News for the Foresight
Community
> Warnings: Worst-Case Scenarios
> Hot Topic: Arab Futures
> Publication: The
Suicide of the Jews
> Leaders Lend an Ear: Thomas Frey, Jeremy Rifkin
> Foresight Report: Technology Work 2030
> Appointment: New Editor for World Future Review
> Book Review by Randall Mayes: The Master Algorithm
> Mack Report: Revisiting Wool
Warnings: Worst-Case Scenarios
The most recent rounds of terrorist attacks offer tangible evidence
that our worst-case scenarios are getting worse, writes nine-term California Congresswoman
Jane Harman, now
president and chief executive of the Woodrow Wilson International Center for
Scholars.
In a Reuters
blog
posted the day of the Paris attacks, Harman writes that the downing of a
Russian plane in Egypt, for which members of the Islamic State (ISIS) took
credit, “highlights how many national security stories we may be missing—stories
that pose at least as much of a threat to the United States as the development
of an Iranian nuclear weapon.”
Among the other threats Harman points to are “loose nukes in
Pakistan,” long-range rockets in North Korea, radiological weapons for sale on
the Russian black market, and a biological attack or full-out germ warfare, a
scenario not receiving nearly enough attention, she writes.
“Counterterrorism is a science of worst-case scenarios,”
Harman concludes. “The risk of a game-changing plot is always small, but the
kind of “black swan” events that could reshape the region look more and more
real today. Better to overestimate the threat now than read about it in the
papers tomorrow.”
Signals: biological
weapons, black swans, counterterrorism, worst-case scenarios
Hot Topic: Arab Futures
An ISIS strike outside of the Arab world, as occurred in
Paris on November 13, was one of several “wild cards” envisioned by the
Arab
Foresight Group’s report
Arab Futures:
Three Scenarios for 2025, published in February by the European Union
Institute for Security Studies. The rapidity with which the speculated future
can become the realized present renders our consideration of all possibilities
more urgent.
The report describes the megatrends affecting the region,
poses critical questions about potential game changers, and concludes with
descriptions of three scenarios: most likely (“Arab Simmer”), worst-case (“Arab
Implosion”), and transformational (“Arab Leap”).
While the megatrend of population growth might be the
easiest to connect to the region’s major game changer—youth unemployment—the megatrend
of climate change is likely to be dismissed by mainstream observers. But as the
report notes, the impacts will be broad: “Climate change will hit the Arab
world particularly hard, as it exacerbates already acute challenges of water
shortages and desertification, as well as scarcity of resources. In addition, a
rise in sea levels will directly affect the densely populated coastal areas.”
As for the rise and spread of the Islamic State (or Daesh),
its effect within the Arab world has been to divert political attention and
resources from reform to security, leading to laws that “conflate political
opposition with terrorist activity” and reinforce the political role of the
military.
The report concludes that it is time for Arab states to act
together to combat the current and future threats they share: “Cooperation is
the only way forward if Arab states want to progress on the economic as well as
social front.”
Signals: Arab
world, ISIS, megatrends, scenarios, security
Publication: The Suicide of the Jews
The third installment of
American-Israeli futurist Tsvi Bisk’s
trilogy (following Futurizing the Jews
and The Optimistic Jew) is an
“imagineered” vision of Israel as told from the year 2099.
In The Suicide of the
Jews, Bisk states that current conflicts in Israel stem from two opposing
views of Zionism—one whose view of history dictates the creation of a state
that claims the entire land of Israel versus one (to which Bisk subscribes)
that strives instead for a Jewish state within a portion of Israel.
“The decline of my vision of Zionism and the ascendance of
the land-fetishism vision terrifies me and makes me fearful about the future
survival of the Jewish people,” Bisk writes.
The Suicide of the
Jews, Bisk says, is a cautionary tale,
“a manifestation of a wider Jewish and Zionist vision which asserts that:
If Israel will not be a light unto the nations it will not be a light unto the
Jews and thus will not be able to mobilize the energy and passion needed to
survive.”
Signals: alternative
scenarios, Israel, Judaism, Zionism
Leaders Lend an Ear: Thomas Frey, Jeremy Rifkin
- The King
and Frey: DaVinci Institute Senior Futurist Thomas Frey
reports on Facebook that Willem-Alexander, King of the Netherlands, sat in the
front row of Frey’s November 4 talk for Dow Benelux. Frey reports that the king
is “a very nice guy and even asked for a copy of my slides.” Also in the past
year Frey has addressed the Prime Minister's cabinet in New Zealand, as well as
leaders from 90 national postal services of the Turkish Post and executive
teams for numerous private and nonprofit sector institutions.
- Rifkin
Influences China’s Future: A November 5 Huffington
Post editorial credits author Jeremy Rifkin,
president of the TIR Consulting Group, for
providing the futurist underpinnings—or at least the “buzzwords”—in the
announcement of China’s latest five-year plan. “Chinese Premier Li Keqiang has
not only read Jeremy Rifkin's book The
Third Industrial Revolution and taken it to heart,” writes Nathan Gardels,
editor-in-chief of The World Post.
Rifkin’s influence might have been more direct than that: He met with Chinese
Vice Premier Wang Yang in Beijing in September “to discuss how China can be a
global leader in the transition toward a Third Industrial Revolution
sustainable economic paradigm.”
Foresight Report: Technology Work 2030
AAI Foresight has published its latest Foresight Report, “2030:
How Technology Professionals Will Work” (Fall 2015), by Managing Principal Timothy C. Mack. The report is
available as a free PDF download.
