Executive Summaries: March-April 2008 FUTURIST

 

Trends Shaping Tomorrow's World: Forecasts and Implications for Business, Government, and Consumers (Part One) by Marvin J. Cetron [president, Forecasting International Ltd.] and Owen Davies [science writer and researcher]

            SUMMARY: This special report (first of two parts) updates the major trends that have been tracked in a four-decade research project by Forecasting International. Trends covered in part 1 include the growth of the economy in the developed world, the redistribution of global population through mass migration, the loss of privacy--and the demand for it, and the continuing growth in demand for oil. The authors summarize the implications of each trend and include commentaries from professional futurists and experts in relevant fields.

 

Navigating the New Adulthood

by Richard A. Settersten Jr. [professor, College of Health and Human Sciences, Oregon State University]

            SUMMARY: This isn't you're grandfather's 'old age'! The typical life-course pattern has altered in recent decades, as individuals increasingly choose when to go to school, when to retire, when to raise families, and so on. These choices give individuals more freedom but cause problems for policy makers who, for instance, need to specify a "retirement age" for distributing benefits equitably. Many of the life-course decisions are influenced by socioeconomic class rather than by age, suggesting new mind-sets are needed to improve on antiquated age-based policy making.

            PLUS: an interview with Age Wave associate Maddy Dychtwald

 

The AI Chasers: The Science and People Behind Tomorrow's Artificial Intelligence Revolution

by Patrick Tucker [senior editor, THE FUTURIST; communications director, World Future Society]

            SUMMARY: The arrival of human-level artificial intelligence, should it come to pass, promises to generate tremendous wealth for the companies and inventors that bring it to market. How close are we to a human-level AI? Who's tilling the soil of this brave new world? And, aside from its monetary implications, what will the rise of this advanced AI mean for individuals--and society? At the recent Singularity Summit in San Francisco (September 2007), FUTURIST senior editor Patrick Tucker spoke with many of the men and women leading the effort to construct an AGI (artificial general intelligence), including Rodney Brooks, former director of the MIT Computer Science and Artificial intelligence Laboratory; Peter Voss, software developer and founder of the firm Adaptive A.I. Inc.; Stephen Omohundro, founder of Self-Aware Systems; Barney Pell, founder and CEO of the Silicon Valley technology startup Powerset; Ben Goertzel of the software firm Novamente; and Peter Norvig, director of research at Google.

            PLUS: Commentary by Daniel Wilson, author of How to Survive a Robot Uprising. Hollywood has given robots a bad name, and robots with artificial intelligence are unlikely to do many of the things that humans fear.

 

The Future of the Jews and Israel: An Optimistic Vision by Tsvi Bisk [director, Center for Strategic Futurist Thinking (Jerusalem, Israel); author, The Optimistic Jew (Maxanna Press, 2007)

            SUMMARY: For a historically oppressed people, the twenty-first century's "flatness" offers opportunities for Jewish individuals to realize their potential without sacrificing their Jewishness. In this optimistic "imagineered" future, an Israeli futurist examines the resilience of Jewish culture, economic success, and the sense of "belonging" to a larger community that unites the many nodes of the global Jewish Diaspora.