Vol. 1, No. 20 | August
18, 2015 | AAI Foresight
News for the Foresight Community:
> Hot Topic: World Population in 2100
> Commentary: “Why Aren’t There More Women Futurists?”
> Game: Hope City
> Mack Report: Social and Economic Impacts of Aging
Hot Topic: World Population in 2100
The world population will reach 11.2 billion by the end of
this century, predicts the 2015 revision of the UN’s World Population Prospects, released earlier this month. The forecast
sparked an array of commentaries.
Len Rosen (21st
Century Technology): “Can the world sustain 11.2 billion people by 2100?
Can the world sustain a large aging population? Can the world provide the
health care, the education and the employment to all those both living today
and tomorrow? What additional stresses will be put on world population by
changing climate and rising sea levels? It would seem humanity is racing towards
a perfect storm, a population bomb and a climate bomb…. The picture the United
Nations is painting is not a pleasant one yet nowhere in the document does the
world body describe the consequences of its forecast.”
http://www.21stcentech.com/projections-show-world-population-hit-11-2-billion-2100/
Tariq Khokhar and Haruna Kashiwase (World
Bank Open Data): “In the ‘medium variant’ projections … they’ve assumed
that the worldwide average fertility rate will fall from today’s 2.5 children
per woman, to 2.4 by around 2030, and 2.0 by around 2100. But there’s
substantial uncertainty in these projections, especially in countries with
higher fertility rates. They point out that if the average fertility rate was
just 0.5 children higher, the projected population for 2100 would be 16.6 billion—more
than 5 billion greater than the medium variant projection above.”
http://blogs.worldbank.org/opendata/future-world-s-population-4-charts
Brian Wang (The
Next Big Future): “Those projections are before consideration about success
with longevity treatments. Also if Africa's birthrate stayed at current levels
and did not drop at all then world population would be about 20-25 billion in
2100…. We can first look at boosting agricultural yield, achievable
infrastructure construction and minor reorganization to support higher
population…. It is also interesting how some people have a knee jerk reaction
like the following. Well we must stop people in Africa and Asia from breeding
to prevent an increase of 20% in world population. However, driving around in
SUV with 10% ethanol from corn with an hour commute each way from their
McMansion to their office is not considered.”
http://nextbigfuture.com/2015/08/radical-life-extension-birthrates-and.html
James Dyke (The
Conversation): “If industrialised agriculture can now feed seven billion,
then why can’t we figure out how to feed 11 billion by the end of this century?
… Some research suggests global food
production is stagnating. The green revolution hasn’t run out of steam just yet
but innovations such as GM crops, more efficient irrigation and subterranean
farming aren’t going to have a big enough impact. The low-hanging fruits of
yield improvements have already been gobbled up.”
https://theconversation.com/can-the-earth-feed-11-billion-people-four-reasons-to-fear-a-malthusian-future-43347
Reference: United
Nations, Department of Economic and Social Affairs, Population Division (2015).
World Population Prospects: The 2015 Revision, Key Findings and Advance Tables.
Working Paper No. ESA/P/WP.241. http://esa.un.org/unpd/wpp/
Image credit: James Cridland, Flickr
Signals: demography,
fertility, food, population, resources, sustainability
Commentary: “Why Aren’t There More Women Futurists?”
The lead question in a recent Atlantic technology blog post
by Rose Eveleth arises from an
observation that men who claim futurism as their profession (or avocation) outnumber
women who do so. It is not a new observation to those of us who have covered
the field for decades, and the question itself seems designed to provoke defensive,
emotional reactions rather than reasonable responses.
“It turns out that what makes someone a futurist, and what
makes something futurism, isn’t well defined,” Eveleth writes. “When you ask
those who are part of official futurist societies, like the APF and the WFS,
they often struggle to answer.”
To suggest that futurists struggle to define themselves is
to suggest there is only one definition of a futurist. Clearly there is not: Trekkies,
transhumanists, technology assessors, urban planners, and visionaries of all
stripes may (or may not) call themselves “futurists.” If men outnumber women in
such categories, maybe women are simply busy doing futurism: visioning, planning, collaborating, executing, re-visioning.
Too busy, perhaps, to raise their hands when the census takers show up to
question their commitment to the cause.
But the real problem with demographic underrepresentation in
any profession or field of research is the imbalance it creates when it comes
to building the world we want to live in and preventing the problems that will cause
nightmares or avert our dreams. If all we know about the future is what the male
techno-optimists are trying to sell us, society will miss a lot of
opportunities and overlook a lot of unintended consequences.
As Madeline Ashby
tells Eveleth, “For a long time the future has belonged to people who have not
had to struggle, and I think that will still be true. But as more and more
systems collapse, currency, energy, the ability to get water, the ability to
work, the future will increasingly belong to those who know how to hustle, and
those people are not the people who are producing those purely optimistic
futures.”
Reference: Rose
Eveleth, “Why Aren’t There More Women Futurists?” Atlantic.com (posted July 31, 2015).
http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2015/07/futurism-sexism-men/400097/?utm_source=SFFB
Image: Geralt,
Pixabay.com
https://pixabay.com/p-645772/?no_redirect
Signals: feminism,
futurism
Game: Hope City
Draw your Citizen Card, grab your Wage Bag, and roll your Hope,
Talent, Capital, and Corruption cubes. Play with Chaos, but beware of Punk
attacks.
Developer Robert
Mattox describes the Hope City board game as “Strategic Foresight 101.”
Hope City “deals with systems thinking, S.T.E.E.P, and identity formation,” he
says.
While teaching the principles of community development, the
game also features a creative cast of good guys (Mayor, Entrepreneur, Coach,
Engineer, Ranger, Doctor) and bad guys (Mobster, Tycoon, Bully, Cyberpunk,
Squatter, Drug Dealer). Though every Citizen starts out good, they “break bad”
upon accumulating corruption cards. (But there is always hope that the drug
dealer can be reformed back into a doctor.)
Details: Hope City
http://www.playhopecity.com/ See also
Facebook page https://www.facebook.com/Playhopecity
Signals: cities,
gaming, scenarios
Mack Report: Social and Economic Impacts of Aging
In his latest blog post on the impacts of an aging
workforce, AAI Foresight managing principal Tim Mack observes that a tightening labor market combined with the
aging baby boomers’ general desire to stay engaged and gainfully employed will
lead to a greater appreciation among employers for the skills that their older
workers possess.
The skills required of these workers in the future, however,
will need to keep up with the ever-transforming economic environment and
technological developments. That means investing in training.
“Employers have shown a significant aversion to paying out
in a globally competitive environment,” Mack writes. “Accordingly, low-cost
training options such as community colleges, tax incentives, and other
strategies appear viable for funding these programs, although the 21st-century
skills that will be needed have been evolving over the past decade and a half.”
Timothy C. Mack
is the managing principal of AAI Foresight.
Read “Aging’s Social and Economic Impacts (Part Two)” on the Foresight
Signals blog.
Signals: aging, demography,
employment, training, workforce
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