Ten-Year Forecast
feedFor nearly five decades, the Ten-Year Forecast has been a leading source of foresight for a vanguard of business, government, and community organizations. As a platform for tracking today’s latent signals, we help many of the world’s most influential institutions to navigate a complex ecosystem of technological, cultural, and social change, to build resilience and make better futures.
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Contact Sean Ness at sness@iftf.org or 650-233-9517
An Arab Proverb About Forecasting
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...
IFTF's Youth Action Research Network (YARN) is here!
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...
McKinsey's Pitch for a More Compact Urban China
The McKinsey Global Institute has just published a major report outlining four potential scenarios for urbanization in China.
The main thrust of the report is that China needs to focus less on growing its cities and more on making them efficient and productive. Given the massive levels of capital investment Chinese cities have seen over the last 20 years, it makes sense that the...
Green Acres, Now Including Penthouse View
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.
Dr. Despommier estimates that it would cost $20 million to $30 million to make a prototype of a...
3D Print-On-Demand
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. For the more experimental types out there, however, ...
The Unwieldy World of Peer-produced Video
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...
Melting Icecaps and Global Oceans
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? Unless you live along the Atlantic coastlines of North America or Europe, you'll have a few decades, at least. And if the...
Superstruct! Play the game, invent the future.
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
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New report on the U.S. innovation system
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...
Exinction Risks Underestimated -- NATURE
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:
...Courageous or Cheating? Prosthetics in Sports
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...
Anglican Schism
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...
Creation Care: Evangelicals Embrace Environmentalism
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....
Suburbia During the Crash
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:
Suddenly, the economics of American suburban life are under assault as skyrocketing energy...
The China Slowdown
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...
Simian Rights
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.
"This...
Do Not Taunt Massive Quake Ball
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...
Cease-and-desist letter sent to California-based personalized genetics startups
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...
Tracking Mobile Swarms to Change the Way We See Cities
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...
Living in the (Power-Generating) Material World
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...
