The World Future Day Method: A 24-hour Round-The-World Global Discussion

We All Have Our Responsibility

Our societies are currently accruing risks at a rate that our institutions are not equipped to handle. This is not an open-ended situation and this is our final warning (Lynas 2020). We have a responsibility to protect the environment for our future generations. We should abandon our human-first perspective (Krenak 2020) and give rivers (Evans 2020), lakes, and oceans legal rights. There should be a Universal Declaration for Rights of Nature and crime against nature should be punishable. AI could connect rivers and indigenous people, and allow rivers to express themselves (Schroeder 2019). Citizens could report violations of nature’s rights. If a new Ecocide (Funnel 2021) law is added to the International Criminal Court (ICC)’s remit, it would enable it to investigate and prosecute any individual or organization for actions and policies that damage our biosphere. The World’s Youth for Climate Justice is a global campaign to take climate change and human rights to the International Court of Justice (ICJ).

Addressing the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) should shift emphasis from accountability to public participatory decision-making, as some experiments of citizen science do. We should build an intergenerational format.

Advanced and Sustainable Agro-Food

Nutritious and environmentally sustainable agriculture management will be difficult in the future (Morton 2013, 2016). It is important to understand how agriculture, and livestock in particular, can be an asset or a great liability for the climate. Agriculture, food, and animal treatment is a complex issue with multiple interrelations. We should discuss how technology improves the sector in terms of quality food and non-intensive agriculture with less workforce and energy in a green environment. We should be thinking about a sort of cooperation, for example using technologies to monitor the water levels or to track the soil consistency, and about empowering farmers on the spot with mobile technology that helps them to get closer to the markets.

While going toward biotech, the green revolution should be a soil revolution. We have many ways to regenerate the planet and to reduce carbon and methane emissions ⁵ . Regenerative practices are beneficial for carbon capture, for quality and diversity of pastures, for improving animal health and meat quality, and for the water systems by avoiding agrochemicals. The Food and Agriculture Organization (Taubes 2021) estimates that changing feed and feeding practices, grazing management and animal husbandry can reduce greenhouse-gas emissions by 1/3 in some parts of the world. These practices are not included in scientific research agendas nor recognized by the markets. As the benefits of regenerative raised meat start getting recognition, certifications, protocols, and an eco-ethical markets should flourish.

Synthetic meat could be a game changer. The recent recommendations from Bill Gates (Temple 2021) that rich nations should entirely shift toward synthetic beef is an interesting trigger for a discussion that intertwines different subjects, aspects, and dimensions related to the future of food and technology. Different protein alternatives as food to eat can now be vegetal (from plants, seeds, algae, etc.) and animal proteins. For them, we can draw a line between conventional meat products and cell-based animal meat which is not synthetic nor synthesis but actually animal. The future of meat production is a controversial but necessary topic to discuss with urgency in order to identify desirable paths.

Genderless Community Governance

We need shared visions of a future governance. A vision is unbelievably contagious; it is an element of inspiration for innovation and for officers to do what they say. In order to plan for a better life, we should imagine the intangibles now, like what we can do to make cities liveable in terms of equity, access mobility, gender equality, and environment. We could promote smaller cities and redesign communities in order to travel less because of digitalization. Local governors could define a community of communities, small cities working in constellations under an efficient concept of development.

We should womanize the economic system by changing cultural values and pursuing partnership-oriented societies (Eisler, and Douglas 2019). If women could develop a new system, we would have a happiness index to drive us. Our future human civilization should define an incremental process to emerge as a genderless society and a sort of commission on the quality of life to think about our body well-being. This could be the new role of public actors when AI and robots automatize the maintenance of urban systems and make everything connected with the Internet of Things (IoT).

A Repression and Prevention Ecosystem

Addressing Transnational Organized Crime becomes more and more urgent in many old and new activities. Malware services are widely available on the internet. In a 0 day (Perlroth 2021), the system could be penetrated and this software sold on the black market. There are many forces and possibilities interplaying, such as the real ambitions of world powers, terrorist groups, and rogue states, and we should be prepared (Krepinevich 2010) with a new set of rules. One of the solutions (Glenn, and Florescu 2017) is to create a financial prosecution system as a new international body that prioritizes cases one at a time. It would prepare legal cases, identify suspects’ assets to freeze, establish the current location of suspects, assess local authorities’ ability to make an arrest, and send the case to one of a number of preselected courts. A new protocol would deputize the courts by the ICC. They could be selected via a lottery system among volunteering countries. After initial government funding, the system would receive support from frozen assets of convicted criminals.

