Hello, Future!: The World in 2035″ is probably one of the best books I read on foresight. It is excellent. Framed in the current perma-crisis or poly-crisis, with the possibility of everything going wrong unendingly, no relief or resolution in sight, ever, nonstop, and inescapable.
The race between education and catastrophe
It is a race between education and catastrophe. Because the stakes are high and increasing, and through foresight, we seek to learn how today’s dreams and choices may influence and possibly even determine tomorrow’s outcomes. To escape the poly-perma-life-sentence-in-the-basement-crisis trap, we’re going to have to look ahead and see with clear eyes what’s coming,
The multi-shock universe
An increase in frequency and magnitude. It’s a multi-shock universe.
- Future Shock: The dread induced by accelerating change
- Geopolitical Shock: Mass war in the 21st century
- Politico Shock: The breakdown of the social contract
- Ecology Shock: The climate crisis
- Techno Shock: The perfect digital storm
- Demographic shock.
- Energy shock.
- Economic Shock: Economic stress and transformation
- Urban Shock: The massive demographic transformation
- Culture Shock: The social fractures caused by acceleration.
Shock
Shock is a set of self-protective reactions that the mind-body system adopts automatically. And across all of modern society, it’s clear that people are in shock. Either way, where we are, without any doubt, is in the midst of a very complex system.
The wave
We’re about to experience a great wave of technological change that will carry civilisation forward, but for us, it leads only to greater uncertainties. AI and robotics, fintech, quantum computing, satellites, networks, surveillance, facial recognition, VR, AR, synthetic biology, genetic editing and cloning are all bringing us still more of the unpredictable. While it’s impossible to accurately predict future events, the patterns of change that underlie events and the major forces and social structures that drive them are often visible far in advance. Read “The coming wave“.
Understanding the patterns
We need to gain an understanding of the critical driving forces, structures, and patterns that are shaping today. We need to grasp the connections between them. To consider possible futures that may emerge. To define the choices and actions that lead down various future pathways, so that we may thereby discover how to achieve our higher and better aspirations. But, while the constructed narrative of the past leads inevitably to the present, the narrative toward the future leads only into the unknown. There are patterns. Acceleration, early warning, cycles and progress, disruption and shock, systems and complexity. and emergence, events, driving forces, and deep structures.
Acceleration
Take acceleration. Never before in human history have conditions like those of today even remotely existed, with simultaneous revolutions occurring across so many dimensions of our lives. Exponential technology development, CO2, population, robotics, AI, knowledge, health care expenditure, unevenly distributed wealth, debt, etc. They are all mutual change multipliers. And here is the bad news. Any system that grows exponentially very soon destroys itself, most likely along with its habitat. We find ourselves on the “going out of business” curve and are lost in the change gap. In most systems, acceleration causes increasing pressure, and under pressure-packed conditions, it is prone to lurching out of control at unpredictable moments. In social systems, the process of change is rarely so smooth or enjoyable.
The fog of unpredictability
So, the fog of unpredictability again plays havoc with the clear skies of planning. That is not helped by increased complexity, which is an innate characteristic of steadily advancing technology. A micro example is the original jet engine of 1936, which had a few hundred parts, while today’s has 22,000 of them. As societies become more complex, they are forced to invest an increasing proportion of their resources in managing the complexity itself, but meanwhile, the benefits have also grown. At some point, the cost of this management burden exceeds the benefits, and this leads to the collapse of complex societies (which is a book). The concept of declining marginal returns is so significant that we should consider it an organising principle.
Culture
Underneath all is culture. Culture is humanity’s medium; there is not one aspect of human life that is not touched and altered by culture. The “total communication framework: words, actions, postures, gestures, tones of voice, facial expressions, the way we handle time, space, and materials, and the way we work, play, make love, and defend ourselves. Above the surface are the manifestations that we see, feel, hear, and touch, the foods we eat, how we celebrate, the flags we fly, the clothes we wear, and the overt, highly visible expressions. However, the hidden forces and factors that often shape these expressions may not be so evident because although we are constantly making choices and we seem to have firm beliefs, to a great extent, we don’t really know where these beliefs have come from. They just seem to be there. They were always there. Self-evident truths arrived at invisibly.
Below the level of conscious awareness
But the most important paradigms or rules governing behavior, the ones that control our lives, function below the level of conscious awareness and are not generally available for analysis. Values, attitudes, and beliefs may endure for centuries, passed from generation to generation, even while remaining well hidden.
