Future Planet

Forecasting Black Swan Events

2011-11-13T02:41:00.000-08:00

Director of the Future Planet Research Centre- David Hunter Tow, contends that the survival future of humanity will be contingent on our ability to forecast the Black Swan disruptive events likely to impact global society over the next decade.
Standard forecasting methods by definition have a poor track record in predicting Black Swan events, such as the GFC and Arab Spring. These are often be triggered by subtle environmental, technological, economic or social changes. They can however cause massive disruption, both to the detriment and benefit of the social status quo and therefore need to be predicted and managed much more effectively.
A number of advanced projects are currently underway worldwide, including the EU flagship FuturICT simulator, to attempt to provide better modelling and forecasting of such events. But it is doubtful whether coordinated action based on such models can be implemented to the required level of confidence and within the timescale needed to avoid many of the potential disasters looming over the next decade to 2020.
This level of uncertainty is increasing as natural disasters across the world, such as more frequent droughts and floods as well as recurrent earthquakes in high population areas such as Japan, create social flow-on disruption on an unprecedented scale. As society becomes more complex and the planet’s climate more volatile such events will proliferate, producing increasingly unexpected and violent outcomes.
But natural and man-made disasters are only part of the story however. New innovative technologies in the cyber and knowledge environment that have the potential to help solve social problems, also have the capacity to cause disruptive Black Swan events, because of the hyper-speed speed of their introduction, allowing insufficient time to assess critical side-effects.
No community or country will be exempt from these consequences. Therefore it is vital to develop early warning systems to mitigate their capacity for chaotic outcomes.
Three examples are provided of Black Swan events that are likely to occur over the next decade from the Centre’s quarterly Risk Review Report. All are scenarios that are likely to impact humanity on a global scale.

Black Swan Event 1- Evolutionary Thrashing
As the frequency of natural and human generated change increases it will become much more difficult for society to adapt to the consequences, before a new wave of change occurs, triggering the phenomenon of ‘evolutionary thrashing’ at the social as well as environmental level, with dire consequences.
Impacts with a high probability of occurrence due to such adaptive incapacity, will include global recession and collapse of markets, waves of unrest particularly in developing countries leading to spreading conflict and mass human migrations as well as disruption of major public and private scientific, engineering and social programs, creating increases in global poverty, malnutrition and disease.
Evolutionary Thrashing has been previously associated mainly with rapid biological change leading to destruction of ecosystems and species, triggered by global warming. But several research groups, including the Centre have recently extrapolated such a phenomenon to the social environment, including additional disruption caused by rapid technological and cultural change.
The potential for damage to the social fabric from ongoing evolutionary thrashing therefore poses one of the most dangerous threats to our society in modern times.

Black Swan Event 2- Global Conflict triggered by Food Scarcity
Evolutionary thrashing impacts will be amplified by increasing food scarcity and depletion of fresh water sources over the next decade.
At the current rate of consumption by a global population of 7 billion and rising, combined with the increasing risk of drought, the planet is rapidly running out of fresh water and food. Survival will be contingent on continuous adaptation in the form of re-allocation and prioritisation of all major natural and man-made resources on a global scale.
A recent report by the Cambridge Centre for Complexity estimates that increasing food shortages in developing countries, will likely trigger conflict as early as 2013. If not addressed this could spread globally. The precedent has been set by history. Food shortages triggered by drought and expanding populations have lead to the demise of a number of earlier nation states, empires and civilisations.
Food scarcity is already in train, due primarily to the melting of the mountain snows caused by global warming leading to the eventual drying of the major river systems in all continents, combined with disruption to monsoon weather patterns in Asia, increasing populations, the expansion of monocultures such as palm oil and biofuel production, as well as groundwater pollution from shale gas production.
Although desalination plants are now being commissioned in drought affected areas such as the Middle East and Australia, these have only the capacity to service major cities and urban environments in the short term. Genetic engineering techniques to increase crop yields in drying regions will also be extremely valuable in the future, but will have only a marginal mitigation effect over the next decade.
It is estimated that the drying of the major food bowls of China, India and Africa, will force another billion people into poverty and malnutrition. This will bring to around 20% of the global population at at risk, and presents a huge challenge for the International community.

Black Swan Event 3- The Intelligent Web 4.0 becomes a Decision Partner
Managing the complexity of the decision-making required to mitigate such risks to human civilisation will be largely contingent on the ability by humans to harness the enormous growing computational intelligence of the Web. In its future incarnation as the Intelligent Web, it will combine AI techniques and semantic reasoning, to find solutions to social problems autonomously and implement them in the form of advanced computational processes and algorithms.
This will create a new societal decision framework never before contemplated by human society, requiring responses in real time and with minimal human intervention in a manner similar to managing a modern manufacturing plant or flying an aircraft on autopilot.
Accepting the decision capability of the Web as an equal and in the future- senior decision partner, integrating up to 10 billion human minds, will be one of the defining paradigm shifts of the 21st century. It will involve a very radical mind-shift. Large cooperative projects such as FutureICT are important stepping stones towards this goal, but now the timeframe for concerted action has become so restricted that the impetus towards global cooperation via the Web will have to be vastly accelerated.
Barriers between individuals, teams, institutions and nations will need to be eliminated. This type of survival mindset has been adopted many times before in history by humans, in the face of the threat of a nation or empire facing imminent annihilation in time of war. Traditional norms are scrapped and evolution’s survival mechanism comes into play.
We are now in the throes of a destructive force posing a much greater threat than a war- the annihilation of our entire 15,000 year civilisation; perhaps the only one in the Universe. If humans delay beyond the next decade to accept such radical action, it will likely be too late.
Overcoming the inertia and complacency built into our social framework will be difficult. Many leaders and politicians still continue to ignore the warning signals that have been apparent to many individuals for over fifty years.
But the time to act has now almost run out.
New technological developments in renewable energy and conservation remain vital, but it is the decision timeframe governing the drawing of all these strands together that is now the bottleneck. Web 4.0, the culmination of humanity’s knowledge and innovation, will need the wisdom and freedom to function largely autonomously within an ethical framework and override the many conflicts of interest that will arise.
Such a concerted strategy will change human society for ever, but at the same time set it on a path to redemption for the mindless exploitation of planet earth and our long term survival. We will have to cede part of our individuality to the global good and recognise that only through co-opting the power of the Intelligent Web, co-joined with human intelligence, will the decision-making rigor relating to global resource allocation and sustainability essential for our civilisation’s longevity be possible.
Whether our human intelligence, survival instincts and institutional framework can make it happen by 2020 is debatable.
But we owe it to future generations to at least try.

The Future of Migration

2011-07-29T02:15:00.001-07:00

The author contends that the future of Global Migration is governed by the laws of physics and that the flow of information, knowledge and education across borders will inevitably be followed by a flow of human skills on a global scale.

This scenario is based on the physics of the Least Action Principle, which postulates that any dynamical process, whether the trajectory of a ray of light or orbit of a planet, follows a path of least resistance or one which minimises the 'action' or overall energy expended.

Physicist Richard Feynman showed that quantum theory also incorporates a version of the Action Principle and underlies a vast range of processes from physics to linguistics, communication and biology. The evidence suggests a deep connection between this principle based on energy minimisation and self-organising systems including light waves, information flows and natural system topographies, such as the flow of a river.

Information is now flowing seamlessly to every corner of the planet and its populations, mediated by the Internet and Web; reaching even the poorest communities in developing countries via cheap PCs, wireless phones and an increasing variety of other mobile devices.

Half the population of the developing world in Asia and Africa now have access to the Web via inexpensive mobile phones. Individual local farmers and small businesses increasingly use them to transfer money, track commodity prices and supplier deliveries and keep in touch with relatives and their community. They are also the ideal medium for transferring knowledge as the basis of the education process.

In sync with the flow of information and knowledge there is now a global flow of educational material online including open access courseware resources. Courseware is a critical resource already offered by a number of prestigious tertiary institutions including- The Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Yale and Harvard, in addition to free knowledge reference sites such as Wikipedia.

The trend-lines in this open learning revolution are already evident and will become pervasive in the near future. They include online 24 hour access to the Web, open content via free courseware, and real-time wireless web delivery; making it much cheaper and easier for the flow of knowledge to reach previously illiterate societies and communities, particularly as a generational shift takes place.

At the same time the human learning process is being driven by the need to adapt to a fast changing work and social environment, to provide ongoing support for society’s needs in the new cyber-age. This shift in turn is being driven by the increasing rate of knowledge generation providing new opportunities.

By 2030 the full power of the Web will be deployed towards this new paradigm. At the same time work practices will become increasingly fluid, with individuals moving freely between projects, career paths and virtual organisations on a contract or part-time basis; adding value to each enterprise and in turn continuously acquiring new skills, linked to ongoing advanced learning programs.

And so by 2040, the flow of information followed by the continuous flow of educational courseware, together with improvements in standards of living, will have largely eliminated the inequalities of skills and training that currently exist between developed and developing nations.

The Action Principle will finally allow the developing world to achieve equal status with the developed world in terms of access to knowledge, training and the realisation of human potential and facilitate the free movement of human workers and their families between workplaces globally.

Already there is a large transfer of skills between countries like India, with a vast pool of engineering and computer science graduates, and the West’s need for such skills. This may be in the form of virtual outsourcing or physical transfers of a skilled labour force on short term contracts. The same process currently operates between EU countries to fill capacity shortages on a regular and continuing basis.

At the same time as the information/education/workflow convergence is occurring at a worldwide level, two other major drivers of global migration are accelerating - global warming and global conflict.

Planet earth is now reaching a catastrophic tipping point, where it is realised that humans have probably left their run too late to limit global temperature rise to the maximum safe 2 degrees centigrade and atmospheric carbon levels to less than 450 ppm.

