La World Future Society è un’organizzazione no profit americana il cui obiettivo è capire, investigare e predire i comportamenti della nostra società e le sue possibili evoluzioni.
Eccovi alcuni punti significativi tratti dal loro ultimo report Outlook 2013:
- Money and even cash will still exist by 2100.
- Many recently lost jobs may never come back, but there’s still a future for work.
- Career “paths” will become patchwork pieces. Baby boomers’ future career trajectories will more resemble a lattice than a ladder, with more lateral moves on the way up. For younger generations, it will be more of a patchwork quilt: multiple jobs stitched together to form a more flexible work environment.
- Subways, trains, and diesel trucks will become future sources of energy, not just consumers
- Noise vibrations and other “junk” energy will be harvested from the environment
- Alternative energies won’t be enough to solve the world’s energy woes. Alternatives to alternatives are needed. Heavy investment into solar energy, wind energy, and other renewable systems may actually set us back, since these strategies draw resources away from others that might work better, warns University of California–Berkeley visiting scholar Ozzie Zehner. A more practical approach may be to design communities that enable people to live well while using less Ambiente
- The next great wave of species extinctions may be in the oceans By 2100, humans will have become managers of the natural environment. As climate change and population growth claim the planet’s remaining “wild places,” mankind will learn to manage the natural world as a global garden. Species and even microscopic habitats will be monitored and protected via tiny sensors, and managed with the assistance of artificial intelligence.
- Genetically engineered animals will become a major part of agriculture, but not soon.
- China’s growing appetite for meat will strain global grain supplies. China now consumes 71 million tons of meat a year, about twice as much as the United States and more than a fourth of all the meat produced worldwide, according to the Earth Policy Institute. Increased meat production also increases demand for corn and soybeans used for livestock feed. Supplies of these grains are already seeing strain as energy and other sectors compete with food producers.
- Full-body firewalls will be necessary to prevent hackers from tampering with your implants. Wireless medical devices designed to manage and monitor drug-delivery systems and other implants are vulnerable to interference. Researchers at Purdue and Princeton universities are developing a medical monitor (MedMon) designed to identify potentially malicious activity.
- Better health, but fewer doctors
- The future Internet could connect the world at the neural level.
- Advances in neurotechnology will make it possible for us to link our minds, share our emotional experiences, and even feel changes in the collective state of mind. This “telempathy” would, for instance, enable leaders to gauge public anxiety during a catastrophe. Minority languages will disappear with minority populations.
- By 2025, there will be 27 megacities around the world, each with populations exceeding 10 million.
- By 2100, 70% of the world’s 10 billion inhabitants will live in cities.
- The global Muslim population could increase from 1.6 billion to 2.2 billion (35%) by 2030.
- India will become a hotbed of “invisible innovation.
- Of the 6,900 languages spoken today, more than half face extinction in the next 100 years. Reason: 95% of the world’s population speak one of just 400 languages, and the remaining 5% of languages are scattered among fewer and fewer speakers.
- The last newspaper and book will have been printed in 2020.
- Tablet PCs, netbooks, and laptops will be extinct by 2022.
- Soldiers will communicate via telepathic helmets by 2020.
Conclusioni
La razza umana si sta evolvendo a un passo sempre veloce e questo ci da sia motivi di gioia che di preoccupazione.
Good news:
- The percentage of people with access to clean water.
- Percentage of people enrolled in secondary school.
- GDP per capita.
- Infant mortality rates.
- HIV prevalence among 15- to 49-year-olds.
- Total debt service in low- and mid-income countries.
Bad news
- Carbon-dioxide emissions.
- Global surface temperature anomalies.
- Percentage of people voting in elections.
- Levels of corruption in the 15 largest countries.
- Number of refugees per 100,000 total population.
A breve un altro post sull’argomento, sperando che questo via sia piaciuto!