Ten-Year Forecast

Superstruct! Play the game, invent the future.

Jane McGonigal — Thu, 10 Jul 2008 15:10:01 -0700

This fall, the Institute for the Future invites you to play Superstruct, the world’s first massively multiplayer forecasting game. It’s not just about envisioning the future—it’s about inventing the future. Everyone is welcome to join the game. Watch for the opening volley of threats and survival stories, September 2008.

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

SEPTEMBER 22, 2019

Humans have 23 years to go

SuperStruct Signals

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Are You Ready for A Future of Crises? NYU Report Says No

Anthony Townsend — Tue, 19 Aug 2008 09:48:33 -0700

A provocative new report from NYU argues that the vast bulk of US government agencies, non-governmental organizations and businesses are not ready to respond to a growing array and frequency of crises. The study, titled Predicting Organizational Response to Crisis: Perspectives and Practices toward a Pathway to Preparedness (holy alliteration Batman!), reports on a telephone survey of 468 organizational leaders conducted for NYU by Princeton Survey Research Associates International.

Ten-Year Forecast

Re-engineering the Internet

Michael Liebhold — Fri, 15 Aug 2008 13:02:41 -0700

During a workshop at IFTF this week, I offered a forecast that there is at least a 50% probability of a fundamental re-engineering of the internet. Here's a bit of detail on this forecast and why I think this last week has been a critical turning point.

SuperStruct Signals

Map of Future Forces Affecting Sustainability

Jeff Burgan — Wed, 13 Aug 2008 16:00:59 -0700

Twenty years ago, terms such as "sustainability," "environmentalism,"
and "health" were virtually unknown in business strategy circles.
Today, all of these concepts have evolved broader and more complex
definitions and they have moved from the margins to the center of
business activity.

Ten-Year Forecast

An Arab Proverb About Forecasting

Anthony Townsend — Mon, 04 Aug 2008 06:11:25 -0700

Working my way through Kishore Mahbubani's recent book, "The New Asian Hemisphere", and came upon this great Arab proverb on the topic of forecasting:

He who speaks about the future lies, even when he tells the truth.

At IFTF, there is a broad understanding based on experience, that no one can predict the future. But we rarely say that no one should... perhaps we need to be as aggressive about that as these ancient sages.

Ten-Year Forecast

IFTF's Youth Action Research Network (YARN) is here!

Tessa Finlev — Wed, 30 Jul 2008 19:35:54 -0700

Mission Statement
Come shape the future with us!
Our mission is to establish a vibrant youth network of intrinsically motivated doers and learners who, unsatisfied with the status quo, want to create a better future. As youth in today's society, we consider it our duty to realize our potential, and take action toward creating the world we want to see. If we don't, who will?

Objective

IFTF Staff Posts

Ten-Year Forecast Research Agenda

Tessa Finlev — Thu, 24 Jul 2008 14:38:47 -0700

Research Agenda

The coming decade will challenge organizations-and human society at large-like no other decade in recent history. Extreme environmental pressures, large-scale economic disruptions, and technologically amplified human expression will combine to create what may seem like an alien landscape. The Ten-Year Forecast will leverage cutting-edge social software and gaming platforms to engage a broad public in anticipating the future, imagining personal and organizational responses, and creating public dialog about the challenges ahead.

Ten-Year Forecast

McKinsey's Pitch for a More Compact Urban China

Anthony Townsend — Thu, 24 Jul 2008 08:44:47 -0700

The McKinsey Global Institute has just published a major report outlining four potential scenarios for urbanization in China.

Ten-Year Forecast

Green Acres, Now Including Penthouse View

Jamais Cascio — Wed, 23 Jul 2008 13:13:59 -0700

Vertical farms finally make the move from cybergreen fantasy to the pages of the New York Times. The logic is seductive: urban towers, filled not with more offices and apartments, but with food crops.

Ten-Year Forecast

3D Print-On-Demand

Jamais Cascio — Wed, 23 Jul 2008 13:10:36 -0700

Whenever the topic of low-cost 3D fabrication comes up, one inevitable question (after "how expensive is a printer?") is "does anyone do print-on-demand fabbing?" 3D print-on-demand services have been around for awhile, but they're largely aimed at design pros with healthy bank accounts.

Ten-Year Forecast

The Unwieldy World of Peer-produced Video

David Evan Harris — Tue, 15 Jul 2008 19:52:47 -0700

From the San Francisco Chronicle, Nov. 30, 2007, interview with Jimmy Wales, founder of Wikipedia:

Q: Do you plan on adding more audio and video features?