The evidence is starting to become apparent from a number of sources. The melting of the Arctic and Antarctic ice sheets and mountain snows feeding the major river systems in Asia and Africa, the disintegration of the northern tundra threatening the release of vast amounts of methane, the catastrophic loss of biodiversity, disruption of most ecosystems including the coral reefs and tropical forests, ocean warming, threatening the phytoplankton base of the food chain, and increases in extreme climate related events- droughts, floods, rising ocean surges in coastal areas, tornados etc. These are already threatening to overwhelm even the wealthier nations’ capacity to rebuild damaged and obsolete infrastructure.

Rampant global warming will inevitably lead to major disruption of the world’s food and fresh water supply chains, seriously affecting at least half the world’s population. This will result in vast migration movements as the rivers and food bowls of China, India and Africa dry up and deadly tropical diseases such as the malaria and dengue fever, spread.

In turn these factors will result in increasing social chaos and conflict unless managed on a global basis.

To stabilise the situation, the 1951 UN convention on refugees will need to be strengthened and expanded to establish a world humanitarian body with the powers to override national sovereignty and mandate the number of climate and conflict refugees that each region will be required to accept, according to capacity and demand.

Migration has always been a routine way of coping with floods and droughts going back to the earliest civilisations, when there were few borders and the numbers affected were trivial in comparison with today’s 7 billion population and its vast infrastructure.

The magnitude and frequency of environmental hazards is now beginning to place enormous pressure on the capacity of many communities to survive. The recent IPCC / Stern Review of the economics of climate change estimates that climate refugees will reach 200 million by 2050.

An idea of the coming wave of human migration can be glimpsed from a sample of recent natural disaster statistics, which do not include earthquake, volcanic or tsunami events.

Mexico was a source of 1 million environmental refugees a year during the 1990s with increased hurricanes and floods also the root cause of its economic crisis.

Large-scale government enforced relocation programs in Vietnam and Mozambique moved hundreds of thousands of people to cope with worsening floods and storms in 2000.

Six million environmental refugees in China have been created by the expanding Gobi desert. Migration in China and India has also been greatly amplified by development of projects such as China’s Three Gorges, which displaced 2 million people.

The 1998 monsoon floods in Bangladesh covered two thirds of the country and left 21 million homeless.

In 2008, floods following the Burma cyclone forced hundreds of thousands to flee, with little assistance from the Burmese junta.

In 2010, record monsoon rains in Pakistan caused the Indus River to burst its banks, causing millions to relocate.

Although most of these events created internal rather than external migration, it is unlikely that this will continue to be the case, with rising temperatures forecast to force tens of millions to move from tropical to more temperate regions, due to ongoing droughts over the next twenty years.

There are also an increasing number of conflict refugees from autocratic and despotic regimes and failed states. Tribalism and fear and suspicion of the ‘other’ is still strongly embedded in the DNA of human evolution, leading to scapegoating of migrant groups in tough economic times. Examples include Muslim harassment in Christian countries, Neo-Nazism in Europe targeting African refugees and inter-religious conflict in Asia and the Middle East.

The refugee diaspora has greatly expanded in conflict zones across the globe over the past two years, driven by upheavals in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iraq, Somalia, Sudan and the Democratic Republic of Congo and the Ivory Coast, as well as persecution of ethnic minorities in China, Burma and Bhutan. Criminal violence, as now endemic in Mexico, is likely to add to this misery.

It is estimated that almost a million people are smuggled and trafficked across international borders each year, using increasingly sophisticated methods by criminal organisations linked to a range of other crimes- identity theft, corruption, money laundering, and violence ranging from debt bondage to murder- earning of the order of $10billion.

By 2030 mounting humanitarian crises are likely to make assistance to all climate and conflict refugees mandatory as it is realised that a piecemeal national approach will result in far worse disruptions to society in terms of the uncontrolled spread of violence in a very unstable time.

Any country that avoids its international obligations and attempts to free ride the system will be ostracised and severely sanctioned.

Europe already contends with a growing number of refugees from North Africa, which include economic, climate, disaster and conflict refugees, but with the upturn in Middle East violence and difficult economic times is battling xenophobia in its member states.

By 2040/50 most of the new migration infrastructure will be in place and communities will have to adjust accordingly. In an already largely globalised multicultural world where most nations have already accepted other cultures for several generations, even if begrudgingly, this will not be as revolutionary a development as many might expect.

It is therefore likely that the paradigm of controlled but flexible migration worldwide will cease to be controversial, endorsed and managed under the auspices of the UN, as a globalised One Planet philosophy gains traction.

It will be the only solution capable of managing cross border refugee flows in a time of looming climate disruption, but also the most economic means of allocating valuable human resources in a globalised educated world to areas of greatest need, as humans fight to save their planet.

Future Civilisation 3.0

2011-05-15T02:05:00.000-07:00

David Hunter Tow, Director of the Future Planet Research Centre argues that the combination of the recent triple major disaster in Japan, the GFC and looming world recession, together with the Arab Spring and Occupy Wall Street movement, have provided the final triggers for the rapid evolution of Civilization 3.0 in the fight for human survival.

These world-shaking events send a timely message to the rest of the world, that the form of civilisation and the social norms we have become accustomed to and lived by over the last few centuries, is over.

Civilisation 1.0 began over 15,000 years ago with the founding of the earliest settlements and villages around the world, as hunter gatherers settled down to take advantage of the rich sources of edible grasses and natural foods growing mainly around the fertile delta areas of the great rivers and coastal areas of the world. These early habitats evolved into the first towns, cities and eventually nation states. At the same time, the first writing and number systems evolved to keep track of the products and services that developed and were traded by modern humans. Also with the growth of towns and trade across the world and the use of wood for building and smelting, the clearing of the forests across Europe began.

Civilisation 2.0 then emerged, with more sophisticated means of production using wind and water; rapidly accelerating following the industrial revolution in the 18th century with the harnessing of steam and later electricity and combustion engine power. These innovations were dependent on the burning of fossil fuels- coal and oil on a massive scale, allowing the West to steal a march on the rest of the world; colonising its populations and exploiting its wealth.
The manufacture of goods and services then increased on a massive scale; everything from food, textiles, furniture, automobiles, skyscrapers, guns and railway tracks- anything requiring the use of steel, cement or timber for its production.

The major cities expanded on the same original settlement sites as Civilization 1.0 - coastal ports, river delta fertile flood plains, regardless of the risk from subsidence and earthquakes.
The energy revolution was rapidly followed by the communications and information revolution- grid power, telephone, wireless, radio, television and eventually computers. Later, nuclear power was added to the mix.

Then in the second half of the 20th century the realization finally dawned that the planet’s resources really were finite, following the many dire predictions for decades previously.
Now at the current rate of consumption by a global population of 7 billion, projected to grow to 9 billion by mid-century, combined with the Armageddon of global warming, the planet is rapidly running out of fresh water, food, and oil. At the same time the grim effects of the escalating levels of carbon in the oceans and atmosphere has triggered more frequent and severe weather events- major droughts, floods and storms, adding to the impact of earthquakes in highly populated urban areas.

These problems are now bigger than any one nation can handle and can only be effectively addressed on a global basis. This will inevitably need to be coupled to a higher level of social awareness and democratic governance, in which everyone, not just politicians, are involved in the key decision processes affecting the planet.

Welcome to Civilisation 3.0.

Civilization 3.0 is just beginning, but is already being tested. From now through the rest of this century comes the hard part. Tinkering around the edges won’t do it for the planet and its life- including humans, any longer.
The planet’s climate is already in the throes of runaway warming, regardless of what forces caused it, because of the built-in feedback processes from the melting of the ice sheets in Greenland and Antarctica, to the release of huge methane reserves in the northern tundra and ocean floor.

But this is just the start of our problems.
Some areas may get a short term reprieve with local cooling, but overall the heating process appears to be unstoppable. The Faustian bargain that humans struck to establish Civilisation 1.0 and 2.0, when the planet was teeming with natural resources, is about to be redeemed. Humans are being called to account.

By 2020 the cost of solar, wind and biofuels is likely to be at a baseline level comparable to that of fossils fuels, due to major technological advances currently underway, such as artificial photosynthesis. But because of the flawed democratic process, major businesses and corrupt governments can still undermine the critical mindset needed for radical change, with calls for short term profits drowning out the desperate call by future generations for long term survival. It is therefore highly likely that we will still be emitting copious amount of carbon by 2020 and starting to exceed the safe limits of temperature rise.
In addition, supplies of fresh food and water, particularly in developing countries are already dwindling, with the potential to create further malnutrition and conflict.

So Civilisation 3.0 has to get serious.

One of the major recent initiatives at the heart of the fight-back revolution is the concept of a smarter planet. The Japanese experience has now reinforced that concept. Every built object and operational process will eventually need to be embedded with sensors and its performance and integrity continuously monitored and assessed in relation to natural disasters and sustainability.

Everything from roads, transport, bridges, railways, buildings, dams, power plants, grids and information systems, as well as human knowledge and skill capacities, will need to be urgently upgraded. Even towns and cities will have to be redesigned to avoid future worst case natural and manmade disasters and provide a more sustainable living space for future generations.
In addition, the loss of critical ecosystems and species will compound the infrastructure problems of the planet, requiring re-prioritization of the value of the natural environment and fair re-allocation of its resources on a global scale.

The current level of risk and waste in the built environment is now seen as both unacceptable and avoidable. By applying new technologies already available such as smarter materials, safer engineering methods, improved communications and sophisticated computer modeling, risk can be dramatically reduced.

The new sustainability standards will need to be set much higher; at a much smarter level than previously accepted, in order to reduce carbon emissions, optimize performance and enable more responsive adaptation within a fast deteriorating physical and social environment. This will be mandatory as the escalating scale of the risk becomes apparent.

