State of the Future 19.1

Acknowledgments

The Chairs and Co-chairs of the 63 Millennium Project Nodes, plus their members who help select participants for studies and national workshops, translate questionnaires, scenarios, and studies, initiate projects, review text, and conduct interviews, are essential for the success of the research and entire work of The Millennium Project. Their unique contributions to this and previous years’ State of the Future reports are greatly appreciated.

Jerome Glenn and Elizabeth Florescu were partners in the research and production of this volume. Jerome Glenn wrote the executive summary, provided the leadership on the cumulative research on the 15 Global Challenges in Chapter 1, conducted the three Real-Time Delphis on each of the Future Work/Technology 2050 Global Scenarios, wrote the initial and final drafts of these scenarios in Chapter 4, and oversaw the national workshops and their suggestions listed in Chapter 4. Elizabeth Florescu and Theodore Gordon computed the 2015 State of the Future Index in Chapter 2. Elizabeth Florescu managed the NATO Advanced Research Workshop on Emerging Technologies and New Counter-Terror Strategies and produced the final synthesis in Chapter 3 with inputs from Theodore Gordon, Yair Sharon, and Jerome Glenn.

The reviewers of the initial drafts of the 15 Global Challenges included Amara Angelica, Gregory Brown, Dennis Bushnell, Puruesh Chaudhary, Henry Cole, Jose Cordeiro, Cornelia Daheim, Tony Diggle, Elizabeth Florescu, Greg Folkers, Paula Gordon, Theodore Gordon, Odette Gregory, William Halal, Sirkka Heinonen, Mary Herman, James Hochschwender, Philip Horvath, Candice Hughes, Ted Kahn, Nikolaos Kastrinos, Steve Killelea, Hayato Kobayashi, Gerd Leonhard, Mark Lupisella, John Mankins, Mario Marais, Michael McDonald, Eszter Monda, Thomas Murphy, Concepción Olavarrieta, Charles Ostman, Gordian Raacke, Diann Rodgers-Healey, Sheila Ronis, Paulo Rossetti, Yashar Saghai, Geci Karuri Sebina, Linda Thornton, Sesh Velamoor, Pera Wells, and Axel Zweck.

The Millennium Project Interns who conducted research for this report and the Global Futures Intelligence System that updates this report were Zahra Asghar, Elaine Cavalheiro, Antoniya Dineva, Hazel Hadian, Clairisse Haines, Chaebin Han, Seokryu Hong, Yifan Hu, Marit Hunt, Niccolò Invidia, Luxing Jiang, Matthew Jones, Xiongxiong Kang, Shreyak Khanal, Jimin Kim, Jude Herijadi Kurniawan, Gema León, Zirui Liao, Jane Nakasamu, Sânziana Onac, Brenda Ongola-Jacob, Verónica Parra, Dheeya Rizmie, Nicholas Ryu, Shyama Sadashiv, Sida Shu, Suraj Sood, Nadja Wipp, Louay Youssef, and Sunny Zhang.

Special thanks to Wesley Boyer for trouble-shooting the Global Futures Intelligence System at themp.org that was used extensively to produce this report. Updating the 15 Global Challenges of the State of the Future is an ongoing process in the GFIS, which also has weblinks to references for much of the data that are not visible in this print edition.

Linda Starke provided editing and proofreading. Veronica Agreda and Juan Alberto Prósperi of the Bolivian Node provided the infographics for the 15 Global Challenges. Elizabeth Florescu did the production and layout of this publication.

And special gratitude for donations from readers like you, who help our work continue. Contributions to The Millennium Project are tax-deductible for taxpayers in the United States, as it is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization.

Preface

Today’s information overloaded world needs coherence, frameworks, and context to get a sense of the big picture of how we are doing and foreseeable prospects. Taken together, the very short overviews of the 15 Global Challenges offer a systemic framework for understanding global change.