A: There's not a lot of demand for that from the community. An encyclopedia is inherently textual. Audio or video is a little tricky because it's hard to collaboratively edit it. People can just submit stuff, but if you don't like it, you can't fix it, so it doesn't really fit our style.

IFTF Signals Pool

Melting Icecaps and Global Oceans

Jamais Cascio — Tue, 15 Jul 2008 17:24:07 -0700

If the Greenland icecap sees an even-more-significant melt, how soon do you need to pack your bags and head for the high country?

Ten-Year Forecast

New report on the U.S. innovation system

Alex Soojung-Kim Pang — Wed, 09 Jul 2008 10:47:57 -0700

The Institute does quite a bit of work these days on the future of innovation and innovation systems. So I was interested to see a report by the Information Technology and Innovation Forum (ITIF) on the U.S. innovation system. (It also caught my eye because long ago I took a sociology of work class with one of the report's authors.) From the press release:

IFTF Signals Pool

Exinction Risks Underestimated -- NATURE

Jamais Cascio — Thu, 03 Jul 2008 15:46:26 -0700

A new article in Nature argues that current models for estimating extinction risks underestimate the impact of forces beyond birth-death ratio and environment. As a result, biologists may be missing potentially significant extinction threats.

From the Nature summary:

Ten-Year Forecast

Courageous or Cheating? Prosthetics in Sports

Jamais Cascio — Mon, 30 Jun 2008 16:25:53 -0700

The Boston Globe has a profile of MIT's Hugh Herr, a specialist in the development of prosthetic limbs. As is typical for current articles about prosthetics, sprint Oskar Pistorius makes an appearance. Herr makes an astute observation about the cultural tension regarding prosthetics and the potential for super-enabled disabled:

Ten-Year Forecast

Anglican Schism

Jamais Cascio — Mon, 30 Jun 2008 16:15:22 -0700

The Anglican Church -- generally known as the Episcopal church in the US, and the Church of England in, well, England -- faces a growing likelihood of a full-blown schism between modernists and traditionalists over the subject of ordainment of female and gay ministers, and a broader acceptance of homosexuality.A gathering last week in Jerusalem of over a thousand representatives of Anglican churches denounced the gay-acceptant policies of the Anglican leadership, and sought to create a new "power bloc" within th

Ten-Year Forecast

Creation Care: Evangelicals Embrace Environmentalism

Anthony Townsend — Fri, 27 Jun 2008 11:49:02 -0700

The Sundance Channel aired an interesting new documentary last night called "The Great Warming". What's interesting about it is that it examines how people are coping with forecasts and realities of global warming around the world - in London, in Bangladesh, etc. It's not about polar bears dying off or the Earth in pain... it's about real people suffering and being scared out of their wits. Powerful stuff.

Ten-Year Forecast

Suburbia During the Crash

Anthony Townsend — Thu, 26 Jun 2008 08:20:40 -0700

Maybe it's the rain in New York today, but I'm gloomy. So while China collapses, it looks like the mobility-land use solution embodied in many of America's newer suburbs seems to be unravelling due to high oil prices.

The IHT reports:

Ten-Year Forecast

The China Slowdown

Anthony Townsend — Thu, 26 Jun 2008 06:15:06 -0700

The World Bank's East Asia and Pacific blog has a good update on the most recent China quarterly forecast. The Bank's official forecast for 2008 China GDP growth is now 9.8 percent, a full 2 points below 2007 growth. Elsewhere, we've been hearing about high fuel prices and the cheap dollar putting the squeeze on Chinese manufacturing export platforms.

Ten-Year Forecast

Simian Rights

Jamais Cascio — Wed, 25 Jun 2008 16:56:55 -0700

This week, the Spanish Parliament approved resolutions calling on the executive to comply with the Great Ape Project, which seeks to extend many human rights to Chimpanzees, Bonobos, Orangutans and Gorillas.

Ten-Year Forecast

Do Not Taunt Massive Quake Ball

Jamais Cascio — Wed, 25 Jun 2008 16:44:25 -0700

As anyone who has built a tower out of blocks or LEGO knows, as they get taller, the more small movements at the base can be magnified into catastrophic motion at the top. This is just as true for skyscrapers, increasingly so as we get closer to building kilometer-high towers.