At the heart of this revolution will be the powerful mathematical algorithms and intelligence capable of making optimum decisions at a far greater speed and with less human intervention. In turn this will require instant access to the Intelligent Web’s global resources of specialized knowledge, artificial intelligence and massive grid computing power.

By 2030 however, panic will be building across the globe. The safe levels of temperature rise of 2%, expected to hold until the end of the century, will likely be breached and physical and social problems will escalate.

Any realistic solution for human survival will require living and working together cooperatively and peacefully as one species on one planet, finally eliminating the enormous destruction and loss of life that wars and conflict inevitably bring.
Although cooperation on a global scale will be vital, individual nations will be tempted to free ride, as populations react with violence and anarchy to shortages of basic necessities through rising prices and inadequate infrastructure, particularly in hard-hit developing economies.

A massive mind shift will be required across the planet to achieve this level of cooperation; a more collaborative and creative process will need to evolve and quickly, harnessing all human knowledge and technological resources. To achieve this level of cooperation non-democratic states will need to democratize or be excluded from the resulting benefits and the old forms of democracy will have to be upgraded to a more inclusive and participatory level if human civilization is to avoid slow annihilation.
The stress of the human fight for survival will also present myriad ripple-on challenges relating to maintaining a cohesive social fabric. Democracy and justice are basic options, but also providing adequate levels of health, work and education will get a lot harder. This will require adaptation on a vast scale.

By 2040 the trendlines will be set and through the social media, the risks will need to be openly and clearly relayed to all populations. This will be similar to the collective discipline and mindset required many times in the past by nations threatened by the fear of war and decimation.
It will now need to be replicated on a global scale

Beyond increasing renewable energy and reducing waste, the fight for survival will require the implementation of other more radical innovations, including the eventual geo-engineering of the weather and climate. The science and technology needed to achieve such a complex outcome is unlikely to be achievable before 2050 and in the meantime our civilization may be in free fall. However it will probably be the only solution capable of reversing rather than just slowing the headlong rush to chaos.

Other radical solutions will involve the need to accelerate our level of knowledge generation. This is already taking place through advanced methods of automatic pattern analysis and algorithm discovery, applying artificial intelligence methods and the immense computational intelligence of the Web.

It will be a bootstrapping process. The faster the increase in knowledge acquisition, the more powerful the potential intelligence of the Web will become, which will then further accelerate the increase in life-saving expertise. This exponential process may be further accelerated by promoting higher levels of networked ‘swarm’ behavior, combining human intelligence on a grand scale across the planet. The benefits of collective intelligence acting like an advanced insect hive are already being realized, with research teams combining in larger and larger groups to solve more and more difficult problems. It has been demonstrated that an increase in synergy resulting from collective intelligence in complex self-organising systems allows ‘smarter’ problem solving as well as greater decision agility.
For example 50 European Universities have recently combined in the FuturICT project; an EU billion dollar flagship project to model, predict and solve future planetary and social problems. And this is only one collective project out of thousands, with increasing collaboration between US, European and Asian science and technology groups.

With all these initiatives, will Civilization 3.0 survive ?

It will likely be a very close call, dependent largely on whether our increase in beneficial knowledge can outstrip the planet’s rapid descent into environmental and social oblivion- a potential runaway pre-Venusian scenario with no end in sight.

It is similar to the Red Queen scenario in Lewis Carroll’s- Alice through the Looking Glass, in which the red chess queen has to run faster and faster just to maintain her position. Humans will also have to become smarter and smarter just to stay ahead of the approaching Armageddon.

The odds in fact will be very similar to the climate bottleneck that almost eliminated our early Homo sapien ancestors 20,000 years ago as they struggled to survive the last ice age. Only a small band of perhaps several hundred survived thousands of years of frozen hardship, finally regrouping and reaping the rewards that evolved following the great melt.

Modern humans can also can reap a future cornucopia if they have the courage and skill to survive the looming crisis in our evolution.

Many other civilisations across our universe may well have faced a similar bottleneck. Those that survived will have gone on to reap the untold riches of Civilisation 4.0 with its mastery over the physical laws governing our world and galaxy. Along the way Civilisation 5.0 will emerge, possessing not only the immense scientific capability needed to solve any physical problem, but enough wisdom to avoid future social catastrophes.

The stakes couldn’t be higher. The Japanese catastrophe and many others, including the Indian Ocean earthquake and tsunami in 2004 leaving 300,000 dead, should have given us all a clarion call.
This is not a bad dream, from which we’ll all awake tomorrow with business as usual. The future of Civilisation 3.0 and our unique intelligent life-form really is in the balance. Let us hope ours will be one of the few or perhaps the only advanced civilisation to have survived such a test, so that our children and our children’s children can live to experience the untold wonders of our planet and universe.

But the Red Queen will have to run very fast indeed.

Future Cities

2011-01-18T16:33:00.001-08:00

By 2015 over half the population of the planet will be living in high density cities, with dozens of mega-cities having populations greater than 10 million. On current estimates of access to basic services this level of population density will make them unsustainable in terms of acceptable quality of life standards.
Major cities today are already facing escalating problems of survival including transportation gridlock, critical lack of low cost public housing, massive pollution, high crime rates and ongoing disruption caused by natural disasters.

Urban planners are beginning to have some success in solving these problems. For example standards for both public and private architecture are going through a major transformation aimed at energy conservation and sustainability. At the city planning level, China is building its first ecocity- Dongtan, on an island near Shanghai in the Yangste Delta. It offers a model for sustainable cities of the future, designed to be completely self sufficient, generating its own power, zero carbon emissions and the capacity to feed its inhabitants. Similarly in Abu Dhabi, work has begun on the first zero-carbon, zero-waste city in the region at Masdar.

Building and planning codes will also seek to minimise natural disasters such as hurricanes, earthquakes, arctic storms and sea inundation, for city dwellers. Such catastrophes are now occurring more frequently and at greater intensity across the planet due to climate change, causing serious loss of life and billions of dollars of damage and disruption each year.

By 2025 the impact of global warming will dominate city planning, with water and waste recycling mandatory for all households and businesses. Buildings will be designed to conserve energy, with surfaces utilising flexible organic solar panels. In addition, high growth public gardens, green belts and mini-parks will generate cooling air-flows and most surfaces will be utilised to collect runoff water to support sustainable horticulture.
Garbage will be totally recycled, including paper, plastics, metals, chemicals and electronics, with organic waste generating significant levels of methane energy for local heating and power grid usage.

At the same time, in all major cities, planning and architecture will shift towards the design of small self-sufficient interconnected neighbourhoods, within walking or cycling distance of essential service centres. These will provide the full range of communication, education, work, health, leisure and social resources.

In addition, locally available high bandwidth web infrastructure will provide community and home-based alternatives to today's physical shopping malls and office blocks. Those facilities already built will be largely recycled over time to create community low cost living, work and leisure facilities.

Most conventional vehicle-based transport infrastructure will be replaced in favour of flexible urban public transport including rapid bus transit and automatic monorail pods operating on demand for personal use. Very high speed trains travelling up to 500kph will also replace a large percentage of cross-country aircraft travel, as is already occurring in China.

By 2035 cities will be operating primarily as complex service and knowledge hubs fostering high levels of innovation. Fully automated supply, manufacturing and distribution centres will function with near-zero carbon emissions on the outskirts of cities connected by underground automatic rail links to ports and storage centres, eliminating the bulk of truck transport congestion, damage to roads and risk of accidents.

Planning and control centres will be distributed within city neighbourhoods, with sections of the urban environment built underground to conserve energy, avoid extreme weather events and also free up more land for local sustainable city horticulture.

By 2050, cities will have evolved to become fully integrated service, supply and knowledge ecosystems, largely supported by the intelligent Web 4.0( Ref Future Web). Ongoing higher education and trade-related skills for populations will be mandatory and constantly updated to meet evolving societal requirements. Earlier problems such as traffic congestion, capacity bottlenecks and pollution within cities will have been largely eliminated. Physical and petty crime will also have been significantly reduced by automatic implementation of ubiquitous security monitoring and prevention.

In the future, the current and growing complexities and population densities of cities will be recognised as lifestyle assets to be exploited and leveraged by their populations rather than liabilities to be avoided.Future Cities

The Future of Tourism

2010-11-15T18:32:00.000-08:00

David Hunter Tow, Director of the Future Planet Research Centre, forecasts the Tourism Industry of today will be unrecognizable by 2040/50. The industry currently lacks the foresight and planning required to prepare for a radically different human lifestyle. The majority of operators and investors are still in denial, rushing into short term investments, oblivious to the monumental changes ahead, driven by global climate change – both environmental and social.
Like lemmings they follow the next faddish trend and five-year business plan, destined for annihilation over the cliff of the future.

By 2020- the nature of traditional Tourism and Travel will have radically altered in a variety of ways.
There has already been a reduction in overseas business travel through the alternate use of videoconferencing and this trend will accelerate within the general population as more travelers become aware that air transport contributes 3%-4% of global carbon emissions as well as unnecessary costs. It will also have the effect of increasing the popularity of local destinations in many countries, including exploring local wildernesses and heritage sites, as well as the option of numerous exotic city theme parks. Communities in both urban and country areas with common interests will in the future take advantage of local resources to a much greater degree, creating their own discovery and travel themes independently of the larger operators.

Eco-tourism will continue to boom along with high-risk adventure themes such as foot safaris and survival treks. But tourism will also need to become more eco-friendly and socially responsible, with operators offering a choice of carbon offsets such as tree planting and feral species reduction. As part of a standard package, tourists will be required to contribute to reducing the risk of damage to pristine wildernesses and fragile archaeological sites; encouraged to volunteer their time to remediate the environments they visit and becoming more personally involved with the welfare of local indigenous communities.

The larger resort operators will also need to change their mindset and reject their limited view of the role of tourism in the 21st century. At the moment it is a free-rider mentality; exploiting local natural resources instead of adding real value to their preservation and sustainability. Solar panels, water-saving shower heads and drip-fed golf courses do not improve biodiversity or reduce toxic waste runoff.

