The Sixth annual World Future Day’s Round-the-World 24-Hour conversation in cooperation with the Association of Professional Futurists, Humanity Plus, World Academy of Art and Science, World Futures Studies Federation and hosted by The Millennium Project began in New Zealand and ended in California.
It was quite a global day of sharing insights among total strangers working to help build a better future.
Some unsolicited comments:
- Very inspired by the brilliant and passionate people working in foresight. Phenomenal hearts and minds working globally for our common humanity. Oriana Beaudet, VP, Healthcare Transformation, Array Advisors, Minneapolis-St Paul, USA
- Amazing people, brilliant insights. Provocative, inspiring. Happiest world future day! Thanks much! Shermon Cruz, Executive Director, Center for Engaged Foresight, Manila, Philippines
- Loved it! – Mark Sackler Host “Seeking Delphi” CT, USA
- Great experience. Thank you!! — Asanga Abeyagoonasekera, Director General, Institute of National Security Studies, Colombo, Sri Lanka
- Great experience! What beautiful people! Mila Popovich, World Academy of Art and Science, Denver, USA
Stephanie Pride Head of StratEDGYf began the Word Future Day in New Zealand leading a discussion about the need to get futures thinking distributed among the public, not just concentrated in institutions, and she committed to producing a series of short videos about futures tools….Anita Sykes-Kelleher, Designer Futures, led a panel discussion in Australia about changing the current world narrative to a healthier long-range direction that is more regenerative, creative, and with new concepts of growth.
No way to do justice to the rich conversations in this mini report, so instead here are just some small snippets:
In the early days of “Silicon Valley” with the likes of Doug Englebart created software and hardware to help groups develop collective intelligence to solve problems. But today, that purpose seems lost. Instead people want to get the “next new thing” to the market as fast as possible, without asking why create it? Why do it? How does Silicon Valley get its “why” back?
We need culture change, evolution of consciousness, and evolution of values to keep up with technological change. Values have to change faster to address climate change. What is right; what is wrong in culture to make better futures; e.g., do you have the right to clone yourself?
Explore new forms of democracy such as voting more often like Switzerland or giving part of your vote to those who know more than you on a specific issue or whom you trust more, rather than all people voting equally whether they are ignorant or an expert on the issue… Artificial narrow intelligence is increasingly necessary to manage an increasing complex society…Finland’s far more flexible educational changes gets similar scores on standard tests as South Korea…
The conversations around AI should make distinctions among artificial narrow intelligence (single purpose), artificial general intelligence (which we don’t have yet, but could adapt to new situations, drawing on “everything” to improve its intelligence), and artificial super intelligence (AGI that sets is own goals independent of humans – and that is what science fiction is writing about and others are warning about).
We need to dialog with and present futures to different groups of people in different ways, using different media…. There is a lack of consideration of secondary and tertiary impacts of future technologies, including AI and autonomous robot technologies and their enabling technologies that will enhance future autonomous weapons systems and to make war easier to enter. Google employees went on strike to successfully get Google to stop work on autonomous weapons.
Longevity research and ways to repair aging damage to prolong healthy life is progressing, cost of gene sequencing continues to fall becoming part of personalized medicine, and future synthetic biology to create microbes to clean plaque build-up in the brain.
New ways to represent knowledge…People need new ways to be connected to what is good, and to help counter corruption, crime, and problems of political leaders with little knowledge.
The facilitators for the World Future Day Conversation were:
1. Stephanie Pride <[email protected]> New Zealand
2. Anita Kelleher [email protected] Australia
3. Shermon Cruz [email protected] Manila, Philippines 9-11 am
4. Asanga Abeyagoonasekera [email protected], Sri Lanka
5. Paul Epping [email protected] Dubai, UAE
6. Kamal Shaeer [email protected] Egypt
7. Marius Oosthuizen [email protected] South Africa
8. Heiner Benking [email protected] Germany +491637000263
9. Mark Sackler [email protected] 9 am East coast time, New Haven
10. Rosa Alegria [email protected] Brazil
11. Guillermina Benavides Rincón [email protected] Mexico 9-11.00 am central time
12. Carlos Peralta [email protected] Peru
13. Diego Coca [email protected], Bolivia
14. Tony Carbonero [email protected] San Salvador
15. Oriana Beaudet (Central time US) Minneapolis-St Paul, USA.
16. Kimberly “Kay” Daniels [email protected] Houston 1 pm CST/USA
17. Lea Artis [email protected] CMT/USA
18. Mila Popovich [email protected] Denver CMT 6:30 am / 5:30 pm
19. Joe Murphy [email protected] San Francisco, USA
20. Brock Hinzmann [email protected] Silicon Valley, Ca/USA
Jerome C. Glenn, h.c. Dr. h.c. mult.
Co-Founder and CEO, The Millennium Project www.millennium-project.org