A complete description of the global situation, prospects for the future, and strategies to achieve the best possible future is—of course—impossible, but enough is presented in the State of the Future to improve the readers' global foresight. Far greater information and intelligence is available in the Global Futures Intelligence System at www.themp.org, where the subscriber can also participate in updating and improving this collective intelligence system on the future of the world.

The State of the Future Version 19.1 brings together an extraordinarily diverse set of data, information, intelligence, and, we hope, some wisdom about the future. This is the nineteenth edition of the State of the Future. We believe that each edition is better than the previous one. We update data, improve insights, and respond to feedback. [Note: the difference between this State of the Future 19.1 and version 19.0 is only the addition of infographics for each of the 15 Global Challenges.]

Over the years, the short overviews in each State of the Future report kept getting longer, and they became too long to say they are short. In this edition, they are shorter. We hope you like them. The longer Short Overviews with regional considerations will still be available free online and updated regularly in the GFIS, which is also available on your mobile phone, for just-in-time information.

Since humanity lives in different conditions around the world, not all of the actions suggested to address the Global Challenges are appropriate in all situations; think of them as a menu of options and a source of stimulation to develop more appropriate strategies to your unique situation. The suggested actions are drawn from feedback on previous State of the Future reports, Millennium Project Delphi studies, and GFIS’s news feeds, scanning items, situation updates, and peer reviewers’ comments.

This is the third time we have used the online GFIS to update and improve the State of the Future report. The challenges in GFIS are updated regularly from news aggregations, scanning items, situation charts, and other resources, which has led to greater detail and depth than in the previous edition. While this report presents the distilled results of recent research by The Millennium Project, GFIS contains the detailed background and data for that research, plus all of The Millennium Project’s research since its founding in 1996. It also contains the largest internationally peer-reviewed set of methods to explore future possibilities ever assembled in one source. Readers of this report are encouraged to subscribe to GFIS to keep up to date and to participate in improving insights about future possibilities.

The purpose of futures research is to systematically explore, create, and test both possible and desirable futures in order to improve decisions. Just as the person on top of the mast on old sailing ships used to point out the rocks and safe channels to the captain below for the smooth running of the ship through uncharted waters, so too can futurists with foresight systems point out problems and opportunities to leaders and the public around the world. Since decisionmaking is increasingly affected by globalization, global futures research is increasingly needed for decisionmaking by individuals, groups, and institutions. The quality of democracies emerging around the world depends on the quality of information received by the public. The issues and opportunities addressed in this report can contribute to better-informed decisionmaking.

This report is for thought leaders, decisionmakers, and all those who care about the world and its future. Readers will learn how their interests fit into the global situation and how the global situation may affect them and their interests. The State of the Future and GFIS provide an additional eye on global change. These are information utilities that you can draw from as relevant to your unique needs. They provide an overview of the global strategic landscape. Business executives use the research as input to their strategic planning. University professors, futurists, and other consultants find this information useful in teaching and research.

The Millennium Project is a voluntary global participatory think tank of futurists, scholars, scientists, business planners, and policymakers who work for international organizations, governments, corporations, NGOs, and universities and who volunteer their time to improve each edition of the State of the Future. It was selected to be among the top think tanks in the world for new ideas and paradigms as well as for best quality assurance and integrity policies and procedures by the 2013-2016 University of Pennsylvania’s GoTo Think Tank Index and as a 2012 Computerworld Honors Laureate for its innovations in collective intelligence systems.

The purposes of The Millennium Project are to assist in organizing futures research, improve thinking about the future, and make that thinking available through a variety of media for consideration in policymaking, advanced training, public education, and feedback, ideally in order to accumulate wisdom about potential futures. The Project’s diversity of opinions and global views is ensured by its 63 Nodes around the world. These are groups of individuals and organizations that interconnect global and local perspectives. They identify participants, conduct interviews, translate and distribute questionnaires, and conduct research and conferences. It is through their contributions that the world picture of this report and indeed all of The Millennium Project’s work emerges. The Node Chairs and Co-chairs are listed in the Appendix.