By 2030- many ecosystems will have degraded or be seriously at risk due to climate change- coral reefs, coastal wetlands, forests, temperate grasslands, mountain glaciers and river systems. At the same time fifteen percent of animal and plant species will have disappeared or be endangered. Tourists will therefore be banned from most national parks and wildernesses, except under strictly controlled conditions and will rush to visit the last great cultural sites and natural remote environments on earth before they disappear or are permanently closed.

The great Tanzanian Serengeti ecosystem reserve- a vast network of swamps, grasslands and woodlands and one of the ten natural travel wonders of the world, will be already at risk from development of a major bisecting highway with an inevitable increase in traffic infrastructure. Following this disastrous trend, most wild animal species will in the future be viewed solely in zoos and theme parks.

By 2040- the massive investment in resort and tourism infrastructure in the traditional coastal and tropical areas of South East Asia, Indonesia, Northern Australia, Africa, the Gulf States and countries surrounding the Mediterranean and Black Seas will be at risk of obsolescence and irrelevance. Many traditional holiday playgrounds will become no-go areas except in air-conditioned skyscrapers, with temperatures regularly exceeding 50 degrees centigrade- lethal to humans and exacerbated by extreme weather events and rising sea levels. The remaining tourism infrastructure and assets will be converted to assist local communities manage the inevitability of encroaching degraded environments.

With over 50 percent of the world’s population living in city areas including many mega-cities, major urban and surrounding environments will become the main tourist hubs of the future as many are today; but also offering not only traditional entertainment and cultural experiences, but previously exclusively outdoor physical activities such as surfing, skiing, fishing and golfing- now in managed controlled environments. Most major sporting venues will also be fully enclosed against chaotic weather, with synthetic surfaces. All but a handful of golf courses will be phased out as an unacceptable use of land and water resources, which could otherwise be used for essential urban horticulture and public recreation space.

With accelerating global warming radically altering the planet’s climate patterns, a massive population shift from the tropics to the more temperate areas of the northern hemisphere will be an inevitable outcome. Areas of Scandinavia, the Baltic States, Greenland, Canada, and Russia as well as portions of Antarctica, New Zealand and Tasmania in the south, will host the new outdoor tourist playgrounds.
However there will remain major limitations on exploitation of the planet’s few remaining vast wilderness areas, such as the Russian Taiga.

By 2050 tourism will have fragmented into myriad primarily urban exotic experiences, often transacted in virtual and augmented realities; simulating extraordinarily realistic and personal immersive experiences, involving all the senses. Gradually such lifestyle scenarios will be indistinguishable from the previous natural realities, allowing unlimited generated options, as well as surreal trips into space and under the oceans, back in time to historic events and forward into future cosmic civilisations.

In thirty years time the global Tourism Industry will bear little relationship to that of today’s dominant eco-exploitative model. To survive and adapt to the harsh climatic and social conditions ahead, the current business mantra, with its reliance on a relatively benign planet offering unlimited and free natural assets of utopian forests, fecund reefs, snow-capped mountains and sublime oceans, will need to be discredited and discarded.
Tomorrow’s tourist landscape will be vastly different. Natural assets will be replaced by a reality for future generations, which is largely artificial, manufactured and virtual, but one which could still be immensely exciting if creatively seized.

The Future of Space Exploration

2010-10-19T23:21:00.000-07:00

By 2020- the Constellation moon-landing project will be back on track, allowing humans to return to the moon following the Apollo missions of the 60s and 70s, to begin creating a permanent space colony and base for future galactic exploration. The International Space Station will continue to play a vital test launch, scientific research, communications and training role, supporting future space missions.

India, China and Japan will also have proceeded with their own exploratory missions to the moon and planets, but will increasingly work cooperatively with the US and EU under International Space Treaty protocols administered by the UN. Other middle rank G20 countries such as Russia, Brazil, Turkey, Canada, Australia, UK, Germany, France and South Africa will also be major individual contributors to future space programs. Space exploration will have become a global cooperative enterprise.

The Constellation Orion Space Shuttle replacement will be launched in 2015, supporting the space station and future lunar missions, by providing a means of repair and escape for astronauts if the shuttles are damaged by space junk or solar radiation. Power sources for space vehicles and interstellar probes will routinely combine plutonium nuclear power, solar sail energy, gravity slingshot and ion drive technologies.

The construction and maintenance of future space stations, including the lunar colony, together with its instrumentation maintenance, will be carried out largely autonomously by robots, involving eventually the mining and transportation of local materials.

By 2030- most of the solar system's major objects- its planets, moons and larger asteroids will have been visited by probes and tested for signs of life. In addition, extensive modelling of the sun’s convection dynamics and heliosphere, extending the ICE missions, will be critical to gaining a better understanding of its cyclic impact on global warming. A significant sample of Mars terrain will also have been mapped by the next generation robot explorers, which will finally determine the existence of past and present microbial life on the red planet.

The potential for life to exist on many of the extrasolar planets similar to earth and within a proximity of 30 light years, will also have been determined by the SIM- Space Interferometry Mission; rejuvenated by NASA because of growing public awareness and involvement in extraterrestial life search and contact programs such as SETI. In addition, the prevalence and nature of complex pre-life organic molecules within the solar system and near space will have been extensively mapped to determine its likely origins and nature.

An asteroid and comet defence system will also have been established as a high priority, capable of tracking and eliminating most major threats to Earth. The threat to space missions from space junk and subatomic particle and electromagnetic impact will also be largely eliminated through extensive mapping and sweep technology as well as the use of new graphene-based protective materials.

The private sector’s commercial involvement in space missions will be increasingly significant, eventually surpassing Government investment and NASA’s role as primary project manager. Space tourism will become feasible but remain strictly limited because of the prohibitive energy costs and the ability to realistically replicate such experiences more safely in virtual reality.

By 2040- all navigation and exploration tasks will be automated and managed by the powerful capability of the Intelligent Web 4.0, extended to encompass communication with all spacecraft, exploratory vehicles, telescope observatories, satellites and robots involved in projects and missions across the solar system. This will include the use of intelligent robotic probes, relying on their own decision capability to analyse relevant data and determine items of interest for further exploration.

The nature of dark energy will also have been resolved supported by the $2 billion WFIRST- Wide Field Infrared Space Telescope project, centrepiece of NASA’s next decade development program.

The entire space enterprise will be linked and coordinated via massive e-infrastructure such as the European Grid Environment- EGEE, which integrates networks, grids, middleware, computational resources, data repositories, instruments, and operational support for global virtual science collaborations. A vast amount of data will need to be downloaded, stored and processed by global space programs. EGEE currently has access to more than 20,000 petabytes of storage and 80,000 CPUs. Projects by 2045 will increase this level of data processing by a factor of 100.

Globalisation and cooperation will have reached an advanced stage on earth in the face of the extreme risks to society from global warming. Therefore the risk of conflict between the major powers over sovereignty rights resulting from space exploration will be minimal. As the space program gathers momentum, humans will increasingly see themselves as belonging to one world in this domain- not separate nations.

By 2050- colonisation programs, including Mars and possibly the moons Europa and Titan will be launched, as well as the first interstellar robotic probes. These will be capable of self-replicating and evolving as agents in their own right. This will herald the beginning of second phase of the exploration and colonisation of the galaxy, as Transhumans move beyond their own home solar base and accelerate the search for new knowledge and experiences; including finally linking with other intelligent life forms.

Starships will follow later in the century, transporting the first interstellar robotic explorers; initially powered by nuclear pulse propulsion systems but later by more advanced technologies based on new physics. These will allow the nearest stars to be reached within several decades, with transhuman explorers following, primarily as observers and communicators in non-navigational support roles.

The primary task of exploring galactic space will be carried out instead by autonomous, self-learning, computationally-advanced probes, managed by a vast communications and knowledge network, extending across the galaxy.
This process will proceed exponentially as the ecosystem of smart AI probes replicates throughout the cosmos, with all life eventually becoming co-existent with the universe.

The Future of Economics

2010-09-22T23:16:00.000-07:00

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.

Cyber-Infrastructure for World 2.0

2010-09-11T20:23:00.000-07:00

Our future World 2.0 will face enormous challenges from now into the foreseeable future, including global warming, globalisation and social and business hyper-change.

Global Warming will create shortages of food and water and loss of critical ecosystems and species. It will require massive prioritisation and re-allocation of resources on a global scale.

Globalisation will require humans to live and work together cooperatively as one species on one planet- essential for our survival and finally eliminating the enormous destruction and loss of life that wars and conflict inevitably bring.

Social and Business Change will present myriad challenges relating to building and maintaining a cohesive social fabric to provide - democracy and justice, adequate levels of health and education, solutions to urban expansion, crime prevention, transport congestion and food and water security, in a fast changing global environment. This will require adaptation on a vast scale.

It is apparent that in order to meet these challenges, humans must harness the enormous advances in computing and communications technologies to achieve a complete makeover of the world’s Cyber-Infrastructure.

The infrastructure of the new cyber reality now affects every aspect of our civilisation. In tomorrow’s globalised world a dense mesh of super-networks will be required to service society’s needs- the ability to conduct government, business, education, health, research and development at the highest quality standard.

This infrastructure will be co-joined with the intelligent Internet/web, but will require additional innovation to facilitate its operation- a transparent and adaptable heterogeneous network of networks, interoperable at all levels of society.

In the last two decades tremendous progress has been made in the application of high-performance and distributed computer systems including complex software to manage and apply super-clusters, large scale grids, computational clouds and sensor-driven mobile systems. This will continue unabated, making the goal of providing ubiquitous and efficient computing on a worldwide scale possible.

