Notes
Slide Show
Outline
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Just 25 years ago, there was no…
  • Internet, World Wide Web, PCs, or mobile phones
  • European Union, WTO, ICC, or NATO in Eastern Europe
  • Talk of globalization, genetically modified food, stem cells
  • AIDS
  • Asymmetrical warfare, and
  • … and most believed that a nuclear WW III
    would have destroyed the world by now
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What about the next 15 years
  • IQ becomes the competitive advantage in the global knowledge economy (personalized food, genetic engineering, computer enhanced learning)
  • India and China are the axes of the global economy and produce far more millionaires than you are willing to believe today
  • Life Extension begins to look like a realistic option while the aging population increases economic concerns
  • Genetic engineering and AI creates new life forms that achieve awareness and can evolve
  • A global brain emerges from Internet evolving later into 
    Conscious-Technology
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Simplification of History
and an Alternative Future
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Whither Europe?
  • Expanding tourist Mecca living off its past
    • with increasing unemployment
    • aging society with crushing medical costs
    • with imported labor maintaining the status quo?
  • Or can its aging population create its own employment via web-based businesses from teaching to tour guides?
  • Or will it rise to the occasion and reinvent itself?
  • The answer could be found in how it is responding to the 15 Global Challenges facing humanity today
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Millennium Project
Global Challenges Identification & Assessment
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Millennium Project Nodes...
are groups of individuals and institutions that connect global and local views in:
    • Nodes identify participants, translate questionnaires and reports, and conduct interviews, special research, workshops, symposiums, and advanced training.
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1. Sustainable Development for All
  • 2050 expect 3 billion more people; Economic growth accelerates; About 5-7 billion of the 9 billion will be urban; Serious urban systems ecology, nanotech, and new electric production and distributions system seem vital
  • European knowledge of green technologies, policies, and ethics should be marketed to the world.
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2. Sufficient clean water without
    conflict
  • Water tables falling on all continents
  • 40% of humanity on international watersheds
  • 70% water for agriculture
  • New knowledge needed for
      • filters and membranes for large-scale water treatment
      • agricultural efficiencies
      • Drought-and salt-tolerant plants
      • Desalinization
      • Household sanitation
      • Water storage
      • massive tree planting
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3. Population growth and
    resources be brought into balance
  • Poverty-Environmental Migration to Europe increases
  • By 2100 Europe’s population could be half of that of 2000. (362 million down from 728 million)
  • Old Age Percent doubles 2050 (30% up from 15%)
  • Knowledge economy jobs for older people should a HUGH industry for Europe.
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4. Genuine democracy…
    emerging from authoritarian regimes
  • European knowledge from colonial times to address failed states or sections within states?
  • The increasing ability to manipulate information and information warfare threatens the future of democracy
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5. Policymaking more sensitive to
    global long-term perspectives
  • Knowledge economy requires the ability to monitor and anticipate future global change
  • This sensitivity and ability can be automated into software
  • EuroSOFI   - European State of the Future         Index
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6. Global IT working for everyone
  • Internet is the self-organizing mechanism for the global brain and the emerging nervous system for conscious-technology by both design and self-organization
  • China:  1 in cell phones, 2 in Internet users; gap is closing
  • Knowledge economy Tele-education, Tele-nations Tele-government, Tele-volunteers, Tele-medicine, Tele-everything (if it isn’t tele - it will be tele-terminated)
  • Meme epidemics (cultural implications) (seek markets not jobs)
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7.Ethical market economies reducing the rich-poor gap
  • Top 5% bottom 5% ratio 6-1 in 1980; now over 200-1
  • Internet is re-distributing the means of production
  • Elderly Europeans create self-employment – Memes needed to change from employment model to self-employment
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8. The threat of new and  reemerging diseases, and immune micro-organisms reduced
  • Europe a leader in Pharmaceuticals – a growth industry.
  •  World’s fast growth AIDS in Eastern Europe
  • Gene sequencing leading to specific new drugs is very fast today (SARS), but urban concentrations, travel, and terrorism it may still require an alternative approach – rapid, short-term boost of the immune system.
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9. Capacity to decide improved
  • Democratization and interactive media increase the number of people involved in decisionmaking, and the acceleration of change increases uncertainty, which reduces our capacity to decide and set priorities.
  • Decision support software to identify and improve the improvement system, training in decisionmaking, cognitive science, prioritization, synergies, self-organization, knowledge visualization, mapping, and automated decisionmaking.
  • TransInstitutions – part government, corporation, NGO, international organization, and university – for each of these 15 Global Challenges or any challenge
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Future Businesses may become involved with TransInstitutions
  • receives its funds from at least three of the following categories but not a majority from anyone: governments, for-profit corporations, non-profit organizations, UN or other international organizations, foundations, and/or individuals
  • the persons who compose its board of directors and associated employees and consultants must come form all of these institutional categories but not a majority of anyone
  • the products, services, and/or other outputs must be purchased or received by all of these categories, but not by a majority
    of anyone.  This could be an extension of non-profit or
    profit corporate law of a government.
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10. Ethnic conflicts, terrorism, weapons of mass destruction
  • African crime rate in Paris, Islamists threats in Holland, Pakistani immigrants in England, stateless Gypsies, and organized crime throughout Europe.
  • Future ICT, marketing, competitive intelligence, infor-warfare, info-terrorism, and organized crime may be inter-linking – How will people know what to trust?  Knowledge Economy Pollution
  • SIMAD (Single Individuals Massively Destructive)
  • Linkage of Education, health, and security systems
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11. Changing status of women
 helping to improve the human
 condition
  • Internet, knowledge economy increases women’s access to cash/political economy, which increase general welfare, especially of children
  • Yet, male attacks on women 15-44 cause more death and disability than wars; Amnesty International estimates that 33% of women worldwide have been attacked by partners
  • Media, Memes power to change male culture
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12. Transnational organized
 crime
  • About € 2,000,000,000,000.00 (€ 2 trillion)
  • Next? Governments’ decisions bought and sold like drugs; Elderly on Internet exploited.
  • Could Europe initiate a new a new global system? Implement Palermo Treaty with a new mechanism that upgrades check transfer software, prioritizes collaborative enforcement, and deputizes courts
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13. Growing energy demand met safely and efficiently
  • Global Electricity demand will double, and maybe triple in the next 50 years; advances in nanotech and biotech will greatly improve efficiencies, but more is needed.
  • A world energy organization to pool talent and money from business, government, and universities for high risk, high payoff R&D for large-scale systems such as Carbon Sequestration and Solar Power Satellites
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14. S&T Breakthroughs accelerated
to improve the human condition
  • S&T progresses too fast to regulate, yet its potential dangers are too big not to regulate on a global scale
  • International Science & Technology Organization could begin as an information system


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15. Global Ethics and
Global Decisions
  • Global ethics are emerging via ISOs, UN Treaties, the Olympics, NGOs, and the media
  • To be a counter weight to the US and China/India, Europe could lead the global ethics discussions:
    • What is the ethical way to intervene in the affairs of a country that is significantly endangering its or other people?
    • Do we have the right to alter our genetic germ line so that future generations cannot inherit the potential for genetically related diseases or disabilities?
    • Do we have the right to genetically change ourselves and future generations into new species?
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"The Millennium Project"
  • The Millennium Project


  • WWW.STATEOFTHEFUTURE.ORG


  • Jglenn@igc.org