Ten-Year Forecast

Cease-and-desist letter sent to California-based personalized genetics startups

Alex Soojung-Kim Pang — Thu, 19 Jun 2008 12:51:09 -0700

California likes to think of itself as a high-tech friendly place, and generally it is. However, Alexis Madrigal reports that the state government has decided to go after personal genetics companies:

Last Monday, the state's laboratory field services group issued 13 cease-and-desist letters to genetic testing companies. Wired.com obtained a copy of the letters (pdf.) from two recipients. And the tough talk in a recent teleconference among regulatory officials confirms the seriousness of the department's intent.

"We [are] no longer tolerating direct-to-consumer genetic testing in California," Karen Nickles, Chief of Laboratory Field Services at the health department, told members of the Clinical Laboratories Advisory Committee on June 13.

Targeted companies include personal genomics startups 23andMe and Navigenics. These services are seen as the leading edge of a new type of health care in which consumers can use their genetic profile to tailor their medical and lifestyle choices. The established medical community, however, is wary of the technology arguing that the medical utility of some tests is unproven. Doctors also complain that direct-to-consumer services bypass them as the gatekeepers and analysts of medical information, which they worry could confuse consumers, not to mention cost them a billing event.

The health department's actions are a direct challenge to the viability of the infant DNA-testing industry, for which physician involvement is shaping up to be a major battleground. As far back as a September 2006 meeting, health department officials were voicing concerns over "nutrigenetic tests that analyze a limited number of genes to give personalized nutritional and lifestyle recommendations."

(via Virginia Postrel's Dynamist Blog)

Health Horizons

Tracking Mobile Swarms to Change the Way We See Cities

Anthony Townsend — Fri, 06 Jun 2008 06:39:17 -0700

Last fall, I reported on Alberto Barabasi's research using mobile phones to track large-scale human mobility patterns after seeing him give a paper on the topic in Budapest. That paper has now been published in Nature, and there is a public summary in Nature News.

Technology Horizons

Living in the (Power-Generating) Material World

Jamais Cascio — Fri, 30 May 2008 14:45:38 -0700

Apple Computer has filed for a patent on a process to embed solar cells on portable devices, including (in particular) as part of the display mechanism. From the patent filing:

Ten-Year Forecast

Massively Multi-Sensor Earthquake Detection

Jamais Cascio — Fri, 30 May 2008 14:34:38 -0700

After discovering a free application that let her Mac laptop display movement like a seismograph, seismologist Elizabeth Cochran of UC Riverside was struck by a pretty good idea: let's turn our laptops into real earthquake sensors.

Ten-Year Forecast

Meat vs. Miles

Jamais Cascio — Wed, 14 May 2008 16:14:20 -0700

Carnegie Mellon University's Christopher Weber and H. Scott Matthews argue in a new report in Environmental Science and Technology that, when it comes to the environmental (especially carbon) impact of food webs, the presence of meat in the diet matters more than the distance the food has traveled.

Ten-Year Forecast

IFTF in the news

Alex Soojung-Kim Pang — Mon, 12 May 2008 20:26:28 -0700

The Institute's new future of making map got a mention in the New York Times.

As important as tinkering has been to the nation’s past, it could become a much bigger deal before long, said David Pescovitz, a research director at the Institute for the Future, a consultancy in Silicon Valley. A new report from the institute argues that the makers could force enormous changes in the ways that goods and services are designed and manufactured. The renewed urge to tinker, along with flexible manufacturing technologies, could shift production from big companies and stores to communities of makers and consumers, Mr. Pescovitz said.

"It’s about having a deeper connection with the stuff around you, and through that with the people around you," he said. That is why his research group took the slogan from the pins given out at the Futurama pavilion at the 1939 World’s Fair — "I have seen the future" — and edited it for the report to "I am making the future."

"If you want something done right, do it yourself. That’s really what it’s about," Mr. Pescovitz said.

IFTF Staff Posts

Maoists on the Streets of Mumbai? Coming Soon

Anthony Townsend — Mon, 12 May 2008 12:58:42 -0700

BusinessWeek Asia is reporting some genuine news for me - about the growing threat of India's home grown Maoist insurgency, the Naxalite movement, that is starting to bubble over after decades of simmering in the remote countryside. Now that Maoists have overthrown the Nepalese government:

Ten-Year Forecast

Workbook in Resilience Assessment -- the Wiki

Jamais Cascio — Fri, 09 May 2008 12:20:35 -0700

The Resilience Alliance, an organization promoting the study and support of social and environmental resilience, has converted its Resilience Assessment Workbooks into wiki format. According to the alliance's Allyson Quinlan,

Ten-Year Forecast

Watch Your Carbon Footprint As You Go

Jamais Cascio — Mon, 05 May 2008 17:05:42 -0700

Participatory web service Dopplr, which allows individuals to coordinate travel and inform colleagues about where they'll be, has now introduced a tool for calculating the carbon footprint of your journeys.