But there’s a long road ahead. It is still difficult to combine multiple disparate systems to perform a single distributed application. Each cluster, grid and cloud provides its own set of access protocols, programming interfaces, security mechanisms and middleware to facilitate access to its resources. Attempting to combine multiple homogeneous software and hardware configurations in a seamless heterogeneous distributed system is still largely beyond our capability.

At the same time tomorrow’s World 2.0 enabling infrastructure, must also be designed to cope with sustainability and security issues.
It is estimated that The ICT industry contributes 2-3% of total Greenhouse Gas emissions, growing 6% per year compounded. If this trend continues, total emissions could triple by 2020. The next generation cyber-architecture therefore needs to be more power-adaptive. Coupled with machine learning this could achieve savings of up to 70 % of total ICT Greenhouse emissions by 2020.

But the world is also grappling with the possibility of cyber-warfare as well as increasingly sophisticated criminal hacking, with an estimated 100 foreign intelligence organisations trying to break into US networks. A global protocol safeguarding cyber privacy rights between nations, combined with greater predictive warning of rogue attacks, is critically needed. The next generation of cyber-infrastructure will therefore have to incorporate autonomous intelligence and resilience in the face of both these challenges.

To meet these targets a lot will ride on future advances in the field of Self-Aware Networks- SANs. Previous blogs have emphasised the emergence of the networked enterprise as the next stage in advanced decision-making. SANs are a key evolutionary step on the path to this goal. Self-aware networks can be wired, wireless or peer-to-peer, allowing individual nodes to discover the presence of other nodes and links as required- largely autonomously. Packets of information can be forwarded to any node without traditional network routing tables, based on reinforcement learning and smart routing algorithms, resulting in reduced response times, traffic densities, noise and energy consumption.
Another major shift towards a networked world has been the rise of Social Networks. These have attracted billions of users for networking applications such as Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter etc. These are providing the early social glue for World 2.0, offering pervasive connectivity by processing and sharing multi-media content. Together with smart portable devices, they cater to the user’s every desire, through hundreds of thousands of web applications covering all aspects of social experience– entertainment, lifestyle, finance, health, news, reference and utility management etc.
With increased user mobility, location sharing and a desire to always be connected, there is a growing trend towards personalized networks where body, home, urban and vehicle sensory inputs will be linked in densely connected meshes to intermediate specialised networks supporting healthcare, shopping, banking etc.
The explosion of social networked communities is triggering new interest in collaborative systems in general. Recent research in network science has made a significant contribution to a more profound understanding of collaborative behaviour in business ecosystems. As discussed in previous posts, networked ‘swarm’ behaviour can demonstrate an increase in collective intelligence. Such collective synergy in complex self-organising systems allows ‘smarter’ problem solving as well as greater decision agility. By linking together in strategic and operational networks, enterprises can therefore achieve superior performance than was previously possible.
The key characteristics of the smart business network of the future will be its ability to react rapidly to emerging opportunities or threats, by selecting and linking appropriate business processes. Such networks will be capable of quickly and opportunistically connecting and disconnecting relationship nodes, establishing business rules for participating members on the basis of risk and reward.
This ‘on the fly’ capacity to reconfigure operational rules, will be a crucial dynamic governing the success of tomorrow’s enterprise. CIOs must also learn to span the architectural boundaries between their own networked organisation and the increasingly complex social and economic networked ecosystems in which their organisations are embedded.
In fact the business community is now struggling to keep up with the continuous rate of innovation demanded by its users. Social network solutions have the potential to help meet this demand by shaping the design of future architectures to provide better ways to secure distributed systems.
So what is the future of this new collaborative, densely configured networked world? What we are witnessing is the inter-weaving of a vast number of evolving and increasingly autonomous networks, binding our civilisation in a web of computational nodes and relational connections, spanning personal to global interactions.

By 2050 the new World 2.0 cyber-infrastructure will link most individuals, enterprises and communities on the planet. Each will have a role to play in our networked future, as the cells of our brain do- but it will be a future in which the sum of the connected whole will also be an active player.

Managing the Planet

2010-05-12T00:59:00.000-07:00

There will be an urgent need to harness the full resources and intelligence of the Web to coordinate and manage major programs relating to global warming and survival of the planet- including its life and human civilization.

The cards are now on the table- the climate skeptics bluff has been called. The latest science suggests that of the critical indicators of the health of the planet, three have already passed the critical stage and the remainder are perilously close to the abyss.

Those past critical are biodiversity loss, ozone depletion and ocean warming and acidification; with chemical pollution, land and freshwater over-use and nitrogen and phosphorous runoff close behind. Most importantly, at current levels of CO2 accumulation, the maximum 2 degree centigrade threshold increase will be breached within twenty years.

In addition, over the past 50 years the world’s population has almost doubled to 7 billion, global consumption of food and fresh water has more than tripled, fossil fuel use has quadrupled and vertebrates have declined by over 30%.

It is clear that managing the planet’s outcomes to provide life with a future is the paramount goal that must focus all humanity’s skills, creativity and knowledge, from now into the far future

Up until comparatively recently, managing resources, infrastructure and catastrophes has been largely an ad hoc affair run on a country rather than regional or global basis. This is not surprising considering the evolution of our civilization, which has been based on a largely competitive, winner-take-all model between individuals, organizations, cities and nation-states.

Over the last few decades however a realization has dawned that this is an extremely inefficient and counterproductive approach and totally unsustainable in the modern carbon-induced warming era. This is particularly the case when it comes to managing critical global issues such as climate change, spread of disease, ecosystem protection and major catastrophes- including mega-droughts, oil-spills and earthquakes.

Although still operating in largely fragmented mode, humans are beginning to mobilise cooperatively, creating global research consortiums, trade and business alliances and knowledge exchange networks. But a lot more is needed to ensure our survival- primarily by becoming a lot cleverer in focusing our scientific, technology and social resources.

One of the most significant advances recently announced, is the European FuturIcT project.

This ambitious European Commission funded billion euro enterprise, is designed to simulate the knowledge resources of the entire planet- not just physical but social and economic, mobilising partners from most of the top university research centres in Europe.

The 'Living Earth Simulator' is a major part of this project to be completed by 2022. It will mine economic, technological, environmental and health data to create a model of the entire planet’s dynamics in real time; applying it to solve major problems relating to these areas.

There is now a vital need to better understand the global interrelationships enmeshing the society in which we live and the effect that these have on the planet as a whole. We also need to know how to leverage the benefits of global social systems, while at the same time limiting any downsides they may generate.

Labelled- 'Reality Mining', the plan is to gather information about every aspect of the living planet including its life-forms and use it to simulate the behaviour and evolution of entire ecosystems and economies; helping predict and prevent future potential crises. The Living Earth Simulator is expected to predict for example, potential economic bubbles, impacts of global warming, pandemics and conflicts and how to best mitigate them.

The FuturicT project has the potential to nucleate and accelerate this process operating as an essential catalyst and mobiliser for managing our future. But there are many other advanced projects with the potential to complement this grand design and working in parallel to help complete the big picture.

The focus is on preparing for a smarter future for planet earth- creating solutions for managing more efficiently and reliably the world’s infrastructure, energy, food, water and health. This will be achieved through harnessing the immense power of advanced artificial intelligence, mathematical, computing, communication, control and modelling techniques.

Examples of current myriad hi-tech initiatives include-
self-healing software capable of automatically detecting, identifying, and fixing errors in the programs used in complex systems; a ‘central nervous system’ of ‘smart dust’ for the Earth, in which a trillion sensors will be deployed worldwide to monitor ecosystems, detect earthquakes, predict traffic patterns, and study energy use; a system of computerized agents that can manage energy use in the home, designed to optimize individual electricity usage to improve efficiency of the electricity grid; and leveraging the vast cornucopia of freely available services on the web to build mashups to support humanitarian and disaster relief.

As mentioned, game changing projects such as FuturicT are critical, but managing the planet requires much more- in essence coordinating and focusing the entire knowledge base and mind-power of our civilisation.

This should implemented as a world wide public project, in the same manner as the Internet and Web: with each component of the planet’s intellectual mosaic- individuals, research groups, corporations and governments, contributing and mining their knowledge resources- each according to their creative capacity and expertise.

Such a global vision is too fundamentally vital and complex to be funnelled through individual private organisations, politicians or states. It must instead function as a self-organising supra-national entity- evolving eventually as a largely autonomous system.
Managing the planet therefore will involve the massive task of coordinating thousands of techniques, technologies, systems and initiatives to gain the maximum leverage within the timescale available.

But time now is precious. Most current ‘green’ applications are in the early stages- designed to improve energy efficiency by deploying breakthroughs in sustainable technologies such as solar, wind, biofuels, carbon capture etc. But this is just the beginning of the journey. Copenhagen demonstrated that gaining consensus even for the essential task of implementing a global carbon trading system - so vital in generating the momentum to transition from polluting fossil fuels to green power- is difficult to achieve.

Is this a feasible proposition? Yes, but only by applying adaptive, autonomic system technology, capable of responding dynamically and autonomously to changes in the physical and social environment. Such a system will need to include the ability to self-organise and self-optimise its planning and operations – to discover, innovate, simulate, create, predict, apply, learn and continuously gain intelligence- to ensure optimal outcomes.

As mentioned, the FuturicT project now has the potential to kick-start this process. But there is only one practical mechanism to ensure the ultimate success of such a gargantuan endeavour- harnessing the intelligence of the Web itself. It must be nurtured and engineered to become self-organising and self-adaptive, in order to reach the goal of managing a sustainable future- essential for us and our planet.

The Future of War

2010-02-21T13:44:00.000-08:00

Aggressive wars and conflicts- that is those not waged in direct defence of a nation or region, cause massive destruction to human life and its environment as well as future generations.
Therefore it is morally incumbent on all governments to avoid or minimise the horrendous social and economic consequences.

