SEF - Quickfinder: "GLOBAL TRENDS is a standard work containing facts, analyses and forecasts on key developments in global society. Prepared in collaboration with the Institute for Development and Peace, it is published every two years (only once in English as yet)."

Future Studies:

University of Hawaii - Jim Dator

Futures Organizations:

World Trends Research
World Future Society
Global Future Forum
Foundation for the Future
Copenhagen Institute for Future Studies
Institute for the Future
The Futures Group International
Institute for Alternative Futures

Does evolution select for faster evolvers?: "Does evolution select for faster evolvers? Discussion at PhysOrgForum
It's a mystery why the speed and complexity of evolution appear to increase with time. For example, the fossil record indicates that single-celled life first appeared about 3.5 billion years ago, and it then took about 2.5 billion more years for multi-cellular life to evolve. That leaves just a billion years or so for the evolution of the diverse menagerie of plants, mammals, insects, birds and other species that populate the earth."

Green Car Congress: World Economic Forum: Global Risks Are Outpacing Ability to Mitigate Them: "The core risks fall into five primary categories:

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Economic
o Oil price shock/energy supply interruptions
o US current account deficit/fall in US$
o Chinese economic hard landing
o Fiscal crises caused by demographic shift
o Blow up in asset prices/excessive indebtedness
*

Environmental
o Climate change
o Loss of freshwater services
o Natural catastrophe: Tropical storms
o Natural catastrophe: Earthquakes
o Natural catastrophe: Inland flooding
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Geopolitical
o International terrorism
o Proliferation of weapons of mass destruction (WMD)
o Interstate and civil wars
o Failed and failing states
o Transnational crime and corruption
o Retrenchment from globalization
o Middle East instability
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Societal
o Pandemics
o Infectious diseases"

Green Car Congress: World Economic Forum: Global Risks Are Outpacing Ability to Mitigate Them: "World Economic Forum: Global Risks Are Outpacing Ability to Mitigate Them
15 January 2007
Wef
Likelihood of core global risks vs. projected economic loss. Click to enlarge.

The World Economic Forum—the organization that convenes the annual Davos meeting of global leaders—has released the Global Risks 2007 report. The report, published in cooperation with Citigroup, Marsh & McLennan Companies, Swiss Re and the Wharton School Risk Center, highlights a growing disconnect between the power of global risks to cause major systemic disruption and our ability to mitigate them.

Many of the 23 core global risks explored in the report have worsened over the last 12 months, despite growing awareness of their potential impacts, according to the report. In addition to specific risk mitigation measures, institutional innovations may be needed to create effective responses to a complex risk landscape."

The Discover Interview: Marvin Minsky - - science news articles online technology magazine articles The Discover Interview: Marvin Minsky

The Discover Interview: Marvin Minsky - - science news articles online technology magazine articles The Discover Interview: Marvin Minsky: "It sounds like you could make a very smart computer, but is your ultimate goal to actually reproduce a human being?

Or better. We humans are not the end of evolution, so if we can make a machine that's as smart as a person, we can probably also make one that's much smarter. There's no point in making just another person. You want to make one that can do things we can't.

To what purpose?

Well, the birthrate is going down, but the population is still going up. Then we're going to have old people, and we'll need smart people to do their housework, and take care of things and grow the vegetables. So we need smart robots. There are also problems we can't solve. What if the sun dies out or we destroy the planet? Why not make better physicists, engineers, or mathematicians? We may need to be the architects of our own future. If we don't, our culture could disappear."

The Discover Interview: Marvin Minsky - - science news articles online technology magazine articles The Discover Interview: Marvin Minsky

The Discover Interview: Marvin Minsky - - science news articles online technology magazine articles The Discover Interview: Marvin Minsky: "The history of AI is sort of funny because the first real accomplishments were beautiful things, like a machine that could do proofs in logic or do well in a calculus course. But then we started to try to make machines that could answer questions about the simple kinds of stories that are in a first-grade reader book. There's no machine today that can do that. So AI researchers looked primarily at problems that people called hard, like playing chess, but they didn't get very far on problems people found easy. It's a sort of backwards evolution. I expect with our commonsense reasoning systems we'll start to make progress pretty soon if we can get funding for it. One problem is people are very skeptical about this kind of work."

The Discover Interview: Marvin Minsky - - science news articles online technology magazine articles The Discover Interview: Marvin Minsky

The Discover Interview: Marvin Minsky - - science news articles online technology magazine articles The Discover Interview: Marvin Minsky: "Yes, through the lens of building a simulation. If a theory is very simple, you can use mathematics to predict what it'll do. If it's very complicated, you have to do a simulation. It seems to me that for anything as complicated as the mind or brain, the only way to test a theory is to simulate it and see what it does. One problem is that often researchers won't tell us what a simulation didn't do. Right now the most popular approach in artificial intelligence is making probabilistic models."

The Discover Interview: Marvin Minsky - - science news articles online technology magazine articles The Discover Interview: Marvin Minsky

The Discover Interview: Marvin Minsky - - science news articles online technology magazine articles The Discover Interview: Marvin Minsky: "Throughout, Minsky has written philosophically on the subject of AI, culminating in the 1985 book Society of Mind, which summarizes his theory of how the mind works. He postulates that the complex phenomenon of thinking can be broken down into simple, specialized processes that work together like individuals in a society. His latest book, The Emotion Machine, continues ideas begun in Society of Mind, reflecting twenty-some additional years of thought. It is a blueprint for a thinking machine that Minsky would like to build—an artificial intelligence that can reflect on itself—taking us a step forward into a future that may seem as if out of an Asimov story."

KurzweilAI.net
Researchers at Washington University in St. Louis found that the human mind taps into the same parts of the brain while imagining the future as it does when recollecting the past.

This means that the brain apparently predicts the course of future events by imagining them taking place much like similar past ones.

ZNet |Economy | Factors in Our Colossal Mess: "Given this growing consensus of risks, on November 13 Sir John Gieve, the deputy governor of the Bank of England, concluded, in the Financial Times, that each national state regulating full-blown financial crises was no longer feasible: the financial system is international in scope today and no national mechanism can handle it. There have been at least 13 borderline or full-blown financial crises since the late 1970s and some of the methods for dealing with them would be 'less easy to deploy' under present conditions-which is a polite way of saying they were irrelevant. His conclusion: Regulators 'should practise coping with global crisis,' 'work together' on practical examples to develop machinery, especially to avoid the 'moral hazards' of bailing out firms in trouble, including 'closing down a large firm in an orderly way.'"