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Author: Future Agenda | https://www.futureagenda.org
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https://www.futureagenda.org/foresights/page/6/
New perspectives on the future are gained from multiple expert discussions around the world. Our ten year foresights offer rich, insightful views on some of the most important changes shifts – and challenges - that lie ahead.
As people move they take their beliefs with them. For many, religion is one of the few aspects of their previous life, a key to their sense of identity – stronger than the citizenship of their adopted country or the nation they left behind. The world’s religious landscape is changing dramatically, thanks to differences in population structure such as age and sex, demographic processes such as fertility, mortality and, of course, religious conversions between different groups. Increasing migration has meant that most countries are becoming more religiously diverse – most evident in major cities, often the first port of call…
Permalink: https://www.futureagenda.org/foresights/keeping-the-faith/
Increasing competition between cities overrides national boundaries and drives change. They compete to attract the best but also collaborate to avoid the downside of success – over-crowding, under-resourcing and pollution. Global trade and power is generally defined between governments at a national level; nations acting collectively to negotiate deals to their mutual benefit, on occasion with the support of organisations such as the WTO. This process is often time-consuming, and fails to deliver benefits for specific regions. For city administrations this can be particularly frustrating as they are disproportionately responsible for most of the world’s output – 600 urban centres…
Permalink: https://www.futureagenda.org/foresights/intra-city-collaboration/
Infrastructure again becomes a source of competitive advantage. Emerging economies invest in new railroads and highways for more effective movement of people and goods, while developed nations suffer from poor legacy. Infrastructure – ports, pipelines, hospitals, highways, water, sewage and phone systems – matters, providing the bedrock of national prosperity and well-being. Facilitating transport, promoting communication, providing energy and water, boosting the health and education of the workforce and enabling the whole economy to flourish. The costs of building infrastructure are vast, but the costs of failing to make such investments are incalculable. For a country to be competitive, it…
Permalink: https://www.futureagenda.org/foresights/infrastructure-deficit/
A growing population adds another billion people but it is also rapidly ageing: a child born next year will live 6 months longer than one born today. While migration helps to rebalance, increasing dependency ratios challenge many. While there are a number of different views on total population growth over the next 50 years, no one disagrees that this growth is going to be imbalanced. Be it ageing, fertility or geography, we are increasingly going to have more people in the places and demographic zones where we are least comfortable. Dependency ratios in some countries are fast moving into unsustainable…
Permalink: https://www.futureagenda.org/foresights/imbalanced-population-growth/
As service provision and consumption becomes ever more digital, automated and algorithmic, those brands that can offer more emotional engagement and human-to-human contact become increasingly attractive. Since the Industrial revolution, the world has become more automated. In the 19th century, machines removed the dirty and the dangerous, from looms to the cotton gin, relieving humans of onerous manual labour. In the 20th century, machines took away the dull and the repetitive, with automated interfaces relieving humans of routine service transactions and clerical chores, from airline kiosks to call centres. Today, a world increasingly awash with connected and artificial intelligence and…
Permalink: https://www.futureagenda.org/foresights/human-touch/
Increasing transparency of society’s reliance on nature, intensify requirements for business to pay the true cost of the resources provided by ‘natural capital’ and so compensate for their negative impact on society. In many of today’s commercial activities with historical accounting practices, decisions are often taken on the basis of measurement of a narrow view of profitability and performance. Transparency provided by technology and a growing understanding of supply chain impacts and dependencies are leading to a re-evaluation of value and accounting practices that aim to include ‘whole value chain’ costs and benefits – taking into account costs and benefits…
Permalink: https://www.futureagenda.org/foresights/full-cost/
30-50% of our food is wasted either in the supply chain or in consumption and could feed another 3 billion. Optimising distribution and storage in developing countries and enabling better consumer information in others could solve this. We live in a world where 1 in 4 of the calories we create are never eaten. Every day, consumers in the West throw away as much food as is produced in the whole of Sub Saharan Africa, while, globally, the 2bn tonnes of food wasted each year are equivalent to around $1 trillion of financial loss each year. Going forward, if we…
Permalink: https://www.futureagenda.org/foresights/food-waste/
The vast majority of our cities are not prepared for flooding. Many districts and households can no longer get flood insurance and are in jeopardy. It’s going to get worse before it gets better. 2015 was the warmest year on record and, arguably, with many natural disasters. The Nepal earthquake, the worst flooding for 100 years in Chennai, one of longest heat waves in years in India that claimed 2,000 lives, huge monsoon rains in Myanmar, Bangladesh and India, massive flooding in Mozambique and Malawi, another drought in Ethiopia. Add to that flooding in Europe, the US and South America…
Permalink: https://www.futureagenda.org/foresights/flooded-cities/
Women in richer economies have greater choice, and with it increased control and influence. This continues to drive change and decision-making but globally the battle for female equality has a long road to travel. Debates about equal rights for women have been on the agenda for over a century. Despite the best efforts of the UN’s Millennium Goals, more girls than boys still don’t go to school; in Africa and South Asia boys remain 1.55 times more likely to complete secondary education than girls. Even in rich countries life isn’t equal; the average wage gap between men and women is…
Permalink: https://www.futureagenda.org/foresights/female-choice-dilemma/
Over 1 trillion sensors are connected to multiple networks: everything that can benefit from a connection has one. We deliver 10,000x more data 100x more effectively but are concerned about the security of the information that flows. By 2025, there will be over 50bn SIM cards in use, we will have digitized all of our archives, and new information will be being created at such a rate that some see us doubling the volume of our total data set every month. Much of this data will come from machines, talking to each other as well as to us – by…
Permalink: https://www.futureagenda.org/foresights/everything-connected/
Automation spreads beyond trading and managing systemic risk. As we approach technology singularity, autonomous robots and smarter algorithms make ethical judgments that impact life or death. In ten years time, driverless cars will fill our roads, machine-learning algorithms combat disease and drones will deliver our shopping. Rapid advances in machine learning, visual and voice recognition and neural network processing mean that computers are getting better at perception tasks. This puts Artificial Intelligence (AI), once the mainstay of science fiction writing, at the forefront of next generation computing. AI brings extraordinary benefits, particularly around disease diagnosis, while it also does a…
Permalink: https://www.futureagenda.org/foresights/ethical-machines/
We are developing key technologies that could integrate humans and data to make us safer, more informed and potentially super-human in performance – but should we? The idea of human enhancement is not new. For years now we have variously been seeking to improve our cognitive, emotional and physical capabilities using training, drugs or technology. What we are now seeing however is the convergence of a whole series of pharmaceutical, biological and mechanical developments from different arenas coming into view. Whether from DARPA-sponsored military programmes aimed at creating the super-soldier; medical projects looking to overcome blindness, Parkinson’s or Alzheimer’s; or…
Permalink: https://www.futureagenda.org/foresights/enhanced-performance/