In addition, wars are not only immoral but also illegal under national and international law. At the Nuremberg trials following the defeat of Nazi Germany, aggressive wars were judged to constitute the worst of international crimes, with prevention the major reason for founding the United Nations.

Methods for managing such conflicts and avoiding escalation between major powers have been greatly bolstered since the end of WW2, with the creation of institutions such as the UN, NATO and later the EU. In addition, new methods of mediation and diplomacy have gradually evolved in which third party nations and groups are involved in the resolution of conflict and peacekeeping processes. Although these methods are far from perfect, there are grounds for optimism that over time, combined with increasing globalisation ensuring the intermeshing of all national interests and cultures, major conflicts between and within states will become impossible to sustain.

Post cold war there have been numerous civil and neighbouring national conflicts, often involving ethnic or separatist groups, creating great suffering and subsequent large flows of refugees. However a study of wars and armed conflict, The Human Security Report: War and Peace in the 21st Century, shows that the number of armed conflicts has fallen by 40% since the end of the Cold War.

So far in the 21st century an average of 20,000 to 30,000 people each year have suffered violent deaths in wars within and between states, compared with more than 200,000 each year through most of the 1990’s. At the same time, the number of people killed in conflicts has been falling continuously since 1950. Terrorism kills comparatively few people compared with wars, genocide and even traffic accidents. This decline is attributed to the post 1992 increase in UN preventative diplomacy and peace keeping missions and also to the rise and effectiveness of NGOs in drawing attention to crimes perpetrated by or with the knowledge of governments.

Also since its establishment, the UN has played a significant role as effective peacemaker, with a positive outcome achieved in 66% of peace missions. There has been a sixfold increase in UN efforts to prevent wars from starting, a four fold increase in UN peacemaking missions to end unresolved conflicts and an eleven fold increase in the number of states made subject to UN sanctions.

There is gradually emerging through the slow painful process of evolutionary trial and error, mechanisms for containing and resolving violent conflicts, involving the combined efforts of the international community- Governments, NGOs, the UN, WTO, IMF, together with regional and local national alliances.
The social forces unleashed by the expansion of technological, economic and political knowledge, have ensured that no nation can remain in isolation for very long. As globalisation accelerates, pressures are placed on all states by their peers to meet minimum standards of human rights as well as good governance. Failure to respond to these pressures can result in a state becoming a pariah- paying the price of reduced trade, financial support and a lower standard of living for its population.

A variety of techniques from mediation and peace-keeping to trade sanctions and threat of reprisal, are being applied in order to force warring parties to the peace table. These have been applied with mixed success in Bosnia, Kosovo, Kashmir, Northern Ireland and the Sudan, while high-pressure mediation is continuing in more intractable conflict areas such as Palestine, Somalia, The Republic of Congo, North Korea and Burma. There is no doubt that that we are witnessing the evolutionary genesis of globally mediated methods for permanently maintaining peace across the planet.

The principle of mutual support and cooperation between states provides an evolutionary win-win for all stakeholders. As has been demonstrated throughout history, competition for resources can on its own achieve short term gains for the dominant parties; but without cooperation, this will inevitably lead to conflict and war, resulting in loss and eventual for all parties. Support for the floundering economies affected by climate change and conflict in Asia, Africa, Central Asia and South America, will be a crucial test for the international community in the future; demonstrating its capacity for support and cooperation on a global scale.

Since 1945 there have been two major developments in the practice of war and peace; the rise of human rights law in peacetime and the strengthening of international humanitarian law in wartime. The relationship between a government and its citizens is now more transparent because of democracy, with government officials increasingly held responsible for violations of human rights. There is a need in conflicts to make a clear distinction between oppressors and oppressed, between the guilty and the innocent. Nations held captive by dictators and despots should not be doubly punished by collective sanctions and outside violence. Killing innocents to save innocents is an unacceptable moral choice. With hindsight it is clear that In Iraq the Security Council should have sought the option Hussein’s indictment by an international criminal tribunal as a perpetrator of war crimes and should not have imposed sanctions and turned a blind eye to war by the US, which over a decade has cost at least a half a million civilian lives.

A new system of international justice based on the UN Human Rights Charter can also provide a road to post-conflict reconciliation. The new model can contribute to peace and democracy for states emerging from the massive trauma of violent war and genocide.
One approach being implemented is the Truth and Reconciliation Commissions. These deal with acts of violence and repression committed by the State that occurred in a country’s recent past. Commissions cannot impose sentences or award damages, but are authorised by the state, lasting about 2 years and then disbanding. There are currently three such commissions in operation; in Morocco, the Democratic Republic of Congo and Paraguay, with three new commissions being established in Indonesia, Liberia and Burundi.

It is now clear that most military analyses relating to the future of war are severely skewed and one dimensional, failing to adequately factor in drivers beyond traditional geopolitical and weapons trendlines. These future drivers- primarily globalisation, cyber-culture and global warming are now approaching with the force of a tsunami and will overwhelm all other traditional military drivers by mid-century.

Failing to adequately take their consequences into account is to blindside future reality, with the potential to lead to further irrevocable impacts on a fragile world.

Globalisation involves the interweaving of the cultural, educational, legal, economic, political, and technological protocols of all nations in a dense web of dependencies and relationships. China and the US for example are now joined at the hip despite ideological disparities and are mutually interdependent. The US needs China’s financial reserves to prop up its massive dollar debt, while China needs US markets for a large proportion of its exports. These two superpowers are also indirectly connected by the web of alliance and trade networks of the international community as a whole. They are now both too big, too interconnected and too focussed on trying to improve the quality of life of their own populations to become involved in massive national global wars.

The outstanding template for globalisation is of course the European Union, which now links the economies of 27 nations, that up until a century ago warred continuously, with massive loss of life and potential. Now their populations work together, trade together, marry together and share a common currency. The EU is the third force in an increasingly multi-polar world, counterbalancing both the US and China.

Globalisation is also being accelerated by the Cyber revolution- providing access by all populations to the world’s knowledge base and providing an unstoppable catalyst for democracy, despite short term futile attempts at national censorship. It now mediates civilisation’s social, scientific and commercial progress, with the potential to provide enormous computational and decision power for future global governance.

Simulated war-gaming, involving complex scenario simulations based on holistic social and economic factors, will therefore be increasingly applied to pre-evaluate the potential outcomes of waging war; with the result that military imperatives will play a significantly reduced role in the future.

Cyber warfare will also become increasingly common, used as a proxy for direct weapons-based assault. Recent major attacks on Google as well as 2,500 major companies worldwide, demonstrate the potential for even small groups to wage global economic warfare- hijacking strategic planning data and shutting down critical processes and infrastructure.

But global warming is the biggest challenge, with the greatest potential impact ever faced or ever likely to be faced by our civilisation. By the middle of this century the budgets of all countries, particularly those of the major and middle powers will be focussed on mitigating the disastrous outcomes including- increased frequency and severity of catastrophic events, resulting in massive damage to both the natural and built environment, acidification of oceans, scarcity of food, water and energy, disease pandemics and unprecedented refugee flows.

The stresses on all societies will be enormous, but only through global cooperation will anarchy and conflict will be constrained. This will require planning and allocation of resources on a global scale. The budgets and assets of all major powers including the US, China, India and the EU will need to be synchronised and focussed on avoiding this over-riding threat to the future of humanity. National rivalries will be subsumed and military and weapons programs drastically cut.

A timeline on the evolution of this process is as follows-

By 2020- battlefield strategy will evolve towards one that is increasingly fought in covert form – not through the use of large-scale traditional weaponry as in previous wars, as conventional military values become obsolete. Most attacks will be focused on subduing increasingly integrated terrorist and criminal groups, military juntas and authoritarian regimes as well as minority ehtnic groups.

A high proportion of battlefield operations will be automated, with drones and robots operating remotely and eventually autonomously, using satellite and sensor surveillance and the latest Web based intelligence for decision support. Cyber and economic warfare will also play an increasing role, conducted both by governments and criminal and terrorist groups.

At the same time there will be greater emphasis on a variety of peace-keeping and mediation initiatives, involving a range of alliances between Governments, NGOs and military forces such as the new-look NATO, operating at the local level in cooperation with civilian populations. These strategies will increasingly be applied to support failing and dysfunctional states and establish democratic institutions and are now beginning to be rolled out in Iraq and Afghanistan. This will become the primary template for future military operations.

By 2030- superpower states – US and China, will no longer able to sustain long term conflicts using 20th century arsenals of air, sea and land forces. The US will be forced to abdicate its traditional 20th century role of global military dominance as its resources become spread too thinly and it struggles to maintain quality of life for its population against unsustainable mounting levels of debt.

Similarly China, India and middle power nations will be forced to channel most of their resources to developing infrastructure, capacity and social services. Numerous flashpoints involving quelling local insurgencies and ethnic uprisings will remain. Increasingly the UN and representative government groups such as the present G20 will work together to minimise conflict globally. The EU will be seen as the template for global cooperation and peace-keeping will become the norm for conflict containment.

By 2040 – it is realised by most nations that conflict and wars are increasingly unsupportable. Globalisation continues to accelerate, with the creation of more complex networks of alliances and treaties binding nations and regional groups. At the same time countries start to lose their traditional status, with pressure for more fluid cross border relaxation as in the EU. The mixing of races and nationalities eases pressure for conflict, and provides greater accessibility to global health, education, and knowledge resources.
The reality of climate change, with its increasing frequency of disaster events, forces ideological disparities to play a secondary role.

By 2050- all available global resources are marshalled to overcome the immense problems associated with global warming. The end of wars between nations is in sight.

Future World Order- Mark 2

2009-12-23T23:21:00.000-08:00

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

Future Child Rights- Global Warming

2009-11-23T14:57:00.001-08:00

On the 20th anniversary of the Convention on Children’s Rights,
progress in reducing child poverty and exploitation is now at risk from the impact of global warming.