Through its research, publications, addresses at conferences, and Nodes, The Millennium Project helps to nurture an international collaborative spirit of free inquiry and feedback for increasing collective intelligence to improve social, technical, and environmental viability for human development. Feedback on any sections of the book is most welcome at and may help shape the next State of the Future, GFIS, and the general work of The Millennium Project.

Jerome C. Glenn

Executive Director

The Millennium Project

Elizabeth Florescu

Director of Research

The Millennium Project

The Millennium Project Team

Staff, 63 Nodes, Reviewers,

and feedback from readers like you

Executive Summary

Most children born today are likely to be alive in the year 2100.

Imagine a world 50 years before then—2050—when the majority of the world could be augmented geniuses inventing their workday, every day, with new people, ideas, and experiences to make life worth living, and civilization could be far better than what we know today. However, without making good decisions, we can all imagine a future far worse than today. This State of the Future 19.1 offers you data, information, intelligence, and some wisdom to provide a context or framework to help make better decisions than is commonly offered today.

Artificial intelligence will drive the development of quantum computing, and then quantum computing will further drive the development of artificial intelligence. This mutual acceleration could grow beyond human control and understanding. Scientific and technological leaders, advanced research institutes, and foundations are exploring how to anticipate and manage this issue.

Meanwhile, human life expectancy has increased from 46 years at birth in 1950 to 72 years now. Child mortality, poverty, contagious disease, and illiteracy have all decreased. The global nervous system of humanity is on the road to completion: 52% of the world—over 3.8 billion people—are now connected to the Internet, about two-thirds of the world has a mobile phone, and over half have smart phones. The Millennium Project’s State of the Future Index shows the world is expected to continue improving over the next 10 years (see Chapter 2); however, environmental conditions, armed conflicts, terrorism, and organized crime are getting worse.

The IMF expects growth of the world economy to increase from 3.1% percent in 2016 to 3.5% in 2017 and then 3.6 % in 2018. Given population growth at 1.11%, global income per capita is growing 2.39% annually.

Although extreme poverty fell from 51% in 1981 to 13% in 2012 and to less than 10% today, the concentration of wealth is increasing, income gaps are widening, jobless economic growth seems the new norm, and return on investment in capital and technology is usually better than labor. As labor costs go up and AI and robot costs go down, manufacturing and service unemployment rates will increase. Hence, new forms of economics seem inevitable if we are to avoid the social disasters of large-scale worldwide structural unemployment that have been forecast by many. Three alternative Future Work/Technology 2050 Global Scenarios in Chapter 4 show how different outcomes might evolve from these trends, along with 100 suggestions to address these issues from The Millennium Project national workshops held in 17 countries in 2016 and 2017. Other national workshops are being planned; taken together, they are intended to broaden and deepen the future of work conversation around the world, leading to improved long-range national policies.

The current world population of 7.6 billion is expected to grow another 2.2 billion in just 33 years (by 2050), putting pressure on food production, environmental management, and financial support systems. Although the world is aging, biological breakthroughs could dramatically extend the lives of healthy, mentally alert people way beyond what is believed today. Future migrations from low-income, high-youth-employment regions to high-income aging societies seem inevitable.

Eco-smart Cities are being built around the world, and older cities are being retrofitted with intelligent systems. China’s One Belt, One Road initiative could lend up to $8 trillion for infrastructure in 68 countries to better connect China to Central Asia, the Middle East, and Europe, making it one of the greatest infrastructure projects in history, hopefully incorporating the latest eco-smart systems with AI. It may be that global urbanization is becoming too complex to manage without artificial intelligence. Moving workers to jobs creates massive traffic jams around the world. New technologies will make it increasingly easy to move jobs to workers. Recent calls for a Fourth Industrial Revolution that uses AI for all elements of production from