Dopplr co-founder Matt Jones describes its purpose this way:

Ten-Year Forecast

Green Games

Jamais Cascio — Fri, 02 May 2008 11:06:59 -0700

Jon Lebkowsky has a piece in the Austin Chronicle entitled "The Serious Play in Saving the World," building on the South-by-Southwest panel he ran in March. It's a strong piece on the state of green gaming, and both its potential and challenges.

Ten-Year Forecast

The Bionic Athlete

Jamais Cascio — Fri, 02 May 2008 10:57:28 -0700

The cover story of the current ESPN Magazine, "Let 'Em Play," explores the bigger issues surrounding the augmentation of our biological bodies with prosthetic technologies. The story's author, Eric Adelson, looks at a cross-section of prosthetic enhancements, some allowable, some not, and notes that this wouldn't be the first

Ten-Year Forecast

Maker Faire: It's About Rethinking Assumptions

Marina Gorbis — Thu, 01 May 2008 18:10:10 -0700

Maker Faire opened today with a Maker Day—a time for Makers to meet each other and showcase some of their cool projects. As I was listening to Umberto Crenca, one of the founders of AS220, a non-profit arts center in Providence, RI, that provides spaces for different types of media artists and performers, it occurred to me that the Faire is not just about seeing great DIY projects, it is about much more; it is about breaking established modes of thinking, established approaches to living, working, organizing.

Technology Horizons

The X2 project

Alex Soojung-Kim Pang — Tue, 22 Apr 2008 15:41:47 -0700

For the last 6 months or so, I've been working on a big new project at the Institute. I haven't written that much about it, as we've been... quiet. Now, though, we're starting to take the project public.

IFTF Staff Posts

On Morning Edition

Alex Soojung-Kim Pang — Mon, 21 Apr 2008 10:48:55 -0700

Cyrus Farivar quotes me at the end of his latest NPR Morning Edition piece, "High-Tech Pen Makes Note-Taking Easier." In my sound bite, I reveal that I like my Moleskine notebook because it's harder for me to break paper than the screen on my Nokia N95.

X2 Project

Post-scientific society

Alex Soojung-Kim Pang — Sat, 19 Apr 2008 17:45:11 -0700

I've been in Malaysia and Singapore this week, conducting workshops on the future of science and innovation. It's been a very interesting week, talking to scientists in Penang and Kuala Lumpur about the future of science, and what role they see Malaysia playing in that future. The people I've been talking to are pretty convinced that Malaysia, which has a respectable but not world-class scientific community, can evolve into a global player in science in the next couple decades. They don't want to emulate American and European institutions: you won't see multi-billion dollar particle accelerators here any time soon. But they're pretty aware that cloud computing, cheap genomics, and other inexpensive research tools will lower the economic bars to develop world-class competence in some important fields. So I was especially struck by Gregg Zachary's latest column in the New York Times, which asks, "might cheap science from low-wage countries help keep American innovators humming?"

Technology Horizons

Biocitizens and Advertizing

Miriam Lueck — Fri, 18 Apr 2008 08:33:43 -0700

A recent piece in the NYT BITS blog has some interesting ramifications for our forecasts on biosocial identities and affinities. It discusses a set of “compromises” reached by the Network Advertising Initiative, an advertising trade association.

The lists of restrictions and red-flag categories represented here is about as culturally loaded as you can get, but what drew my attention was the way that biological identities, biological affinities, online collective organization were called out as particularly tricky areas of “behavioral correlation.”

Health Horizons

Food vs. Fuel Heats Up

Anthony Townsend — Tue, 15 Apr 2008 10:23:41 -0700

The food vs. fuel debate has really flared up in the last few weeks, with food riots in places like Haiti threatening major political disruption. This has been building up rapidly for the last year.

The New York Times reports today:

Ten-Year Forecast

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Time-lapse Video from TYF Conference

Jess Hemerly — Fri, 11 Apr 2008 12:49:14 -0700

As promised, Jerry Michalski's time-lapse video from the Ten-Year Forecast Conference on Thursday, April 10, 2008.