Nations are staging special events to mark the 20th anniversary of the Convention on the Rights of the Child, which came into force on November 20, 1989. It is the most widely ratified international human rights treaty. Every country in the world has ratified it, with the exception of Somalia and the United States, which claims government interference in family life and the possible loss of its sovereign rights. Despite remarkable economic growth in scores of countries over the past 20 years, shocking disparities still exist, with the poorest children left further behind.
In 2000 the UN’s Millennium Development Goal aimed to provide all children with access to primary education and to cut infant mortality by two thirds by 2015. These goals appeared to be achievable. Educational advances for children over the last 10 years have included a 5% increase in primary school enrolment and 12.5 % rise at the secondary level, with a 16% improvement in literacy.

In addition, in 2004 India vaccinated all children under the age of five against polio- 155 million in all. This was the largest public health initiative in the history of humanity. Previously there were 75,000 cases of polio per year. This debilitating disease has now been almost completely eliminated. There are also three 3 million fewer child deaths per year globally, largely due to immunisation and reduction of a third of cases of diarrhoea. As a result, infant mortality has dropped from 10% to 5% globally.

However despite these major advances, the most recent UNICEF report on the world's progress over the past ten years concludes that this is just a start. Until recently, children had benefited from exceptional growth in the world economy, but even so one in twelve died before the age of five, usually from preventable illnesses; with malnutrition recognised as a factor in half of child deaths.

It has been estimated that for less than $35 billion or a small fraction of the money allocated to weapons purchases or farming subsidies in the US and EU each year, infant mortality could be reduced by two thirds, land mines removed and access provided to clean water and sanitation.

Now following the world financial collapse and the worsening effects of global warming, the situation is worsening, creating program funding shortfalls from the UN and developed countries. According to the latest 2009 UNICEF report, 200 million children are still chronically malnourished, while overall, one billion lack services essential to their survival and development. In addition, child trafficking, sexual violence and slavery is stiill rampant in countries such as Gabon in West Africa, with more than 140 million worldwide forced to work in brutal conditions.

But now with the acceleration of global warming the hard won gains of the past twenty years are at much greater risk. Severe droughts are already affecting rainfall across India, China and Africa, creating chronic food and water shortages.

In addition, global warming is likely to lead to increases in disease and conflict, regardless of current carbon reduction programs. This will inevitably have ripple on effects, increasingly affecting children’s health and welfare, particularly in developing countries.
But it doesn’t have to be. The representative of the UN Children’s Fund- Jose Juan Ortiz, speaking at celebrations marking Universal Children's Day, noted that Cuba, one of the poorest countries on the planet and still under an economic embargo and suffering frequent natural disasters, has significantly reduced child mortality and improved child nutrition to levels that rival those of developed countries, by focussing its priorities and meagre resources.
This provides a clear and unequivocal template for the developed world.
The progress achieved through knowledge sharing, cooperation and prioritisation of essential resources between nations must be maintained, even through the critical times ahead.
The reason? very simply- the children of the planet are our only hope and our only future.

A Future Smarter Greener Journey

2009-05-19T04:37:00.000-07:00

As we move into the next phase of our civilization it is apparent that our built infrastructure will have difficulty coping with the journey ahead- the demands of rising populations, expanding power and computer usage and the global warming risks of extreme floods, droughts and rising sea levels.

Everything from roads, bridges, railways, buildings, dams, power plants, grids and communications systems, as well as human skill capacities, will need to be urgently upgraded. The new standards will be set much higher- at a much smarter level than previously, in order to reduce carbon emissions, optimize performance and enable more responsive adaptation within a fast changing physical and social environment.

Not only will this shift towards a smarter greener planet bring about enormous improvements in efficiency and productivity, but will also save countless lives. Every time a bridge or building collapses through poor design, shoddy building controls or lack of adequate maintenance, needless lives are lost and communities displaced, particularly in poorer countries.

The current level of risk and waste in the built environment is now seen as both unacceptable and avoidable. By applying new technologies already available such as smarter materials, safer engineering methods, improved communications and sophisticated computer modeling, risk can be dramatically reduced.

At the heart of this revolution towards a smarter planet will be the powerful mathematical algorithms and intelligence capable of making optimum decisions at a far greater speed and more rigorously, with less human intervention. In turn this will require instant access to the Web’s global resources of specialized knowledge bases, artificial intelligence and massive grid computing power.

Every built object and operational process will eventually be embedded with sensors and its performance and integrity continuously monitored and assessed. Nowhere is this capability more urgently required than in upgrading today’s archaic power grids. These need to be much smarter and more flexible in order to deliver greater efficiency, better quality service and adapt to community demands for greener energy.

In particular, tomorrows electrical grids must be re-engineered to seamlessly combine renewable energy with fossil power generation. Solar and wind in the US currently supply only 1% of energy needs, but a number of states have now passed laws requiring 20% within the next few decades.

To smooth out future variations in supply and demand, utilities will need the capability to store large amounts of electricity, build high voltage direct current transmission networks, reducing power losses and covering larger areas at lower cost, as well as having greater control over consumer usage.

To achieve this capability, sensors will be required to analyze the grid’s status from thousands of independent renewable sources and react immediately if conditions deteriorate. In turn this will require more accurate weather forecasting, including wind speed, sunlight intensity etc. If this is not sufficiently accurate or reactive the advantages of green energy will be lost.

Smarter infrastructure will be just the beginning for achieving tomorrow’s smarter, greener planet. At the core of the revolution will be the harnessing of the intelligent web – a potentially vast cooperative decision network linking all humanity’s knowledge and wisdom.

We will need all its support for the difficult journey ahead.

The Future Smart Planet

2009-05-15T17:00:00.001-07:00

A new tipping point in human civilisation’s development has been reached.
Over the past year from myriad sources, the concept of the ‘Smart Planet’ has crystallized and now the revolution has begun.

Information technology, engineering and applied mathematics has reached the point where the infrastructure and processes of our civilisation can be leveraged to a much ‘smarter’ level- with the potential to reduce risk, increase productivity and improve the standard of living for all.

‘Smart’ means that what is designed, developed and implemented must have the capacity to make intelligent decisions in realtime, largely without human intervention and be adaptive and responsive to its environment. This can be achieved using a variety of sensors, meshed high speed autonomic communications, computing power and sophisticated algorithms for analytical and pattern analysis of large amounts of information. Also vital will be the use of artificial intelligence techniques such as genetic algorithms, fuzzy logic and neural networks.

It will not be acceptable from now on for our future planet’s infrastructure– its roads, bridges, railways, buildings, power generators, electricity and computer grids and the software that runs them, to be built or maintained at a sub-optimal level. It will be unacceptable for our enterprise infrastructure and processes to be dysfunctional or decay to the point of catastrophic collapse, as happens across the planet on a daily basis, with an enormous cost in lives, time and money.

Now the IT behemoths- IBM, Oracle, SAP, Microsoft, Cisco and Google and all the thousands of small and medium IT enterprises are scrambling to be part of the revolution in creating smarter infrastructure and processes for our planet. The tools and techniques to realise this revolution- computing and communication power, social and scientific knowledge, software and systems capacity, mathematical and artificial intelligence - have been building exponentially in momentum and scope over the past 50 years.

Now after developing and nurturing the financial, logistics, production, procurement, industrial, distribution and office support systems- assisting business to reap the benefits of building better products and services, IT is positioning to become an equal partner, sharing in the greater rewards.

The relationship between IT and business will now undergo a dramatic shift. There has always been a tension between the two as each wrestled for control of enterprise processes. Today’s management structures, architectures and planning processes will be replaced by a new smarter, more autonomous regime- decision rather than process oriented, with far less human intervention; shifting the balance of commercial power.

Over the past three years, since the original germ of the ‘smart planet’ emerged, IT companies have been scouring the world for the best techniques, algorithms, philosophies and smartest minds in order to successfully implement its grand design. In the process they’ve scooped up IP relating to decision and knowledge engineering technologies, business intelligence, mathematical and AI advances, as well as cultivating new strategic business partnerships, covering the spectrum of major industries and applications.

But as history has repeatedly shown, over the longer term no individual or group of organisations has a monopoly on the process of human invention and innovation. In an increasingly globalised world, by linking intellectual progress and initiatives via the intelligent web, the planet's knowledge can eventually be shared by all of society.

The really Smart Planet therefore is one which harnesses life’s intelligence and potential for the benefit of all humanity; at the same time utilising the incredible power of the web to overcome the threats to our survival of global warming, disease, conflict, poverty and major catastrophes.

Only a truly global partnership will ensure the Smart Planet’s future success.

The Future Wise Web

2009-05-13T18:39:00.001-07:00

By 2015 Web 2.0- The Social Web- will have developed into a complex multimedia interweaving of ideas, knowledge and social commentary, connecting over three billion people on the planet. In combination with the Semantic Web 3.0 it will automatically analyse, interpret and create new forms of layered knowledge beyond the world of today's blogs, wikis, social networks and virtual worlds.
Over the next decade these early trends will continue to evolve at a frenetic pace- social networks will both fragment and unify, catering to special groups, but also overlapping and creating within the next few years a global social network of networks. At the same time, social networks and virtual worlds such as Second Life will converge, along with powerful simulation technology, to create the first realistic virtual realities.

By 2020, Web 3.0- advanced versions of the Semantic Web- will have made many important contributions to new knowledge through network relationships, logical inference and artificial intelligence. It will be powered by a seamless, computational mesh, enveloping and connecting most human life and will encompass all facets of our social and business lives- always on and available to manage every need. It will connect not only most of the 8 billion individuals on the planet, but also link with other biological and artificial life forms, as well as countless everyday electronically controlled objects. The Semantic Web and Intelligent Web will have combined.

