Abstract
Daring to evaluate anything as vast and ambitious as the Millennium Project seems almost foolhardy, yet I am happy to have been invited to provide some guidance. This creative effort has been underway since Jerome Glenn was seeking sponsors about twenty years ago, and I am amazed at what he and his coworkers have accomplished.
Sixty-three nodes of dedicated volunteers, some 450 in all, explored the implications of the Millennium Project’s work for the issues facing their nations. This unique forecasting network collectively provides the information assembled here on a variety of challenges for the entire world. Building a work of this magnitude is a stunning achievement, and we should be grateful for this gift at a critical point in social evolution.
For anyone concerned with the future of the world and of our species, State of the Future, 19.0 is essential reading. The Millennium Project, of which State of the Future is an annual summary of results, is a private think tank devoted to evaluating global challenges. Its stated purpose is to “Improve humanity’s prospects for building a better future.”
The main message of this report is that global progress is advancing steadily and will continue to do so at least through 2050. Yet, huge threats remain and must somehow be addressed. To the authors’ credit, their report provides direction for each challenge in succinct and comprehensive lists of strategic action items.
The Millennium Project focuses on fifteen major issues:
How can sustainable development be achieved for all while addressing global climate change?
How can everyone have sufficient clean water without conflict?
How can population growth and resources be brought into balance?
How can genuine democracy emerge from authoritarian regimes?
How can decision making be enhanced by integrating improved global foresight during unprecedented accelerating change?
How can the global convergence of information and communications technologies along with machine intelligence, big data, and cloud computing work for everyone?
How can ethical market economies be encouraged to help reduce the gap between rich and poor?
How can the threat of new and reemerging diseases and antibiotic-resistant micro-organisms be reduced?
How can education make humanity more intelligent and knowledgeable, and wise enough to address its global challenges?
How can shared values and new security strategies reduce ethnic conflicts, terrorism, and the use of weapons of mass destruction?
How can the changing status of women help improve the human condition?
How can transnational organized crime networks be stopped from becoming more powerful and sophisticated global enterprises?
How can growing energy demands be met safely and efficiently?
How can scientific and technological breakthroughs be accelerated to improve the human condition?
How can ethical considerations become more routinely incorporated into global decisions?
These topics emerged from The Millennium Project’s early work, a series of fifty-five global futures research studies and global scanning systems initiated in 1997. They have evolved over the years. For example, the environment has long been a staple of this report, but the focus has shifted in recent years to climate change. What evolves with each revision is the quality of information and wealth of interesting and useful details gathered over time.
The issues addressed here are analyzed succinctly but well. In the first chapter, Global Challenges, each gets a few hundred words of summary that manage to cover all the most important points of its development and implications. For example, the précis of sustainable development in a time of global climate change moves from the Permian extinction—an example of what greenhouse gases can do—through the Paris Agreement on Climate Change and the present and future effects of global warming, to the challenges of bringing this problem under control. It is followed by fifteen proposals to help address the challenge. This is illustrated with a graph of greenhouse gas emissions since 1990. All fifteen challenges are similarly covered in fifty-one pages, including the Executive Summary.
State of the Future goes on to examine two special topics:
Chapter 3, Emerging Technologies for Potential Pre-Detection of Terrorists and New Counter-Terrorism Strategies, condenses the results of a three-day “Advanced Research Workshop” held in 2016 under the auspices of North Atlantic Treaty Organization’s Science for Peace and Security Programme. While emphasizing that the best approach is to address the root causes of terrorism, the authors report that technology appears to offer some hope of identifying future terrorists before they act. Unfortunately, even modest success may come at significant cost to individual privacy.
One of the study’s most interesting findings is a date: 2025. Then, and perhaps before, society will reach a turning point when it decides among several paths. The public will either accept or reject a loss of privacy and personal freedoms in return for stronger counterterrorism measures. Individual citizens may take over the responsibility of watching each other to identify potential terrorists and leave only the response to government. Pushed to its extreme—another option—this leads to a nation in which privacy has disappeared and everyone knows, or can know, everything about everyone else. Or society could break down because it chose neither of the preferable options. It seems that for anyone who still values privacy, the future will be uncomfortable.
Chapter 4, Future Work/Technology 2050 Global Scenarios and Strategies, offers insights harvested from three scenarios for the future in the standard business-as-usual, bad news, and radical transformation format. These scenarios were created from real-time Delphi polls of some 450 futurists and domain experts. Then they were analyzed in some two-dozen strategy workshops held in seventeen countries to develop responses to the transformation now overtaking the world’s labor markets. In this last, anyone disappointed not to see artificial intelligence (AI) and automation in the original list of fifteen challenges will find an abundance of information and thought-provoking insights.
However, there is more here than the usual message of “the robots are coming.” The study presented here covered a much broader range of technologies now entering the marketplace and just over the horizon. These include virtual and augmented reality, blockchain, cloud analytics, 3D and 4D printing. Also here are bio-printing and synthetic biology, technologies we have not often seen included in this kind of study. This inclusivity helps to raise this work from just one more forecast to an uncommonly interesting and useful contribution to our understanding of what may lie ahead.