Mack describes the impacts of a wide range of trends on the
workplace in general and the work environments of the technology workforce
specifically. The choices that individuals make for their own career lives will
also be influenced by shifts in the global economy, demographics, and values;
likewise, these trends will affect the choices employers make for the traits
and skills they will seek.
Signals: education,
foresight report, jobs, technology, trend analysis, workforce
Appointment: New Editor for World Future Review
James Dator,
director of the Hawaii Research Center for Futures Studies at the University of
Hawaii at Manoa, has been named the new editor of World Future Review, the journal formerly published by World Future
Society for its professional membership program. The journal was recently sold
to SAGE Publications, WFS announced.
“We will have a new editorial board, which includes some of
the old ones,” Dator says, adding that the journal may also consider producing
special issues with guest editors.
WFR was the product of the consolidation of two WFS
publications—Futures Research Quarterly, co-edited
by Timothy Mack and Kenneth W. Hunter, and Future Survey, edited by Michael Marien with Lane Jennings as production editor.
Mack and Jennings served as WFR’s executive editor and managing editor,
respectively, since its inception, while Marien continued to contribute
substantially to the journal’s content with his unique and comprehensive
coverage of futures literature.
“What will
distinguish WFR from other futures journals,” Dator writes in his call for
submissions “is that (as a rule) it will not have articles about ‘the future’
or ‘the futures of x,’ but rather about futures studies as an academic and
consulting discipline—the roots of futures studies, its present state, the
preferred futures for futures studies itself. Sage Publishing is very
firmly committed to futures studies and their newly-acquired journal. They want
WFR to succeed and futures studies to mature, and believe this the way to do
both.”
Book Review: The
Master Algorithm
By Randall Mayes
One of the game-changing projections for the future is the Singularity,
the point in time when machine intelligence equals human intelligence. In The Master Algorithm: How the Quest for the
Ultimate Learning Machine Will Remake Our World (Basic Books/Perseus,
2015), University of Washington computer scientist Pedro Domingos proposes a novel engineering solution for achieving
this milestone.
His premise is that “all knowledge—past, present, and
future—can be derived from data by a single, universal learning algorithm,” or master algorithm. “If such an algorithm
is possible, inventing it would be one of the greatest scientific achievements
of all time,” Domingos writes. “In fact, the Master Algorithm is the last thing
we’ll ever have to invent because, once we let it loose, it will go on to
invent everything else that can be invented.” So,
can we invent it?
AI researchers aim to create superintelligence by developing
neuromorphic chips—hardware and software capable of surpassing human
intelligence. These machines will contain AI versions of common sense,
currently an advantage of human intelligence, combined with advanced computing
capabilities, where machines hold the advantage.
Domingos advocates a machine-learning approach—that is,
programming computers to do what we want and then having them learn from data.
However, currently AI researchers utilizing machine learning are not a
homogenous group. Different groups of AI researchers have different methods of
achieving the Singularity and superintelligence, and each group is adamant that
their approach is the best means to the end.
Domingos identifies five “tribes” of
researchers—connectionists, Bayesians, symbolists, evolutionaries, and
analogizers—each believing that their method of representing, evaluating, and
optimizing data is superior to the others.
For practical applications, each tribe’s algorithms are only capable of
artificial narrow intelligence (ANI)—the ability to perform one specialized
task. With the current state of AI, if you have two different problems to
solve, programmers need to write two different programs.
Reaching the Singularity would require artificial general
intelligence (AGI) or multitasking similar to humans. Domingos argues that a
metalearning algorithm (the “master algorithm”) is necessary for encompassing
the strengths and problem-solving capabilities of all the tribes.
While Domingos believes the master algorithm is the best
route to the Singularity and superintelligence, others such as Ray Kurzweil,
the director of engineering at Google, and managers of multibillion-dollar
government-sponsored research projects advocate mapping the human brain’s neurons
and synapses and reverse-engineering our natural brain networks.
Domingos is critical of Kurzweil’s brain-mapping approach
for several reasons. Although Domingos agrees that gains in technology are not
linear, Kurzweil bases his forecasts on exponential curves, suggesting that
technological progress will accelerate on into the distant future. However,
developments in technology typically follow S-curves where progress rises, then
stagnates and reverses course, and then rises again but sharply or rises then
fades for good.
The Master Algorithm is a great read, and Domingos provides an excellent crash
course on the enigmatic field of machine learning. He dedicates a chapter to
each tribe and provides detailed examples of each tribe’s methods and draws on
his experience to educate the reader on challenges that lie ahead for AI
practitioners.
Randall Mayes is
Field Editor for Digital
Economy and Energy & Environment
at TechCast Global, www.techcastglobal.com. His article “The Future of
Futurists,” published by the World Future Society in
The Futurist (November-December
2014), provides a more in-depth discussion of the merits of both sides of this
debate.
He may be contacted at randy.mayes@duke.edu.
Signals: artificial
intelligence, computers, Moore’s law, Singularity
Mack Report: Revisiting Wool
In his latest
blog,
Tim
Mack invites us to rethink an ancient material: Wool’s virtues as an
industrial material include its ability to both absorb and repel water and to
fight fires. It is also highly sustainable, since it is renewable and, as Mack
notes, “only requires a fraction of the production and energy costs of manmade
materials put to similar uses.”
The lesson from wool, Mack suggests, is to not let our
prejudice for new inventions “pull the wool over” our vision.
Signals: industrial
materials, sustainability
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