In parallel, socio-cultural ecosystems for prevention (Olavarrieta 2021b) should consider risk factors related to the individuals and their family, education, relations, and local scope. They would require collaboration among different actors, like industry, universities, entrepreneurs, and investors, and at a global level.

Energularity

Nuclear proliferation involves the possibility of a small war growing into a large war and the need to deal with nuclear waste management. In 2018, the United Nations (UN)’ Human Rights Committee said that the threat or the use of nuclear weapons violates the right to life. The global Appeal to Protect People and the Planet aims at ending the nuclear threat, abolishing nuclear weapons, and shifting the weapons budgets and investments to public health, COVID-19 recovery, climate and sustainable development.

We are in a transition toward a future civilization based on different energy sources and models. For some, solar energy and other renewables will provide almost a hundred percent of the energy we need in one decade, in a sort of energy singularity or Energularity in 2030 (Cordeiro 2012). The next energy source should be much more functional, cheaper, and cleaner if we want to build a new civilization.

Breaking through Boundaries

Increasing population does not have to be negative. If there are 10 billion people, we will build vertically, deep or on Mars, in many places but not with industrial technologies, energy sources, and capitalistic methods. We will break through the boundaries of this planet. There were many people deeply excited by the vision of Gerard O’Neill. ⁶ Today, Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos have primary focus on exploring outer space and potentially moving to Mars.

The unknown related to other potential intelligent beings in outer space is getting more attention now, together with the Fermi paradox. ⁷ If we finally reached the conclusion that we are alone in the universe, it would change our perspective, as evidence of extraterrestrial life would. The idea that the only kind of life that could evolve is the one here on Earth is a failure of imagination. After having followed the evolution of the Drake equations ⁸ , some have the feeling that the next big question is if our species is about to escape the Great Filter ⁹ (Hanson 1996), one of the solutions to the Fermi paradox. The truth is we do not actually know but the more we think about our place in the cosmos, the more we think about our own existence.

Next Democracies

We have much more information today but most is not pertinent or is fragmented. Information is not solid anymore: it is dynamic, continuously changing together with innovation and intelligence. The more information we have, the less attention we have at disposal for that (Simon 1971). We are moving from an economy of information to an economy of attention, extracting pertinent information and knowledge with the help of often-biased AI.

We should actually go toward an economy of wisdom because technology will influence decision-making. It will have implications on the future of democracy. There could be two main opposite directions, one manipulating democracy and the other supporting it. We could keep having non-democratic governments using AI for population surveillance and control, opinion and election manipulation, fake news distribution, and so on. The new digital oligarchy, and its power over the entire communication network, might represent a new type of authority with little accountability and respect for democratic values. In a positive direction, technology could help democratize processes by using digital platforms to create communities and by collecting feedback from the public, the politicians, and other supporters. Blockchain-based platforms could support consensus-building, decision-making, and electronic democracy, moving toward a mixture of direct democracy, offline applications, and representative democracy. Data sharing could help build trust and/or cooperation among countries. Serenata De Amor, for instance, is an AI for social control of a public administration.

We should ask ourselves who is controlling all the technological progress (Shrobe et al. 2016) and understand how to provide equal distribution and access to technology, following the activity of the 3A Institute and the Envisioning platforms.

Loving our Family Robots

We have many rapidly advancing technologies already at our disposal, like biotech, synthetic biology, IoT, Augmented/Virtual/Extended Reality, autonomous driving cars and drones. The more the calculation power increases under Moore’s law, the more technology will become powerful. At the same time, we see a consistent trend of chips, devices, and related solutions getting smaller, faster, and cheaper. Convergence is accelerating, and AI powers many exponential technologies that accelerate its self-learning capability. With quantum computing, the acceleration pattern will go even faster in a couple of years. Machines and AI will solve problems that humans cannot solve alone, for example, what Deep Mind’s AlphaFold is doing with protein folding (Senior et al. 2020).

There is a creative fallacy in thinking that the prevailing narrative for the future will involve only humans and many artists are designing AI as a kind of alternative being. A Cyber Minister could balance the relations between robots and humans in the future. Deep affective ties between men and machines are already developing and we should qualify them in terms of sentiment and dependency/codependency. Some think that hyper-intelligent beings will be independent, that we will be partners in the coming Novacene (Lovelock 2020) and invest in collaborative communities supporting decision-making with talents enhanced by strong machine facilities. The future could belong to hybrid human-machine systems, an enhanced interacting community with task forces brought together by machine-supported environments and humans.

