In John Petersen’s book, “A Vision for 2012, Planning for Extraordinary Change”, John discusses many pressing issues and on page 90 he summarizes the most pressing issues and their impacts. Check these out below and buy his book to learn more:
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And a few of the many recommendations for preparing for the future:
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Peter Schwartz is a cofounder and chairman of Global Business Network, a Monitor Group Company. GBN is the world’s foremost consultancy in scenario thinking, strategic conversation, and futures research. Peter is an internationally renowned futurist, business strategist and Founder of GBN. He is one of the world’s leading practitioners of scenario planning, working with corporations, governments and institutions to create alternative perspectives of the future and develop robust strategies for a changing and uncertain world.
Before founding GBN in 1987, Peter headed scenario planning for the Royal Dutch/Shell Group of Companies in London and directed the Strategic Environment Center at SRI International.
Schwartz has written several books, on a variety of future-oriented topics. His first book, The Art of the Long View (Doubleday, 1991) is considered by many to be the seminal publication on scenario planning, and is used as a textbook by many business schools. Inevitable Surprises (Gotham, 2003) is a look at the forces at play in today’s world, and how they will continue to affect the world. He also wrote The Long Boom (Perseus, 1999) with co-authors Peter Leyden and Joel Hyatt, which is a book about the future of the global economy. His book When Good Companies Do Bad Things (Wiley, 1999), is an argument for corporate responsibility in an age of corruption. China’s Futures (Jossey-Bass, 2001), is a vision of several different potential futures for China. He also co-authored the Pentagon‘s An Abrupt Climate Change Scenario and Its Implications for United States National Security. He publishes and lectures widely and served as a script consultant on the films “Minority Report,” “Deep Impact,” “Sneakers,” and “War Games.”
This image shows the changing rate of mass in mountain glaciers on the Gulf of Alaska.
John L. Petersen, President and founder of The Arlington Institute, is considered by many to be one of the most informed futurists in the world.
He is the leading futurist who writes and thinks about high impact surprises–wild cards–that are global in scope, potentially disruptive, and intrinsically out of control.
In 1989 Petersen founded The Arlington Institute (TAI), a non-profit, future-oriented research institute. Arlington operates on the premise that effective thinking about the future is impossible without casting a very wide net. The think tank serves as a global agent for change by developing new concepts, processes and tools for anticipating the future and translating that knowledge into better present-day decisions. Using advanced information technology, a core group of bright thinkers and an international network of exceptionally curious people along with gaming events and simulations, modeling, scenario building, polling and analysis, Arlington helps equip leaders from many disciplines with tools and perspectives on probable futures.
Mr. Petersen’s government and political experience include stints at the National War College, the Institute for National Security Studies, the Office of the Secretary of Defense, and the National Security Council staff at the White House. He was a naval flight officer in the U.S. Navy and Navy Reserve and is a decorated verteran of both the Vietnam and Persian Gulf wars. He has served in senior positions for a number of presidential political campaigns and was an elected delegate to the Democratic National Convention in 1984.
John has a very nice video that overviews what his Institute is about:
See also: Pressing Issues & Impacts and Values & Perspectives for the Future
Ray Kurzweil is one of the luminaries who we see as a credible source of information. Ray has been described as “the restless genius” by the Wall Street Journal, and “the ultimate thinking machine” by Forbes. Inc. magazine ranked him #8 among entrepreneurs in the United States, calling him the “rightful heir to Thomas Edison,” and PBS included Ray as one of 16 “revolutionaries who made America,” along with other inventors of the past two centuries.
As one of the leading inventors of our time, Ray has worked in such areas as music synthesis, speech and character recognition, reading technology, virtual reality and cybernetic art. All of these pioneering technologies continue today as market leaders. Ray was the principal developer of the first omni-font optical character recognition, the first print-to-speech reading machine for the blind, the first CCD flat-bed scanner, the first text-to-speech synthesizer, the first music synthesizer capable of recreating the grand piano and other orchestral instruments, and the first commercially marketed large-vocabulary speech recognition. Ray’s web site Kurzweil AI.net has over one million readers.
Among Ray’s many honors, he is the recipient of the $500,000 MIT-Lemelson Prize, the world’s largest for innovation. In 1999, he received the National Medal of Technology, the nation’s highest honor in technology, from President Clinton in a White House ceremony. And in 2002, he was inducted into the National Inventor’s Hall of Fame , established by the US Patent Office . He has received twelve honorary Doctorates and honors from three U.S. presidents.
Ray has written six books, four of which have been national best sellers. The Age of Spiritual Machines has been translated into 9 languages and was the #1 best selling book on Amazon in science. Ray’s latest book, The Singularity is Near, was a New York Times best seller, and has been the #1 book on Amazon in both science and philosophy. His website, KurzweilAI.net, has over one million readers.
The “Singularity” is a mind-opening read. We believe this is a must read for anyone wanting to not only know about what the future might hold but to expand one’s thinking to be mentally, emotionally, and physically “ready” for the incredible changes that may/will come.
At the onset of the twenty-first century, humanity stands on the verge of the most transforming and the most thrilling period in its history. It will be an era in which the very nature of what it means to be human will be both enriched and challenged, as our species breaks the shackles of its genetic legacy and achieves inconceivable heights of intelligence, material progress, and longevity.
