Opening session shoots off
Dancing from a top of the funnel, futurist Erik Petersen frames the big question: will the world in 2025 be better- that is, with LESS disease, despair, poverty, injustice, conflict, or should we prepare for a world that is more dangerous? He outlined the major trends that are shaping earth to 2025, and married his broad sweep at what’s next with a plea that we attempt to repair the pervasively flawed economic and governance structures which result in devastating “short-termism”, making our “leaders” more like “managers”, and our “strategy” more like “tactics”.
Erik’s Top 7
Population:
o We will be 8BN strong in 2025, up from 6.5 BN now.
o The distribution of the population around the world will shift in ways that make the impact more significant than the absolute numbers.
o The distribution by age will foundationally shift.
Strategic Resources:
o Need to double our Food and Water production by 2025, in a way that preserves usable land and does not degrade it.
o At the current pace, with no alternative energy, China will be importing 10million barrels of oil per day- as much as the US, in 20 years.
Technology:
o Computation, Biotech and genomics, and nanotech force foundational shifts.
o Disparities must condense (today, a baby girl born in Japan has a 50% likelihood of seeing the year 2100, in Afghanistan, that baby girl would have a 1 in 4 chance of dying before she was 5).
Information:
o Death of distance.
o Knowledge proficiency.
o Critical trends in accessing, shaping and leveraging information.
Economics:
o Today, the world’s richest 225 individuals have the same amount of wealth as the world’s poorest 2.7 BILLION people! (this income stratification at the very top is not generally reflected in broader sigma analytics)
o Integrated economics will continue to strengthen.
Governance:
o Of the TOP 50 economies in the world, 15 are corporations.
o The 22nd largest economy in the world is WalMart.
Governance in an interconnected world requires innovation.
o Dynamic coalitions must emerge
o Atomization, dispersion, fragmentation do not happy governments make.
Robert Wright:
History is directional, and is net positive.
It tends to complexity and interconnectedness.
Zero sum, or win lose games are not the model in most of the world.
Non Zero Sum Games- that is, all ships rise and fall with the ocean- win win or win lose- is actually the model…in an increasingly interconnected world, the awareness of interconnectedness will drive people to act in new ways (“transatlantic business class morality”). And those new ways, also directional, must align with absolute morality, in the direction of the positive.
Anecdote on moral progression: 2,500 years ago, citizens of a particular city-state saw themselves as human, and citizens of other city states as sub human. The next moral evolution was to see other Greeks as also human, but not, say, Persians. Now, most people believe that any human regardless of religion, race, etc, is fully human (I might beg to differ that in certain cultures that applies to women yet)- this is absolute morality trending positive over time.
The current threats to our well being- growing lethality of hatred, and the “death spiral of negativity” which is action, overreaction, counter action, hatred, action….etc.require a major round of moral progress in the world, particularly in places where the grassroots cannot readily see the interconnectedness, and so CANNOT ACT intelligently in the pursuit of their own self interest, and frankly, neither can we as the “west”,
Wright suggests that there is a mandate here to take some kind of moral review of one’s own existence- why are we hated, in an effort to product empathy, in an effort to product change, in an effort to interrupt the cycle of hatred.
More coming....
Erik’s Top 7
Population:
o We will be 8BN strong in 2025, up from 6.5 BN now.
o The distribution of the population around the world will shift in ways that make the impact more significant than the absolute numbers.
o The distribution by age will foundationally shift.
Strategic Resources:
o Need to double our Food and Water production by 2025, in a way that preserves usable land and does not degrade it.
o At the current pace, with no alternative energy, China will be importing 10million barrels of oil per day- as much as the US, in 20 years.
Technology:
o Computation, Biotech and genomics, and nanotech force foundational shifts.
o Disparities must condense (today, a baby girl born in Japan has a 50% likelihood of seeing the year 2100, in Afghanistan, that baby girl would have a 1 in 4 chance of dying before she was 5).
Information:
o Death of distance.
o Knowledge proficiency.
o Critical trends in accessing, shaping and leveraging information.
Economics:
o Today, the world’s richest 225 individuals have the same amount of wealth as the world’s poorest 2.7 BILLION people! (this income stratification at the very top is not generally reflected in broader sigma analytics)
o Integrated economics will continue to strengthen.
Governance:
o Of the TOP 50 economies in the world, 15 are corporations.
o The 22nd largest economy in the world is WalMart.
Governance in an interconnected world requires innovation.
o Dynamic coalitions must emerge
o Atomization, dispersion, fragmentation do not happy governments make.
Robert Wright:
History is directional, and is net positive.
It tends to complexity and interconnectedness.
Zero sum, or win lose games are not the model in most of the world.
Non Zero Sum Games- that is, all ships rise and fall with the ocean- win win or win lose- is actually the model…in an increasingly interconnected world, the awareness of interconnectedness will drive people to act in new ways (“transatlantic business class morality”). And those new ways, also directional, must align with absolute morality, in the direction of the positive.
Anecdote on moral progression: 2,500 years ago, citizens of a particular city-state saw themselves as human, and citizens of other city states as sub human. The next moral evolution was to see other Greeks as also human, but not, say, Persians. Now, most people believe that any human regardless of religion, race, etc, is fully human (I might beg to differ that in certain cultures that applies to women yet)- this is absolute morality trending positive over time.
The current threats to our well being- growing lethality of hatred, and the “death spiral of negativity” which is action, overreaction, counter action, hatred, action….etc.require a major round of moral progress in the world, particularly in places where the grassroots cannot readily see the interconnectedness, and so CANNOT ACT intelligently in the pursuit of their own self interest, and frankly, neither can we as the “west”,
Wright suggests that there is a mandate here to take some kind of moral review of one’s own existence- why are we hated, in an effort to product empathy, in an effort to product change, in an effort to interrupt the cycle of hatred.
More coming....
posted by Christine at 3:27 PM
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