Thanks to all who joined us at the conference!

Ten-Year Forecast

2008 Ten Year Forecast conference

Alex Soojung-Kim Pang — Wed, 09 Apr 2008 09:07:51 -0700

The Institute's 2008 Ten Year Forecast conference is going on today at the Mission Bay conference center. The center is part of the new UCSF Mission Bay campus, which is a pretty extraordinary piece of city redevelopment. It's also a very fitting place for this year's conference, as we're talking about innovations in biology and ecology, sources of new economic value, and the development of "amplified humans"-- all things that are happening here.

Ten-Year Forecast

IFTF Celebrates 40 Years!

Jess Hemerly — Tue, 08 Apr 2008 10:48:05 -0700

On Tuesday, April 8, 2008, friends and family of Institute for the Future gathered to launch a yearlong celebration of IFTF's 40 years.

The future is everything we can imagine: the fearsome, the inspiring, the inexplicable, the essential. 40 years ago, our founders imagined a world in which it would be possible to improve human lives and build better institutions by thinking systematically about the future. Today, we call this practice "Foresight to Insight to Action."

Ten-Year Forecast

The coming debate about brain enhancement

Alex Soojung-Kim Pang — Thu, 13 Mar 2008 13:48:41 -0700

The New York Times recently had a pretty decent article about debates over brain enhancement in academia:

an era of doping may be looming in academia, and it has ignited a debate about policy and ethics that in some ways echoes the national controversy over performance enhancement accusations against elite athletes like Barry Bonds and Roger Clemens.

Ten-Year Forecast

I for one welcome our new computer overlords

Alex Soojung-Kim Pang — Wed, 29 Aug 2007 16:27:00 -0700

The National Academies' Center for Education has been working on a study of the future of computers and work. By 2030, they ask, what kinds of capabilities will computers have; how well will those capabilities prepare them to do jobs currently done by humans; and what proportion of the workforce might be displaced or rendered unemployable?

Ten-Year Forecast

Get There Early: The VUCA Opportunity

Alex Soojung-Kim Pang — Wed, 29 Aug 2007 07:29:00 -0700

[This is an extract from Chapter 3 of Bob Johansen's new book, Get There Early: Sensing the Future to Compete in the Present. -Ed.]

Ten-Year Forecast

Get There Early

Alex Soojung-Kim Pang — Tue, 28 Aug 2007 14:18:00 -0700

Bob Johansen, the former president of the Institute, has published a new book, Get There Early: Sensing the Future to Compete in the Present. It draws on his extensive experience as a forecaster and facilitator, and describes both Bob's own practice working with executive groups, and the Institute's research on the future of business, health, and technology.

Ten-Year Forecast

Get There Early: Introducing the VUCA World

Alex Soojung-Kim Pang — Tue, 28 Aug 2007 00:00:00 -0700

[This is an extract from Chapter 3 of Bob Johansen's new book, Get There Early: Sensing the Future to Compete in the Present. -Ed.]

Ten-Year Forecast

Experience is the new reality

Alex Soojung-Kim Pang — Wed, 11 Jul 2007 00:00:00 -0700

Via Epicenter, this new forward-looking video, "Prometeus: The Media Revolution."

Ten-Year Forecast

Has the Higgs boson been found?

Alex Soojung-Kim Pang — Tue, 10 Jul 2007 00:00:00 -0700

Slate reports on some fairly serious rumors that scientists working using the Fermilab Tevatron have found the Higgs boson, right where the standard model says it should be. The Tevatron is supposed to close in 2009, and so "as time runs out for America's biggest atom smasher, some nervy experimentalists have jumped the gun."

So why could this be bad news for physics? Two reasons.

Ten-Year Forecast

Danish survey of the Lomonosov Ridge

Alex Soojung-Kim Pang — Tue, 10 Jul 2007 00:00:00 -0700

As we've noted before, competition between nations with territory around the North Pole-- the United States, Canada, Norway, Denmark, and Russia-- over who will control the North Pole, and the valuable sea passages and natural resources that have until recently been completely inaccessible, is starting to heat up.

Ten-Year Forecast

Evolutionary algorithms, and design vs. understanding

Alex Soojung-Kim Pang — Mon, 09 Jul 2007 00:00:00 -0700

Following on the work we did in the 2007 Ten Year Forecast on the end of science: this week's New Scientist has an article on evolutionary algorithms (sometimes also called genetic algorithms) and debates over their use.

Ten-Year Forecast