. Sounds like we are moving toward a Borg way of becoming interconnected and improving communication to self organize and improve how we solve problems with crowd sourcing/organizing like efforts.