By 2030 Web 4.0- the Intelligent Web- will be ubiquitous- able to interact with the repository of almost all available knowledge of human civilisation- past and present, digitally coded and archived for automatic retrieval and analysis. Web 4.0 will mark the beginning of a new intelligent entity- a sentient and cognisant multidimensional network, powered not only by billions of ultra-fast tiny processors and unlimited communications bandwidth, but by the first quantum computers, capable of processing trillions of operations in parallel. Human intelligence will have cojoined with advanced forms of artificial intelligence, creating a higher or meta level of knowledge processing. This will be essential for supporting the complex decision-making and problem solving capacity, required for civilisation's future progress.

By 2050 Web 5.0- The Wise Web- will have emerged, embedding all biological and artificial life wthin a global cooperative intelligence. All critical decisions affecting our planet and life, including those relating to global warming, sharing vital resources and the ethical resolution of conflict and human rights, will be guided by this global intelligence.

The Wise Web will mark the beginning of a new threshold in human civilisation- a new form of global consciousness- in which all life will be embedded.

Future Global Cooperation - Key to Survival

2009-05-12T04:35:00.000-07:00

Global warming is now perceived as the dominant threat to humans and to present civilisation. This will manifest increasingly in more extreme events such as floods, droughts, hurricanes, heat waves etc putting at risk water, food and infrastructure resources; rising sea levels putting at risk two thirds of the world’s major cities and all low lying coastal areas; loss of biodiversity with the consequent crashing of food chains; increases in deadly diseases such as malaria, dengue fever, and in worst case scenarios the risk of escalating chaos and conflict in developing countries.

Gradually humans in all countries are realising that only through cooperation on a global scale can they effectively survive the major threats to their survival in the future. In the areas of health, technology, agriculture, trade, climate change and disaster management, global partnerships are beginning to make a significant difference to the lives of the disadvantaged.

Global warming and its impact on ecosystems and biodiversity is one of the most critical areas where cooperative research is essential, with the very survival of the planet at stake. Conserving ecosystems and the services they provide such as maintaining clean air and water, is now seen as vital to human self-interest and survival. This has now been recognised with the establishment of the UN Convention on Biological Diversity, which came into force 1993, with the goal of arresting the decline in global diversity by 2010. In addition, 190 countries at the 2002 Johannesburg World Summit on Sustainable Development committed to achieving a significant reduction in the current rate of biodiversity loss.

Global Warming and the increasing awareness of the need to shift to less polluting energy solutions as well as conserve energy water resources has become a major issue for communities and business. In a very short timeframe all human developed social and physical infrastructure systems, including those of health, transport, education, communications, energy, building, computing etc will need to be oriented towards mitigating this potential global catastrophe.

The International Conference on Biodiversity Science and Governance in January 2004, organised by France and UNESCO, suggested a global network of experts be established, to increase knowledge of biodiversity and establish the scientific basis to achieve its goals. This requires broad based international cooperation under the UN Convention on Biological Diversity and the creation of a UN Environmental organization. Agreeing on suitable indicators to measure this loss is obviously critical. The first step was taken in 2004 by this convention’s agreement on 18 indicators with France to include an environmental charter in its constitution in 2005. Researchers from around the world are also planning a global project to tag important marine species- The Ocean Tracking Project. This will cover 14 ocean regions and should provide insights into how climate change is affecting marine ecosystems and migration.

Another key long term initiative is the Climate Watch Pact, an earth observation summit, which defines how the US, Japan, Russia, China and the EU will apportion data collection among the earth orbiting satellites, monitoring future water supply, weather forecasting, drought mitigation, bushfire control, flood prediction, hurricanes and crop growth.

Global warming and related poverty is also linked to increases in major diseases such as malaria, dengue fever, tuberulosis and HIV/Aids. There are now thousands of medical research initiatives seeking to apply the new scientific breakthroughs in molecular biology to counter the pathology of disease. One critical area is the ongoing effort to find an effective vaccine for HIV/AIDS. Twenty million people have already died and 40 million more currently have the virus, reducing life expectancy by in some countries by 18 years.

The WHO summit recently hosted four hundred government and UN agency officials, donors and experts in human and animal health, to develop a global plan to build early warning systems to spot early outbreaks of infectious diseases, stockpile drugs and encourage vaccine research and cooperation at all levels. The WTO provides inexpensive drugs to the poor and allows Africa to import cheaper copies of patented drugs for diseases such as AIDS, malaria and tuberculosis.

Tapping into the expertise of nationals living abroad is one example of cooperation. Because of the reduced support and interest by rich countries in finding solutions for problems of developing countries in the tropics, a consultative group on international agricultural research was established, which promotes sustainable agricultural development across the developing world, with a shift of research activities from the public to private sector. Another initiative was the creation of the Arab Science and Technology Foundation in 2002 in the United Arab Emirates to promote international cooperation on science and technology among Arab countries and other members of the international community.

All the above initiatives are critical to the survival of our civilisation and demonstrate the underlying imperative of evolution in reacting to environmental indicators that signal a threat to the survival of life. Cooperation through sharing and integrating the world’s knowledge and resources in the future to facilitate energy, health, education, food and water access and sustainability for all, will now be critical our survival.

Since the Indian ocean tsunami, which killed over 300,000 people in 2004, together with the recent disastrous earthquakes in China, Iran, Pakistan, Kashmir and Indonesia, it has been increasingly recognised that major disasters can only be managed and mitigated through cooperation and the sharing of resources on a global scale. These catastrophes have been the catalyst for cooperative assistance and long-term economic development in poorer countries. They have also served to raise humanitarian awareness beyond racial, social, religious and sectarian constraints in developed nations.

Global Cooperation must therefore continue to develop, to ensure human and life's survival and the full realisation of its potential

Future Human Sustainability

2009-05-12T04:33:00.000-07:00

The following is one scenario for the future of life on the planet. It is a fairly bleak assessment but one which is being taken seriously and its ramifications explored by an increasing number of environmentalists and planners.

By 2010- most developed countries will have taken significant steps to reduce global emissions and foster major renewable energy alternatives in line with proposed Copenhagen protocols, despite the global financial crisis. Renewable sources are growing rapidly, but still account for only around 5 percent of energy use, with dirty coal remaining the dominant base-load power source in both developed and developing countries.

By 2020- carbon levels continue to rise faster than forecast towards the critical 450ppm threshold and 2 degrees centigrade rise needed to contain global warming. It is realised that the impact of climate change will be unstoppable if the level of emissions is not drastically reduced to below 50% by 2030- not 2050. Major polluters in the developing countries such as China and India join with the US and Europe to meet these targets.
India and China will both have outstripped the US in energy consumption by a large margin. There will have been a significant shift by consumers and industry to renewable energy technologies- around 20%, powered by second generation solar cells, wind turbines and biofuels, Coal and gas will continue to play a major role at around 60% usage, with clean coal technologies well advanced but still very expensive. Nuclear technology will remain static at 10%.

By 2030- oil from the easily accessible fields will be largely exhausted, with most vehicles using battery or hydrogen cell electric power technology. Renewable energy will account for 40% of usage, including substantial baseload power generation. Solar and wind power will dominate in the form of huge desert solar and coastal farms, but all renewable energy technologies- ocean, geothermal, biomass etc will play a significant role.
Safer fourth generation nuclear power plants will account for around 15% of energy production, with significant advances in the recycling, incineration and storage of waste.
The cycle of extreme weather events, shrinking polar ice and rising oceans that threaten to destroy most coastal lowlands and cities will continue to increase, compounded by major loss of ecosystems, biodiversity and food capacity.
This will force a major rethink of the management of climate change as global catastrophe threatens.

By 2040 global warming will reach a critical threshold with energy usage tripling from levels in 2020, despite conservation controls. Renewables will account for 60% of the world's power supply, nuclear 15% and fossils 25%. Technologies to convert CO2 to hydocarbon fuel together with more efficient sequestering, will allow coal and gas to continue to play a significant role
Despite reductions in emissions by up to 80 %, irreversible and chaotic feedback impacts on the global biosphere will be apparent. These will be triggered by massive releases of methane from permafrost and ocean deposits, fresh water flows from melting ice causing disruptions to ocean currents and weather patterns.
In addition the disintegration of many of the intricate dependencies of plant and animal species will become apparent with unpredictable risks to ecosystems, health and global food webs.

By 2050- the critical thresholds of climate warming will have been passed, rising towards carbon levels of 550ppm and increases in temperature of up to 4 degrees centigrade.
Increasingly desperate measures are canvassed and tested, including the design of major geo-engineering projects aimed at reducing the amount of sunlight reaching earth, harnessing fusion power and reversal of the acidity of the oceans. These massive infrastructure projects would have potentially enormous economic impacts on all social, industrial and economic systems. They are assessed to be largely ineffective, unpredictable and unsustainable.
As forecasts confirm that carbon levels in the atmosphere will remain high for the next 1000 years, regardless of mitigating protocols, priorities shift urgently to the need to minimise risk to life on a global scale, while protecting civilisation's core social, knowledge and cultural assets.
Preserving the surviving natural ecosystem environment and the critical infrastructure of the built environment, particularly the Internet and web, will now be vital.
The sustainability of human life on planet Earth, in the face of overwhelming catastrophe, will be dependent to a critical degree on the power of the future Web, combining human and artificial intelligence.(ref Future Web)
Only the enormous problem-solving capacity of this human-engineered entity, will be capable of ensuring the continuing survival of civilisation as we know

Future Planet Foundations

2009-05-10T02:33:00.000-07:00

The goal of this blog is to monitor and analyze the evolution of the health and sustainability of the planet and impacts on its life systems- covering climate, energy, food, water, ecology, ecosystems, biodiversity etc.

In addition it will examine the cultures, technologies and philosophies driving the evolution of human life and civilisation into the far future.

Green videos are also freely downloadable viz- the State of the Planet Series /Ecosystems, to be extended in 2010, from the www.theoriesofeverything.com website