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 A magazine of forecasts, trends, and ideas about the future. May-June 2006, Vol. 40, No. 3 |
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About This
Issue Futuring Gets Personal Foresight and planning are not the exclusive domains of organizations. Individuals can take advantage of the same tools--such as scenario planning, impact analysis, and life-cycle mapping--to create a personal future plan that will help them achieve their goals and prepare for change. In this issue, consulting futurist Verne Wheelwright describes his step-by-step technique for understanding how your activities, goals, and needs change throughout your lifetime and how you can best plan for foreseeable (and unforeseeable) events. (See "Personal Futuring: A Step-by-Step Guide.") And as a special feature, THE FUTURIST invited one of its readers, student Anne Rigby, to "test drive" Wheelwright's methodology and report her experiences and assessment back to you. (See "Personal Futuring in Action.") One area of the personal future that most people need more control over is balancing their lives between work and personal time. In the digital age, technologies, are supposedly helping us to become more productive at work--could translate into either higher pay or more free time for workers. In the United States, the choice has typically been for higher pay, but economic policy analyst Robert Atkinson shows how policies may help people use higher productivity to gain more time for life. (See "Building a More-Humane Economy.") Another choice that our technologies may soon force us to make is whether to design our future children through genetic engineering. A "eugenics race" may emerge between cultures that have clashing views over the ethics of using biotechnology in this way, but the risk of falling behind in a "smart-baby gap" may be high, warns technologies scholar Eric Swedin. (See "Designing Babies: A Eugenics Race with China?") Click to order the May-June 2006 issue of THE FUTURIST. Order the May-June 2006 issue or join the World Future Society for $49 per year ($20 for students) and receive THE FUTURIST, Futurist Update, and many other benefits. Send comments about our web pages to: webmaster@wfs.org |
