Michael Lee's blog

Like the road you can see ahead of you as you drive on a journey, I suggest the future is embedded in emerging, continuous space-time. Although you’re not there yet, you can see the road in front of you. In the rear-view mirror stretches the landscape of the past, the world you have been through and still remember.

“In the end…the environmental budget is the only one that really counts…it’s difficult to find two nations that have been more severely disadvantaged by climate change than the US and Australia.”--
Tim Flannery, Australian scientist, conservationist and author of The Weather-Makers and The Future Eaters

The indicators that 2012 was a troubled year are many and manifold. The following is a telling sample:

It’s incredible to think that my car, which is parked in the garage, is, in reality, moving. That’s because our world is a 4D space-time continuum and things move through time, as shown by the ageing process, even when they are at rest in space. The parked car is travelling through time. It’s undergoing change. It’s getting older and rustier. A person who is asleep and motionless in bed is also moving. Not only is this person moving through time, but the space-time world as a whole is always travelling at incredible speeds in our expanding universe. Nothing that exists is ever at rest in space-time, even when they appear to be stationary.

Everyone can see that North Korea is trapped in a tragic time-warp, a kind of living museum of 1950s style Cold War socialism. Its political bubble of unreality is likely to burst open with great force well before mid-century.

By Michael Lee

Adopting a satirical tone, self-confessed sceptic Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s bestseller The Black Swan ridicules the idea of predicting the future. Instead, he argues that the world is dominated by the impact of rare, unforeseen, random, highly improbable and yet influential events. These Black Swans, he says, happen abruptly, coming from outside the range of our vision.

Everyone has a favourite iconic Japanese consumer product – the Sony Walkman, a Panasonic DVD recorder, Blu-ray disc player, a Canon, Nikon, Minolta or Pentax camera or even a Toyota Prius. But this century will witness the long, slow sunset of Japan’s power. That’s because the country’s ageing and depopulating society will drag the economy down with it, as it has already started to do.

“I look for businesses in which I think I can predict what they’re going to look like in ten to fifteen years’ time…A long-term or durable competitive advantage in a stable industry is what we seek in a business.”
Warren Buffett

Warren Buffett did not become one of the most successful investors of all time by being a bad futurist.

By Michael Lee, founder of the Southern African Chapter of the World Future Society, Institute of Futurology and author of Knowing our Future - the startling case for futurology.

What will happen to money, and especially cash, in this new electronic age? Will all money eventually be digitized? Will PayPal become the big bank of the future? Will virtual currencies like Linden dollars one day rival the British Pound and other currencies?