For over three decades, the great inventor and futurist Ray Kurzweil has been one of the most respected and provocative advocates of the role of technology in our future. In his classic The Age of Spiritual Machines, he presented the daring argument that with the ever-accelerating rate of technological change, computers would rival the full range of human intelligence at its best. Now, in The Singularity Is Near, he examines the next step in this inexorable evolutionary process: the union of human and machine, in which the knowledge and skills embedded in our brains will be combined with the vastly greater capacity, speed, and knowledge-sharing ability of our own creations.
That merging is the essence of the Singularity, an era in which our intelligence will become increasingly nonbiological and trillions of times more powerful than it is today—the dawning of a new civilization that will enable us to transcend our biological limitations and amplify our creativity. In this new world, there will be no clear distinction between human and machine, real reality and virtual reality. We will be able to assume different bodies and take on a range of personae at will. In practical terms, human aging and illness will be reversed; pollution will be stopped; world hunger and poverty will be solved. Nanotechnology will make it possible to create virtually any physical product using inexpensive information processes and will ultimately turn even death into a soluble problem.
While the social and philosophical ramifications of these changes will be profound, and the threats they pose considerable, The Singularity Is Near maintains a radically optimistic view of the future course of human development. As such, it offers a view of the coming age that is both a dramatic culmination of centuries of technological ingenuity and a genuinely inspiring vision of our ultimate destiny.
A Video Where Ray Explains the Singularity:
And yet another:
See our post regarding our defintion of crediblility.
Sterling Insights looks to this team of
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) is the leading international body for the assessment of climate change. It was established by the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) and the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) to provide the world with a clear scientific view on the current state of knowledge in climate change and its potential environmental and socio-economic impacts.
The main activity of the IPCC is to provide at regular intervals Assessment Reports of the state of knowledge on climate change. The latest one is “Climate Change 2007“, the IPCC Fourth Assessment Report. The IPCC produces also Special Reports; Methodology Reports; Technical Papers; and Supporting Material, often in response to requests from the Conference of the Parties to the UNFCCC, or from other environmental Conventions.
Here is the latest version of the climate change report:
Here is an excerpt of an article by Sarah Birch where she analyzes the value of the IPCC report:
“To those, however, who make it their business to be informed consumers of the science and policy surrounding the climate change issue, there are a number of criticisms of the IPCC that must be considered. First, it has been said that the IPCC is a highly selective body, choosing for participation only those scientists who fall in line with the overarching message, which is pre-determined. While this is partially true (it is common for authors who have participated in past reports to be invited to participate in future reports, thereby ensuring a certain consistency of message), it must be remembered that the output of the IPCC is widely circulated to critics and supporters alike during four excruciatingly drawn-out rounds of review. This includes hundreds of experts in the fields of atmospheric physics, ecology, hazards management, epidemiology, economics, political science and engineering (to name but a few), as well as members of think-tanks, governments, lobby organizations, activist groups, and Non-Governmental Organizations. No other scientific publication can claim to encircle such a broad range of perspectives. While clearly the opinions of these various parties cannot be accepted en masse, each and every comment is considered in detail by the author teams. Each suggested publication is reviewed, each new idea debated, and each fact checked. I’m exhausted just thinking about the amount of effort.
Despite this excessively thorough procedure, the lovingly and painstakingly prepared documents remain the whipping-boy of a host of scientific critics. Of course I wouldn’t dare imply that some of these critics are simply petulant children who haven’t been asked to play, or that, in claiming that the participating scientists are only trying to secure funds for their personal research agendas, some critics are clawing for the same goody-basket of funding dollars themselves. Indeed, it is carefully considered and analytical criticism that forms the foundation and rigour of science itself, so these vocal opponents must not be silenced. We must be vigilant, however, for in the broader (often rather fatigued) public consciousness, even a whisper of impropriety surrounding a document or organization that calls for uncomfortable levels of change on the part of governments, industry, and individuals is enough to cause us to change the channel and forget the message.
So, despite the output of the IPCC being a highly politicized and (fairly or unfairly) controversial beast, we must use the Fourth Assessment Report as a tool with which we can capture the current climate fanaticism. This unprecedented level of public awareness may be exactly what is needed to pass laws and formulate policies that are more forward-thinking than ever before in the short history of industrial capitalist economies. We have the opportunity to prove to our descendents that we are neither apathetic nor lacking in empathy and foresight, and that our vast stores of ingenuity can be used to solve the problems that our ingenuity created in the first place. Carbon neutrality, after all, is not a pipe dream but a concrete reality that can be achieved using tools and technologies already in circulation. Furthermore, the seeds of dissatisfaction with an existence based solely on consumption have long since been sowed, and climate change may provide an unparalleled opportunity to fundamentally restructure the stories that we tell about our culture. In the absence of alternatives to scientific collaboratives on the scale of the IPCC, we must use what tools we have to alter the story of the 20th and 21st centuries from one of degradation, consumption, poverty, waste and violence to one of innovation, foresight, equity, and peace.”
Click here to read Sarah’s full assessment of the IPCC:
