The convergence of two brutal triggers affecting the social fabric have provided the catalyst for the acceleration of the process of globalisation to a new level - Hyper-Globalization. This effectively marks the emergence of cooperation and synchronization of the major practices and protocols for nations on a grand scale.
It will involve the intermeshing of not just trade, but decision-making on all critical issues- social norms, conflict resolution, environmental protocols etc- including the management of energy, food, water and air. It will also require the rapid creation and strengthening of common frameworks for managing commerce, education, science, technology, legal, financial, health, computing, communication and engineering processes on a world-wide scale.
The first trigger- Global Warming- now requires the synchronized efforts of all nations to fend off the biggest catastrophe likely to befall the inhabitants of any planet- a runaway extreme climate- threatening to destroy the ecosystems, environment, habitats and social networks of many life-forms.
Of course our earth has been through many natural catastrophic cycles in the past- from freezing to sauna weather conditions. The last ice age ended 14,000 years ago, having caused serious dislocation to life on the planet, including our own species, which came precariously close to annihilation. But soon after, our modern civilization got off to a flying start with the gift of an unimaginably rich natural environment waiting to be exploited. And exploit it we did.
In addition there have been at least five previous major life extinctions over the past 540 million years- the last causing the demise of dinosaurs 65 million years ago; triggered by mega volcanic, meteorite, plate tectonic and weather events. But each time life effectively regrouped after its near-demise and powered on, resulting 200,000 years ago in the evolution of modern humans.
The difference of course between those previous extinction events and our current pending apocalypse was that they all occurred when there were no human species around to feel the effects. But this time it’s different, with a population of 6.5 billion and rising. Now the sixth mega-annihilation event is on us, with the likelihood that if not averted in time, billions of humans and hundreds of thousands of plant and animal species will disappear.
Only cooperation on a global scale to reduce high levels of carbon emissions can avert this scenario.
The second catastrophe likely to trigger hyper-globalization has been the current collapse of the world’s financial and economic systems. After a number of false and fragmented starts, the framework for a global solution has been signed and sealed by the G20- the group of the 20 largest nations in terms of GNP, accounting for 85% of world trade.
Over the last two years the crisis has deepened, with frantic efforts by individual countries to avoid the worst of the financial tsunami engulfing them, by pumping trillions of dollars into the world’s crippled financial institutions, while at the same time shoring up jobs through massive infrastructure and subsidy programs.
Finally it dawned on the largest players – the US, EU, China and India, that the only chance for redemption was global cooperative action. This time around, solving the effects of a lethal firestorm on a national or regional basis, by building currency and trade firewalls, was just not going to work.
The Global Framework arrived at by the G20, includes the following five components-
Recapitalise and repair the financial system to restore lending
Strengthen financial regulation to re-build trust
Fund and reform international financial institutions to provide better global support
Promote global trade and investment, avoiding protectionism
Build a recovery that is inclusive, green and sustainable
Each of these elements demands globalized action, revolving around two major institutions- The International Monetary Fund and Financial stability Board.
Financial resources available to the IMF for lending will be increased to $750 billion and Special Drawing Rights- SDRs to $250 billion.
The FSB will collaborate with the IMF to provide early warnings of excessive financial risk and the actions needed to address them, as well as extending regulation and oversight to all major financial institutions instruments and markets, including hedge funds. It will also establish a single set of high quality global accounting standards.
But this hastily prepared agenda may not be enough to save the financial and economic infrastructure and may require a complete scientific rethink of the forces shaping markets and capitalism as well as the basis of traditional economic theory in general. With some notable exceptions such as China and South East Asian economies, Australia, Brazil and Germany, most of the rest of the world is still at risk two years later of slipping back into negative growth.
The combination of global warming threatening the planet’s natural environment and the massive financial collapse affecting our economic and institutional environment, has created a perfect apocalyptic storm.
All future global policies and processes will be both constrained and driven by these two potentially terminal shocks to human civilization.
On the upside however, solutions to both will ensure future massive benefits for our 21st century civilization through cooperation and globalization supported by an exponential increase in knowledge and innovation.
Neither solution can be allowed to fail.
Sunday, October 3, 2010
Wednesday, September 22, 2010
The Future of Economics
The recent failure of classical economics to predict and manage the catastrophic failure of the world’s financial system has triggered a re-evaluation of the whole basis of current economic theory, which has been applied to sustain capitalism for the last 100 years. .
By the end of the 20th century traditional economics was dominated by the classical paradigm based on notions of rational consumers making rational choices in a simple supply/demand world of finite resources, with prices constrained by decreasing returns; all driving the economy to an optimal equilibrium point.
Twentieth century economists had finally realised their dream of creating a rational, rigorous and well-defined mathematical model for describing the workings of the global economy. This standard model has been applied by business leaders, finance ministers, central bankers and presidential advisers ever since.
Up until recently classical economic theory has appeared to work adequately by a process of trial and error. In times of growth people are generally optimistic and the theory describes reality reasonably well. But in extreme circumstances panic quickly spreads and the theory fails spectacularly, amplified by the performance of the quantitative risk algorithms beloved by hi-tech stock market traders.
Unfortunately such a clockwork model has proved over the last four decades to be seriously out of synch with reality, as global markets have been roiled by a series of disastrous credit, market, liquidity and commodity crises. The predictions of the standard model have failed to match real world outcomes, generated in succession by the Savings and Loan, Asian, Mexican, Dotcom and now GFC bubble disasters.
In this latest incarnation of excess greed debacles, high risk mortgage loans were repackaged many times over into opaque risk financial instruments, such as Collateralised Debt Obligations or CDOs, which ended up through an unregulated banking system in the portfolios of nearly every bank and financial institution around the world. Because of lack of controls, members of the shadow system such as hedge funds and merchant banks borrowed scores of times their own worth in cash. When the CDOs finally failed, the losses rippled through the world economy. The banks stopped lending, leading to further business failures and investors were then forced to sell previously sound stocks causing a stock market crash.
But this crash was far more serious- perhaps even more so than the Great Depression, as it could be contained within borders as easily or so simply solved by pump priming mass lending and job creation programs. Now we’ve seen the biggest banks, car manufacturers, miners, energy suppliers and national economies toppling like dominoes around the world, under trillions of dollars of debt.
The current global interventions have now staunched the haemorrhaging but not cured the disease.
The stronger economies of China and south east Asia, Brazil and Germany, less affected by the carnage, have bounced back. But the European economy is still fragile, with Greece, Spain and Portugal and other smaller nations struggling to contain debt; while the recent G20 summit in Toronto failed to enforce the rigorous regulation and improved economic governance previously mandated. The US recovery is also weak, with the latest OECD report predicting that the US employment rate will not fall to pre-recession levels before 2013.
In fact a number of interdisciplinary thinkers, starting in the seventies, began to question the credibility of the entire basis of the classical economic model, likening it to a gigantic academic think tank experiment rather than a serious science. And it gradually began to dawn on this group that at a number of the key premises or axioms underpinning the existing model were seriously flawed.
As mentioned, the first is the assumption that humans are rational players in the great game of market roulette. They are not. Behavioural scientists have shown that while people are very good at recognising useful patterns and interpreting ambiguous or incomplete information in their decision-making, they are very poor when it comes to performing complex logical analysis, preferring to follow market leaders or flock according to the latest fashion. This can further amplify distorting trends.
The new theories of behavioural finance argue that during a bubble the rate of buying and selling can become manic, resulting in irrational decisions. Making money actually stimulates investor’s brain reward circuitry, causing them to ignore risk- increasing the difficulty of valuing stocks accurately.
But perhaps the most critically flawed assumption is that an economic system always reaches an ideal equilibrium of its own accord. In other words, the market is capable of benign self-regulation- automatically allocating resources and controlling excesses in an optimum way, best effected with minimum outside interference.
Since the nineteenth century the fundamental principle underpinning economics has therefore been based on the mythology that the economy is a system that moves from one equilibrium point to another, driven by shocks from external disruptions – whether technological, political, financial or cultural- but always eventually coming to rest in a natural equilibrium state.
The new emerging evolutionary paradigm however postulates that economies and markets, as well as the web, enterprises and the human brain, are all forms of complex systems in which agents dynamically interact, process information and adapt their behaviour to a constantly changing environment; never reaching a final stable equilibrium or goal.
In biological evolution, the natural environment selects those systems that are best able to adapt to its infinite variation. In economic evolution, the market is a combination of financial, logistical, cultural, organisational and government regulatory elements, which adapt to and in turn influence a constantly changing ecological, social and business environment.
In essence, economic and financial systems have been fundamentally misclassified. They are not perfect self-regulating systems. They are enormously complex adaptive networks, with topologies that include decision hubs, relationship connections and feedback loops linking multi-agent groups which interact dynamically in response to changes in their environment; not merely through simplified price setting mechanisms, tax and interest rate cuts, liquidity injections or job creation programs. They must be understood and managed at a far deeper level.
Modern evolutionary theorists believe that evolution is a universal phenomenon
and that both economic and biological systems are subclasses of a more general and universal class of evolutionary systems. And if economics is an evolutionary system, then it follows there are also general evolutionary laws of economics, which must be understood and harnessed if it is to be effectively managed.
This contradicts much of the standard theory in economics developed over the past one hundred years.
The economic evolutionary ecosystem is now fed by trillions of transactions, interactions and non-linear feedback loops daily. It may in fact have become too complex and interdependent for economists and governments to control or even understand. Therefore, as several eminent complexity theorists have recently stated, it might be on the verge of chaos. Too much or not enough regulation can distort the outcomes further- creating ongoing speculative pricing bubbles or supply and demand distortions.
There is now an urgent need to understand at a much deeper level the genie that modern capitalism has engineered and released. This can only be done by admitting the current crumbling edifice is beyond repair and building a radical new model from the ground up; a system that incorporates the hard sciences of network, evolutionary, behavioural and complexity theory.
Tinkering around the edges with the old reactive tools is not an option anymore.
To have any real chance of harnessing the economic machine of the 21st century for the benefit of all human society, not just the wealthy, it must be modelled at the network level and managed autonomously according to adaptive evolutionary principles.
If a business as usual economic philosophy prevails, it is likely that the resulting ultra-massive waste of resources and social turmoil of a second GFC would be catastrophic for our civilisation.
By the end of the 20th century traditional economics was dominated by the classical paradigm based on notions of rational consumers making rational choices in a simple supply/demand world of finite resources, with prices constrained by decreasing returns; all driving the economy to an optimal equilibrium point.
Twentieth century economists had finally realised their dream of creating a rational, rigorous and well-defined mathematical model for describing the workings of the global economy. This standard model has been applied by business leaders, finance ministers, central bankers and presidential advisers ever since.
Up until recently classical economic theory has appeared to work adequately by a process of trial and error. In times of growth people are generally optimistic and the theory describes reality reasonably well. But in extreme circumstances panic quickly spreads and the theory fails spectacularly, amplified by the performance of the quantitative risk algorithms beloved by hi-tech stock market traders.
Unfortunately such a clockwork model has proved over the last four decades to be seriously out of synch with reality, as global markets have been roiled by a series of disastrous credit, market, liquidity and commodity crises. The predictions of the standard model have failed to match real world outcomes, generated in succession by the Savings and Loan, Asian, Mexican, Dotcom and now GFC bubble disasters.
In this latest incarnation of excess greed debacles, high risk mortgage loans were repackaged many times over into opaque risk financial instruments, such as Collateralised Debt Obligations or CDOs, which ended up through an unregulated banking system in the portfolios of nearly every bank and financial institution around the world. Because of lack of controls, members of the shadow system such as hedge funds and merchant banks borrowed scores of times their own worth in cash. When the CDOs finally failed, the losses rippled through the world economy. The banks stopped lending, leading to further business failures and investors were then forced to sell previously sound stocks causing a stock market crash.
But this crash was far more serious- perhaps even more so than the Great Depression, as it could be contained within borders as easily or so simply solved by pump priming mass lending and job creation programs. Now we’ve seen the biggest banks, car manufacturers, miners, energy suppliers and national economies toppling like dominoes around the world, under trillions of dollars of debt.
The current global interventions have now staunched the haemorrhaging but not cured the disease.
The stronger economies of China and south east Asia, Brazil and Germany, less affected by the carnage, have bounced back. But the European economy is still fragile, with Greece, Spain and Portugal and other smaller nations struggling to contain debt; while the recent G20 summit in Toronto failed to enforce the rigorous regulation and improved economic governance previously mandated. The US recovery is also weak, with the latest OECD report predicting that the US employment rate will not fall to pre-recession levels before 2013.
In fact a number of interdisciplinary thinkers, starting in the seventies, began to question the credibility of the entire basis of the classical economic model, likening it to a gigantic academic think tank experiment rather than a serious science. And it gradually began to dawn on this group that at a number of the key premises or axioms underpinning the existing model were seriously flawed.
As mentioned, the first is the assumption that humans are rational players in the great game of market roulette. They are not. Behavioural scientists have shown that while people are very good at recognising useful patterns and interpreting ambiguous or incomplete information in their decision-making, they are very poor when it comes to performing complex logical analysis, preferring to follow market leaders or flock according to the latest fashion. This can further amplify distorting trends.
The new theories of behavioural finance argue that during a bubble the rate of buying and selling can become manic, resulting in irrational decisions. Making money actually stimulates investor’s brain reward circuitry, causing them to ignore risk- increasing the difficulty of valuing stocks accurately.
But perhaps the most critically flawed assumption is that an economic system always reaches an ideal equilibrium of its own accord. In other words, the market is capable of benign self-regulation- automatically allocating resources and controlling excesses in an optimum way, best effected with minimum outside interference.
Since the nineteenth century the fundamental principle underpinning economics has therefore been based on the mythology that the economy is a system that moves from one equilibrium point to another, driven by shocks from external disruptions – whether technological, political, financial or cultural- but always eventually coming to rest in a natural equilibrium state.
The new emerging evolutionary paradigm however postulates that economies and markets, as well as the web, enterprises and the human brain, are all forms of complex systems in which agents dynamically interact, process information and adapt their behaviour to a constantly changing environment; never reaching a final stable equilibrium or goal.
In biological evolution, the natural environment selects those systems that are best able to adapt to its infinite variation. In economic evolution, the market is a combination of financial, logistical, cultural, organisational and government regulatory elements, which adapt to and in turn influence a constantly changing ecological, social and business environment.
In essence, economic and financial systems have been fundamentally misclassified. They are not perfect self-regulating systems. They are enormously complex adaptive networks, with topologies that include decision hubs, relationship connections and feedback loops linking multi-agent groups which interact dynamically in response to changes in their environment; not merely through simplified price setting mechanisms, tax and interest rate cuts, liquidity injections or job creation programs. They must be understood and managed at a far deeper level.
Modern evolutionary theorists believe that evolution is a universal phenomenon
and that both economic and biological systems are subclasses of a more general and universal class of evolutionary systems. And if economics is an evolutionary system, then it follows there are also general evolutionary laws of economics, which must be understood and harnessed if it is to be effectively managed.
This contradicts much of the standard theory in economics developed over the past one hundred years.
The economic evolutionary ecosystem is now fed by trillions of transactions, interactions and non-linear feedback loops daily. It may in fact have become too complex and interdependent for economists and governments to control or even understand. Therefore, as several eminent complexity theorists have recently stated, it might be on the verge of chaos. Too much or not enough regulation can distort the outcomes further- creating ongoing speculative pricing bubbles or supply and demand distortions.
There is now an urgent need to understand at a much deeper level the genie that modern capitalism has engineered and released. This can only be done by admitting the current crumbling edifice is beyond repair and building a radical new model from the ground up; a system that incorporates the hard sciences of network, evolutionary, behavioural and complexity theory.
Tinkering around the edges with the old reactive tools is not an option anymore.
To have any real chance of harnessing the economic machine of the 21st century for the benefit of all human society, not just the wealthy, it must be modelled at the network level and managed autonomously according to adaptive evolutionary principles.
If a business as usual economic philosophy prevails, it is likely that the resulting ultra-massive waste of resources and social turmoil of a second GFC would be catastrophic for our civilisation.
Sunday, September 5, 2010
The Future of Health
A dominant partner role is forecast for the Intelligent Web 4.0 in healthcare management by 2050, as well as a significant increase in human longevity in developed societies to 150 years and the emergence of Transhumans.
By 2020 most developed countries will have established comprehensive electronic Health Record systems to track lifetime patient medical and general population health histories, including personal DNA genome sequences and SNP microarray test results. An individual’s medical records will then provide personalised drug and vaccine protocols based on genetic response variants. Whole-of-life e-health records will be accessible across the developed and much of developing world, eventually allowing the creation of online global networks of population health records from pre-birth to death.
Global e-Health archiving will also accelerate the provision of expert biomedical advice and services to populations across the planet, utilising the communication modalities of the Web and smart mobile phone technologies. These will also function as personalised helpers, performing real-time monitoring and transmission of vital patient status data including images, via ubiquitous sensor networks. These will forward continuous data to government and private healthcare hubs for expert online assessment and intervention.
In addition, health and lifestyle support will be managed increasingly in conjunction with global professional care and patient social networks. Such networks operating via the open standards of web-based technologies will promote collaboration between patients, caregivers and health providers, offering interactive exchange of case information- symptoms, diagnosis and treatment options; improving lifestyle outcomes and ensuring individuals feel less isolated.
By 2025 A Universal Health Grid will be in operation connecting e-health client records seamlessly across all nations; providing ubiquitous communication support for the acquisition and delivery of life enhancement knowledge on a global basis. In addition, scanned images will be linked in vast virtual databases providing remote expert support to local medical teams and practitioners. This will facilitate advanced surgical techniques, applied remotely using robotic, virtual and augmented reality technologies.
By 2030 tens of thousands of human genomes from diverse populations will have been sequenced and made available online for research into the genetic basis of common diseases. Analysis will have moved from understanding the role of single gene mutations to the highly complex networks of multiple genetic interactions. Polygenic natural selection has allowed new traits to rapidly sweep through populations in the past, allowing humans to adapt to extreme climates and new food sources.
The genetic basis of the major diseases and injuries afflicting humans will have been traced and effective therapies addressed covering- Neurodegenerative - such as Parkinson’s and Alzheimers; Pathogenic and parasitic based- - including malaria, dengue fever, cholera and lyme; Cancers and auto-immune diseases; Organ failure- such as heart, pancreas, lung, liver and kidney; Injuries to the nervous system, joints and bone- spinal cord trauma and arthritis.
Improvements in these therapies will continue at an accelerating rate.
In addition, the power of the web will be supported by a new way of unlocking a deeper understanding of nature and its evolution in the form of Systems Biology- already marking a paradigm shift from traditional reductionism to a more holistic level of understanding of biological phenomena. This approach interprets organisms in terms of information processing networks at the system rather than component genetic, protein and environmental level. Systems biology also marks the beginning of a more quantitative science, highlighting the causality and dynamics of biological interactions by applying mathematical models and the capability of simulating interactions at all levels- cells, organs and the total organism.
Stem Cell therapies, including both adult and embryonic stem cell differentiation, will be commonly applied to the repair of human tissue and organs including— skin, cartilage, blood vessels, bone, eyes, spine, pancreas, liver and heart muscle. The future treatment of diseases such as heart failure and breast cancer will be revolutionised by such technologies, with the option of growing new organs and tissue inside the human body using the patient’s own stem cells and biodegradable scaffolds to avoid immune rejection.
Stem cell technology will complemented by Molecular Engineering techniques such as gene therapy, involving the correction of genetic mutations by inserting reengineered genes into cells. Molecular engineers are already beginning to create custom-built proteins with enhanced functions, including the capacity to correct disease genes causing hemophilia, muscular dystrophy and sickle cell anemia.
Understanding the role of RNA in cells will also be vital in understanding gene silencing and targeting cancer and other diseases.
By 2035 Cyber-Human symbiosis will also be routinely applied, allowing the direct linkage between computer-electronic control and virtual reality technologies and human biological systems. This science is already includes the use of -
Sensory augmentation implants such as early retinal and corneal implants;
prosthetics such as a neurally-controlled limbs; brain interfaces, overcoming paralysis using brain signals; artificial hippocampus- assisting patients with memory deficits; brain image extraction and reconstruction and interactive humanoid robots to provide human companionship and physical support.
By 2040 Neuro-Engineering technology will be commonly applied enabling enhancement of human intelligence, memory and creativity. Significant advances are already being made towards simulating the brain’s capacity for sensation, perception, action, interaction and cognition, using advanced 3D fMRI and Optogenetics technologies,allowing better analysis of neural circuits to reveal new neural regulation and drug treatment targets.
Cognitive enhancement compounds will also be widely used. These will be applied to Alzheimer’s and other forms of dementia as well as generally enhancing human decision-making, alertness and memory capability. The impact of cyberspace on the evolution of the brain is also likely to be very significant over the coming decades. Children are constantly being neurally rewired as the interactive Web becomes an essential part of their lives in the form of virtual realities, multimedia and social media/ networking.
Brain simulation is also a nascent field offering huge future potential. A brain with a billion neurons and ten trillion synapses- equivalent to a cat’s cortex or 4.5% of a human brain has been simulated by IBM; while a team of European scientists have taken the first steps towards creating a silicon chip designed to function like a the cortex of a human brain.
With research and development converging on all fronts in this field, both at the hardware and software level, it will be only a matter of time before a brain with mammalian and eventually human-level complexity is scaled up for experimental use.
Molecular biology has largely been applied as a reductive science but now synthetic biologists are beginning to build machines from interchangeable DNA parts that work inside living cells, deriving energy, processing information and eventually reproducing. Flexible reliable fabrication technology, together with standardised methods and design libraries have enabled a new generation of biological engineers to already create new organisms from biological components from the ground up..
By 2045 the nanobiotechnology revolution of new and enhanced life forms will be common. For the first time in human history an artificial life form with synthetic DNA has been created by Craig Venter This will open a portal for the explosion of human potential beyond the confines of biological evolution alone. In addition, Medibots are being designed. These are tiny robots only a few millimetres in size that can work internally and are designed to enter the body through the mouth, ears, eyes or lungs and swim through the bloodstream.
These will be widely used to conduct robotic surgery, install medical devices, including a camera in a capsule small enough to be swallowed, deliver drugs and take tissue samples. Nanoscale machines and motors will be inserted inside cells which can then self-assemble and seamlessly integrate with other cell functions. Smart implants and tiny biological fuel cells are also on the drawing board, capable of producing electricity from glucose and oxygen in the bloodstream.
By 2050 the super-intelligent Web 4.0 combining human and artificial intelligence will be ubiquitous, powered by a smart computational sensory, grid/mesh, enveloping and connecting all human life and encompassing all facets of social, technological and scientific knowledge- always on, aware and available.
This capability will be essential for supporting the immensely complex decision-making and problem solving requirements essential for civilisation's future progress; including applying algorithms to manage medical research, diagnosis and treatment. The Web will then have emerged as the senior partner in complex medical diagnosis and specialist intervention, as well as genetic discoveries, driving healthcare advances into the future.
Within 40 years the rate of medical/health progress will have accelerated knowledge discovery to the point where it will begin to eliminate most human diseases, doubling human lifespan to 150 years. Combined with accepted human cloning and breakthroughs in organ replacement and cognitive enhancement, the stage will be set for the emergence of a new generation of Transhumans.
By 2020 most developed countries will have established comprehensive electronic Health Record systems to track lifetime patient medical and general population health histories, including personal DNA genome sequences and SNP microarray test results. An individual’s medical records will then provide personalised drug and vaccine protocols based on genetic response variants. Whole-of-life e-health records will be accessible across the developed and much of developing world, eventually allowing the creation of online global networks of population health records from pre-birth to death.
Global e-Health archiving will also accelerate the provision of expert biomedical advice and services to populations across the planet, utilising the communication modalities of the Web and smart mobile phone technologies. These will also function as personalised helpers, performing real-time monitoring and transmission of vital patient status data including images, via ubiquitous sensor networks. These will forward continuous data to government and private healthcare hubs for expert online assessment and intervention.
In addition, health and lifestyle support will be managed increasingly in conjunction with global professional care and patient social networks. Such networks operating via the open standards of web-based technologies will promote collaboration between patients, caregivers and health providers, offering interactive exchange of case information- symptoms, diagnosis and treatment options; improving lifestyle outcomes and ensuring individuals feel less isolated.
By 2025 A Universal Health Grid will be in operation connecting e-health client records seamlessly across all nations; providing ubiquitous communication support for the acquisition and delivery of life enhancement knowledge on a global basis. In addition, scanned images will be linked in vast virtual databases providing remote expert support to local medical teams and practitioners. This will facilitate advanced surgical techniques, applied remotely using robotic, virtual and augmented reality technologies.
By 2030 tens of thousands of human genomes from diverse populations will have been sequenced and made available online for research into the genetic basis of common diseases. Analysis will have moved from understanding the role of single gene mutations to the highly complex networks of multiple genetic interactions. Polygenic natural selection has allowed new traits to rapidly sweep through populations in the past, allowing humans to adapt to extreme climates and new food sources.
The genetic basis of the major diseases and injuries afflicting humans will have been traced and effective therapies addressed covering- Neurodegenerative - such as Parkinson’s and Alzheimers; Pathogenic and parasitic based- - including malaria, dengue fever, cholera and lyme; Cancers and auto-immune diseases; Organ failure- such as heart, pancreas, lung, liver and kidney; Injuries to the nervous system, joints and bone- spinal cord trauma and arthritis.
Improvements in these therapies will continue at an accelerating rate.
In addition, the power of the web will be supported by a new way of unlocking a deeper understanding of nature and its evolution in the form of Systems Biology- already marking a paradigm shift from traditional reductionism to a more holistic level of understanding of biological phenomena. This approach interprets organisms in terms of information processing networks at the system rather than component genetic, protein and environmental level. Systems biology also marks the beginning of a more quantitative science, highlighting the causality and dynamics of biological interactions by applying mathematical models and the capability of simulating interactions at all levels- cells, organs and the total organism.
Stem Cell therapies, including both adult and embryonic stem cell differentiation, will be commonly applied to the repair of human tissue and organs including— skin, cartilage, blood vessels, bone, eyes, spine, pancreas, liver and heart muscle. The future treatment of diseases such as heart failure and breast cancer will be revolutionised by such technologies, with the option of growing new organs and tissue inside the human body using the patient’s own stem cells and biodegradable scaffolds to avoid immune rejection.
Stem cell technology will complemented by Molecular Engineering techniques such as gene therapy, involving the correction of genetic mutations by inserting reengineered genes into cells. Molecular engineers are already beginning to create custom-built proteins with enhanced functions, including the capacity to correct disease genes causing hemophilia, muscular dystrophy and sickle cell anemia.
Understanding the role of RNA in cells will also be vital in understanding gene silencing and targeting cancer and other diseases.
By 2035 Cyber-Human symbiosis will also be routinely applied, allowing the direct linkage between computer-electronic control and virtual reality technologies and human biological systems. This science is already includes the use of -
Sensory augmentation implants such as early retinal and corneal implants;
prosthetics such as a neurally-controlled limbs; brain interfaces, overcoming paralysis using brain signals; artificial hippocampus- assisting patients with memory deficits; brain image extraction and reconstruction and interactive humanoid robots to provide human companionship and physical support.
By 2040 Neuro-Engineering technology will be commonly applied enabling enhancement of human intelligence, memory and creativity. Significant advances are already being made towards simulating the brain’s capacity for sensation, perception, action, interaction and cognition, using advanced 3D fMRI and Optogenetics technologies,allowing better analysis of neural circuits to reveal new neural regulation and drug treatment targets.
Cognitive enhancement compounds will also be widely used. These will be applied to Alzheimer’s and other forms of dementia as well as generally enhancing human decision-making, alertness and memory capability. The impact of cyberspace on the evolution of the brain is also likely to be very significant over the coming decades. Children are constantly being neurally rewired as the interactive Web becomes an essential part of their lives in the form of virtual realities, multimedia and social media/ networking.
Brain simulation is also a nascent field offering huge future potential. A brain with a billion neurons and ten trillion synapses- equivalent to a cat’s cortex or 4.5% of a human brain has been simulated by IBM; while a team of European scientists have taken the first steps towards creating a silicon chip designed to function like a the cortex of a human brain.
With research and development converging on all fronts in this field, both at the hardware and software level, it will be only a matter of time before a brain with mammalian and eventually human-level complexity is scaled up for experimental use.
Molecular biology has largely been applied as a reductive science but now synthetic biologists are beginning to build machines from interchangeable DNA parts that work inside living cells, deriving energy, processing information and eventually reproducing. Flexible reliable fabrication technology, together with standardised methods and design libraries have enabled a new generation of biological engineers to already create new organisms from biological components from the ground up..
By 2045 the nanobiotechnology revolution of new and enhanced life forms will be common. For the first time in human history an artificial life form with synthetic DNA has been created by Craig Venter This will open a portal for the explosion of human potential beyond the confines of biological evolution alone. In addition, Medibots are being designed. These are tiny robots only a few millimetres in size that can work internally and are designed to enter the body through the mouth, ears, eyes or lungs and swim through the bloodstream.
These will be widely used to conduct robotic surgery, install medical devices, including a camera in a capsule small enough to be swallowed, deliver drugs and take tissue samples. Nanoscale machines and motors will be inserted inside cells which can then self-assemble and seamlessly integrate with other cell functions. Smart implants and tiny biological fuel cells are also on the drawing board, capable of producing electricity from glucose and oxygen in the bloodstream.
By 2050 the super-intelligent Web 4.0 combining human and artificial intelligence will be ubiquitous, powered by a smart computational sensory, grid/mesh, enveloping and connecting all human life and encompassing all facets of social, technological and scientific knowledge- always on, aware and available.
This capability will be essential for supporting the immensely complex decision-making and problem solving requirements essential for civilisation's future progress; including applying algorithms to manage medical research, diagnosis and treatment. The Web will then have emerged as the senior partner in complex medical diagnosis and specialist intervention, as well as genetic discoveries, driving healthcare advances into the future.
Within 40 years the rate of medical/health progress will have accelerated knowledge discovery to the point where it will begin to eliminate most human diseases, doubling human lifespan to 150 years. Combined with accepted human cloning and breakthroughs in organ replacement and cognitive enhancement, the stage will be set for the emergence of a new generation of Transhumans.
Sunday, August 29, 2010
The Future of the Media
The Director of the Future Planet Research Centre- David Hunter Tow, forecasts the end of traditional media as we know it by 2050, with the demise of large media oligarchies, the dominance of ubiquitous personalised web channels, freelance citizen reporting and blogging, automated online news aggregation and analysis, the downgrading of traditional advertising to an entertainment role and the rise of the Global Commons model, combined with the power of the Intelligent Web.
By 2015- most major print media will have been forced to radically adapt towards an online multimedia model. Newspapers are already in turmoil as they switch to a primarily online model with revenues collapsing as traditional advertising revenue streams dry up. Loss of classified and banner advertising is unable to be compensated by online revenues.
New revenue models are already being frantically trialled, with more flagship publications resorting to pay-walls as well as smart phone and tablet PC download apps, using the same model as the music and now book industries. These are having limited success, but as the stream of multimedia news and commentary outlets expands, offering alternate options to the larger publishing oligopolies, it is clear that this strategy will have a limited shelf life. At the same time page layouts, features and editorial are being outsourced, further fragmenting the print media industry.
To boost news gathering and editorial in the face of diminishing returns, both traditional news and specialist commentary sites will simultaneously open up reporting to largely unpaid citizen journalists and freelance bloggers, as is already occurring. This in turn will encourage syndicated commentary. There is also the beginning of a major trend to personalised and hyper-local online reporting by major news publishers, aimed at attracting small community interest groups and advertisers. This trend will also be increasingly reliant on local citizen reporting.
Traditional news media, both local and global, will be rapidly reduced to a stream of headlines with minimal analysis. Special editions and feature articles will continue in reduced quantity, but online short-burst information- text, video and audio streams, will be increasingly popular, distributed via multimedia mobile platforms such as new generation smart phones and tablets, already evident.
By 2020- traditional free-to-air broadcast television channels will have largely disappeared, along with many cable channels, with television advertising similarly caught in the headlight glare of tumultuous change. The switch will be to web channels covering every topic, personalised to individual taste, viewable anywhere, anytime- primarily on mobile media screens in 3D. The personalised channel will be ubiquitous with news and information filtered and customised to cater for every personal whim.
All print media including magazines and books will have followed newspapers to a multimedia model distributed over the web, using almost exclusively new generation multimedia readers for flexible viewing. Terabyte flash memory will be used for offline personal media storage, but will be largely redundant due to the availability of virtually unlimited archival storage utility/cloud sites run by Google, Amazon, Microsoft etc.
Most print and video media will be available via direct ultra-fast wave division multiplex wireless downloads. Bookstores will also convert largely to downloads, already accelerated by Google Edition’s retail alliance with the US Independent Booksellers Association. In turn, traditional booksellers will be forced to compete for download business with coffee houses and other social/cultural hubs, offering additional direct media experiences. These hubs will morph into the dominant local community knowledge and workplace centres of the future (ref Future of Cities). On demand direct 3D retinal projection technology will also begin to compete with download media access.
In addition, the trend towards alternate realities will continue, with media spaces such as virtual worlds combining with social gaming to become the dominant entertainment form. News, entertainment and sport will then become truly interactive, overlapping with gaming and increasingly available within 3D holographic environments for maximum immersive reality effect.
The media will now evolve as differentiated reality streams available from thousands of web hubs, aggregation sites and social networks in three broad forms. First- news headlines and short synopses of current events available online, competing with traditional news feeds and wire services. Second- in-depth reviews and features relating to past events and narratives, merging with traditional book and blog storyline formats. And third- future scenario analyses and forecasts tied to current trends. These scenarios will also feed back into current events creating ongoing news scenario loops.
In addition the number of individual and small group freelance multimedia blogs, twitter-type conversation feeds and wikis, distributed via syndicated web sites, webcasts, social networks, media feeds and aggregation sites, will have grown exponentially, exploring every aspect of societal experience and linked to ubiquitous location-based and augmented reality options. The blurring of professional and citizen journalism via blogging, stream-of-consciousness conversations and automated story generation and will continue to expand.
By 2030- free-to-air networks, except for some public broadcasting, special demographic and dedicated sponsored channels will have disappeared, eliminated by reduced advertising revenue and the ready availability of unlimited web on-demand content.
Public broadcasting will continue to receive strong support from community groups.
Specialised channels covering real-time activities, such as major sporting events, will survive, but increasingly these will be produced by freelance spaecialised groups and directly brokered for distribution to consumer groups on social networks and hubs.
Film and video production will also fragment, dominated by small independent producers and creative groups working on particular projects within virtual teams; marketing their services directly to consumer groups and market intermediaries.
By 2040- all news category coverage including- political, economic, financial, cultural, environmental and technological, will be handled automatically as 24 hr feeds, operating largely independently of human intervention. Analysis will be available as a product of contracted specialists supported by the web- not permanently tied to any particular media organisation.
The web behemoths such as Google and Microsoft will have become the largest media as well as advertising players. However a reverse trend will have begun, with greater acceptance of the Global Commons model- a free sharing marketplace of technology and knowledge, freely accessible for the global benefit. This trend will eventually make tied in-house news-gathering and reporting functions largely redundant.
In addition, traditional advertising models will have become increasingly irrelevant as markets fragment and consumers begin to take control. This will utilise ultra- intelligent media search/knowledge mining agents, allowing consumers to dictate their own in-depth information requirements on a need-to-know basis. Low key informational advertising, embedded within social media and available only on a request basis, will become the last remnant of the original dominant form.
Alternate knowledge and social hubs such as the thousands of Wikipedia look-a likes, controlled by consumer groups, will start to compete with and displace the power of the media and ultra-web enterprises such as Google. These will be forced to cede part of their global knowledge dominance in their own survival self-interest.
The Internet/Web will now be controlled by and open to all people on the planet via the global commons in conjunction with a specially constituted body such as the present ICAAN, finally devolving away from US control.
By 2045 news analysis, as well as its gathering and distribution, will be largely automated and fluid- available independently on demand and on a push/feedback basis; tailored to all net-citizens and ever-changing special interest groups and operating in diverse virtual social realities.
Advertising as we know it will have largely disappeared. Product and service information will be available instead via reliable consumer assessment feedback networks, supported by semantic and intelligent web assessment (ref Future Web) and assisted by a small number of specialised human information researchers; continuously updated, with strictly authenticated information available on demand or pushed to meet personal preferences. The remaining informational advertising forms will have morphed to provide consumer virtual experiences on an entertainment and educational knowledge basis only.
By 2050 the major media organisations will now be extinct, with the last of the media barons and dynasties departed. Instead media generation and dissemination will have shifted to countless creative individuals and small-scale media enterprises operating cooperatively and seamlessly in tandem with the medium of the Global Commons and Intelligent Web.
Future Trend analysis and scenario creation will become the new buzz- increasingly significant to knowledge creation and the largest media growth segment; merging with the gaming and entertainment markets, as humans commit to increasingly virtual and future-based development technologies. At the same time there will be an inevitable loss of direct individual control over media processing, as all aspects of reality event discovery, aggregation, processing, analysis and distribution are automated as a function of the combined fusing of artificial and human intelligence and the rigorous decision capacity of the Web 5.0.
The media will instead become a pervasive medium for recording local and global experience, generating new forms of knowledge and immersive entertainment for human civilisation. This will be facilitated by the automatic collection of events by embedded sensors in every artefact and all environments on the planet- delivered instantly via ultra-fast bandwidth and direct neural/brain connection.
Its role will encompass documenting and projecting the evolutionary progress of all cultural, political, scientific and technological experience of life's existence.
Web 5.0, as a synthesis of human and cyber extended knowledge, sensory experience and intelligence, will merge with and start to take ultimate control of this medium.
By 2015- most major print media will have been forced to radically adapt towards an online multimedia model. Newspapers are already in turmoil as they switch to a primarily online model with revenues collapsing as traditional advertising revenue streams dry up. Loss of classified and banner advertising is unable to be compensated by online revenues.
New revenue models are already being frantically trialled, with more flagship publications resorting to pay-walls as well as smart phone and tablet PC download apps, using the same model as the music and now book industries. These are having limited success, but as the stream of multimedia news and commentary outlets expands, offering alternate options to the larger publishing oligopolies, it is clear that this strategy will have a limited shelf life. At the same time page layouts, features and editorial are being outsourced, further fragmenting the print media industry.
To boost news gathering and editorial in the face of diminishing returns, both traditional news and specialist commentary sites will simultaneously open up reporting to largely unpaid citizen journalists and freelance bloggers, as is already occurring. This in turn will encourage syndicated commentary. There is also the beginning of a major trend to personalised and hyper-local online reporting by major news publishers, aimed at attracting small community interest groups and advertisers. This trend will also be increasingly reliant on local citizen reporting.
Traditional news media, both local and global, will be rapidly reduced to a stream of headlines with minimal analysis. Special editions and feature articles will continue in reduced quantity, but online short-burst information- text, video and audio streams, will be increasingly popular, distributed via multimedia mobile platforms such as new generation smart phones and tablets, already evident.
By 2020- traditional free-to-air broadcast television channels will have largely disappeared, along with many cable channels, with television advertising similarly caught in the headlight glare of tumultuous change. The switch will be to web channels covering every topic, personalised to individual taste, viewable anywhere, anytime- primarily on mobile media screens in 3D. The personalised channel will be ubiquitous with news and information filtered and customised to cater for every personal whim.
All print media including magazines and books will have followed newspapers to a multimedia model distributed over the web, using almost exclusively new generation multimedia readers for flexible viewing. Terabyte flash memory will be used for offline personal media storage, but will be largely redundant due to the availability of virtually unlimited archival storage utility/cloud sites run by Google, Amazon, Microsoft etc.
Most print and video media will be available via direct ultra-fast wave division multiplex wireless downloads. Bookstores will also convert largely to downloads, already accelerated by Google Edition’s retail alliance with the US Independent Booksellers Association. In turn, traditional booksellers will be forced to compete for download business with coffee houses and other social/cultural hubs, offering additional direct media experiences. These hubs will morph into the dominant local community knowledge and workplace centres of the future (ref Future of Cities). On demand direct 3D retinal projection technology will also begin to compete with download media access.
In addition, the trend towards alternate realities will continue, with media spaces such as virtual worlds combining with social gaming to become the dominant entertainment form. News, entertainment and sport will then become truly interactive, overlapping with gaming and increasingly available within 3D holographic environments for maximum immersive reality effect.
The media will now evolve as differentiated reality streams available from thousands of web hubs, aggregation sites and social networks in three broad forms. First- news headlines and short synopses of current events available online, competing with traditional news feeds and wire services. Second- in-depth reviews and features relating to past events and narratives, merging with traditional book and blog storyline formats. And third- future scenario analyses and forecasts tied to current trends. These scenarios will also feed back into current events creating ongoing news scenario loops.
In addition the number of individual and small group freelance multimedia blogs, twitter-type conversation feeds and wikis, distributed via syndicated web sites, webcasts, social networks, media feeds and aggregation sites, will have grown exponentially, exploring every aspect of societal experience and linked to ubiquitous location-based and augmented reality options. The blurring of professional and citizen journalism via blogging, stream-of-consciousness conversations and automated story generation and will continue to expand.
By 2030- free-to-air networks, except for some public broadcasting, special demographic and dedicated sponsored channels will have disappeared, eliminated by reduced advertising revenue and the ready availability of unlimited web on-demand content.
Public broadcasting will continue to receive strong support from community groups.
Specialised channels covering real-time activities, such as major sporting events, will survive, but increasingly these will be produced by freelance spaecialised groups and directly brokered for distribution to consumer groups on social networks and hubs.
Film and video production will also fragment, dominated by small independent producers and creative groups working on particular projects within virtual teams; marketing their services directly to consumer groups and market intermediaries.
By 2040- all news category coverage including- political, economic, financial, cultural, environmental and technological, will be handled automatically as 24 hr feeds, operating largely independently of human intervention. Analysis will be available as a product of contracted specialists supported by the web- not permanently tied to any particular media organisation.
The web behemoths such as Google and Microsoft will have become the largest media as well as advertising players. However a reverse trend will have begun, with greater acceptance of the Global Commons model- a free sharing marketplace of technology and knowledge, freely accessible for the global benefit. This trend will eventually make tied in-house news-gathering and reporting functions largely redundant.
In addition, traditional advertising models will have become increasingly irrelevant as markets fragment and consumers begin to take control. This will utilise ultra- intelligent media search/knowledge mining agents, allowing consumers to dictate their own in-depth information requirements on a need-to-know basis. Low key informational advertising, embedded within social media and available only on a request basis, will become the last remnant of the original dominant form.
Alternate knowledge and social hubs such as the thousands of Wikipedia look-a likes, controlled by consumer groups, will start to compete with and displace the power of the media and ultra-web enterprises such as Google. These will be forced to cede part of their global knowledge dominance in their own survival self-interest.
The Internet/Web will now be controlled by and open to all people on the planet via the global commons in conjunction with a specially constituted body such as the present ICAAN, finally devolving away from US control.
By 2045 news analysis, as well as its gathering and distribution, will be largely automated and fluid- available independently on demand and on a push/feedback basis; tailored to all net-citizens and ever-changing special interest groups and operating in diverse virtual social realities.
Advertising as we know it will have largely disappeared. Product and service information will be available instead via reliable consumer assessment feedback networks, supported by semantic and intelligent web assessment (ref Future Web) and assisted by a small number of specialised human information researchers; continuously updated, with strictly authenticated information available on demand or pushed to meet personal preferences. The remaining informational advertising forms will have morphed to provide consumer virtual experiences on an entertainment and educational knowledge basis only.
By 2050 the major media organisations will now be extinct, with the last of the media barons and dynasties departed. Instead media generation and dissemination will have shifted to countless creative individuals and small-scale media enterprises operating cooperatively and seamlessly in tandem with the medium of the Global Commons and Intelligent Web.
Future Trend analysis and scenario creation will become the new buzz- increasingly significant to knowledge creation and the largest media growth segment; merging with the gaming and entertainment markets, as humans commit to increasingly virtual and future-based development technologies. At the same time there will be an inevitable loss of direct individual control over media processing, as all aspects of reality event discovery, aggregation, processing, analysis and distribution are automated as a function of the combined fusing of artificial and human intelligence and the rigorous decision capacity of the Web 5.0.
The media will instead become a pervasive medium for recording local and global experience, generating new forms of knowledge and immersive entertainment for human civilisation. This will be facilitated by the automatic collection of events by embedded sensors in every artefact and all environments on the planet- delivered instantly via ultra-fast bandwidth and direct neural/brain connection.
Its role will encompass documenting and projecting the evolutionary progress of all cultural, political, scientific and technological experience of life's existence.
Web 5.0, as a synthesis of human and cyber extended knowledge, sensory experience and intelligence, will merge with and start to take ultimate control of this medium.
Thursday, August 26, 2010
The Future of Democracy
Democracy, as with all other processes engineered by human civilisation, is evolving at a rapid rate. A number of indicators are pointing to a major leap forward, encompassing a more public participatory form of democratic model and the harnessing of the expert intelligence of the Web. By the middle of the 21st century, such a global version of the democratic process will be largely in place- Democracy 2.0.
Democracy has a long evolutionary history. The concept of democracy - the notion that men and women have the right to govern themselves, was practised at around 2,500 BP in Athens. The Athenian polity or political body, granted all citizens the right to be heard and to participate in the major decisions affecting their rights and well-being. The City State demanded services and loyalty from the individual in return. There is evidence however that the role of popular assembly actually arose earlier in some Phoenician cities such as Sidon and Babylon in the ancient assemblies of Syria- Mesopotamia, as an organ of local government and justice.
As demonstrated in these early periods, democracy, although imperfect, offered each individual a stake in the nation’s collective decision-making processes. It therefore provided a greater incentive for each individual to cooperate to increase group productivity. Through a more open decision process, improved innovation and consequently additional wealth was generated and distributed more equitably. An increase in overall economic wellbeing in turn generated more possibilities and potential to acquire knowledge, education and employment, coupled with greater individual choice and freedom.
According to the Freedom House Report, an independent survey of political and civil liberties around the globe, the world has made great strides towards democracy in the 20th and 21st centuries. In 1900 there were 25 restricted democracies in existence covering an eighth of the world’s population, but none that could be judged as based on universal suffrage. The US and Britain denied voting rights to women and in the case of the US, also to African Americans. But at the end of the 20th century 119 of the world’s 192 nations were declared electoral democracies. In the current century, democracy continues to spread through Africa and Asia and significantly also the Middle East, with over 130 states in various stages of democratic evolution.
Dictatorships or quasi democratic one party states still exist in Africa, Asia and the middle east with regimes such as China, North Korea, Zimbabwe, Burma, the Sudan, Belarus and Saudi Arabia, seeking to maintain total control over their populations. However two thirds of sub-Saharan countries have staged elections in the past ten years, with coups becoming less common and internal wars gradually waning. African nations are also starting to police human rights in their own region. African Union peacekeepers are now deployed in Darfur and are working with UN peacekeepers in the Democratic Republic of the Congo.
The evolution of democracy can also be seen in terms of improved human rights. The United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights and several ensuing legal treaties, define political, cultural and economic rights as well as the rights of women, children, ethnic groups and religions. This declaration is intended to create a global safety net of rights applicable to all peoples everywhere, with no exceptions. It also recognises the principle of the subordination of national sovereignty to the universality of human rights; the dignity and worth of human life beyond the jurisdiction of any State.
The global spread of democracy is now also irreversibly linked to the new cooperative globalisation model. The EU, despite its growing pains, provides a compelling template; complementing national decisions in the supra-national interest at the commercial, financial, legal, health and research sharing level. The global spread of new technology and knowledge also provides the opportunity for developing countries to gain a quantum leap in material wellbeing; an essential prerequisite for a stable democracy.
The current cyber-based advances therefore presage a much more interactive public form of democracy and mark the next phase in its ongoing evolution. Web 2.0’s social networking, blogging, messaging and video services have already significantly changed the way people discuss political issues and exchange ideas beyond national boundaries. In addition a number of popular sites exist as forums to actively harness individual opinions and encourage debate about contentious topics, funnelling them to political processes. These are often coupled to online petitions, allowing the public to deliver requests to Government and receive a committed response.
In addition there are a plethora of specialized smart search engines and analytical tools aimed at locating and interpreting information about divisive and complex topics such as global warming and medical stem cell advances. These are increasingly linked to Argumentation frameworks and Game theory, aimed at supporting the logical basis of arguments, negotiation and other structured forms of group decision-making. New logic and statistical tools can also provide inference and evaluation mechanisms to better assess the evidence for a particular hypothesis.
By 2030 it is likely that such ‘intelligence-based’ algorithms will be capable of automating the analysis and advice provided to politicians, at a similar level of quality and expertise as that offered by the best human advisers.
It might be argued that there is still a need for the role of politicians and leaders in assessing and prioritising such expert advice in the overriding national interest. But a moment’s reflection leads to the opposite conclusion. Politicians have party allegiances and internal obligations that can and do create serious conflicts of interest and skew the best advice. History is replete with such disastrous decisions based on false premises, driven by party political bias and populist fads predicated on flawed knowledge. One needs to look no further in recent times than the patently inadequate evidential basis for the US’s war in Iraq which has cost at least half a million civilian lives and is still unresolved.
However there remains a disjunction between the developed west and those developing countries only now recovering from colonisation, the subsequent domination by dictators and fascist regimes and ongoing natural disasters. There is in fact a time gap of several hundred years between the democratic trajectory of the west and east, which these countries are endeavouring to bridge within a generation; often creating serious short-term challenges and cultural dislocations.
A very powerful enabler for the spread of democracy as mentioned is the Internet/Web- today’s storehouse of the world’s information and expertise. By increasing the flow of essential intelligence it facilitates transparency, reduces corruption, empowers dissidents and ensures governments are more responsive to their citizen’s needs. Ii is already providing the infrastructure for the emergence of a more democratic society; empowering all people to have direct input into critical decision processes affecting their lives, without the distortion of political intermediaries.
By 2040 more democratic outcomes for all populations on the planet will be the norm. Critical and urgent decisions relating to global warming, financial regulation, economic allocation of scarce resources such as food and water, humanitarian rights and refugee migration etc, will to be sifted through community knowledge, resulting in truly representative and equitable global governance. Implementation of the democratic process itself will continue to evolve with new forms of e-voting and governance supervision, which will include the active participation of advocacy groups supported by a consensus of expert knowledge via the Intelligent Web 4.0.
Over time democracy as with all other social processes, will evolve to best suit the needs of its human environment. It will emerge as a networked model- a non-hierarchical, resilient protocol, responsive to rapid social change. Such distributed forms of government will involve local communities, operating with the best expert advice from the ground up; the opposite of political party self-interested power and superficial focus-group decision-making, as implemented by many current political systems. These are frequently unresponsive to legitimate minority group needs and can be easily corrupted by powerful lobby groups, such as those employed by the heavy carbon emitters in the global warming debate.
By 2050 a form of global consciousness will have evolved, where the back channel of opinion and reason will gradually subsume today’s hierarchical and populist consumer/brand filtered political models. New forms of the democratic process at the community and regional level are already growing, pointing towards the emergence of a new form of truly representative public participation and cooperation - Democracy 2.0.
This trend towards a fairer and more peaceful society must continue if the human race is to survive the uncertainty and turmoil ahead..
Democracy has a long evolutionary history. The concept of democracy - the notion that men and women have the right to govern themselves, was practised at around 2,500 BP in Athens. The Athenian polity or political body, granted all citizens the right to be heard and to participate in the major decisions affecting their rights and well-being. The City State demanded services and loyalty from the individual in return. There is evidence however that the role of popular assembly actually arose earlier in some Phoenician cities such as Sidon and Babylon in the ancient assemblies of Syria- Mesopotamia, as an organ of local government and justice.
As demonstrated in these early periods, democracy, although imperfect, offered each individual a stake in the nation’s collective decision-making processes. It therefore provided a greater incentive for each individual to cooperate to increase group productivity. Through a more open decision process, improved innovation and consequently additional wealth was generated and distributed more equitably. An increase in overall economic wellbeing in turn generated more possibilities and potential to acquire knowledge, education and employment, coupled with greater individual choice and freedom.
According to the Freedom House Report, an independent survey of political and civil liberties around the globe, the world has made great strides towards democracy in the 20th and 21st centuries. In 1900 there were 25 restricted democracies in existence covering an eighth of the world’s population, but none that could be judged as based on universal suffrage. The US and Britain denied voting rights to women and in the case of the US, also to African Americans. But at the end of the 20th century 119 of the world’s 192 nations were declared electoral democracies. In the current century, democracy continues to spread through Africa and Asia and significantly also the Middle East, with over 130 states in various stages of democratic evolution.
Dictatorships or quasi democratic one party states still exist in Africa, Asia and the middle east with regimes such as China, North Korea, Zimbabwe, Burma, the Sudan, Belarus and Saudi Arabia, seeking to maintain total control over their populations. However two thirds of sub-Saharan countries have staged elections in the past ten years, with coups becoming less common and internal wars gradually waning. African nations are also starting to police human rights in their own region. African Union peacekeepers are now deployed in Darfur and are working with UN peacekeepers in the Democratic Republic of the Congo.
The evolution of democracy can also be seen in terms of improved human rights. The United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights and several ensuing legal treaties, define political, cultural and economic rights as well as the rights of women, children, ethnic groups and religions. This declaration is intended to create a global safety net of rights applicable to all peoples everywhere, with no exceptions. It also recognises the principle of the subordination of national sovereignty to the universality of human rights; the dignity and worth of human life beyond the jurisdiction of any State.
The global spread of democracy is now also irreversibly linked to the new cooperative globalisation model. The EU, despite its growing pains, provides a compelling template; complementing national decisions in the supra-national interest at the commercial, financial, legal, health and research sharing level. The global spread of new technology and knowledge also provides the opportunity for developing countries to gain a quantum leap in material wellbeing; an essential prerequisite for a stable democracy.
The current cyber-based advances therefore presage a much more interactive public form of democracy and mark the next phase in its ongoing evolution. Web 2.0’s social networking, blogging, messaging and video services have already significantly changed the way people discuss political issues and exchange ideas beyond national boundaries. In addition a number of popular sites exist as forums to actively harness individual opinions and encourage debate about contentious topics, funnelling them to political processes. These are often coupled to online petitions, allowing the public to deliver requests to Government and receive a committed response.
In addition there are a plethora of specialized smart search engines and analytical tools aimed at locating and interpreting information about divisive and complex topics such as global warming and medical stem cell advances. These are increasingly linked to Argumentation frameworks and Game theory, aimed at supporting the logical basis of arguments, negotiation and other structured forms of group decision-making. New logic and statistical tools can also provide inference and evaluation mechanisms to better assess the evidence for a particular hypothesis.
By 2030 it is likely that such ‘intelligence-based’ algorithms will be capable of automating the analysis and advice provided to politicians, at a similar level of quality and expertise as that offered by the best human advisers.
It might be argued that there is still a need for the role of politicians and leaders in assessing and prioritising such expert advice in the overriding national interest. But a moment’s reflection leads to the opposite conclusion. Politicians have party allegiances and internal obligations that can and do create serious conflicts of interest and skew the best advice. History is replete with such disastrous decisions based on false premises, driven by party political bias and populist fads predicated on flawed knowledge. One needs to look no further in recent times than the patently inadequate evidential basis for the US’s war in Iraq which has cost at least half a million civilian lives and is still unresolved.
However there remains a disjunction between the developed west and those developing countries only now recovering from colonisation, the subsequent domination by dictators and fascist regimes and ongoing natural disasters. There is in fact a time gap of several hundred years between the democratic trajectory of the west and east, which these countries are endeavouring to bridge within a generation; often creating serious short-term challenges and cultural dislocations.
A very powerful enabler for the spread of democracy as mentioned is the Internet/Web- today’s storehouse of the world’s information and expertise. By increasing the flow of essential intelligence it facilitates transparency, reduces corruption, empowers dissidents and ensures governments are more responsive to their citizen’s needs. Ii is already providing the infrastructure for the emergence of a more democratic society; empowering all people to have direct input into critical decision processes affecting their lives, without the distortion of political intermediaries.
By 2040 more democratic outcomes for all populations on the planet will be the norm. Critical and urgent decisions relating to global warming, financial regulation, economic allocation of scarce resources such as food and water, humanitarian rights and refugee migration etc, will to be sifted through community knowledge, resulting in truly representative and equitable global governance. Implementation of the democratic process itself will continue to evolve with new forms of e-voting and governance supervision, which will include the active participation of advocacy groups supported by a consensus of expert knowledge via the Intelligent Web 4.0.
Over time democracy as with all other social processes, will evolve to best suit the needs of its human environment. It will emerge as a networked model- a non-hierarchical, resilient protocol, responsive to rapid social change. Such distributed forms of government will involve local communities, operating with the best expert advice from the ground up; the opposite of political party self-interested power and superficial focus-group decision-making, as implemented by many current political systems. These are frequently unresponsive to legitimate minority group needs and can be easily corrupted by powerful lobby groups, such as those employed by the heavy carbon emitters in the global warming debate.
By 2050 a form of global consciousness will have evolved, where the back channel of opinion and reason will gradually subsume today’s hierarchical and populist consumer/brand filtered political models. New forms of the democratic process at the community and regional level are already growing, pointing towards the emergence of a new form of truly representative public participation and cooperation - Democracy 2.0.
This trend towards a fairer and more peaceful society must continue if the human race is to survive the uncertainty and turmoil ahead..
Monday, July 26, 2010
Future of the Media
By 2012 all print media will be forced to radically adapt towards an online multimedia model. Newspapers are already in turmoil as they switch to a primarily online model with advertising revenues collapsing as traditional revenue streams dry up and loss of classified and banner advertising unable to be compensated by online revenues. Already mass layoffs of journalists and support staff are in train- 12,000 this year alone, as page layouts and editorial are contracted out.
Traditional news media, both local and global, is rapidly being reduced to a stream of headlines with minimal analysis. Special editions and feature articles will continue in reduced quantity, but online short-burst information- text, video and audio streams will be increasingly popular, distributed via multimedia platforms such as new generation smart phones, already in common use.
By 2020- traditional free to air television channels will have largely disappeared, along with many cable channels, with television advertising similarly caught in the headlight glare of change. The switch will be to web channels covering every topic- personalised to individual taste- viewable anywhere, anytime and watched primarily on mobile media screens. The personalised channel will be ubiquitous- news and information will be filtered and customised to every personal taste.
All print media including magazines and books will have followed newspapers to a multimedia model distributed over the web, using almost exclusively eBook readers such as Amazon's Kindle, iPads and smart phones for flexible viewing. Terabyte flash memory will be used for offline personal media storage- but will be largely redundant due to the availability of virtually unlimited online storage cloud/utility sites run by Google, Amazon, Microsoft etc.
Most print and video media will be available via direct ultrafast wave division multiplex wireless downloads. Bookstores, despite the use of print on demand xerox machines as a short term stop-gap will also convert exclusively to downloads and be forced to compete for business with coffee houses and other social/cultural hubs offering direct media experiences. These will morph into the dominant local community knowledge and workplace centres of the future.
In addition, the trend towards alternate realities will continue, with entertainment media such as virtual worlds combining with social gaming to bcome a dominant form. News and sport will also become interactive, overlapping with gaming and increasingly available within 3D holographic spaces for maximum immersive effect.
The media will focus on a number of differentiated streams available from thousands of web hubs, aggregation sites and social networks in three broad forms. First- news headlines and short synopses of current events as currently available online, competing with traditional news feeds and wire services. Second- indepth reviews and features relating to past events and narratives, merging with traditional book and blog formats. And third- future scenario analyses and forecasts tied to current trends. These scenarios will also feed back into current events creating news.
In addition the number of individual and small group freelance mulltimedia blogs and wikis, distributed via syndicated web sites, webcasts, social networks, media feeds and aggregation sites, will have grown exponentially- to at least triple current levels- exploring every aspect of societal experience.
By 2030- free to air networks, except for a small proportion of public, special demographic and dedicated sponsored channels will have disappeared, eliminated by reduced advertising revenue and the ready availability of unlimited web on-demand material.
Specialised channnels covering realtime activities, such as major sporting events, will survive, but increasingly these will be produced by freelance groups and directly brokered to consumer groups for distribution on social networks for example.
Film amd video makers will be largely independent individuals and groups working on particular projects within virtual fluid teams- marketing their services directly to consumer groups or market brokers.
All news including generic geopolitical, weather, economic, financial, environmental and technology coverage, will be handled automatically as 24 hr feeds, operating without human intervention. Analysis will be available as a product of specialist freelance individuals and groups, not permanently connected to any particular media organisation.
The web behemoths such as Google, Microsoft, Apple and Facebook will have become the largest media as well as advertising players. However a reverse trend will have begun, with citizen journalism playing a major role together with greater acceptance of the Global Commons model- a free sharing marketplace of material and knowledge accessible for the global benefit. This will make inhouse news gathering and reporting functions largely redundant. In addition, traditional advertising will have become increasingly irrelevant as markets fragment and consumers begin to take control, dictating their own information indepth requirements on a need-to-know basis. Low key informational advertising embedded within social media and available on a request basis will become the dominant form.
Alternate knowledge and social hubs such as the thousands of Wikipedia lookalikes, controlled by consumer groups, will start to compete with and displace the power of the media and ultra web enterprises such as Google, which will be forced to cede part of its global knowledge control in its own survival self-interest. The Web will be controlled by all nations via the global commons in conjunction with a specially constituted body such as the present ICAAN, devolving away from US control.
By 2040- news analysis, as well as its gathering and distribution, will be largely automated and fluid- available independently on demand and on a push feedback basis- tailored to all netcitizens and ever-changing special interest groups, operating in diverse virtual social realities.
Traditional advertising as we know it will have largely disappeared. Product and service information will be available instead via reliable consumer assessment feedback networks based on the semantic and intelligent web assessment (ref Future Web blog) and assisted by a small number of specialised human information researchers - continuously updated, with factual information available on demand or pushed to meet personal preferences.
Advertising will have morphed to provide consumer virtual experiences on an entertainment and support knowledge basis. At the same time future trend analysis and scenario creation will become increasingly significant and the largest media growth segment, merging with the gaming and entertainment markets.
By 2050 traditional major media organisations will be extinct, with the last of the media barons and dynasties departed. Instead media control and dissemination will begin to shift to countless creative individuals and small-scale media groups operating cooperatively and seamlessly in tandem with the medium of the global commons and intelligent web.
At the same time there will be an inevitable loss of direct individual control over media outputs, as all aspects of news and event discovery, aggregation, processing, analysis and distribution are automated as a function of the combined fusing of artificial and human intelligence and the rigorous decision-making capacity of the Web 5.0.
The media will instead become a pervasive medium for recording local and global experience, generating new forms of knowledge and imersive entertainment for human civilisation- including automatic collection by embedded sensors in every artefact and environment on the planet, to instant delivery via ultrafast bandwidth and direct neural/brain connection. It will encompass, document and support the evolutionary progress of all cultural, political, scientific and technological experience of life's existence.
Web 5.0 starts to take control.
Traditional news media, both local and global, is rapidly being reduced to a stream of headlines with minimal analysis. Special editions and feature articles will continue in reduced quantity, but online short-burst information- text, video and audio streams will be increasingly popular, distributed via multimedia platforms such as new generation smart phones, already in common use.
By 2020- traditional free to air television channels will have largely disappeared, along with many cable channels, with television advertising similarly caught in the headlight glare of change. The switch will be to web channels covering every topic- personalised to individual taste- viewable anywhere, anytime and watched primarily on mobile media screens. The personalised channel will be ubiquitous- news and information will be filtered and customised to every personal taste.
All print media including magazines and books will have followed newspapers to a multimedia model distributed over the web, using almost exclusively eBook readers such as Amazon's Kindle, iPads and smart phones for flexible viewing. Terabyte flash memory will be used for offline personal media storage- but will be largely redundant due to the availability of virtually unlimited online storage cloud/utility sites run by Google, Amazon, Microsoft etc.
Most print and video media will be available via direct ultrafast wave division multiplex wireless downloads. Bookstores, despite the use of print on demand xerox machines as a short term stop-gap will also convert exclusively to downloads and be forced to compete for business with coffee houses and other social/cultural hubs offering direct media experiences. These will morph into the dominant local community knowledge and workplace centres of the future.
In addition, the trend towards alternate realities will continue, with entertainment media such as virtual worlds combining with social gaming to bcome a dominant form. News and sport will also become interactive, overlapping with gaming and increasingly available within 3D holographic spaces for maximum immersive effect.
The media will focus on a number of differentiated streams available from thousands of web hubs, aggregation sites and social networks in three broad forms. First- news headlines and short synopses of current events as currently available online, competing with traditional news feeds and wire services. Second- indepth reviews and features relating to past events and narratives, merging with traditional book and blog formats. And third- future scenario analyses and forecasts tied to current trends. These scenarios will also feed back into current events creating news.
In addition the number of individual and small group freelance mulltimedia blogs and wikis, distributed via syndicated web sites, webcasts, social networks, media feeds and aggregation sites, will have grown exponentially- to at least triple current levels- exploring every aspect of societal experience.
By 2030- free to air networks, except for a small proportion of public, special demographic and dedicated sponsored channels will have disappeared, eliminated by reduced advertising revenue and the ready availability of unlimited web on-demand material.
Specialised channnels covering realtime activities, such as major sporting events, will survive, but increasingly these will be produced by freelance groups and directly brokered to consumer groups for distribution on social networks for example.
Film amd video makers will be largely independent individuals and groups working on particular projects within virtual fluid teams- marketing their services directly to consumer groups or market brokers.
All news including generic geopolitical, weather, economic, financial, environmental and technology coverage, will be handled automatically as 24 hr feeds, operating without human intervention. Analysis will be available as a product of specialist freelance individuals and groups, not permanently connected to any particular media organisation.
The web behemoths such as Google, Microsoft, Apple and Facebook will have become the largest media as well as advertising players. However a reverse trend will have begun, with citizen journalism playing a major role together with greater acceptance of the Global Commons model- a free sharing marketplace of material and knowledge accessible for the global benefit. This will make inhouse news gathering and reporting functions largely redundant. In addition, traditional advertising will have become increasingly irrelevant as markets fragment and consumers begin to take control, dictating their own information indepth requirements on a need-to-know basis. Low key informational advertising embedded within social media and available on a request basis will become the dominant form.
Alternate knowledge and social hubs such as the thousands of Wikipedia lookalikes, controlled by consumer groups, will start to compete with and displace the power of the media and ultra web enterprises such as Google, which will be forced to cede part of its global knowledge control in its own survival self-interest. The Web will be controlled by all nations via the global commons in conjunction with a specially constituted body such as the present ICAAN, devolving away from US control.
By 2040- news analysis, as well as its gathering and distribution, will be largely automated and fluid- available independently on demand and on a push feedback basis- tailored to all netcitizens and ever-changing special interest groups, operating in diverse virtual social realities.
Traditional advertising as we know it will have largely disappeared. Product and service information will be available instead via reliable consumer assessment feedback networks based on the semantic and intelligent web assessment (ref Future Web blog) and assisted by a small number of specialised human information researchers - continuously updated, with factual information available on demand or pushed to meet personal preferences.
Advertising will have morphed to provide consumer virtual experiences on an entertainment and support knowledge basis. At the same time future trend analysis and scenario creation will become increasingly significant and the largest media growth segment, merging with the gaming and entertainment markets.
By 2050 traditional major media organisations will be extinct, with the last of the media barons and dynasties departed. Instead media control and dissemination will begin to shift to countless creative individuals and small-scale media groups operating cooperatively and seamlessly in tandem with the medium of the global commons and intelligent web.
At the same time there will be an inevitable loss of direct individual control over media outputs, as all aspects of news and event discovery, aggregation, processing, analysis and distribution are automated as a function of the combined fusing of artificial and human intelligence and the rigorous decision-making capacity of the Web 5.0.
The media will instead become a pervasive medium for recording local and global experience, generating new forms of knowledge and imersive entertainment for human civilisation- including automatic collection by embedded sensors in every artefact and environment on the planet, to instant delivery via ultrafast bandwidth and direct neural/brain connection. It will encompass, document and support the evolutionary progress of all cultural, political, scientific and technological experience of life's existence.
Web 5.0 starts to take control.
Tuesday, July 20, 2010
Future of Work
By 2015- the traditional notion of an individual's job and work-related role will be recognised as outdated in developed countries. Output will be measured in terms of flexible value-added criteria or contributions to the goals of the organisation, together with social utility, rather than in terms of hours worked on a particular job.
The traditional office will also become redundant as the wireless web expands, allowing information workers- fifty percent of the workforce, to operate from home or local social hubs such as coffee bars as already occurring- (Ref Future Cities). All such centres will be linked seamlessly via the Internet's multimedia Grid/Mesh Utility supporting Web and Cloud Infrastructure. This will also enable enormous time and energy savings for workers and the planet in general, having a beneficial impact on the quality of life for millions.
By 2025- most tasks, even in the traditional labour-intensive sectors of health, construction, manufacturing and transport will be largely automated or robot-assisted. Projects will be managed and resourced on a real-time basis within the Web's global knowledge network- (Ref Future Web), with creativity and innovation recognised as critical competitive inputs.
Boundaries will blur between traditional full-time, part-time, contract and volunteering modes of employment as well as between worker and management roles, with most workers sharing time between their own creative projects and enterprise applications- the two often overlapping.
By 2035- organisational boundaries and work practices will be fluid and porous, with individuals moving freely between projects, career paths and virtual organisation structures; adding value and in turn continuously acquiring new skills, linked to ongoing learning programs.
The semantic distinctions between workers and management will have disappeared and robots will perform a large proportion of operational roles without human supervision. Union roles will have morphed to largely providing advisory, research and support services.
By 2045/50- work will relate primarily to the generation of new knowledge and services, by combining human, robot and web intelligence to maximum potential. Most processes will be fully automated both at the operational and strategic level within the context of the intelligent enterprise. New products and services will be generated from concept to design to production within days or hours. Individual creativity and skills will remain in high demand but will increasingly will be amplified and modulated within the context of the Web's cooperative decision-making and intelligence capacity.
Welcome to a brave new world.
The traditional office will also become redundant as the wireless web expands, allowing information workers- fifty percent of the workforce, to operate from home or local social hubs such as coffee bars as already occurring- (Ref Future Cities). All such centres will be linked seamlessly via the Internet's multimedia Grid/Mesh Utility supporting Web and Cloud Infrastructure. This will also enable enormous time and energy savings for workers and the planet in general, having a beneficial impact on the quality of life for millions.
By 2025- most tasks, even in the traditional labour-intensive sectors of health, construction, manufacturing and transport will be largely automated or robot-assisted. Projects will be managed and resourced on a real-time basis within the Web's global knowledge network- (Ref Future Web), with creativity and innovation recognised as critical competitive inputs.
Boundaries will blur between traditional full-time, part-time, contract and volunteering modes of employment as well as between worker and management roles, with most workers sharing time between their own creative projects and enterprise applications- the two often overlapping.
By 2035- organisational boundaries and work practices will be fluid and porous, with individuals moving freely between projects, career paths and virtual organisation structures; adding value and in turn continuously acquiring new skills, linked to ongoing learning programs.
The semantic distinctions between workers and management will have disappeared and robots will perform a large proportion of operational roles without human supervision. Union roles will have morphed to largely providing advisory, research and support services.
By 2045/50- work will relate primarily to the generation of new knowledge and services, by combining human, robot and web intelligence to maximum potential. Most processes will be fully automated both at the operational and strategic level within the context of the intelligent enterprise. New products and services will be generated from concept to design to production within days or hours. Individual creativity and skills will remain in high demand but will increasingly will be amplified and modulated within the context of the Web's cooperative decision-making and intelligence capacity.
Welcome to a brave new world.
Friday, July 9, 2010
Evolutionary Thrashing and Social Chaos
Society may be on the cusp of social chaos triggered by ‘Evolutionary Thrashing’, which could result in major social breakdown for many decades. The ‘evolutionary thrashing’ phenomenon occurs when the rate of change in a system’s environment exceeds its capacity to effectively adapt or evolve, before again being overwhelmed by the next wave of change.
At the biological level this can result in an organism’s inability to reach its optimal potential, making it less fit and more susceptible to extinction. This is currently occurring on the planet at an unprecedented rate. Many species are finding it increasingly difficult to adapt to the continuous changes in their habitat resulting from global warming and human destruction, with a quarter of vertebrate species predicted to become endangered or extinct by 2050.
However the phenomenon of ‘evolutionary thrashing’ is not restricted to biological systems. According to David Tow’s recently published generic evolutionary theory, outlined in his book– The Future of Life: A Unified Theory of Evolution, it can apply equally to social systems, including human society.
In this generic scenario, the same laws and principles of evolution apply to all systems at the quantum information level. Support for this thesis has recently been provided by physicist Wojciech Zurek’s ground-breaking work on Quantum Evolution and Decoherence, analogous to Charles Darwin’s theory of natural selection.
Such ‘thrashing’ at the human level can therefore lead to ineffective decision-making, social breakdown and eventually chaos, before long-term optimal evolution reasserts itself.
Global warming is a significant primary driver of this process because it has the potential to adversely impact all the planet’s ecosystems, which in turn will affect most aspects of human civilization including its social and democratic institutions.
A high level of ongoing adaptation is therefore required, but if critical social needs cannot be met in response to rapidly changing constraints, dysfunctional outcomes on a global level such as increased conflict, work and lifestyle stress, loss of community cohesion etc, will inevitably result.
But global warming is not the only contributor to social evolutionary thrashing. The second major driver is globalization, which is also occurring at hyper-speed, resulting in the blurring and mixing of cultures, religions and social norms as populations spread across the planet.
This is most apparent for example in the emergence of the major geopolitical blocs such as the EU linking nations in Europe, Asia, America and Africa, together with an increasing number of regional groupings and cross-over trading and political alliances such as APEC. In addition, each of these networks is increasingly coordinating its influence through global decision-making bodies such as the United Nations and more recently the G20.
In order to manage global issues such as climate change, crime and terrorism, disease, natural and man-made disasters, refugee flows and the allocation of key resources such as food, water and energy, global cooperation will be essential. But at the same time, traditional cultural and commercial practices that have evolved sometimes over thousands of years are being swamped in less than a generation- the blink of an eye in evolutionary terms; resulting in racial blowback, which can trigger reactions such as paranoia and conflict.
The third major driver of hyper-change is the information and communication revolution, facilitated by the Internet and Web Mark 2.0 incorporating the new cyber-world of virtual reality, mobile communication, social media and instant information access.
This is beginning to accelerate exponentially, threatening to outpace the capacity of populations of both developed and developing countries to adapt their social and cultural practices relating to democratic, educational, legal, financial and governance processes. With a third of the world’s population, including developing nations, now connected via inexpensive mobile phones and laptops to this infinite resource, the rate of change will become hyper-exponential within the next few decades.
No-one disputes the benefits of this massive egalitarian knowledge gain, providing the potential to deliver quality of life improvements to both poor and rich nations- combating the adverse effects of poverty and climate change. But there is the real risk that such hyper-change will outstrip the capacity of humanity to absorb and utilize it to the best advantage, succumbing to the centrifugal forces that threaten rip the fragile fabric of society apart.
In the space of a generation, the rate of social evolution driven by these three mega-forces- global warming, globalization and knowledge acceleration, each catalyzing the others in a frenzy of complex feedback systems, now threatens to destabilize the foundations of human civilization.
Non-adaptive evolutionary thrashing is likely to reach a critical threshold within the next decade, mirroring the likely point of no return for global warming.
This effectively means that coordination and synchronization of the major practices and protocols for managing the planet will be essential. It will involve the intermeshing of not just trade, but decision-making on all critical social issues.
It will require the rapid creation and strengthening of common frameworks for managing commerce, finance, economics, education, science and technology- including the management of energy, food, water and air quality on a world-wide scale. This has already begun on a regional basis with the strengthening of the European Union and on a global basis since the recent financial melt-down with the creation of the G20.
In other words, it will demand achieving an excruciatingly fine balance between continuing to encourage the creativity, innovation and development that drives our civilization and the risk of social overreach, with the potential to implode it. Only global commitment and good will by all populations on the planet can achieve this resolution.
At the biological level this can result in an organism’s inability to reach its optimal potential, making it less fit and more susceptible to extinction. This is currently occurring on the planet at an unprecedented rate. Many species are finding it increasingly difficult to adapt to the continuous changes in their habitat resulting from global warming and human destruction, with a quarter of vertebrate species predicted to become endangered or extinct by 2050.
However the phenomenon of ‘evolutionary thrashing’ is not restricted to biological systems. According to David Tow’s recently published generic evolutionary theory, outlined in his book– The Future of Life: A Unified Theory of Evolution, it can apply equally to social systems, including human society.
In this generic scenario, the same laws and principles of evolution apply to all systems at the quantum information level. Support for this thesis has recently been provided by physicist Wojciech Zurek’s ground-breaking work on Quantum Evolution and Decoherence, analogous to Charles Darwin’s theory of natural selection.
Such ‘thrashing’ at the human level can therefore lead to ineffective decision-making, social breakdown and eventually chaos, before long-term optimal evolution reasserts itself.
Global warming is a significant primary driver of this process because it has the potential to adversely impact all the planet’s ecosystems, which in turn will affect most aspects of human civilization including its social and democratic institutions.
A high level of ongoing adaptation is therefore required, but if critical social needs cannot be met in response to rapidly changing constraints, dysfunctional outcomes on a global level such as increased conflict, work and lifestyle stress, loss of community cohesion etc, will inevitably result.
But global warming is not the only contributor to social evolutionary thrashing. The second major driver is globalization, which is also occurring at hyper-speed, resulting in the blurring and mixing of cultures, religions and social norms as populations spread across the planet.
This is most apparent for example in the emergence of the major geopolitical blocs such as the EU linking nations in Europe, Asia, America and Africa, together with an increasing number of regional groupings and cross-over trading and political alliances such as APEC. In addition, each of these networks is increasingly coordinating its influence through global decision-making bodies such as the United Nations and more recently the G20.
In order to manage global issues such as climate change, crime and terrorism, disease, natural and man-made disasters, refugee flows and the allocation of key resources such as food, water and energy, global cooperation will be essential. But at the same time, traditional cultural and commercial practices that have evolved sometimes over thousands of years are being swamped in less than a generation- the blink of an eye in evolutionary terms; resulting in racial blowback, which can trigger reactions such as paranoia and conflict.
The third major driver of hyper-change is the information and communication revolution, facilitated by the Internet and Web Mark 2.0 incorporating the new cyber-world of virtual reality, mobile communication, social media and instant information access.
This is beginning to accelerate exponentially, threatening to outpace the capacity of populations of both developed and developing countries to adapt their social and cultural practices relating to democratic, educational, legal, financial and governance processes. With a third of the world’s population, including developing nations, now connected via inexpensive mobile phones and laptops to this infinite resource, the rate of change will become hyper-exponential within the next few decades.
No-one disputes the benefits of this massive egalitarian knowledge gain, providing the potential to deliver quality of life improvements to both poor and rich nations- combating the adverse effects of poverty and climate change. But there is the real risk that such hyper-change will outstrip the capacity of humanity to absorb and utilize it to the best advantage, succumbing to the centrifugal forces that threaten rip the fragile fabric of society apart.
In the space of a generation, the rate of social evolution driven by these three mega-forces- global warming, globalization and knowledge acceleration, each catalyzing the others in a frenzy of complex feedback systems, now threatens to destabilize the foundations of human civilization.
Non-adaptive evolutionary thrashing is likely to reach a critical threshold within the next decade, mirroring the likely point of no return for global warming.
This effectively means that coordination and synchronization of the major practices and protocols for managing the planet will be essential. It will involve the intermeshing of not just trade, but decision-making on all critical social issues.
It will require the rapid creation and strengthening of common frameworks for managing commerce, finance, economics, education, science and technology- including the management of energy, food, water and air quality on a world-wide scale. This has already begun on a regional basis with the strengthening of the European Union and on a global basis since the recent financial melt-down with the creation of the G20.
In other words, it will demand achieving an excruciatingly fine balance between continuing to encourage the creativity, innovation and development that drives our civilization and the risk of social overreach, with the potential to implode it. Only global commitment and good will by all populations on the planet can achieve this resolution.
Saturday, June 26, 2010
World Order 2.0
A year ago the emergence of a New World Order was a relatively simple outcome of the political process- both to understand and predict. The prognosis primarily involved the rise of Asia in economic terms followed by a relatively orderly transference of political and financial power from the West to the East, resulting in the emergence of a more multi-polar globalised world over the next 30 years.
The signals for such a shift were clear then and still are- up to a point.
Following a rapid period of industrial development, as occurred in Europe after its industrial revolution, Asian nations are now playing social and technological catch up.
The speed of Asia's advance has been breathtaking, Before the West's industrial revolution, Asia accounted for almost 60% of the world's economy. By WW2 this had slipped to 20%. It is now projected to rise back to 60% by 2020. Asia is in the middle of a long-term growth phase, even accounting for the current financial meltdown, that extends back to the Meiji Restoration period in Japan in the 19th century and the end of Imperial rule in China at the beginning of the 20th century. By 2040 it is predicted that China will be the world’s leading economy, followed by the US and India.
In India and China the middle class now accounts for over ten percent of the population. It is also upwardly mobile in terms of its consumer and knowledge culture. Combined with improved access to education, science and technology, this means the push for political pluralism is now inevitable. It is also inevitable that a regional Asian grouping- East Asia will emerge over the next 5 years, extending the present ASEAN forum to include over 2 billion people in a model similar to that of the EU.
This transition to equalization of opportunity in the east was always a given. Then along came the greatest financial catastrophe of the modern era, even including the Great Depression.
The US is US$10.6 trillion in debt and counting and the main lender is Asia. China has a US$2 trillion surplus in currency reserves. In another decade, economic power will have passed to Asia and a newly invigorated Europe, with the US no longer in the drivers seat of the world’s capital markets. Its banking structure is already emasculated and unlikely to ever recover its former glory.
China is now banker to the world.
But creating a new multi-polar and globalised world order has only just begun. It is about much more than Asia’s rise to power. The current economic and political architecture is totally bankrupt and will have to be rewritten in a radical new language- a hybrid of socialism and capitalism with various other ethical and green sustainable strands woven in. And this new architecture will need to have the flexibility to continue to evolve and adapt as the cultural, social and technological landscape around it changes at breathtaking speed.
Tinkering around the edges with an infusion of Government backed liquidity and greater regulation isn’t going to cut it this time around After all what we are witnessing is at least a 50% write down of the world’s wealth, which among other downsides is going to force a return to poverty for tens of millions in the developing nations.
The US has been living with serious structural deterioration for more than a decade- negligible levels of private savings, chronic balance of payment s deficits and domestic budget shortfalls. Foreign savers have funded these gaps. Half the US treasury bills on issue are now foreign owned, while sovereign wealth funds are diversifying out of US debt and taking influential positions in some of America’s iconic companies. While China’s growth rate has retreated below 7 percent, the West’s growth rate is negative.
And still at Davos no-one- not world leaders, bankers, economists or investors have a real solution to this cataclysmic disaster, let alone a real willingness to take responsibility for it. It’s as if after a few years and an infusion of a few tens of trillions of dollars the bad news will go away and life will return to ‘normal’ - business as usual again.
When you’ve got the current level of uncertainty in the collective economic and political mind- basically flying blind- you know there is zero probability that this will happen.
But this is just the beginning of a great unwinding of current civilization. The sudden shock to the world’s traditional order will create many unforeseen ramifications- some chaotic and violent. We already see social unrest in China, Russia, Iran, the Middle East and Africa despite weathering the immediate crisis. Combined with worldwide food, water and energy shortages in a time of global climate change, this shock has the potential to put immense pressure on social norms.
We’ve arrived suddenly and unexpectedly at the beginning of the 21st century at a great impasse, a great disjunction in human affairs.
But there is also a great opportunity to fast track reform of a flawed system from the ground up. This crisis can be turned to huge advantage for all humanity, providing the solutions are applied with great creativity, courage and cooperation.
It’s not a time for more of the same- for more great leaders and hubris. Instead it requires the harnessing of collective wisdom, knowledge and responsibility - extending beyond the false pride and patriotism of the national political process, tangled in its debilitating web of self-interest and corruption.
We can already see the tentative beginnings of this New World Order- Mark 2-
Pressure to reform unrepresentative voting structures of the UN; moves to establish a more inclusive grouping of middle power decision-making nations- from the G8 to G20; initiatives to reform the IMF and World Bank; the rise of the NGO community as an ethical counterweight to political decision-making; the continued rise of democracy; greater national cooperation supporting global conventions on human rights, conflict mediation, global warming, the sea, trade, health, science, legal and financial protocols etc; and the rise of the Web with its promise of providing equal access for the developing world to the sum of human knowledge.
But time is short. The luxury of leisurely progress toward achieving these critical goals is past. All options must now be on the table and open to radical reform- ideological, economic and social.
After all, nothing less than the future of human civilisation and the well being of the planet’s seven billion inhabitants is at stake
The signals for such a shift were clear then and still are- up to a point.
Following a rapid period of industrial development, as occurred in Europe after its industrial revolution, Asian nations are now playing social and technological catch up.
The speed of Asia's advance has been breathtaking, Before the West's industrial revolution, Asia accounted for almost 60% of the world's economy. By WW2 this had slipped to 20%. It is now projected to rise back to 60% by 2020. Asia is in the middle of a long-term growth phase, even accounting for the current financial meltdown, that extends back to the Meiji Restoration period in Japan in the 19th century and the end of Imperial rule in China at the beginning of the 20th century. By 2040 it is predicted that China will be the world’s leading economy, followed by the US and India.
In India and China the middle class now accounts for over ten percent of the population. It is also upwardly mobile in terms of its consumer and knowledge culture. Combined with improved access to education, science and technology, this means the push for political pluralism is now inevitable. It is also inevitable that a regional Asian grouping- East Asia will emerge over the next 5 years, extending the present ASEAN forum to include over 2 billion people in a model similar to that of the EU.
This transition to equalization of opportunity in the east was always a given. Then along came the greatest financial catastrophe of the modern era, even including the Great Depression.
The US is US$10.6 trillion in debt and counting and the main lender is Asia. China has a US$2 trillion surplus in currency reserves. In another decade, economic power will have passed to Asia and a newly invigorated Europe, with the US no longer in the drivers seat of the world’s capital markets. Its banking structure is already emasculated and unlikely to ever recover its former glory.
China is now banker to the world.
But creating a new multi-polar and globalised world order has only just begun. It is about much more than Asia’s rise to power. The current economic and political architecture is totally bankrupt and will have to be rewritten in a radical new language- a hybrid of socialism and capitalism with various other ethical and green sustainable strands woven in. And this new architecture will need to have the flexibility to continue to evolve and adapt as the cultural, social and technological landscape around it changes at breathtaking speed.
Tinkering around the edges with an infusion of Government backed liquidity and greater regulation isn’t going to cut it this time around After all what we are witnessing is at least a 50% write down of the world’s wealth, which among other downsides is going to force a return to poverty for tens of millions in the developing nations.
The US has been living with serious structural deterioration for more than a decade- negligible levels of private savings, chronic balance of payment s deficits and domestic budget shortfalls. Foreign savers have funded these gaps. Half the US treasury bills on issue are now foreign owned, while sovereign wealth funds are diversifying out of US debt and taking influential positions in some of America’s iconic companies. While China’s growth rate has retreated below 7 percent, the West’s growth rate is negative.
And still at Davos no-one- not world leaders, bankers, economists or investors have a real solution to this cataclysmic disaster, let alone a real willingness to take responsibility for it. It’s as if after a few years and an infusion of a few tens of trillions of dollars the bad news will go away and life will return to ‘normal’ - business as usual again.
When you’ve got the current level of uncertainty in the collective economic and political mind- basically flying blind- you know there is zero probability that this will happen.
But this is just the beginning of a great unwinding of current civilization. The sudden shock to the world’s traditional order will create many unforeseen ramifications- some chaotic and violent. We already see social unrest in China, Russia, Iran, the Middle East and Africa despite weathering the immediate crisis. Combined with worldwide food, water and energy shortages in a time of global climate change, this shock has the potential to put immense pressure on social norms.
We’ve arrived suddenly and unexpectedly at the beginning of the 21st century at a great impasse, a great disjunction in human affairs.
But there is also a great opportunity to fast track reform of a flawed system from the ground up. This crisis can be turned to huge advantage for all humanity, providing the solutions are applied with great creativity, courage and cooperation.
It’s not a time for more of the same- for more great leaders and hubris. Instead it requires the harnessing of collective wisdom, knowledge and responsibility - extending beyond the false pride and patriotism of the national political process, tangled in its debilitating web of self-interest and corruption.
We can already see the tentative beginnings of this New World Order- Mark 2-
Pressure to reform unrepresentative voting structures of the UN; moves to establish a more inclusive grouping of middle power decision-making nations- from the G8 to G20; initiatives to reform the IMF and World Bank; the rise of the NGO community as an ethical counterweight to political decision-making; the continued rise of democracy; greater national cooperation supporting global conventions on human rights, conflict mediation, global warming, the sea, trade, health, science, legal and financial protocols etc; and the rise of the Web with its promise of providing equal access for the developing world to the sum of human knowledge.
But time is short. The luxury of leisurely progress toward achieving these critical goals is past. All options must now be on the table and open to radical reform- ideological, economic and social.
After all, nothing less than the future of human civilisation and the well being of the planet’s seven billion inhabitants is at stake
Future Society
David Hunter Tow, Director of The Future Planet Research Centre, predicts the emergence of a superorganism architecture for human society within the next thirty years.
Recent research by a team of scientists from the University of Florida, has shown that insect colonies follow the same evolutionary “rules” as individuals; a finding that suggests insect societies operate like a single “superorganism” in terms of their physiology and life.
The researchers believe that the rules that guide social insect species and group behaviour may also have applicability to other species, including humans and human society.
A process of evolutionary convergence is a major driver governing this process.
Evolutionary convergence occurs when many critical feedback loops allow key knowledge-based processes such as computation and communication, to be optimised or reach convergence very quickly - eventually almost instantaneously from local to global and back to local again. At the same time new knowledge is generated, which continuously triggers change, feedback and problem solving on a continuously accelerated cycle. This has the capacity to create social complexity on a grand scale.
On the business and scientific front, global collaboration is now the norm, encompassing international networks of researchers, project alliances and commercial consortiums and involving diverse countries and cultures. Pluralist political, economic, trade, educational, cultural and environmental systems are also developing on a global basis including institutions such as the UN, WHO, UNESCO, EU, APEC, WTO, NATO, G20 etc. With increasing coverage and frequency of communication mediated by the Web, explosive growth in such social systems is already occurring.
This enmeshment process is now leading to a new phase in life's development, the realisation of a global human entity or intelligence. In other words, the same type of social Superorganism as emerges for insect species. According to Tow, such a global entity will eventually encompass all forms of human existence- biological, artificial and virtual.
Virtual communities will manifest in the form of groups of intelligent software agents- programs which cooperate to perform specific tasks and achieve goals. These are already being deployed within the cyberspace of the Web to solve communication and knowledge-based problems. Their current service capability includes locating, categorising, assessing, computing and negotiating information. More importantly however, they now have the capacity to learn, adapt, mutate and replicate- that is, to evolve in a primitive way.
Intelligent agents are only one example of the prototypes of virtual societies, with the eventual potential to evolve to a level of complexity similar to and symbiotic with our own. Eventually all such communities will merge with biological life throughout the universe. The evolution of society and civilisation, from the emergence of homo sapiens 200,000 years ago, to the sophisticated global society that we experience today will continue to be guided by this accelerating process, leading inevitably to the emergence of a global superorganism structure and intelligence.
The overriding outcome of evolutionary convergence ensures the continuing realisation of individual and social potential through the accumulation of knowledge and complexity. Enhancing the potential at the individual level expands the potential of the group, which in turn enhances the potential of society at large. Benefits at the societal and group level in turn feed back to each individual, so that knowledge gained at all levels is constantly recycled through a diffusion process. And so the cycle repeats endlessly, allowing life to continuously leverage its opportunities and extend its horizons.
This leads to an accelerating convergent process, where each increment of information gained catalyses the generation of all other elements, producing new knowledge at an accelerating rate. Concurrent with this process is the generation of meta-knowledge; a set of guiding principles which are continuously extracted from the base lode of information; designed to ensure that all knowledge contributes to the survival and the realisation of benefits for society at large.
These principles may be termed ethical codes, morality, human rights or principles of social justice. They include the set of modern democratic principles that encode the rights and responsibilities of the individual in relation to the group, such as equality under the law and freedom of speech. These become the rules that set the social and behavioural boundaries of human evolution, formulated through trial and error over eons.
The forces governing such historical outcomes according to this thesis are manifestations of the flow, exchange and refinement of information within a social context. Only at the local level is history therefore contingent. At the global level it is convergent, with the deep undercurrents of evolution guiding its progress.
Recent research by a team of scientists from the University of Florida, has shown that insect colonies follow the same evolutionary “rules” as individuals; a finding that suggests insect societies operate like a single “superorganism” in terms of their physiology and life.
The researchers believe that the rules that guide social insect species and group behaviour may also have applicability to other species, including humans and human society.
A process of evolutionary convergence is a major driver governing this process.
Evolutionary convergence occurs when many critical feedback loops allow key knowledge-based processes such as computation and communication, to be optimised or reach convergence very quickly - eventually almost instantaneously from local to global and back to local again. At the same time new knowledge is generated, which continuously triggers change, feedback and problem solving on a continuously accelerated cycle. This has the capacity to create social complexity on a grand scale.
On the business and scientific front, global collaboration is now the norm, encompassing international networks of researchers, project alliances and commercial consortiums and involving diverse countries and cultures. Pluralist political, economic, trade, educational, cultural and environmental systems are also developing on a global basis including institutions such as the UN, WHO, UNESCO, EU, APEC, WTO, NATO, G20 etc. With increasing coverage and frequency of communication mediated by the Web, explosive growth in such social systems is already occurring.
This enmeshment process is now leading to a new phase in life's development, the realisation of a global human entity or intelligence. In other words, the same type of social Superorganism as emerges for insect species. According to Tow, such a global entity will eventually encompass all forms of human existence- biological, artificial and virtual.
Virtual communities will manifest in the form of groups of intelligent software agents- programs which cooperate to perform specific tasks and achieve goals. These are already being deployed within the cyberspace of the Web to solve communication and knowledge-based problems. Their current service capability includes locating, categorising, assessing, computing and negotiating information. More importantly however, they now have the capacity to learn, adapt, mutate and replicate- that is, to evolve in a primitive way.
Intelligent agents are only one example of the prototypes of virtual societies, with the eventual potential to evolve to a level of complexity similar to and symbiotic with our own. Eventually all such communities will merge with biological life throughout the universe. The evolution of society and civilisation, from the emergence of homo sapiens 200,000 years ago, to the sophisticated global society that we experience today will continue to be guided by this accelerating process, leading inevitably to the emergence of a global superorganism structure and intelligence.
The overriding outcome of evolutionary convergence ensures the continuing realisation of individual and social potential through the accumulation of knowledge and complexity. Enhancing the potential at the individual level expands the potential of the group, which in turn enhances the potential of society at large. Benefits at the societal and group level in turn feed back to each individual, so that knowledge gained at all levels is constantly recycled through a diffusion process. And so the cycle repeats endlessly, allowing life to continuously leverage its opportunities and extend its horizons.
This leads to an accelerating convergent process, where each increment of information gained catalyses the generation of all other elements, producing new knowledge at an accelerating rate. Concurrent with this process is the generation of meta-knowledge; a set of guiding principles which are continuously extracted from the base lode of information; designed to ensure that all knowledge contributes to the survival and the realisation of benefits for society at large.
These principles may be termed ethical codes, morality, human rights or principles of social justice. They include the set of modern democratic principles that encode the rights and responsibilities of the individual in relation to the group, such as equality under the law and freedom of speech. These become the rules that set the social and behavioural boundaries of human evolution, formulated through trial and error over eons.
The forces governing such historical outcomes according to this thesis are manifestations of the flow, exchange and refinement of information within a social context. Only at the local level is history therefore contingent. At the global level it is convergent, with the deep undercurrents of evolution guiding its progress.
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