This chapter concludes with a list of 116 suggestions to address the issues raised in the scenarios that need to be considered in the years ahead. They are drawn from the fields of education and learning, government and governance, business and labor, science and technology, and culture. Even a brief study of this list should trigger more valuable ideas than most readers will have time to pursue.
In all, it overlooks very few issues of significance to humanity in the years ahead.
The State of the Future Index is intended to replace gross domestic product as a measure of global development. The Index combines twenty-nine weighted variables into a single index, of which economic status is only one component. Other variables measure demographic and health issues, natural resources, energy production and efficiency, educational status, social unrest and national and international conflict, and freedom and human rights. The authors provide graphs for each of the factors incorporated into the Index. If compressing all this information into a single number appears to hide more information than it reveals, it is nonetheless a useful indicator of improvement or deterioration in humanity’s overall well-being. Similar measures have been computed at the national level, where they can help to evaluate the results of changing policy, and may be calculated for specific domains such as AI or the knowledge economy.
The systematic analysis that goes into constructing such an index may be more revealing and useful than the result. A graph of “where we are losing or there is no progress” makes it clear that eleven index components are particularly in need of attention. They include the continuing accumulation of greenhouse gases, loss of forest coverage, rapid decline of renewable internal freshwater resources, and the number of wars and serious armed conflicts. For example, the number of terrorism incidents was just above 3,200 in each of the Millennium Project’s first two decades. In the third, now just past, it rose to more than 15,000. In the next, it is expected to soar above 36,000. Projecting these variables forward to the decade ending in 2027, as the graph does, is illuminating and troubling.
All this is supported by a wealth of data. State of the Future 19.0 is a treasure chest of graphs, trends, scenarios, data, and infographics, and with such a large and complex work it is necessary to ask about the validity of the data, the rigor of the research method, and the utility of the results. The main approach used here is the gathering of relevant information by many parties to draw out strategic intelligence. This form of “collective intelligence” has achieved widespread recognition and is now commonly adopted for many research studies, for good reason. Complex issues such as global affairs abound with confusion and ambiguity, and collective intelligence reduces uncertainty by examining the available data from many different perspectives. In this, it is highly effective.
Although this latest State of the Future report includes a variety of studies and considers some alternative scenarios, its primary approach is to integrate this knowledge into a coherent plan for meeting global challenges. In other words, this is not primarily an analytical report that attempts to choose among competing options. Rather, it is mainly the result of a process that includes Delphi surveys and other collective methods for gathering information and reaching consensus. In previous reviews, I have described the Millennium Project’s work as “Strategic Planning for the Planet.” The phrase still fits.
This focus on planning to meet goals gives the report a decidedly “normative” flavor. The intent is to provide desirable goals for the future and suggest routes toward them while acknowledging the many threats that must be overcome to achieve the authors’ vision. This aspirational quality is practical and compelling, but it differs from the many other futures projects that strive for a descriptive account of what is likely and let the chips fall where they may. The U.S. National Research Council’s reports and the work of many other futures groups, such as my own TechCast Global, illustrate the contrast by their strong focus on analysis and forecasts.
This highlights a perennial dilemma facing futurists. Strategic change can be seen as a sequence of two processes—forecasting and planning. Futurists who address the forecasting part must structure their work to offer users a variety of forecasts defining the future environment. Some develop systems that can provide hundreds of “insights” (almost any observation), which users must somehow organize before the information can be applied to their planning. Others focus on technologies, scenarios, or trends organized loosely into a few groups. While forecasting offers universal value as it allows any user to assemble relevant forecasts for their specific purpose, it does not address the second process of converting the forecasts into strategic action—planning.
Because the Millennium Project is organized as a strategic planning system, it solves the planning part of strategic change. This may limit the report’s utility for other specific purposes, yet the State of the Future report is just what is needed for the world as a whole. The cost of this value is the loss of utility for other users. Corporations, nonprofits, local governments, and all others not working on the world as a whole will have their own unique strategic purposes, goals, and environmental challenges.
A great challenge facing futurists is to unify these two parts of strategic change. For example, TechCast Global integrates available knowledge into a system of collective intelligence that is then integrated by expert estimates into a set of best possible forecasts covering the strategic landscape. This is more demanding, but it produces a universal system of forecasts covering the entire environment that can be used by any institution or leader. The system can also be used in a variety of ways for the planning phase. Users can use strategic tools to perform analyses, like “Identify Critical Technologies,” “Create Your Strategic Plan,” and so forth. Other foresight services are also working hard to convert forecasts into strategy, and I think we will see many creative methods invented to facilitate this union of forecasting and strategic planning.
Finding one’s way through all this information could be a major challenge, but the document’s fine organization helps. The Executive Summary and Conclusion that bookend the report provide succinct and highly informative analyses to guide the reader’s exploration of all that lies between them. The action items, which are especially useful in giving the report relevance, also help to make this mass of information approachable.
Our bottom line: “State of the Future 19.0 is essential reading for anyone engaged in strategic planning, foresight, economic development, and many related fields.” It sets a standard the rest of us must strive to reach.