Tomorrow’s driving forces
- Geopolitics: War or Peace?
- Politics: Democracy or Autocracy?
- Climate and Energy: Inconvenience or Collapse?
- Science and Technology: Ever More Knowledge, but for Better or Worse?
- Economy and Demographics: Boom or Bust?
- Culture and Counter-Culture: Can we all just get along?
Here are all the “What ifs”
Here are all the “What ifs”
- Geopolitics
- Scenario 1: What if there is a superpower war?
- Scenario 2: What if there is superpower peace?
- Scenario 3: What if regional conflicts escalate?
- Scenario 4: What if global cooperation prevails?
2. Politics
- Scenario 5: What if autocracy rises?
- Scenario 6: What if democracy strengthens?
- Scenario 7: What if political polarisation intensifies?
- Scenario 8: What if political stability is achieved?
3. Climate
- Scenario 9: What if there is a climate catastrophe?
- Scenario 10: What if climate change leads to inconvenience?
- Scenario 11: What if successful climate mitigation occurs?
- Scenario 12: What if societies adapt effectively to climate change?
4. Energy
- Scenario 13: What if the energy transition is delayed?
- Scenario 14: What if a rapid energy transition takes place?
- Scenario 15: What if energy abundance is achieved?
- Scenario 16: What if energy scarcity becomes a reality?
5. Technology & Science
- Scenario 17: What if technological disruption accelerates?
- Scenario 18: What if technological advancements are demolished?
- Scenario 19: What if ethical technology development is prioritised?
- Scenario 20: What if unchecked technological growth occurs?
6. Economy & Demographics
- Scenario 21: What if there is an economic boom?
- Scenario 22: What if an economic bust happens?
- Scenario 23: What if a demographic dividend is realised?
- Scenario 24: What if demographic decline impacts economies?
7. Culture
- Scenario 25: What if cultural fragmentation increases?
- Scenario 26: What if cultural integration strengthens?
- Scenario 27: What if individualism rises?
- Scenario 28: What if community values are reinforced?
8. Urbanisation
- Scenario 29: What if urban overcrowding intensifies?
- Scenario 30: What if smart city development flourishes?
- Scenario 31: What if there is a rural resurgence?
- Scenario 32: What if suburban expansion dominates?
It is incredibly worthwhile to read the book just for these scenarios alone and the thinking behind the possible impacts. In that way, the book reminds me of “33 Strategies of War”, which is the best book on strategy ever written.
The Next Ten Years
What sort of world shall we live in tomorrow? How shall we organise society to achieve our goals? And what must we do to attain our preferred future? Let’s think about the eight driving forces that constitute the system of human civilisation, how they may unfold, and the early warnings we may encounter.
Some things to ponder
- Are China and the U.S. still at odds, or are they cooperating?
- Is Russia still attacking Ukraine or even NATO?
- Is the bloc of China, Russia, and Iran, with junior partner North Korea,
- Are Ukraine and its Western allies sustaining their fight against Russia?
- What support, even moral support, is Taiwan receiving in its confrontation with China?
- Is the African Sahel still a 3500-mile-long war zone? And is Gaza
- Are trade agreements shifting to bilateral deals, suggesting contracting worldviews, or are they multilateral, regional, and global, suggesting a more open perspective toward the future?
- Are discussions in the United Nations fruitful and informative,
- What about the balance between state power and non-state power? As corporations become wealthier and stronger than many governments,
- Do the levels of social violence and hate crimes increase, or do they decline?
- Who are the world’s elected leaders? Have voters chosen defenders of democratic
- How well is society governed?
- How’s the weather at your place?
- Are the world’s major weather disasters even more disastrous than they were in 2025?
- Are refugees streaming by the millions or the billions?
- Are nations collaborating to solve the global challenge of climate change? How well are nations communicating
- What happens with real estate investment?
- The adoption of rigorous carbon regulations, taxes and trading schemes will give a good indication of the roles that governments are willing to play.
- Follow the progress of the energy transition by tracking energy sources and uses.
- All energy transition scenarios require major upgrades to the global electrical grid. Are these investments being made?
- As a general theme, pay attention to the ongoing social and cultural battles between technological feasibility and social desirability.
- Artificial intelligence promises (or threatens, depending on your viewpoint) to bring profound and fundamental change.