Trans-Human Societies

There is a potential future where humans, AI and robots could merge. Some merging between biology and technology is already ongoing with new applications of nanotechnology, nanoengineering, and DNA. We are testing technologies that recognize people by measuring individual vibrations of feet walking. Magnetic biobots are a combination of AI, very small devices, biology, and biological matter that can travel through our body, release chemicals, and communicate results to devices outside the body. Their evolution could improve our immune system and make disease optional (Jain 2018). There are implications in synthetic human biology, in the ability to re-engineer organs and systems in human biological bodies and brains. There could be attempts to reverse degenerative diseases or aging. Unraveling the human process of consciousness could become possible. Computers could be able to express emotions. We could easily get into the human mind.

Humanity is likely to make a significant attempt to gain happiness, immortality, and God-like power (Harari 2016). The ongoing experiments to connect our brain to the cloud, like Neuralink, will merge us with technology by connecting our brains to the synthetic neocortex. These hybrid models could lead us toward a hybrid species. We could become transhumans in a conscious technology era. Transhumanists predict the enhancement of the human condition with new sophisticated technologies, with unlimited memory, new information and data for decision-making, and faster communications. There could be more intelligence, surpassing human thinking and capabilities in courteous cognitive, emotional, and spatial intelligence (Kurzweil 2005). Longevity could be enhanced. We could become post-humans, with the human age ending in 2045. Some think that humans could be more resilient and happy. TransVision collaborates with leading associations and organizations working on life extension, AI, robotics, nanotechnology, space travel, human enhancement, and other future technologies and trends Whatever we think about it, we need to address the consequences of these possibilities because we could lose control of our free will and consciousness.

An AI Governance System

Two of the main indexes to measure AI developments are the Government AI Readiness Index (Shearer et al. 2020) and the AI readiness by Deloitte. There are many excellent centers studying the ethical issues of Artificial Narrow Intelligence (ANI). However positive, they do not look ahead. Many are working on the advancements from ANI to Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) that could eventually lead to Artificial Super Intelligence (ASI).

Mapping AI is difficult but it will evolve, surpass and replace us in many ways. There is not any potential global governance model for the transition to AGI. If we do not get the initial conditions right, then ASI could emerge and threaten the future of humanity, as Hawkins (Kharpal 2017), Gates (Rawlinson 2015), and Musk (Etherington 2020) warned. We need to explore an international global governance system for the transition. We should try to understand where we are likely to be in a 10 or 15 years window, the minimum time needed to make international treaties and agreements, and to define a governance system for the transition from ANI to AGI. The discussion should focus on how we can reach a consensus about regulations on a global level (Glenn 2019). The first step is to review the current research and speculation about what is to be managed, how it could be managed, and possible alternative models for such a global governance system. The second step is to evaluate the effectiveness of these governance models under differing AGI and human conditions, including how to collaborate between AI and humans.

Changing Education and Learning

The conversation about education and learning around the world is shifting toward skills. We all see a future that is less content and degree driven and more skill oriented. There are several possibilities for education. One is that formal education will continue in the next 10 years, together with non-formal educational sectors that are skill-driven. Another is homeschooling. We should talk about these possibilities and about flexible schools, with the system based on imagination and on nurturing creativity and personalities. Our kids already learn online with AI software. We should pursue a new concept of learning and change teaching consequently with a more personalized experience.

We should be able to speak intergenerational languages and define public policies based on our love for future generations (Karacaoglu 2021). We should learn from youngsters in a feedback loop and help them understand what they want to learn and what their needs for the future are. They should evaluate us as much as we evaluate them. We should discuss the future of universities and of their infrastructure, especially with the increase of online lab experiences. The 2021 “Learning Futures” conference created a cross-disciplinary platform where participants met, shared, and discussed new ideas about the futures of learning. The UNESCO’ “Future of Education. Learning to become” initiative reimagines how knowledge and learning can shape the future of humanity and the planet.

A Matter of Skills

The education systems should be adapted to the new ubiquitous knowledge and teach media literacy. Education should not be about teaching knowledge only but also about how to get information and knowledge.

We teach STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics), STEAM (Arts) and English, and some propose ESTEAM (Entrepreneurship) and PALEM (Philosophy, Arts, Literature, Ecology, Music). We should teach the school of life (De Botton 2019), to be compassionate and empathetic, and to treat nature and human beings with values, ethics and morals. We need critical thinking skills, with logic, evidence, examination, and arguments against ourselves. The first-principle thinking helps reverse-engineer complicated problems and release creative possibilities. Creativity and imagination must be enhanced so that humans are not easily replaced by robots/AI.

We have to encourage exercises to become visionary and to think futures-forward. We should stimulate the wish to feel part of the world and change it, especially in youngsters, as the Global Millennial Prize experience did. Futures literacy (Miller 2005, 2018), on which UNESCO is working, develops the individual capacity of imagining and using the future in many different ways. We could make people play with it through arts, simulations, and immersive theater. The Red Line Art Works project asks artists around the world to focus on big global concerns. Some explore the place of the body and embody practices in the production and experience of grace to generate transformative futures (Bussey, and Mozzini-Allister 2020). Resilience 2032 is a social media theater experience that stimulates civic engagement. The Long Time Project is focused on new ways to stimulate care about the long-term future through the power of art and culture. Gamification could be a new form of education (Glenn 2019). The UNESCO Chair on Futures Research, in cooperation with the Joint Research Center (JRC) of the EC and the MP, created a special edition of the award-winning SES platform focusing on the future of work and technology in 2050. Some suggest playing with future taboos, conversation starters about things that are normal today but may become a taboo in the future or the contrary.

Increasing Intelligence

Some think we should focus on emotional intelligence (Salovey, and Mayer 1990) more than on cognitive intelligence. Others think that we should make increasing intelligence an objective of education (Glenn 2019) because we understand bodybuilding and we should now understand brain building. The future is getting more complex and that requires more brain power. Since we now have the means to get just in time knowledge, the retention of knowledge becomes less important than using the hardware of the brain.

There are various ways to increase individual intelligence already ¹¹ , such as responding to feedback consistency of love with diversity of environment, nutrition, reasoning exercises, placebo effect (believing it is possible), contact with intelligent people or via Virtual Reality simulations software systems and gaming, neuro-pharmacology (enhanced brain chemistry), memes on classroom walls and elsewhere (e.g., intelligence is sexy), low stress, stimulating environments with music, color, and fragrances improving concentration and performances, mental exercises, music, mathematics, logic, and other kinds of technology-related languages. Some long-range approaches are reverse engineering the brain, applied epigenetics and genetic engineering, and designing microbes to eat the plaque on neurons. There are also AI approaches that increase human intelligence (Shamin 2019).

From Foresight to Action

For thousands of years, humanity and civilizations have been futurists in different ways. Futurists today do not study one single future but explore multiple futures. Scenario building is only one of the 37 different methods contained in Futures Research Methodology 3.0 (Glenn, and Gordon 2009). We used Futures Research (FR) in the early days (1950s–1970s) because we wanted to dignify the study of possible futures. It has been called futurology, prospective, futuribles, foresight, and futures studies following Barbieri Masini and Dator’s works (Gidley 2017). The “s” on futures remind us that there are many possible futures (Barbieri Masini 1993). Those who tend to use FR often apply specific FR methods. The field has become complex. Many consider themselves futurists lately because they talk about the future, while other disciplines study the future as well (e.g., Staley 2006).

The future and the past are deeply connected and our ability to imagine the future is dependent or contingent upon what we know. Similarly to what the Club of Rome (Meadows et al. 1972) did, forecasting future implications can help say that if we continue in a certain way, we have a problem. Forecasting and projections help us be smart about what to expect, select, and engage in inventing the future. We should approach our problems by imagining a variety of possible outcomes, an envelope of possibilities, and ask ourselves what we should do if any of these actually materializes. The path that we prepare when we think our way through these variations is helpful. Futurists do not tend to make predictions but explore possibilities, consequences, and strategies for alternative futures. Forecasters make short-term predictions, like the rate of unemployment in 6 months. Futurists give a range of things to consider, for example, what is going on around the world that is making the change and what are the influences that could go one way or another. Futurists do not say when a phenomenon happens but if it will and ask what can be done when it does. They say that there are things to consider before doing something if we want to do it in the best possible way.

Dealing with the Known and the Unknown

One thing people often tend to forget is that problems have a lifetime and even if they are old, they are still threats to solve, like a potential nuclear war. Meantime, one of the strongest trends is that everything gets more complex and faster in the future, bad problems included.

We should not assume that what we need or think to know is adequate and we should keep learning as much as we possibly can. Whatever we learned about dynamic systems may not be correct anymore because they change. We have to keep measuring, understanding, and modeling to stay on top of some of these phenomena, and redefine the labels we use. Lack of clarity is a failure but may be an opportunity for more clarity when there are known unknowables on policy relevant timescales. Science is never absolute but it is the best approximation we have to reality. Dealing with uncertainties and known unknowables is a priority. A key reason Herman Kahn (e.g., Kahn, and Wiener 1967; Glenn, and the Futures Group International 2009) invented scenarios was to find out what we do not know and we do not even know that we do not know. The inability to deal with the unknown is a failure of imagination. The Johari Window (Luft, and Ingham 1955) is something that we have not used enough in foresight.

Small Things make a Difference

The future is much more random that we think. Random events like wildcards have importance. There are trillions of intersection points that are decisions to make or that will be random. This opens infinite futures and a completely new dimension in our thinking about what futures really are, how to find the points of control, and what steers them. Small things make a bigger difference today than ever before. Chaos theory postulates that small differences in initial conditions can have greatly different effects. Population grows; we have more agents and tightly coupled networking connections than ever. Thus, we end up with higher degrees of unpredictability. Meantime, our culture makes singular fixes and goes to the next when done but a singular fix has consequences too. We need to focus on long-term responsibility. The COVID-19 pandemic should have never happened since the MP warned about that from 1997 (Glenn, and Gordon 1997).

The whole idea of anticipatory governance is to figure out how to govern something that is not there yet before it is too late, like AGI. Governments fail because they tend to focus on short-term planning. The linkage between futures and policies is still weak. Our problem with our threats is from foresight to action. Filling this gap implies understanding how the majority of people can listen to the right voices, use technology, and get information on complex matters. It implies ethics, communication, definitions of filters and of right voice, and persuasive ways to focus the public on the unknown. It needs understanding how leaders should manage all this. In a recent science-fiction novel (Robinson 2020), the Ministry of Future is a potent organism with a mandate for potentially unpleasant, unethical, and immoral actions to save the Earth. We should question how far we would go to save the future. Going beyond what is good is not acceptable. Even that future will never please everyone; some will always be disadvantaged. We need a collectivist approach to the planet and cooperation across domains.

Desirable Futures

With growing anxiety and future shocks (Toffler 1970), we should revisit the function of utopias and of positive scenarios. Talking about utopia is talking about desire. When we talk about desirable futures, there should be a connection to public participation. Some prefer to substitute utopia/dystopia with Protopia Futures (Mitchell 2021), proactive prototyping of hope for tomorrow. Whatever the names, the content of narratives is as important as the process of creating them, who relates to them, and who continues them. The link between narratives and action is not linear.

Positive/desirable is sometimes a difficult constraint because plausible situations are open or closed to a diversity of outcomes. What is desirable for one may not be for others. Alternative visions can give a ray of hope. The desirable is not necessarily the one we should pursue every time but it can help future consciousness (Lombardo 2017). Some prefer to move from positive to fertile narratives, such as Narratopias, an open project to organize a collective response to new and already existing narratives in the world.

A United Nations Office of Strategic Threats

Some of our long-term challenges threaten the survival of our species. A single individual could make and deploy a weapon of mass destruction (most likely from synthetic biology). There could be loss of control of future forms of AI, a nuclear proliferation and escalation, an uncontrollable global pandemics, a catastrophic global warming, an asteroid collision, the weakening of the Earth’s magnetic shield, solar gamma-ray burst, malicious nanotechnology (including the “gray goo”), and particle accelerator accidents (anti-matter, Black Hole). There is no single point in the UN that addresses such long-term threats to human survival. No general office works on agreements about what the threats to our species are. We should define an integrated central office to identify, monitor, and anticipate long-term strategic threats to humanity to coordinate efforts for preventing them.

We could start by defining a UN Office of Strategic Threats, a central point to identify and assess long-range trends and synergies among potential future threats and our knowledge gaps, and to coordinate some research without managing the whole theme. It would serve main international agencies, multilateral organizations, nation-states, and humanity in general by centralizing and coordinating information and strategic thinking on a global scale. It would continually assess those threats and new ones, prevention options, synergies among them, and the responsibility to improve readiness or capacity for prevention. This initiative needs endorsement by governments, so that it can be included in the UN General Assembly agenda. It needs at least one country to offer a UN General Assembly resolution to initiate the feasibility and operations of a UN Office of Strategic Threats.