- Notice also what happens if and when AI systems are unleashed in war,
- Quantum computing, when and if it does arrive, will change many things about how we use computers and how society functions,
- If it happens, the singularity will affirm that Kurzweil was correct, and at that point, everything will change. Read “The Singularity is Nearer: When We Merge with AI”
- What new technologies that we don’t know about today will cause us to live differently tomorrow?
- To what extent do new technologies reinforce social coherence, or do they lead to further decoherence?
- Central bankers’ attitudes, expectations, and actions will shape many aspects of government responses to turbulent conditions.
- Foreign direct investment by corporations is also a useful indicator of their expectations regarding future opportunities.
- Some commodities are particularly important to the health of the economy or significant to key industries. For example, relatively rare metals such as lithium and cobalt are critical to the energy transition, but they’re found in useful concentrations only in a few places globally.
- How do nations strike the balance between the needs of young and old?
- What incentives do nations offer for immigrants to come or inducements for families to have more children?
- What is the prevalence of diseases of the aged, and what about the new treatments for these ailments?
- What does all that cost? To what extent are robots used to address shortages of workers,
- Across all the driving force topics, it will remain a challenge to discern the truth from the lies amid the proliferation of deepfakes and fake news, AI-created propaganda, and weaponised social media disinformation.
- How much future shock can we detect, and what forms does it take?
- If the young must compete for education funding with the elderly and their health care needs, how do societies decide?
- How is the education of the young impacted by new technologies?
- How do all of these factors play out in the language and tone of society? The development of society is shaped largely by our willingness to, and our capacity to, realise the best qualities of our humanity and to overcome our egotistic and self-indulgent instincts.
- The risks to society increase when our identities become narrow.
Fragile
Turbulence will certainly be present, and it will pose severe tests to our resilience, our capacity to adapt, and our innovativeness. Fragile organisations and institutions will be weakened by these conditions, and some may collapse. But perhaps others will be strengthened precisely because they have been challenged to withstand the rigours of accelerating change. They may, that is, exhibit the quality of being “antifragile.”
Antifragile
A provocative way to think about our situation is described by the novel term “antifragility. In other words, according to Taleb, all the most interesting stuff is antifragile. Antifragility determines the boundary between what is living and organic (or complex), say, the human body, and what is inert, say, a physical object like the stapler on your desk. In Taleb’s view, we can learn to take advantage of the opportunities that crises may present. They are learning opportunities that help us to become antifragile.
Redundancy
There are other mechanisms as well, such as redundancy. Taleb also observes that redundancy is one of nature’s preferred risk management strategies, as evidenced by our two kidneys and two lungs. There is a logical similarity between options, redundancy, and networks, as the point of all three is that you’re not locked into one strategy, one operating mode, one choice.
Creating options
By creating options to take action in response to expected and emerging conditions, we are better prepared. Using techniques like scenario planning and “what if” thought experiments to explore the future, we begin to shift our organisations and institutions to start operating in alignment with the requirements of accelerating change.
It is getting close
That future may be closer than we realised if climate change causes ocean levels to rise so quickly that we have to abandon low-lying coastal cities and relocate millions or billions to new towns and cities on higher ground. Read “Collapse is an option“. Thus, the point is not only that social design or design science are essential fields of endeavour. It’s the understanding that we must bring the purposefulness of design, the rigour of science, and the intent to engage in social innovation to the creation of our future.
Social Innovation
We should pursue innovation according to our values, making good things happen to address and solve problems that are important not because they will earn business profits but because they will improve lives and communities. Citizens as design scientists.
Hot without cold just blows away
Social change begins hot. It draws its energy from anger, resentment and frustration. Yet, to have a lasting impact, the movements have to become cool. They take the form of bureaucracies, organisations with rules and employees. Protests turn into new laws enforced by courts and judges. Placards turn into new norms.
Culture as the key
The broad social, economic, and technological transformations that we are now in the midst of creating may also acquire the character of a state change. We also see the essential role of education in the formation of society and the development of its culture. Culture is formed by and emerges from everything that’s occurring, so all the driving forces fuse together to create our ways of living and thinking. Our cities are often described as the cradles of human civilisation and the homes of its culture.
Our job
So our job between now and 2035, other than just continuing to get along, is to move our global system of society-economy-technology-governance-civilisation toward a fuller understanding of, appreciation for, and realisation of what it means to live together and to choose to do so as though it means something important.
